Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (107 page)

The ever-suspicious Gaspipe Casso, alarmed by the warehouse discoveries, declared that Savino must be “a rat” and urged Gigante to whack him. “The
robe said, ‘No,’” Gaspipe confided to Al D’Arco, using his private, derogatory nickname for Gigante. (When news of the FBI’s Windows case investigation surfaced in 1989, Casso had no qualms about killing a potential witness in his family, the associate Sonny Morrissey, although the union official had not turned and was himself under investigation.)

Paradoxically, the demands by the Gambino and Lucchese bigwigs for Savino’s head might have protected him. Considering himself the supreme Mafia boss in the country, Gigante had no intention of heeding the advice of rivals, particularly the detested John Gotti, and Gaspipe Casso, a relative novice in high Mafia politics. It was Chin’s judgment call; no one in his borgata had turned up a negative fact on Savino, and Pete had fulfilled every request asked of him. Greed might also have influenced Gigante. Early on, Savino had paid a $1 million Genovese family debt to the Luccheses, and he was a money-engine for the family. The Housing Authority rigged contracts totaled more than $151 million for the four families; although investigators were unable to put a precise pricetag on the fraud, prosecutor Gregory O’Connell reckoned that “multimillions” wound up in the pockets of Genovese gangsters.

Gigante’s confidence in Savino finally wavered in the spring of 1989. Gaspipe Casso’s law-enforcement moles reported that Savino was indeed spying for the government, and the Luccheses cut all contacts with him. Earlier, Benny Eggs Mangano became furious upon learning that Savino had failed to inform him about a meeting with Gambino and Colombo delegates. The discussion with other families sounded to Mangano like a double-cross, and Casso’s warning rang more alarm bells for Benny Eggs.

Danger signals also were going off at the FBI. On the afternoon of June 21, 1989, Savino got an ominous telephone call in his office. The caller refused to identify himself, but Savino recognized the voice of a Brooklyn mobster, who said he had seen Savino with FBI agents and was spreading that news. Discussing the call that night with Dick Rudolph, Savino described it as a prank and wanted to continue the undercover project. The agent was more perturbed; Savino’s cover might be blown. “He’s a wild card,” Rudolph said of the mysterious caller. “Even if he didn’t see anything, he might go around telling everyone that you’re cooperating.” Savino had survived twenty months as an industrious informer, prosecutors had more than fifty hours of secretly taped conversations, and the evidence against high-echelon mafiosi from four families seemed strong. “We have a lot and we need you as a witness—alive,” Rudolph declared.

That night, FBI agents drove Savino to his home in Staten Island, where he
packed a suitcase, and then vanished into the Witness Protection Program. His third wife wanted to join him, but decided against it because she would have been unable to bring along her young son from another marriage without the father’s permission.

Welcoming Pete Savino into his exclusive flock and later vouching for him after bodies were found in the Williamsburg factory had been Gigante’s egregious blunder. Chin’s trust in Savino had endangered himself and his closest lieutenants, and provoked a groundswell of enmity from other families now in deep trouble. Even more embarrassing, Savino had damaged Chin’s reputation for infallibility. Chin put out a contract on Savino and uncharacteristically sought help from other borgatas. During a walk-talk in Little Italy with Al D’Arco of the Lucchese family, Jimmy Ida, the new Genovese consigliere, gave him a photograph of a bare-chested Savino, standing with another man. “Al, Vince needs a favor from you,” Ida said. “We got reason to believe that Petey Savino and his partner are in Hawaii, and we understand that you got a guy in Hawaii. Vince would like to kill these guys.”

Guarded twenty-four hours a day by U.S. marshals, Savino was never found by the Mob. Genovese wiseguys tried to intimidate him through a telephone threat to his wife, warning that she and her son were in danger if Savino testified. That day she found a Molotov cocktail gasoline bomb with an unlit fuse in the front seat of her car. Although she was not formally in the witness-protection system, the government began safeguarding her and her child.

Lead prosecutors Rose and O’Connell fine-tuned the evidence for eleven months, and in May 1990, based largely on Savino’s grand jury testimony and his tapes, Chin Gigante and fourteen other mobsters and associates from four families were indicted on a RICO enterprise charge. They were accused of skimming “tens of millions” of dollars by controlling 75 percent of the window bids, $151 million from a total of $191 million in contracts awarded by the Housing Authority from 1978 to 1989. The thievery eclipsed by far that centerpiece of the Commission trial, the Concrete Club. Although multimillions apparently were ripped off by the Mafia from concrete contracts, prosecutors could substantiate only $1.2 million collected over four years in that caper.

Gigante was arrested in his pajamas at his mother’s Sullivan Street apartment on the morning of May 30, the day the indictment was unsealed. Told to dress, he put on a belted black bathrobe, shoes, and a woolen cap. Before his
hands were cuffed behind his back, he wordlessly handed a card containing the telephone number of his brother Father Louis Gigante to an agent. Fingerprinted and photographed at FBI headquarters in Lower Manhattan, Gigante was more talkative. Asked by an agent about his eldest brother, Pasquale, Gigante pulled out a mass card, indicating that Patsy was dead. “He’s with God,” Gigante said. Fingerprinting him, another agent made small talk, inquiring about his boxing days and how many bouts he had won. “I was a heavyweight, then I lost weight and became a light heavy. It was a long time ago, I don’t remember.”

At the arraignment, Chin was alongside his underboss Benny Eggs Mangano, and capo Baldy Dom Canterino. Others arrested that morning were the Colombo consigliere, Benedetto “Benny” Aloi; Gambino capo Peter Gotti, John’s brother; and Lucchese capo Fat Pete Chiodo. Two major defendants, Gaspipe Casso and Vic Amuso, the Lucchese leaders, were missing, having gone on the lam after a corrupt investigator warned Casso of the imminent arrests. In court, seated in the jury box with the other defendants, Gigante appeared disoriented, mumbling that he wanted to know when the “wedding” would begin. “Where’s the bride?” he asked several times.

Gigante’s lawyer, Barry Slotnick, contending that Gigante was mentally ill and unable to assist in his defense, obtained Chin’s release on a $1 million bond supplied by his relatives. The tabloid press had a field day with Gigante’s arrest and deportment in court. Headlines proclaimed him “Oddfather” and the “Daffy Don.” Submitting reports from psychiatrists that Gigante was deranged and maintaining that he was incoherent, defense lawyers won their first legal skirmish with the prosecution. Chin’s case was severed from the trial of the other defendants until there was a ruling on his sanity and ability to assist in his defense.

With Savino’s testimony and his damaging tapes as the principal evidence, most high-ranking mafiosi in the Windows case were convicted. The Genoveses’ Benny Mangano and the Colombos’ Benny Aloi were found guilty after a six-month trial in 1991. Baldy Dom Canterino died of natural causes before he could be tried. After being captured, Gaspipe Casso and Vic Amuso wound up with life sentences, imposed partly from the Windows indictment. The only big-time mobster acquitted was Peter Gotti, who was defended by his brother’s lawyer, Bruce Cutler. Ripping into Savino’s character, Cutler portrayed him as a serial murderer who had profited from a fraudulent scheme that he originated, and then tried to entrap others to save his own neck. “The corruption, the soiling, the contamination is over here,” Cutler, in his usual fiery manner,
exclaimed, slamming his fist on the prosecution table. There was no smoking-gun tape against Gotti; in fact, one recording indicated that he had lost money on an investment with a window company. “I’ve been in this already two years now,” Gotti was heard griping. “I didn’t make a quarter.”

The Windows trial gave Chin’s lawyers a vivid preview of the government’s strengths and weaknesses in the bid-rigging case as they tried to prove he was mentally impaired. But delaying his trial inadvertently helped the prosecution to expand the charges against Gigante. As the complex legal battle over his competence dragged on, three important mobsters defected, each with new evidence against Chin. Sammy Gravano and Al D’Arco were ready to testify that Gigante was a godfather and to describe his relationship as a boss with the Gambino and Lucchese families. D’Arco and Phil Leonetti, the turncoat Philadelphia underboss, were set to implicate him for ordering six murders and several attempted murders. Still free on $1 million bond, Gigante was back in court in June 1993, this time the lone defendant on a superseding indictment. In addition to the Windows racket, he was accused of more serious charges: being the Genovese boss and having authorized a series of Mob slayings, including the bomb attempt on John Gotti’s life that killed Frank DeCicco.

In the meantime, a battery of psychiatrists retained by the defense diagnosed Gigante as suffering from hallucinations, schizophrenia, and dementia possibly caused by Alzheimer’s disease or organic brain damage from his days in the ring. At a climatic sanity hearing in the spring of 1996, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn presented rebuttal opinions from other psychiatrists that Gigante was sane, and testimony from Savino, Gravano, D’Arco, and Leonetti that Mafia leaders understood Chin’s deranged behavior was an act. The defectors concurred that Gigante’s Cosa Nostra counterparts would never have accepted him as a boss if they believed he was unstable.

A federal judge resolved six years of litigation by ruling that Gigante was mentally competent to stand trial, and that he had engaged in an “elaborate deception” with the help of relatives to feign mental illness. But more delay was in store. On the eve of the trial’s opening, Gigante for the second time underwent open-heart surgery, a double coronary bypass, and the trial was postponed for six months while he recuperated. Finally, in the summer of 1997, Gigante was rolled into a courtroom in a wheelchair by Father Louis, and the proceedings began. The Gigante family cardiologist was in attendance daily, checking his patient’s blood pressure and condition during every recess. For a month, a pallid Gigante sat at the defense table, staring blankly into space, moving his
lips silently as though talking to himself, or apparently dozing off while deserters testified and the prosecution played bugs and wiretaps of mafiosi identifying him as a boss and incriminating him in money-making plots and for arranging murders. Gigante’s voice was on none of the recordings. But the government had tapes and wiretaps of mobsters, including John Gotti, referring to “Chin” and “Vincent” as a boss. Chin’s threats to kill anybody who mentioned his name hadn’t worked.

At the close of the month-long trial, the prosecution presented its most dramatic witness, Peter Savino, in an obvious attempt to provide a compelling finale for the jury shortly before deliberations began. Robust and indefatigable when he went undercover for the government a decade earlier, Savino now looked weary and withered beyond his fifty-odd years. Propped up in a wheelchair, gravely ill from cancer and too weak to travel, he testified by closed-circuit television from an undisclosed location. Constantly wiping perspiration from his skeletal face, he was the only former collaborator who provided firsthand information about direct criminal deals with Chin. His recollections of Gigante discussing murders and racketeering schemes with him riveted the jurors and spectators as he appeared on seven television screens in the hushed courtroom. Wincing in pain, his head sometimes sagging to his chest, and shifting uncomfortably in his seat, Savino needed several recesses to compose himself. In a halting voice, he implored, “I got to take a break, please,” and, “I need to stop a minute now, guys.”

Without calling a single witness, defense lawyers counted on cross-examinations and summations to discredit the six defectors who sought leniency and a parade of FBI agents who swore that Gigante was a highly respected Mafia overlord. The defense hammered at the fact that the government had earlier convicted Fat Tony Salerno of being the Genovese boss at a time the prosecution now said Gigante had run the family. If the FBI had been wrong about Salerno, the lawyers argued, it was logical that the bureau could be equally mistaken about the mentally and physically frail defendant Gigante.

An anonymous jury (a practice which had become de rigueur for Mafia trials in New York) deliberated for three days. Perking up when the jurors returned, and looking more alert than he had at any time during the trial, Gigante rolled his eyes in apparent disbelief when the forewoman announced the verdicts. He was convicted on the most serious counts: serving as the
Genovese godfather, participating in the Windows plundering, and conspiring to kill John Gotti, his brother Gene, and Pete Savino. As a poor consolation for him, the jury acquitted or deadlocked on charges that he had ordered four gangland murders in Philadelphia.

Imposing a sentence of twelve years instead of a possible maximum of twenty-seven, and a $1.25 million fine, Judge Jack B. Weinstein, reflected on Chin’s career. “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.”

The judge was mistaken. Prison walls could not contain the old man’s cunning or “vicious criminal tyranny.”

Chin’s Last Hurrah