Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (108 page)

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mprisoned at age sixty-nine, Chin Gigante continued doing what he had done for decades: behind bars, he acted as if he were mentally ill, and he remained the unchallenged ringmaster of the Genovese family. It took federal prosecutors five more years to unmask his true power. In 2002 he was indicted again, accused of leading his borgata from prison. He also was charged with obstructing justice by pretending to be deranged, thereby delaying his previous trial for seven years.

This time, his son Andrew, a wealthy container-shipping executive, was a codefendant, identified as the courier who ferried his father’s instructions on major policy decisions to mobsters in New York. The indictment alleged that Andrew, while not a made man, was a “a key player in the Genovese family” and “a powerful presence on the New York-New Jersey waterfront.”

Brought from the federal prison in Fort Worth, Texas, for his arraignment in Brooklyn, Chin resumed his befuddled pose. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he spluttered when a judge asked if he had discussed the charges with his lawyer and how he wanted to plead.

Fifteen months later, in April 2003, Gigante was miraculously cured of his brain damage/madness/senility/dementia/Alzheimer’s disease/schizophrenia. On the first day of the trial, he was lucid, animated, and made a stunning confession:
to avoid further prosecution he admitted he had conned a succession of psychiatrists evaluating his mental competency over three decades. In exchange for his admission and a guilty plea to having obstructed justice, the government dropped the racketeering charge that he had continued to run a crime family from prison. A potential prison sentence of another twenty years was reduced to three more years, and three years of supervised probation.

Following in his father’s footsteps, forty-six-year-old Andrew, looking like a well-tailored executive, accepted a bargain, pleading guilty to racketeering and extorting $90,000 from a shipping company. He was sentenced to two years—a sharp drop from a possible twenty if convicted on all counts—and ordered to pay $2 million in fines.

If he survives, Chin’s earliest hope of freedom will come in 2012, when he will be eighty-four.

Clearly, father and son had viewed and weighed the weight of evidence that would have been lodged against them if they risked trials. Like John Gotti and his son, Chin and Andrew had been videotaped in prison and their telephone conversations had been recorded. Prosecutors were ready to substantiate that Chin used code words and hand signals to transmit messages for Andrew to deliver to Genovese battalions.

A solid witness with a long memory, a seventy-nine-year-old waterfront mobster and reputed hit man, George Barone, was eager to testify about Chin and Andrew’s involvement in extortions at New Jersey and Miami ports. Barone renounced his Mafia loyalty to omertà after being indicted for waterfront racketeering and discovering that he was on Chin’s hit list because of a money dispute with Andrew.

Another scheduled prosecution witness, Michael “Cookie” D’Urso, a Genovese associate, had flipped after his arrest on a murder charge. Using a recording device secreted in a Rolex watch, D’Urso over two years had taped Genovese gangsters talking about Chin’s supervising the family from his cell block and using his son as his intermediary.

“Don’t let anyone tell you we’re dead,” capo Alan “Baldy” Longo said on a recording. “We’re not because Vito [Genovese] ain’t here no more. Vincent is.” A soldier, Pasquale Falcetti, was heard telling D’Urso about his illegal waterfront enterprises with Andrew Gigante. “Whatever the kid Andrew says, it comes from him,” Falcetti said, touching his chin. “Who’s going to challenge that?”

Gigante’s guilty plea was highly humiliating for the psychiatrists who had
diagnosed his mental disintegration as irreversible. Dr. Louis D’Adamo, Chin’s principal psychiatrist for seventeen years, in a court affidavit had described him as “suffering from schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is a disease of the mind manifested by delusions, hallucinations, a thought disorder, and what we call negative symptoms.” At the time of Gigante’s 1997 trial, Dr. Wilfred G. van Gorp, director of neuropsychology at Columbia University Medical School, said the patient was afflicted by “moderate to severe dementia which reflects significant underlying central nervous system dysfunction.” In 2003, after Gigante acknowledged his charade, Dr. van Gorp concluded that he might be both mentally ill and a faker. “The guy on the [prison] tapes is not the one I examined.”

(Gigante’s trial and reviews of his medical records disclosed another method he had employed to bilk the government. It might have been chicken feed to a mafioso of his stature, but Gigante and his relatives used the psychiatric diagnosis to obtain $900 a month in Social Security disability payments for Chin, from 1990 until he was imprisoned in 1997, probably the easiest money Chin had ever scored.)

Copping a plea like a common criminal was an unprecedented capitulation for a prodigious Cosa Nostra don. Chin broke tradition by admitting guilt and negotiating a deal. Regardless of the sentence consequences, godfathers did not surrender and seek breaks from prosecutors. Such actions harmed Mafia morale. John Gotti, Carmine Persico, Ducks Corallo, and even the figurehead Tony Salerno had stuck to their guns. Gigante’s rationale was obvious to prosecutors and investigators: he was helping his son Andrew and other relatives who had been compromised because of him. The plea deal with the government spared Andrew a long prison sentence for racketeering, although it shattered Chin’s self-righteous posture that he had quarantined his children from involvement with the Mafia. He had set up Andrew in a nefarious business, made him wealthy through Mob muscle, and used him as a conduit to maintain control of the borgata.

Another hypocrisy spread by Gigante was that he insulated and excluded his immediate family from his Cosa Nostra affairs. In 2002, a prosecutor, Daniel Dorsky, seeking court permission to examine Gigante’s medical records, indicated that his close kin had deliberately misled psychiatrists about his mental condition. The plea bargain specified that any relative who aided Gigante’s deception would not be prosecuted for obstruction of justice. Immunizing his wife, mistress, children, and his brother Father Louis from indictments was a concession that Gigante wrung from the government.

Chin learned the hard way that the era had ended when tolerant prison authorities allowed Mafia bosses exceptional liberties, and mobsters ran entire wings of penitentiaries. Tight security and close electronic monitoring of visitors foiled attempts by John Gotti and Carmine Persico to dictate Gambino and Colombo policies from afar and to use relatives as messengers. Their attempts to maintain a semblance of control landed their sons in prison. Chin ran his family by remote control for five years before the government also caught up with him and Andrew.

The precipitous slide in the Genovese family’s fortunes began with the only mistake Gigante made in judging criminal character and loyalty. During his reign he lowered his guard for one newcomer—Peter Savino. After the two bodies were found in Savino’s old warehouse, Chin disregarded warnings from other mafiosi and allowed Savino to continue his usual family activities, although he had never previously hesitated whacking anyone who might endanger him. “Pete was absolutely the cornerstone for getting Chin convicted; before him there was almost nothing to build on,” the FBI’s Dick Rudolph pointed out.

Gregory O’Connell, the Windows case prosecutor, also credits Savino with unintentionally setting in motion the Genovese family’s decline. At first, O’Connell dismissed Savino as a “rich, spoiled kid, accustomed to getting everything he wanted and desperate to avoid jail.” His contempt changed to admiration for the courage Savino exhibited. “It took a lot of guts to go out on the street every day wearing a wire and meeting with wiseguys who were in the business of killing informers who committed the slightest error and gave themselves away.”

Literally from his deathbed, Savino completed his work for the government. In unremitting pain from terminal cancer, he testified as the central witness against Gigante at the 1997 trial, and died six weeks later at age fifty-five.

When Chin was convicted the first time on RICO charges, the Genoveses overall were in good shape. With over three hundred made men, it was the largest borgata in the country, and its fourteen crews were prospering almost as well as they had in previous decades. To law-enforcement analysts it remained the nation’s most impregnable crime family. Five years later, Gigante’s long-distance reign ended in dismal failure, partly because his oldest and most capable lieutenants were no longer available to help on the outside. Benny Eggs Mangano was in prison; Baldy Dom Canterino and Chin’s brother Ralph were dead; another brother and capo, Mario, was serving time for tax evasion; and Quiet Dom Cirillo, a likely candidate to fill in as acting Genovese boss, was temporarily incapacitated by a heart attack.

The absence of Chin and his seasoned commanders contributed to infiltration of the family and his second conviction. Two crews were penetrated by Michael Cookie D’Urso, the associate who became an informer to beat a murder-conspiracy rap, and by an undercover detective known as “Big Frankie.” The combined evidence resulted in the convictions and guilty pleas in 2001 and 2002 of six capos and more than seventy soldiers, wannabes, and associates. Their criminal activities had extended along much of the East Coast from Little Italy to the Miami waterfront. The arrests were for a wide range of familiar Mafia specialties: labor-racketeering, extortion of businesses, loan-sharking, illegal gambling, gangland executions, and robberies, including a thwarted attempt to steal $2 million to $6 million from
The New York Times
employees’ credit union. Rackets in two other significant family strongholds—the private garbage-collection associations and the Fulton Fish Market—were largely shattered through investigations by the Manhattan DA’s office and long-overdue regulatory crackdowns by City Hall.

Imprisoning Gigante in 1997 was a breakthrough in law-enforcement’s battle against the Genovese family. Without Chin’s close supervision the borgata plunged into a tailspin from which it is trying to recover.

After his 2003 conviction, back in a correctional institution containing a hospital ward should he need treatment for his cardiac condition, Gigante’s reign as a “mad” godfather was over. There was no need to babble incoherently and stare vacantly into space. He had no alternative but to adjust, behave rationally, and make the best of the remainder of his days in mainly Southern and Midwestern prisons, the farthest Gigante had ever ventured from his roots in New York. As a wiseguy and as a godfather, he had avoided night spots and chic restaurants, never took a normal vacation, and restricted his movements within a radius of fifty miles from his birthplace in Greenwich Village. “It’s hard to understand what enjoyment he got out of being a Mob chieftain,” Ronald Gold-stock, former director of the New York State Organized Crime Task Force, remarked in analyzing Gigante’s aspirations. “His only pleasure appeared to be the pure power he exercised.”

In prison, an aged Gigante still exhibited the cockiness and the authoritative aura of a Mafia godfather. Asked by guard Christopher Sexton if other inmates were bothering him, Chin replied, “Nobody fucks with me.”

Nothing Magical:
Forensic Accounting

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mong FBI agents, Jack Stubing was known for his tenacity. “He doesn’t be come obsessed with a hard case and lose sleep over it,” fellow agent Pat Marshall observed admiringly. “He’s more like a watchdog; if he sinks his teeth into an investigation he doesn’t let go until he gets results.”

But in 1998, Stubing was almost ready to admit that he was stumped for a solution to his chief preoccupation: designing a plan of attack against the Bonanno crime family. A square-shouldered, medium-sized man, who grew up in New York’s suburbs, Stubing knew as much as anyone else in the FBI about the history and the contemporary makeup of the Bonanno borgata. After several years as a clerk for the bureau, he became an agent in 1984. Three years later, he began working exclusively on Bonanno investigations, eventually earning a promotion to command the small squad assigned to uprooting that Mafia gang.

Stubing’s twenty-second-floor office in Lower Manhattan was a quiet refuge to contemplate strategy for the “C-10 squad,” bureau shorthand for Criminal Investigative Unit Number Ten. The windowless room had been designed for administering polygraph tests to suspects and witnesses; its thick walls provided Stubing with isolation from outside clatter and distractions. Alone, gnawing on a toothpick, lights dimmed, listening to Beethoven, Copland, and Prokofiev on
his CD player—habits that helped the forty-five-year-old agent organize his thoughts—he spent days poring over intelligence files and agents’ 302 reports. His appraisal was bleak: the squad’s recent results were paltry.

Ever since the American Cosa Nostra’s birth, the Bonanno family had been an integral part of the Mob’s DNA. Its roots and its name date back to 1931, to the end of the Castellammarese War when Joe Bonanno was anointed boss. Three decades of prosperity followed under the reign of Bonanno (disparagingly labeled by tabloid writers as “Joe Bananas”), until his power-play to make himself Boss of Bosses by killing other venerable dons backfired. In 1966, the Commission forced him into early retirement, creating an unsettled and confusing interregnum for more than a decade. The borgata’s command structure was so cloudy that law-enforcement analysts were at a loss to determine the makeup of the family hierarchy. The FBI and the New York Police Department’s top intelligence authorities mistakenly believed that a Bonanno kingpin, Carmine Lilo Galante, had filled the vacuum as boss for several years until he was gunned down in 1979. They were grossly mistaken about his status and power. He had never been a godfather, and was executed in a battle with the real boss, Philip “Rusty” Rastelli.