Chin

by Larry McShane

  Despite the menacing description Andrew was later given a pass to take his family to Disney World before beginning his jail term on September 23.

  * * *

  With the weight of the crazy act now gone, Vincent Gigante seemed happy and upbeat despite the near-certainty of his death behind bars. The returning Chin told the Fort Worth staff that he felt “‘a lot better than in a long time,’ ” read a prison report written one month after his plea. But the mobster’s health was clearly failing, and prison officials arranged for the Chin’s transfer to a facility better equipped to take care of him.

  Gigante arrived at the U.S. Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri, on August 1, 2003. The Chin was now seventy-seven, far from home and in failing health: a bum ticker, bad kidneys, insomnia. The list of his fifteen medications filled a full page and a half.

  And Springfield was the place where old Mob bosses went to die: Old pal Vito Genovese passed away in Missouri on Valentine’s Day, 1969; while old nemesis John Gotti died in the medical center from complications of cancer in 2002. Fat Tony Salerno drew his last breath behind bars in Springfield.

  His family was worried about the Chin’s increasingly troubled health: Carmella Esposito called the prison on August 5, and was given a full update on her father’s health issues. A prison official answered some of her more specific questions about the Chin. But there was no good news as the old fighter’s body continued to fail him.

  In September a baseball-sized hernia was found after Gigante’s cellmate called for a doctor when the Chin began “moaning from the pain.” By November the once-mighty Mob boss was reduced to asking for an appointment to get his toenails trimmed. The request, as usual, was written by another inmate. The Chin always closed with a cheery sign-off: Thank you for your kind assistance.

  As he settled into life at the jailhouse/medical facility, Gigante went through good days and bad days. By now, the Chin was in some ways just another inmate in the massive federal system: one prison report regarding his problems with chest congestion actually misspelled his last name as Giganti.

  The Chin had periods where his body showed some resilience and his mood brightened, when his mood was upbeat despite the circumstances.

  “I was sick, [but] now I’m all right,” he told doctors on May 12, 2004. “God helped me. I used to go to St. Vincent’s. They gave me a lot of medicine.”

  A prison doctor stopped by Gigante’s cell the next month to chat with the Chin, who was complaining of anxiety, restlessness and trouble sleeping. Gigante, very specifically, had asked for Ativan to help him sleep. The doctor found a relaxed Gigante lying in his bed, calm and cooperative.

  His voice was soft, and he spoke slowly, read the doctor’s report. No signs of restlessness or agitation were observed. From a clinical standpoint, there is no evidence currently that Mr. Gigante requires treatment for anxiety with medications.

  His appetite stayed healthy: over the Fourth of July weekend the Chin told doctors that he knocked back a dozen hot dogs and enough watermelon to give him indigestion.

  In mid-October, Gigante was locked in a private room for his own protection after a pair of bizarre incidents where he told prison officials that he wanted to go home to “Mommy and his kids.” On another occasion he appeared “very confused, talking to ‘ghosts.’ ” The Chin was “shaking and shouting at roommates.” He was “urinating in [a] trash can in [his] room.”

  Gigante still submitted to regular psych evaluations. But as the end of 2005 approached, there was little left of the sidewalk song and dance that kept the authorities at bay and the Chin on the streets for decades.

  Dr. Thomas Hare paid the Chin an October 31, 2005, visit after Gigante, in failing health, was transferred to the prison’s intensive nursing care unit—known as No. 1. It was a purely social call, with staff doctor Hare arriving to check on Gigante’s adjustment and chat a bit. There was nothing remotely scary about the Halloween drop-in.

  Mr. Gigante greeted me as usual, smiled, asked how I was and shook my hand, Hare recounted. He asked me how long he would be required to live on No. 1. I explained to him because his physical condition had deteriorated somewhat and that more intensive nursing care was required, [that] was the reason he was transferred.

  He seemed to understand and nodded his affirmation. During my interaction with Mr. Gigante, he was alert, smiled, asked appropriate questions, provided appropriate answers and was alert to his surroundings. He asked me about my family, and appeared to understand why he was living in a different housing situation.

  A day later, when Dr. Robert Denney arrived for a neuropsychology consult, the Chin slipped back into his old ways. Denney was a nemesis from the past—he had interviewed Gigante in the early 1990s and found the Chin was faking his mental illness. The two men sat in Gigante’s room, where Chin—disheveled, unshaven, in clean clothes—appeared “alert and affable.” To a point.

  He behaved in a manner suggestive that he recognized me, but said he could not remember my name or who I was, Denney wrote. His speech was normal in rate, comment and form.

  But Gigante volunteered that he didn’t know the day, the date, the month or the year. The Chin allowed that he believed it was almost winter, but he declined to name the season. And then he stopped answering questions. Denney tried another approach, asking the Chin to fold a piece of paper and place it on the floor.

  “What?” asked Gigante, holding the piece of paper in his hand. “I am not gonna throw no piece of paper on the floor.”

  Denney, like so many before him, departed with a degree of admiration for Gigante’s efforts.

  Mr. Gigante is exaggerating gross neurocognitive dysfunction, he wrote. The sophistication of his malingering attempt suggests to me that he likely has the level of cognitive skill necessary to be considered competent to make basic legal or medical decisions for himself.

  * * *

  If the brain was still working, Chin’s body was increasingly failing. At the request of his family and his lawyer, the Chin was taken to St. John’s Medical Center in Springfield later that month, suffering from heart and kidney problems. A guard stood watch at his hospital room, where Gigante—despite his worsening condition—had his ankles shackled to the bed. Oddly enough, one of the attending physicians was Edward W. Gotti, M.D.

  Gigante’s return to the prison after his November 23 discharge came with twin diagnoses: congestive heart failure and acute renal failure. The Chin, faced with his own mortality, made a decision. Over the objections of his doctors, the old man did not want to go on dialysis.

  According to prison records: He expressed that he understood the nature of the problem. He agreed that he did not want to be maintained on a dialysis machine.

  The former teenage lightweight was throwing in the towel. When placed on an IV for his kidney woes at one point, Gigante pulled the needle from his arm and tossed the bag in the trash. He refused to wear a heart monitor on another occasion.

  “I believe in God,” he told a nurse. “He will assist me.”

  Gigante became increasingly thin and frail—so weak that a note in his medical file said his “condition overall” would “limit the amount of tests which should occur.”

  On December 18, Gigante was alert and cooperative before lights out. Hours later, at 2 A.M., prison staff was called to his room after the old Mob boss had trouble breathing. They arrived to find Gigante’s oxygen tubing was disconnected. It was quickly reattached, with the staff offering some words of comfort before putting Gigante back to bed a half continent away from the familiar streets of Greenwich Village, from his wife, his mistress and his eight kids.

  Prison medical staff would check on the ailing inmate throughout the rest of their overnight shift.

  At 3:05 A.M., the room was quiet and Gigante asleep. Ditto at 4:20 A.M. But when they returned for the morning inmate count at five minutes after five, it was immediately clear that something was wrong.

  Prison records provided a col
d, clinical account of what happened next: Entered room with officer . . . to find inmate laying across bed with 02 (oxygen tube) off in floor, inmate warm to touch, non-responsive to verbal stimuli, no respirations noted. Code called by officer while crash cart obtained, chest compressions initiated.

  As a nurse started CPR, a “Code Blue” emergency call immediately went out. But there was nothing that could be done. At the end Gigante faced no blizzard of bullets, felt no soft kiss of betrayal, sensed no impending twist of criminal fate. At 5:15 A.M., in a small room with the nurse and EMTs, Vincent Gigante was quietly pronounced dead.

  The night shift workers summoned the prison chaplain. The jail’s duty officer was told, and calls went out to the next of kin—his wife, Olympia, as specified on Gigante’s prison paperwork. She was notified at the Old Tappan, New Jersey, home where she had lived without her husband for decades.

  * * *

  Word spread quickly to New York, where the Chin had ruled for so long. First notice for many came via an obituary by Richard Pyle of the Associated Press: Vincent “The Chin” Gigante, the powerful New York mob boss who avoided prison for decades by wandering Greenwich Village’s streets in a ratty bathrobe and slippers as part of an elaborate feigned mental illness, died Monday in prison, federal officials said. He was 77.

  Stamboulidis recalled his phone ringing early that morning with word of Gigante’s demise. A short while later, it rang again—this time with a reporter on the other end looking for comment.

  “Are we off the record?” the lawman asked.

  Assured the conversation would stay between them, Stamboulidis paused before delivering his deadpan reply: “He’s faking.”

  The cause of death was officially listed as cardiac dysrhythmia, and the Chin had apparently passed about fifteen minutes before his body was found. The autopsy notes indicated he was clean-shaven, his once de rigueur stubble gone. The death certificate noted Gigante was a salesman, peddling “haberdashery”—a throwback to his long-ago days in the women’s hat business.

  * * *

  The Chin’s passing set off a war between the families: the Gigantes of New Jersey and the Espositos of the Upper East Side. Olympia Esposito and daughter Carmella both wanted Gigante’s personal effects and property from prison sent to them; Olympia Gigante held the final word as her husband’s designated next of kin.

  There was another bone of contention: Both families wanted to handle transportation of the body and the funeral arrangements. Prison attorney Dennis Bitz urged the two sides to work things out before word of their dispute went public. In this way, he wrote diplomatically, we can avoid the media circus that might occur.

  Olympia Gigante also notified prison officials that she wanted an independent pathologist present for the autopsy—the renowned Michael Baden, a former New York City medical examiner. Prison officials initially blanched, but they caved in when they were notified five minutes before the procedure was set to start that relatives were set to file for an injunction blocking the autopsy.

  In the end a deal was cut and the uneasy peace between the two clans restored. Olympia 1 faxed a handwritten letter to prison officials with the specifics, where she ceded some ground to the Espositos, while letting one and all know that she remained the Chin’s one and only spouse: I, Olympia Gigante, would like to have Vincent Esposito handle the arrangements concerning my husband Vincent ID #26071-037. Thank you! Sincerely, Mrs. Olympia Gigante

  Family lawyer Flora Edwards was dispatched to Springfield to take possession of the body. She first insured that all samples taken during the autopsy were cremated and “not [commingled] with any other remains.”

  Once the details were settled, Vincent Gigante was finally headed home, back to his old haunts on Sullivan Street, just down the block from the Triangle and the apartments that he had shared with his mom, Yolanda. In death, as in life, Gigante would show himself one last time as the antithesis of the showboating Gotti.

  There were two separate funerals, one for each faction of the Chin’s family. Olympia 1, joined by her children and an intimate group of family and friends, gathered at a small Garden State church for a funeral Mass three days before Christmas. The Chin’s body was not present as they bid farewell to the late patriarch.

  One day later, Olympia 2 and her three children held their own funeral at St. Anthony of Padua Church in the Village. Father Louis Gigante presided over a larger but still understated service that featured none of the trappings of old-school Mob boss funerals—no line of limos, no ostentatious floral arrangements, nothing like the glitzy 2002 Queens send-off for Gotti.

  The church was about three-quarters full, with few—if any—of Chin’s old Mob cronies in attendance. His brother Mario was among those in attendance as Father G. spoke about their lost sibling.

  “In the eight years Vincent was in prison, I visited him nineteen times,” the priest said. “There wasn’t a day he didn’t suffer. He did his time like a man. He was going to come home. He was dying to come home. But he couldn’t. They allowed him to die.”

  Father G., standing in the pulpit of a church that survived the neighborhood’s massive gentrification, flashed back to the days when his older brother was the local padrone.

  “The world had a different view of him through the media,” he said. “But we, his family, his friends, the people of Greenwich Village, me, his brothers, his mother and his father, we all knew him as a gentle man. A man of God. Vincent never traveled. He was always on Sullivan Street, walking and helping others, neglecting himself.”

  The white-gloved pallbearers carried the coffin, covered in red-and-white poinsettias befitting the holiday season, from the church. Gigante’s remains were finally cremated at the historic Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, the final resting place of Mob contemporaries Albert Anastasia and Crazy Joe Gallo.

  An agreement between the Gigante and Esposito families allowed each to keep a portion of the Chin’s ashes. Son Salvatore Gigante brought their half of the ashes across the George Washington Bridge to Gigante’s wife, ensuring the Chin would rest in pieces—half in New Jersey, half in his hometown.

  EPILOGUE

  IF NOT FOR YOU

  FATHER G. IS ALMOST DONE WITH HIS BREAKFAST IN BRUNO’S. HE’S told some old stories, and held a few more back. His fondest memories of Vincent are kept in a 550-page memoir cowritten in the mid-1970s with a trusted newspaper reporter and friend. There are just a few copies, printed and bound, all in the hands of family members. And that, he says firmly, is where they will remain.

  “I made it, with a few pictures and everything,” he explains. “I asked him, I said, ‘I’d like to write my life, because I may lose my brain and I’ll forget.’ In my book I’ve got everything about Vincent.”

  The conversation winds down as the waitress clears the table and the street traffic outside picks up.

  “My brother was a good man,” he declares, speaking quite deliberately. “My brother was part of the very essence of New York at the time, in this neighborhood.... He’s gone quite a few years now. That’s why I’d even talk to you about him.”

  Very little in the now-upscale neighborhood outside remains the same. At 208 Sullivan Street, once home to the Chin and his Triangle card games, the Sullivan Street Tea & Spice Co. now serves the city’s “finest and most extensive selection of organic teas.”

  Across the street, apartments once populated entirely by immigrants are morphing into luxury homes for the 1 percent—the wealthiest of the wealthy. At 215 Sullivan a large sign promises the imminent arrival of four luxury town houses, seventeen lofts and four penthouses. Construction workers and equipment fill the street where Vincent Gigante once strolled in a robe instead of a hard hat.

  The entrance to 225 Sullivan, where Gigante and his mother shared an apartment, remains unchanged—the buzzers to ring residents upstairs in the building remain affixed to the right of the front entrance.

  * * *

  Hit-making Tommy James finally wrote a book a
bout his time working for the Mob, but not until after the Chin and the other Genovese bosses were dead. His effort may turn into a Broadway musical.

  Sammy Gravano is behind bars, where he will take his last breath after leaving the Witness Protection Program to resume his life of crime. Bobby Manna and Benny Eggs Mangano, silent to this day, face the same fate. Phil Leonetti is out of the Witness Protection family, enjoying his second life after finishing his government testimony. He wrote a book, too: Mafia Prince. Unlike with his ABC News appearance, he shared a voice in choosing the title.

  George Barone continued to testify against his former Mob compatriots until he died at age eighty-six in December 2010. The feisty gangster went down swinging. In July 2009, Barone swore to tell the whole truth one last time before blasting old pal Harold Daggett: “The bastard. No fucking good, never will be.”

  One of Father G.’s nieces, Chin’s daughter Rita, came out as a lesbian and even wrote a book of her own, The Godfather’s Daughter. The priest did not approve. She is now happily married to her longtime partner.

  * * *

  But other things endure. The Genovese family lumbers on, its ranks depleted and its subsequent bosses unable to rule in the Chin’s imperious style. Law enforcement attention and the steady parade of informants eroded the family as surely as the conviction of their longtime leader. There was now a reluctance to become the boss, a position that came with more problems than perks.

  SEBCO remains a force in the South Bronx, run now by Chin’s son Salvatore. Father G., who stepped down in 2007, still stops in about three times a week. The agency created six thousand new or rehabilitated homes in some 450 buildings throughout the South Bronx, and employs more than three hundred people.

  The priest spends his weekends at the upstate getaway purchased from Morris Levy.

  In the ports of New Jersey, Chin’s son-in-law and his nephew Ralph were two of eleven relatives making a combined $2 million a year, according to a 2010 investigation by the Waterfront Commission of New York and New Jersey.