If convicted, he faced a federal prison term of anywhere from ten years to life. At his age it seemed that even a decade loomed ominously like a death sentence.
The prosecution brought a literal murderer’s row of witnesses to court: Gravano, D’Arco, Leonetti, Savino and Chiodo had confessed to a combined fifty killings. The trial promised high drama, contentious cross-examination, tales of Mob lore and unheard details of the Mafia’s violent history.
Not that Gigante seemed to notice any of it. With his cardiologist sitting nearby, the Chin stared blankly into space as if in a trance. He appeared emotionless and detached, like the whole thing was happening to somebody else. But he saw no hallucinations, and he heard only the voices of the witnesses against him.
The life-and-death legal struggle was not without its lighter moments. Among the Chin’s other purported health woes was a tremor in his left leg. One day in court Stamboulidis looked at the defense table to see Gigante’s right leg twitching madly.
“So I mention to defense counsel, while looking right at Chin, that he’s shaking the wrong leg,” the prosecutor said. “Without missing a beat or looking at me, Chin repositions his legs and starts shaking the [correct] one.”
Though Gigante’s litany of mental and physical ailments was long enough to cover a half-dozen patients, the defendant never missed a single day of court. The demented don took his place each day at the defense table, from the first day of jury selection until the same panel—which was seated anonymously to guard against tampering—rendered their verdict.
* * *
Even before the trial started, Weinstein, who was six years older than the defendant, instructed the defense to insure that Gigante trade his unmade-bed look for more appropriate attire. The Chin should be neatly groomed and properly dressed; his son Salvatore eventually provided his father with a sport coat to replace his usual blue windbreaker. Weinstein was particularly irked by a dirty white T-shirt visible beneath Gigante’s wrinkled polo shirt.
Marinaccio assured the judge his order would be followed to a point: “Mr. Gigante is who he is. I don’t think a blue blazer, tan pants and deck shoes are in the offing here, Judge.”
Weinstein did agree to let the Chin keep the wheelchair, and the judge okayed a defense request to keep a cardiac specialist on call in the courtroom. Dr. Wechsler regularly took Gigante’s blood pressure during breaks.
There were some two hundred jurors called to fill out a forty-five-page questionnaire with some interesting queries:
Did they believe in the existence of the Mafia?
Had they ever seen The Godfather?
Had they read Underboss, the best-selling biography written by author Peter Maas, with the cooperation of Gravano?
Weinstein assured the candidates that neither the defense nor the prosecution would ever learn their identities. Forty of them immediately begged off, citing upcoming vacations or family weddings or work. It nevertheless took just two days to seat the panel for the last of the great Mob trials, with the last of the great Mob bosses as the lone defendant.
The jury of Chin’s peers was more reflective of the city on the cusp on the twenty-first century than the Village of his youth: seven white jurors, four blacks, one Asian. Seven were women. They were described as a largely well-educated bunch, and Weinstein ruled they would not be sequestered.
Chin, in one of the oddball details to emerge during the case, estimated his monthly income at this time at about $900 a month from his pension. The money went directly to his wife.
* * *
Opening statements came on June 25, with the defendant’s family offering their support both inside and outside the Brooklyn Federal Courthouse. The Gigante supporters filled about a quarter of the packed one-hundred-seat courtroom.
“To label him the boss of a conglomerate that extorts is ridiculous,” said Father G. “He didn’t run anything, because he couldn’t run anything.”
The priest doted on his brother throughout the trial, combing Vincent’s hair and rolling the Chin’s wheelchair into the courtroom. Outside, he provided a running rebuttal of the government’s case—and he wasn’t alone among the devoted Gigante clan. Daughter Yolanda, named for the Chin’s mother, flatly described her father as a paranoid schizophrenic.
Defense attorney Marinaccio had assured one and all that his client would be front and center for opening arguments, virtually citing his courtroom presence as the most important defense exhibit.
“We want him to be there, so the public can see who the government is talking about, this shrewd Vincent Gigante, who’s still running a crime family,” Marinaccio declared. “In my view they’re chasing a ghost.”
The prosecution’s opening statement was delivered by Stamboulidis, who offered his blunt take on the motivation behind the crazy act: “He didn’t like prison, and he didn’t want to go back.”
The federal attorney provided a primer for the jury on Gigante’s life and crimes before delivering a one-sentence summary of the prosecution: “This case is about a powerful crime family boss and the great lengths he would go to protect his position.”
Marinaccio, in his opening, wasted little time in attacking the parade of murderous Mob turncoats lined up against Gigante as psychopaths covering their own asses.
The gangsters “have spent every waking minute of their lives either committing crimes or planning to commit crimes, who mastered the art of deception and deceit . . . [and] will tell you, in much the same way they told their victims before they murdered them, ‘Trust me. Trust what I tell you.’ ”
Then he issued a challenge to the jury: “It’s time to separate the man from the myth.”
The Chin, his chair squeezed in between his two lawyers, showed no emotion as the dueling attorneys laid out their cases. He appeared in dire need of a shave and a shampoo.
NYPD detective Gaetano Bruno took the stand to testify about scores of surveillance photos snapped using a camera tucked inside an attaché case, with a button on the handle to snap the pictures. The cream of the Genovese crop, including Quiet Dom and Manna, were among the Mob cronies caught consorting with the Chin outside the Triangle by Bruno’s candid camera.
FBI agent Beaudoin, taking the witness stand early in the trial, relished the chance to go toe-to-toe with the Chin. He recounted his reconnaissance missions on the Upper East Side, telling the jury that Gigante spoke in a “commanding way” to his visitors while unaware of the watching eyes in the adjoining yeshiva.
Gigante sat at the defense table, his lips moving as if in conversation with an imaginary friend. The FBI agent fixed his adversary with a hard stare.
“I looked at him all the time,” he recounted later. “I looked at the sons. There was a break in the trial, and we were all standing in the hallway. One of the sons started giving me the stare-down. I stared right back. ‘Don’t you know who I am? Do you guys want to go to jail for life, too?’”
The mood was much lighter during another recess when, Beaudoin recalled, the Chin momentarily let his guard down.
“His son is pushing him through the courthouse hallway,” the agent said. “And there’s this hot-looking woman in a short dress. All the guys were looking. And then you turn around, and the Chin’s looking, too.”
Dorsky heard similar tales of Gigante’s appreciation of the female form. “Some women said he would wink at them and make flattering comments,” said Dorsky. The only other person the Chin was seen addressing was his brother Louis in whispered conversations.
* * *
All eyes were on the first of the Mob witnesses, Big Pete Chiodo. Chiodo was admittedly hard to miss, a hulking figure wheeled into the courtroom in a chair of his own. He was lucky to be alive, and ready to talk. Chiodo recounted driving one of his Lucchese betters to a commission meeting with Gigante.
“He apologized for dressing in his bathrobe,” the big man testified.
Gigante, his wardrobe upgraded to a blue blazer and white polo shirt buttoned to the neck, of
fered nary a flicker of recognition or interest. For once, the godfather’s stubble was absent as Chiodo testified.
The next time the two men met, Chiodo recalled, was as codefendants after their 1990 arrests in the Windows Case. It was a thin reed in the prosecution’s case, as the typically blunt Weinstein noted.
“You are going to have a problem with a stale case,” he warned Dorsky. “See if you can put a little excitement in it.”
At what became an almost daily review of the trial, Father G. agreed: “It’s obvious he doesn’t know my brother.”
Weinstein was perturbed at day’s end when Chiodo’s face appeared in the work of sketch artists. He ordered the group to “fuzz up the faces” when Big Pete returned to the stand—and when the other ex-mobsters followed. There was one exception to the edict: Gravano, whose face was well known thanks to a simultaneous media blitz for his just-released biography.
Marinaccio attacked Chiodo in the first of his fierce cross-examinations of the flipped Mafiosi, emphasizing the five murders admitted by the witness—including the execution of Windows co-conspirator John Morrissey. Chiodo had also acknowledged killing a man who date-raped the daughter of a Mob associate.
“Did you ever say, ‘This is not the life for me?’” Marinaccio inquired at one point.
Chiodo’s answer spoke for generations of made men: “It’s the only life I knew.”
The extra-large witness also confessed that while he had met John Gotti and Colombo boss Vic Orena, he never had a formal introduction to the Chin during his sessions with Mob higher-ups.
* * *
When Crazy Phil Leonetti took the stand, he looked the part of a Hollywood gangster: tanned and fit, his dark hair slicked back, dressed in a fashionable black blazer. His lip curled slightly in an Elvis Presley–meets–Lucky Luciano style as he recounted his story of the Chin’s homicidal handling of the Philly Mob wars in a gripping yet almost nonchalant fashion.
As he was sworn in and began to answer questions, Leonetti noticed that Gigante appeared distant and disinterested—until the two shared a single moment of clarity.
“In the courtroom, for a brief second, he looked directly at me like he wanted to kill me,” Crazy Phil recalled. “It was as if he was saying to me, ‘I’m disappointed in you.’ The whole rest of the time, he did the crazy act. But for that brief second I saw it in his eyes. Then he went back to being slumped over and he didn’t even look at me. But in those few seconds I could see that he was normal.”
Leonetti acknowledged his story was based on conversations with his uncle Scarfo, and he had never actually met Gigante. But he did drive Scarfo north to the meeting where Caponigro and Salerno received their death sentences, and he heard the whole tale almost immediately on the ride back to Atlantic City.
Gigante, in his wheelchair, sat stone-faced as Leonetti detailed Chin’s role in the Philly bloodletting. After the Testa hit, “the Chin told my uncle to kill everybody involved,” the witness said.
Under cross-examination defense attorney Phil Foglia, whose kids were baptized by Father G., confronted the gangster about charges that the Bronx priest was a made member of the Genovese crime family. The allegation was contained in an FBI interrogation report.
“No, I never said that,” Leonetti insisted. The FBI agent who wrote up the report made a mistake.
The priest heard the testimony from his regular perch in the first row of the federal courtroom. And afterward, he provided more details about the FBI’s claims.
The report charged “that I even committed murders and buried the people in my rectory, but someone else from another crime family told Leonetti, ‘Don’t believe it,’ ” said Father G. “[Foglia] didn’t read that part.”
Leonetti was also asked about his role in an ABC News interview piece titled “Walk with the Devil.”
“And you were in the title role?” asked Foglia.
“Cosa Nostra was the Devil,” the witness replied. “Not me.”
Leonetti then offered his review of the show: “It was terrible.”
* * *
The feds called an FBI agent to introduce photos and tapes made at the late Fat Tony’s club. One of the snapshots showed Dr. Wechsler hanging out with Salerno in March 1984. This was a revelation that seemed to make the good doctor’s blood pressure spike. The well-tanned physician blushed deeply as the photo was brought into evidence.
But Agent Peter Kelleher also acknowledged that Gigante was never once spotted at the East Harlem club during the surveillance that ran from December 1983 through February 1985. Nor was his voice ever heard on more than one thousand hours of audio recordings.
“On any tape whatsoever, did you ever hear Mr. Gigante discuss a commission meeting?” asked Gigante’s other defense attorney, James Culleton.
“No,” replied the bookish, balding FBI agent.
* * *
The trial was interrupted by an appearance from attorney Ronald Kuby, the ponytailed protégé of legendary radical lawyer William Kunstler. Kuby hoped to land one of the coveted courtroom seats for Gravano’s testimony, so he could serve the Mob killer with papers in a civil suit brought by some of Sammy’s nineteen victims.
They were seeking to snare any of Gravano’s profits from his biography, but Weinstein steered Kuby to the state court for help. The left-leaning lawyer was hardly the only interested party. Publisher HarperCollins asked Weinstein to declare details of Gravano’s publishing contract off-limits during his testimony. The judge refused.
And so the stage was set in a Brooklyn courtroom for the trial’s main event: Gravano versus Gigante, the Bull taking on the Chin from the witness stand, the two business partners now working different sides of the Mob street. By the time it was finished, Gigante would be bloodied—and Gravano’s value as a government witness would be zero.
* * *
The Gravano who put his hand on the Bible on July 10, 1997, was a different man—at least on the outside.
The mobster, no longer hiding as the anonymous “Jimmy Moran” in the Federal Witness Protection Program, was living openly in Arizona despite a reported $1 million Mafia bounty on his head. (Two years later, though, a Gambino family plot to blow Gravano up was thwarted when he was busted for running a multimillion-dollar ecstasy ring.)
The vain Sammy Gravano underwent plastic surgery to tighten up his face, and had recently sat for an interview with Diane Sawyer to promote his best-selling book. Life in the Southwest agreed with the old Brooklyn-born gangster, who arrived to testify under enormous surveillance that couldn’t hide his burnished tan or fighter’s trim.
There was a buzz in the courthouse hallways, where spectators arrived hours early for a seat. The in-house court reporters were guaranteed seats, but the rest of the media horde was left to fight for a coveted spot inside.
Before Gravano testified, George Stamboulidis placed a pitcher of water alongside the witness chair. The Bull’s FBI handlers, Matty Tricorico and Frank Spero, watched carefully as they awaited Gravano’s arrival. The prosecutor, with a grin, assured the agents that the ex-underboss was safe from poisoning if he decided to take a sip.
“It’s our water,” he mouthed to the pair.
Late on a Thursday afternoon the Bull arrived in a gray double-breasted suit. His hair was closely cropped and a pair of John Lennon–style glasses gave him a faint professorial look. The Gigante clan glared from the front row as Gravano swore to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
They were not alone in fixing Sammy with the evil eye. The family members of several Gravano murder victims turned out for a look at the man who had killed their loved ones. The prosecution complained that Laura Garofalo, whose father was murdered in 1990 on the family’s front steps, was planted near the front to “rattle” the mobster.
Gravano—unlike the earlier Mob informants—had a business relationship with the Chin, and he once again recounted their get-togethers. The Bull noted that Gigante’s standard business attire in their
later face-to-face meetings was a bathrobe and pajamas.
His direct questioning by Weissmann managed to stir the Chin, who appeared more alert than at any prior time in the trial.
Gravano, who appeared nervous at the outset despite five years of working for the government, occasionally looked at the wheelchair-bound Gigante sitting across the courtroom. The Oddfather returned his gaze at times, intrigued by the traitor in the witness chair.
By the end of Weissmann’s queries, Gravano appeared looser and more confident. His voice was permanently matter of fact, whether discussing cordial Mob summits or brutal Mob slayings. Occasionally, before answering the prosecutor’s well-prepared queries, he slowly adjusted his glasses as if pondering the question.
But the real fun began once Marinaccio started his cross-examination. Many of the questions dealt with Gravano’s publishing exploits, rather than his Mob doings. Money, as it turned out, was still at the root of Gravano’s evil.
The underboss had parlayed his Gambino position into a multimillion-dollar income while on the streets, and he wasn’t doing so badly in the Witness Protection Program. Yes, Gravano acknowledged, he had received a $250,000 advance for sitting down with author Peter Maas to recount his criminal exploits—including the nineteen murders.
Yes, he was expecting additional royalties as his riveting tale—including his decision to testify against his old boss, Gotti—catapulted up the best-seller list. There was even talk of a movie about Gravano, who once acknowledged that The Godfather was a major influence on his life of crime.
Maas, in turn, threw Sammy under the bus and said he was unaware of any financial agreement with the Mob killer—which would have violated the Son of Sam law preventing New York State felons from turning a profit on their crimes. Gravano disagreed: his deal was definitely with TJM Productions, author Maas’s company.
BULL’S GOLDEN TALE, trumpeted the New York Post over a courtroom artist’s sketch of the bespectacled Gravano.
Maas, in Underboss, weaved Gravano’s words into a tale somewhat sympathetic to the Bull. But Gravano was on his own against the pugnacious Marinaccio as his testimony stretched into a second contentious day.
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