Chin

by Larry McShane

  An August 26 sit-down with his chief prison psychiatrist produced Chin’s observation that “the media is on my side.” He also dodged questions about his conviction and prospects for appeal.

  The report concluded: Patient answers were generally cogent and thoughtful. [Gigante] at time seemed to deliberately be avoiding answering questions about legal issues and later indicated a good understanding of his legal situation if not his charges.

  The next day, though, Gigante refuted the suggestion that he had any lawyers working on his appeal. He also complained about loud singing outside his cell keeping him awake the night before. A nurse’s report stated the Chin was sleeping like a baby when checked.

  The big black cat appeared on consecutive nights in September. Gigante asked for some Tylenol to help him sleep.

  “I’m not sick now,” he declared on September 7. “I talked to God, and He told me about everything.”

  But his complaints continued: inmates dancing in the hallways all night or bombs going off in the darkness. According to the Chin, his most peaceful prison times came during his art therapy sessions, where he once drew a picture of the New York skyline.

  With his sentencing date approaching, Gigante confessed that life at Butner was actually pretty good and he hoped to stick around. “I hate to leave this place,” he told a staffer before a trip to Brooklyn for a court hearing.

  But he clammed up quickly: Today, Mr. Gigante stated God told him not to talk to anybody, read a September 30 evaluation.

  * * *

  The defense filed a motion for Chin’s release prior to sentencing, asking on behalf of Gigante’s family for his release in their custody pending his sentencing. U.S. Attorney Zachary Carter, in an August 27 letter to Weinstein, said the government would handle the travel arrangements from North Carolina to New York City in a “humane fashion,” which was apparently more than he believed the Chin warranted.

  We have taken these measures even though we are aware that Gigante has overstated the gravity of his physical ailments since he was arrested on May 10, 1990, read Carter’s pointed two-page missive. For instance, although Gigante presented testimony of doctors that he would die if required to go to jail on the charges against him, this medical prediction was erroneous.

  Indeed, in spite of the opinion of his doctors before the trial, Gigante elected to attend the court proceedings every day. Further, there is no reason for Gigante to be given preferential treatment because of his prominence as a criminal and the leader of the largest organized crime family in the nation.

  It’s worth noting that Carter’s reference to Chin’s position atop the Genovese family was written in the present tense.

  After almost two months of scrutiny, the medical staff at Butner delivered its decision: Gigante should not go into the general federal-prison population, but instead should do his time in a federal medical center for additional treatment.

  It is our opinion that Mr. Gigante is suffering from a mental disease or defect of which he is in need of custody for care and treatment, Warden Harley Lappin wrote in a September 16 letter to Weinstein. He currently has significant medical conditions that also require close monitoring. For these reasons, if incarcerated, we recommend placement in a [facility] that can manage both his psychiatric and medical needs.

  The report also concluded that there was evidence of “malingering” as a get-out-of-jail-free card. The defense, however, hailed the findings as proof of their assertions.

  “The doctors say he is suffering from dementia, which is what we’ve said all along,” said Phil Foglia. “Here’s a man with memory lapses so severe he couldn’t communicate with his own lawyers. The bottom line is that he is incompetent and shouldn’t go to prison.”

  It was déjà vu all over again—including Weinstein’s subsequent opinion. The judge shot down the Gigante family’s bid to have the Chin returned to the Village.

  “I don’t want him shackled, but I’m not sending him home,” the judge declared at a September 24 hearing attended by several members of the clan. He rejected a defense motion to throw out the verdict because of Gigante’s mental woes, ruling the Butner evaluation provided no “new evidence” in the case.

  “Contrary to the defendant’s assertions, the report does not undermine the prior findings of competency by this court,” Weinstein ruled in yet another victory for prosecutors. “Rather, the suggested partial diagnosis of ‘malingering’ supports . . . [a] determination that the defendant Gigante feigned mental illness over many years in order to avoid his day of reckoning.”

  The venerable jurist unleashed a few shots at Chin’s old doctors, suggesting they produced “dubious” diagnoses based on “speculative scientific theories” guaranteed to produce prode-fense findings. He also noted Gigante’s posttrial change in persona upon arriving at Butner.

  While appearing “catatonic” at the defense table, Gigante had “responded to the questions posed to him by Butner’s staff, participated meaningfully in the evaluation procedures and communicated effectively with his evaluators,” the judge said. He specifically noted Chin’s “emotional warmth and sense of humor.”

  And while he dismissed Chin’s conviction in the 1987 Gotti murder plot, due to statute of limitations, Weinstein also lobbed a bomb at the defense appeal. “As far as I’m concerned, all the information we have, plus the Butner information, supports the court’s contention that the trial was a valid trial,” he said.

  * * *

  Prosecutors were prepared for the mixed conclusion of the Butner doctors; they had discovered the Chin was a lot more unfiltered when speaking with prison staff instead of the psychiatrists. With just seven words to a federal corrections officer, Gigante undercut weeks of mental-health misdirection.

  CO Christopher Dale Sexton oversaw a special observation section where Gigante was an inmate. His workstation abutted the Chin’s cell, and they soon established a fairly friendly rapport, given the circumstances. During one of their conversations Sexton inquired if the Mob boss was catching grief from his fellow inmates or fielding any annoying requests for favors.

  “Nobody bothers me,” Gigante replied, waving his right hand for emphasis. “Nobody fucks with me.”

  Sexton went on to note an assortment of interactions with the lucid Chin so long obscured by the Oddfather routine. Gigante showered himself, dressed himself and preferred to eat alone. He quietly made his bed every morning. The old fighter occasionally shadowboxed alone in his cell. His manners were impeccable. Sexton found himself with a soft spot for the ruthless Mob boss, who liked to present himself as a hardworking everyman rather than a cold-blooded killer.

  “That’s the way he was trying to make me feel,” Sexton testified at a Brooklyn presentencing hearing. “I understood that, you know, [he meant] that government is pretty much making up a bunch of bull here. And I understood. I mean, I’m on the bottom poles, so I understood. And even if I didn’t, I generally nodded just to [get] along.”

  Sexton wasn’t going to fuck with the Chin, either.

  Gigante recounted how an annoying inmate once approached him in the visiting room to strike up a conversation. The Chin fixed the man with a stare and uttered a “ssshhh.” When the prisoner pressed the issue, Gigante flat out told the man to leave him alone.

  End of conversation.

  At another point Gigante was looking for the associate warden responsible for the mental-health units. He spotted a woman in a white uniform and asked Sexton if that was the right person.

  “I thought he wanted another nurse or something,” Sexton recounted. “And he said, ‘No, no.’ He kind of stuttered for a second. He said, ‘No, the fucking broad that runs this joint.’ ”

  Sexton, his Southern sensibilities a bit strained, recalled his one-word reply: “Whoa!” Sexton added that it was clear Gigante was treated with deference by the other prisoners and viewed as a leader as soon as he arrived in North Carolina.

  “He was very charismatic,” Sexton explained. �
��Because he made you feel like he was, you know, he knew you. He got along with you . . . the way he carried himself and the way he did speak. He was soft-spoken. He was respectful. He just kind of commanded respect.”

  The Chin even provided Sexton with his Manhattan address and urged the officer to stop by the big and beautiful home—presumably Olympia 2’s town house. Gigante, like any proud family patriarch, talked about his kids and grandkids back in New York. And he offered a little insight into his life on Sullivan Street.

  “I wasn’t a saint in the past,” he acknowledged. “[But] you gotta do what you gotta do to take care of your family.”

  The Chin explained that he avoided phones, although his reason for steering clear of calls had changed over the years. “All my friends are in jail now,” said the famously uncommunicative Gigante, “so I don’t use phones.”

  Gigante never discussed his old Mob contemporaries other than a mention of his old mentor, Vito Genovese, and a verbal broadside at his old Gambino nemesis Sammy Gravano. “He said [Gravano] was a fucking rat,” Sexton recalled. “He was just a worthless piece of shit.”

  Stamboulidis called Sexton to a November presentencing hearing where the prosecution was once again challenged to prove the Chin’s sanity. The feds also called Sharon Brown, a registered nurse working at Butner.

  * * *

  Brown testified that Gigante was coherent in dozens of conversations—when he was discussing his medications, his diet and his family visits.

  “He would say (son) Salvatore is coming back and my brother will probably come back or my wife will come back,” she recounted. When dealing with the staff, he was fairly normal. With the doctors he “tried to isolate himself,” she said. “He’d sit on the bed more.”

  Brown recounted one day when she was escorting the Chin through the prison to his cell. One inmate was raising a ruckus, yelling and screaming at the COs for hours to bring him some items banned from the prison. The crazed man finally flagged down Gigante to introduce himself.

  “He said, ‘My name is George Roseberry,’” she recalled. “And Mr. Gigante looked at him and said, ‘You need to shut up. You are getting on my nerves.’ And the inmate said, ‘Huh?’”

  The Chin evenly repeated his statement before moving on.

  “How did Roseberry respond to that?” a prosecutor asked.

  “He called out for the officers one more time,” the nurse said. “And then (Gigante) goes, ‘Shhh. Never mind.’ And we haven’t had any problems with him since.”

  The Chin later explained to Brown exactly why he had landed in Butner. “He would say, ‘They’re testing my mental status to find out if I can go back to trial,’ ” she recalled.

  Brown summed up her experiences with Gigante in a single damning sentence: “Other than having a memory loss, he’s just like you and I.”

  One other incriminating bit of news came from the prison: Gigante was regularly given prescription drugs to treat his purported mental-health woes. Yet, a urinalysis showed no trace of any drugs in his system—reminiscent of his pill-spitting days inside St. Vincent’s.

  * * *

  The defense made one final stand before sentencing. With the Chin relocated to a prison medical facility in Westchester County, psychiatrist Dr. William Reid appeared before Weinstein to argue against the judge’s competency ruling.

  “He is not malingering,” Reid said at a hearing, again attended by Father Louis and other family members. “He had lucid moments, but there were no times that I was there that I believed he was normal or near normal.”

  Under questioning by defense attorney Michael Marinaccio, the bow-tied Reid recounted the six hours that he spent with Gigante in the northern suburb.

  “He knows the jury didn’t find him innocent . . . [and] he understands that he may go to prison,” Reid conceded. “He knows something bad is going on and may happen or not. He understands that he is the star of the proceedings, but that’s the extent of his understanding.”

  Reid acknowledged Gigante, unlike his appearances during the trial, was warm and engaging—right down to kissing him on the cheek when the sit-down was done.

  “That might be something very familiar to those in New York’s Italian-American community, but not to me,” said the nonplussed shrink, “I’m an old Texan.”

  Judge Weinstein—yet again—was unmoved. In harsh language he flatly dismissed the seemingly endless defense reliance on psychiatric evaluations that supported their incessant contention of mental illness.

  “Defendant has been consistently feigning insanity for many years and is still doing so in a shrewd attempt to avoid punishment for his crimes,” Weinstein said. Sentencing was set, in stone, for December 18, and the players returned to Weinstein’s court for the promised day of reckoning—one that many on both sides believed might never come.

  * * *

  The Chin eschewed his wheelchair this time, arriving with a halting walk to sit alongside his attorneys. He initially wore a pair of sweatpants, but the court provided a pair of gray slacks kept on hand by the judge for underdressed defendants. Gigante, who also sported a blue blazer, paused at one point for a long look at the assemblage of relatives in the courtroom, including all but one of his eight children.

  The Gigante clan had collected twenty-four thousand signatures in eight loose-leaf notebooks supporting their call for leniency, harkening back to the Village’s outpouring of support for Gigante before his long-ago drug conviction. Many in the courtroom crowd were stunned when the Chin actually spoke.

  “Good morning, Your Honor,” he said as Weinstein took the bench. Gigante fell mute for the rest of the hour-long hearing, although he seemed to listen intently as the sentencing proceeded with one final pitch from the defense to keep Gigante out of jail.

  This time the lawyers offered sympathy instead of sanity as the grounds for their application to let Gigante do his time living under house arrest with family members—the same arrangement generously granted during the trial.

  “My client may not have long to live,” said Marinaccio. “I urge the court to allow him to live out what time he has left close to his family.”

  Weinstein, unsurprisingly, ignored the lawyer’s appeal. Gigante was sentenced to twelve years in prison as his children and other relatives once again wept. He was also fined $1.25 million—quite a sum for a deranged, bathrobe-wearing defendant to cover.

  Weissmann earlier spoke for the prosecution, urging the maximum term of twenty-seven years for an “inveterate gangster who committed his life to crime—and committed his life to not being caught. He spent years dodging bullets before he was brought into this courtroom.”

  The judge asked if Gigante wanted to say anything before sentencing was imposed. Marinaccio replied that the Chin had nothing to offer. However, Marinaccio told reporters that the Chin delivered a short statement as he was led away by federal marshals: “What’s going on? I don’t understand anything.”

  The prosecution was irked by Weinstein’s decision to hand down the more lenient prison term. The judge said he believed the Chin had a “fifty-fifty chance” of serving out the full jail term, which could drop to ten years with good behavior. If Gigante was indeed diagnosed as terminally ill, he could appeal for early release with prison authorities, the judge noted.

  He is a shadow of his former self—an old man finally brought to bay in his declining years after decades of vicious criminal tyranny, Weinstein wrote in a twenty-one-page opinion issued after the hearing. The judge then quoted no less an authority on the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune than Shakespeare himself: “And one man in his time plays many parts . . . Last scene of all, that ends this strange eventful history, is second childishness and mere oblivion.”

  A disgusted Father Gigante was more eloquent than his imprisoned brother—if not the judge—and hardly appeased by Weinstein’s lesser sentence.

  “He should never have been brought to trial,” barked the priest, singing his familiar song. “He’
s incompetent. What’s a downward departure? Ten years? He could be dead in about three?”

  Before leaving, Marinaccio said the defense appeal would continue. Weinstein dispatched Gigante back to Butner. It seemed the last chapter in Gigante’s decades-long war with FBI agents and federal prosecutors had finally come to an end. His lawyers would contest the conviction. The Chin would do his time. And so on, and so on.

  Dorsky and others in law enforcement didn’t see things that way. As it turned out, they were unsatisfied with jailing the Chin, who was proven sane; they would now go after his crazy alter ego—along with the family members and physicians who aided in the scam.

  * * *

  The Chin wasn’t the only Gigante to land behind bars in 1997. His oft-arrested older brother Mario, and Gigante’s nephew Salvatore, found themselves convicted in a decades-old arrangement to funnel millions of dollars in extortion payments to the Genovese coffers through their dominance of the garbage business in suburban Westchester County.

  Prosecutors said the operation, which dated to 1960, imposed a Mob tax on local residents, who paid more to get their trash hauled. Mario picked up the cash, and admitted squirreling away “significant amounts” of money generated by the power play.

  How much? He owed the Internal Revenue Service $1 million in unpaid taxes. The Genovese capo said he was now retired. When asked in court what he did for a living before that, he replied, “Mostly gambling.”

  There was a bizarre moment when Mario entered his plea. Manhattan federal judge Jed Rakoff asked Gigante if he was seeing a psychiatrist.

  “No, sir,” he replied emphatically.

  * * *

  The Chin returned to Butner to start his first jail term in thirty-three years, settling into the routine of prison life as his lawyers battled on. Even before the December sentencing occurred, the defense team received a ghoulish bit of good news: Peter Savino had passed away on September 30 at the age of fifty-five. The Genovese turncoat survived for barely two months after testifying against the Chin.

  Word of Savino’s death at an undisclosed location came via a court filing by federal prosecutors. The ultimate Gigante informant died before he could face sentencing for the six murders in which he admitted playing a role.