Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (97 page)

The Pajama Game

A
lmost every day, a graying, shabbily dressed man emerged from a red-brick walkup tenement in Greenwich Village and gingerly crossed the street. Usually, one or two men were at his side, helping him cover a distance of two hundred feet on Sullivan Street. The stooped man’s usual destination was a dingy storefront club where he whiled away hours, playing cards. Most days, he was dressed inconspicuously in baggy pants, work shoes, a windbreaker, a woolen cap. But there were times in gentle weather when he entered the street, seemingly disoriented, wearing pajamas, a bathrobe, and slippers. In street clothes or in pajamas, he sometimes was accompanied and aided by his brother, a Roman Catholic priest and community leader in New York City.

To passersby and nearby residents, the assistance offered the unshaved, middle-aged man on his brief saunters in the neighborhood appeared to be compassionate care by close kin and friends. His mother and brother characterized their tottering relative, who muttered to himself, drooled, and urinated openly on the sidewalks, as a mental and physical wreck.

The pajama-clad excursions were routine occurrences in the 1970s and 1980s by an ex-light heavyweight prize fighter, who a slew of doctors and psychiatrists attested was afflicted with a damaged heart and suffered from dementia rooted in organic brain damage by the time he reached his fifties. His
relatives characterized him as a pitiful, punch-drunk ex-fighter with a sub par IQ of about 70.

There was an unseen dimension to the strange man from Sullivan Street. Late at night, he could be found residing in a million-dollar uptown town house, attired in a silk robe or a sport jacket, totally coherent and in control of his destiny. For three decades he faked mental illness. The improbable deception was designed to help him escape prosecution and imprisonment for his true calling. He was Vincent “Chin” Gigante, one of the nation’s most enduring and tyrannical Mafia magnates.

Other mafiosi posed as legitimate businessmen; Frank Costello tried to pass as a gentleman; John Gotti and Al Capone as public benefactors. Chin Gigante was the only mobster who pretended to be a madman.

Rarely visible in public except for his brief strolls in Greenwich Village, the reclusive Gigante was the Cosa Nostra’s version of the eccentric or half-mad Howard Hughes, the paranoid who, in his later years, ran a billion-dollar business conglomerate while cloistered in a Las Vegas hotel suite. Counting on his outlandish behavior to camouflage his real role as a Mob boss, Gigante controlled the Genovese family at the end of the twentieth century. He ruled over a diversified criminal corporation that became the nation’s supreme Mafia borgata, its tentacles extending deeply into the Philadelphia, Buffalo, New England, and Midwest Mob families. With illicit profits topping $100 million a year, the Genovese gang under Gigante’s administration was begrudgingly hailed in law-enforcement circles as “the Ivy League” and “Rolls-Royce” of the American Mafia.

Guileful, treacherous, and secretive, Gigante, at the slightest hint of betrayal, condoned the whacking of soldiers, associates, all perceived enemies. Just for uttering his name or nickname, wiseguys and wannabes were subject to summary execution. In his long tenure as boss, Gigante made only one exception to his rule of murdering anyone remotely suspected of having crossed over to the government. The exception was not a made man but an associate, a worker for the family, whom Gigante treated almost like a son. It was the only time he broke his iron rule about punishing potential traitors, and he would pay a heavy price for sparing this single individual. Eventually, it cost him his underworld empire.

Greenwich Village and the section near New York University and Washington Square Park in Lower Manhattan was Vincent Gigante’s stamping ground as
boy and man. His father, Salvatore, a jewelry engraver, and his mother, Yolanda, a seamstress, emigrated from Naples in 1921. They settled in the area around Sullivan, Thompson, and Bleecker Streets, which into the 1990s remained a colorful, slightly bohemian extension of adjacent Little Italy. The third of five sons, Vincent was born on March 29, 1928. Vincent was a common name in the neighborhood, and to distinguish him from his namesakes, early on Gigante’s friends called him “Chin.” The nickname was derived from his mother’s habit of addressing him as “Cincenzo” (pronounced chin-CHEN-so), the Italian equivalent of Little Vincent or Vinny. His chums shortened that into Chin, his lifelong nickname.

A lackadaisical student, Gigante (pronounced gee-GAN-teh and meaning giant in Italian) completed the eighth grade but dropped out of a vocational school, Textile High, when he turned sixteen, the legal age for leaving school. The same year, still a juvenile, he acquired a “yellow sheet,” an arrest record. Between the ages of sixteen and twenty-two, Gigante was pulled in by the police at least four times on an array of charges: fencing stolen goods, possession of an unlicensed gun, auto theft, arson, gambling, and bookmaking. Most of the accusations were dismissed or resolved with small fines. The only complaint that stuck to him was a collar for being a runner or collector of sports bets on the Brooklyn College campus for a large gambling operation that took wagers on college basketball and football games. Trying to look tough, the DA demanded jail time, not meaningless fines, for even the small fry in the case, and Gigante was hit with sixty days.

When arrested in his late teens and early twenties, Gigante listed his occupation as unemployed tailor. A strapping youth with a solid punch, he was better known as a professional boxer. He fought as a light heavyweight in clubs or small arenas around town, winning twenty-one of twenty-five bouts, and his accomplishments were recorded in Nat
Fleischer’s Ring Record Book
, the boxing world’s encyclopedia. At that time in the late 1940s, club boxers fought four-and six-round contests, usually getting a percentage of the tickets they themselves sold instead of receiving a fixed amount or purse. It was an era when most Mafia gangs were immersed in professional boxing, intent on fixing bouts and controlling money-making fighters. Although his boxing career petered out, Chin Gigante had the distinction of being managed by a big-time gangster, Thomas “Tommy Ryan” Eboli, a Greenwich Village neighbor. A member of the original Lucky Luciano family, Eboli was linked to prize-fighting rackets when the family was headed by Frank Costello.

Detectives assigned to organized-crime intelligence units in the early 1950s pictured Gigante as a wannabe, working his way up mainly as a gorilla for the family’s loan-sharking and gambling enterprises on Manhattan’s West Side. Three of his brothers, the older Pasquale and Mario, and the younger sibling, Ralph, also were budding mobsters. The youngest brother, Louis, was traveling along a different career highway; he was destined for the priesthood.

Of the four Gigante brothers mixed up with the Mob, Vincent was making the most headway, attracting the attention of Vito Genovese, the capo who had fled to Italy and supported Mussolini before World War II. Since his return to New York, Genovese was nominally subservient to Frank Costello, but, in fact, he was running a virtually independent faction in the family, and the four Gigante brothers were loyal to him. Genovese is believed to have endeared himself to the Gigantes by helping them pay for their mother’s surgery. By the time Vincent was in his late twenties, he was a Genovese protégé, serving as a chauffeur and a bodyguard.

There is little doubt that Chin earned his spurs with Vito Genovese on the evening of May 2f 1957. That was the night a gunman saying, “This is for you, Frank,” creased Frank Costello’s skull with a single shot, a close call that prompted Costello to retire as boss and turn over the reins of the old Luciano borgata to Don Vito. The borgata thereafter was known as the Genovese family. The doorman in Costello’s apartment building identified Vincent as the assailant, but when detectives came looking for him at his Greenwich Village apartment, the twenty-nine-year-old Chin was gone. While there was no immediate trace of Vincent, his brothers Mario and Ralph got embroiled with detectives staked out for him on Sullivan Street. In one tussle, Mario was arrested for assaulting an officer after detectives found a hatchet and a baseball bat in his car. The charges were later reduced to disorderly conduct, and both brothers got off with fines.

Three months after Costello was shot, Vincent walked into a Midtown police station house and asked, “Do you want me in the Costello case?” Chewing gum, the jaunty Gigante flashed smiles at the cameras as he was booked for attempted murder. For this contest, the former pugilist had in his corner Maurice Edelbaum, one of the most accomplished and expensive defense lawyers in the city. All Edelbaum would say about Gigante’s abrupt disappearance after the Costello shooting was that he had been out of town, some five hundred miles
away. Equally baffling was how Gigante raised $100,000 to be bailed out of the Tombs prison, and how he could afford to retain Edelbaum. At the time, the twenty-nine-year-old Gigante was married, had four children, and listed his occupation as a modestly salaried janitor for a federally financed housing-construction project in Greenwich Village. It was actually a no-show job that he obtained through the Mafia’s influence in the construction industry. More than likely, Don Vito picked up the tab for Chin’s costly legal fees.

At the attempted murder trial in the spring of 1958, only Costello’s doorman fingered Gigante, even though he had trimmed thirty to forty pounds off his two hundred-pound-plus frame since the attack, and sported a crew cut instead of long, wavy hair. Edelbaum countered by contending that the prosecution’s sole identifying witness was blind in one eye and had impaired sight in the other. Costello, true to the code of
omertà
, declined to identify Gigante as the gunman.

The all-male jury needed barely six hours to bring in a verdict: not guilty. Some forty relatives, including Gigante’s wife, Olympia, and their four young children and friends burst into applause. Chin sighed with relief, sinking into his chair at the defense table. “I knew it had to be this way because I was innocent,” he protested to reporters. “The cops picked on me.” The only legal repercussion from the indictment was the police discovery that he had ignored dozens of parking tickets, costing him $500 in scofflaw fines.

Within three months, Gigante was in handcuffs again, this time alongside his godfather, Don Vito. They and thirty-five other defendants were arrested in July 1958 as participants in an international narcotics conspiracy. Genovese was described in the federal indictment as the ringleader, and Chin as his principal aide in a syndicate importing huge quantities of heroin and other narcotics from Europe, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Mexico. It was part of the American and Sicilian Mafia’s joint operation in the 1950s to develop drug markets in inner-city neighborhoods, mainly in traditional Mob spheres of influence, including New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Cleveland.

At their court arraignment, Genovese seemed placid behind his horn-rimmed glasses while Gigante looked downcast. The godfather’s outward appearance signified success; he wore a conservative, well-tailored gray suit, a white-on-white shirt, dove-gray tie, and a white handkerchief peeking from his breast pocket. Looking bulky and rumpled with a plaid sports shirt flapping outside his trousers, Gigante perked up when a prosecutor got around to particulars about his importance to his Mafia boss. “He is a protégé of Genovese, a
rising star in the underworld and the number-one boy of this man Genovese,” Paul Williams, the U.S. Attorney in Manhattan, asserted. “Their participation in the conspiracy seems to be invariably together and simultaneous.”

A year later, in 1959, both the boss and his disciple were convicted of violating narcotics laws. Don Vito, whose conviction was later questioned by law-enforcement experts as based on dubious evidence, got fifteen years. Genovese was packed off to the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, and Chin never saw his godfather again. He was separated from his boss and sentenced to seven years at the federal prison in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania. The presiding judge was planning a longer prison term for Gigante, but said he was swayed by an avalanche of letters from residents of Greenwich Village and Little Italy attesting to Chin’s good character and work on behalf of juveniles. The judge’s action came despite questions by prosecutors about the validity of the letters and Chin’s previously unknown concern for underprivileged youths. At Lewisburg, Gigante was a model inmate, staying out of trouble, working as a maintenance man in the prison’s boiler room. His good conduct earned him a parole, and in less than five years he was back in Greenwich Village.

Soon after his release, Chin Gigante became the capo of a crew based in Greenwich Village and Little Italy. His prospects were on the rise. He moved his wife and children from a congested apartment into a fine house in the upscale suburban New Jersey town of Old Tappan, about twenty-five miles from Lower Manhattan. It was here that the issue of Gigante’s mental competency first arose. In 1969, he was indicted in New Jersey on a charge of bribing Old Tappan’s police force to warn him of surveillance and possible investigations by other law-enforcement agencies. The entire force, the chief and four officers, was fired. Gigante never stood trial. Previously, there was no record of his being under psychiatric care, but he began seeking treatment after learning of the bribery investigation. His lawyers produced reports from psychiatrists that he was “psychotic, mute, schizophrenic” and a “candidate for electroshock treatment.” His mind also was found to be “infantile and primitive,” with his condition deteriorating, according to the diagnosis. It was an effective defense strategy. Ruling that Vincent Gigante was mentally unfit to stand trial and assist in his defense, a judge dismissed the bribery accusations. In effect, the judge determined that the Old Tappan officers were guilty of accepting payoffs from a paranoid resident who fantasized that he was being persecuted by the law.