Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (98 page)

When Vito Genovese departed for prison in 1959, he retained his title as boss, eventually leaving day-to day control in the hands of Philip Lombardo, a
New Jersey capo. Extremely myopic and forced to wear glasses with lenses almost as thick as a windshield, Lombardo bore the unflattering nickname of “Benny Squint.” Don Vito never completed his prison sentence, dying of a heart attack in 1969. During the next decade, federal and local investigators, hampered by a lack of reliable informers, were never certain as to the exact makeup of the Genovese hierarchy. Mob families, naturally, never issue press releases about their internal chains of command, and investigators credited the Genoveses with being the most secretive branch of the American Mafia. There was clearly a power struggle in the early 1970s, and Tommy Ryan Eboli, Gigante’s old boxing manager, was the prime loser; he was gunned down in Brooklyn in 1972. (Father Louis Gigante also knew Eboli and officiated at his funeral mass.) The boss’s baton was officially seized by Lombardo, who was a role model for Gigante’s later behavior. Vincent Fish Cafaro, a high-placed Genovese soldier, provided a portrait of Lombardo as an extremely self-protective man, who “wanted to stay in the background and keep the heat off of himself.” Lombardo delegated a great deal of authority to a succession of underbosses, according to Cafaro, even allowing others to “front” for him and attend Commission meetings as the Genovese family’s
representante
.

Chin Gigante came out a winner from the internal strife in the 1970s. He profited from the rubout of Eboli by taking over his huge gambling operations in Lower Manhattan and the West Side. Gigante’s territory extended from the Battery at the southern tip of the borough to 14th Street; Mafia-controlled numbers and sports-betting bookies needed his permission to operate in his territory. The annual take for Gigante reportedly was in the multimillions; Fish Cafaro said that the most successful bookies were required to give Chin 50 percent of their profits.

Going Philip Lombardo one better on self-protection, Gigante began making short but frequent stopovers at psychiatric hospitals, especially when news seeped out that grand juries were investigating Genovese operations. His underworld confederates casually referred to these hospital examinations as “tune-ups.” Chin’s use of psychiatrists to ward off possible arrests and another prison stretch did not denigrate his reputation within the Cosa Nostra or diminish his power. By the mid-1970s, he was a capo whose word carried weight throughout the Genovese family.

A young truck driver from Little Italy got a firsthand lesson of Gigante’s influence in those years. His New Jersey job was under the aegis of teamsters’ Local 560, which was ruled by Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano, whose violent
inclinations
were well known. The local was arguably the most Mob-corrupted unit in teamster union history, and feared for its savage tactics. Provenzano, a Genovese capo, was suspected of helping to arrange Jimmy Hoffa’s murder. The naive young truck driver, unaware of the local’s reputation and its unwritten law about talking back to officials, got into an argument with a business agent about a grievance against his employer. The next day, as the driver was parking his truck, he saw three goons approaching him with the obvious intent of working him over. Faster afoot than the muscle men, he ran across the George Washington Bridge and got home safely.

“I’m in big trouble, and I’m going to get hurt,” the driver told his father. Years later, in an affidavit to a government investigator, he described how his father escorted him to a Little Italy candy store, and instructed him to explain his predicament to a man sitting in a back room.

“I told him what had happened and he said to me, ‘Kid, you’re going to get a beating.’” The man laughed when the driver pleaded ignorance of the local being mobbed up. “He thought that was very funny. He said, ‘All right, I’ll take care of it.’” The upshot was that the man in the back room made a phone call. He then advised the driver to return to the union hall and, in front of all the business agents, kiss the official he had insulted on the cheek. “I had to swear that I would never challenge authority in Local 560.”

After following instructions and redeeming himself with the union bosses, the grateful driver found out that the man who had intervened in his behalf was the neighborhood’s Mafia headman, Chin Gigante.

Throughout the 1970s, Gigante was a shining light in his borgata and increasingly responsible for coordinating Mob rackets with other families. To insure that the Genovese-controlled carpenters’ union would not hinder a Gambino construction project, Sammy the Bull Gravano paid a visit to Gigante in 1976. It was Sammy’s first meeting with Chin, and a Gambino member introduced him as a capo. “Chin corrected him and said he was no longer a capo,” Gravano remembered. “He was the consigliere.”

At the sit-down in a Greenwich Village Mob club, Chin, in pajamas and robe and with a three or four days’ stubble on his face, pledged to take care of Gravano’s union problem. He sounded “perfectly clear and coherent” to Gravano. As a Gambino family expert on construction, Sammy the Bull accompanied his boss, Paul Castellano, and Tommy Bilotti in the late 1970s to a “mini-Commission” meeting with Gigante and other Mob big wigs in the basement of a Staten Island home. This time, Gigante was shaven, and dressed
normally in pants, shirt, and a pea coat. “His pajamas must be in the laundry,” Bilotti joked to Sammy. As in his previous discussion with Gravano, Gigante was articulate, never mumbling, stuttering, or at a loss for words.

“Chin took the lead basically. He felt that a Commission meeting should be strictly for Cosa Nostra reasons, not business, not money.” Gravano remembered. Commission gatherings, Gigante chastised the group, should be about life-and-death issues, preventing Mob wars, and setting policies. Gravano noted that Chin said he was tired of attending meetings about union disputes and the distribution of spoils among the families. These matters, Gigante insisted, should be “straightened out at lower levels” by capos.

The frequent high-level conferences were too risky for Gigante. “I’ve put a lot of time into this crazy act, and I don’t want to get caught in any of these meetings or picked up or bugged,” Gravano quoted him.

Chin’s strategy was more successful than he realized. He was unaware that his insanity charade had pulled the wool over the eyes of numerous FBI, state, and city investigators. They considered Vincent Chin Gigante a comical Mafia sideshow. Some were uncertain about his mental state; others thought he was legitimately loony. None recognized how much power the strange man from Sullivan Street actually wielded in the Genovese family.

Psychological Warfare

G
liding slowly, the car came to a halt in front of a cluster of men talking on the sidewalk outside a storefront. Two FBI agents, badges prominently pinned on their jackets, sat in the front of the car. Suddenly, the conversations halted, the eyes of the men milling on the sidewalk were drawn toward the passenger in the rear. His face was concealed by a paper bag cut with eye holes, and he was pointing to individuals on the sidewalk. As he whispered, both agents scribbled notes. In a flash, the knot of men anxiously dispersed in different directions, shouting to each other, “They got a rat.”

The all-too-conspicuous appearance of the FBI and the man in the crude mask on Sullivan Street in Greenwich Village heralded a psychological phase in the government’s investigation of the Genovese family. It was 1982, and the bureau’s revamped Genovese Squad was trying novel tactics to kick-start a fruitful campaign against the redoubtable gang. Recently appointed the squad’s supervisor, Donald Scott Richards found the unit in poor shape. “We have skimpy intelligence, morale is shot, and we’re not going anywhere on a decent investigation,” Richards glumly admitted to himself.

One of five units established in 1980 to concentrate on each of New York’s Cosa Nostra borgatas, in its first two years the squad had failed to dig up indictable evidence against a significant Genovese soldier or to uproot a major
family racket. The bureau was working on the assumption that Phil Benny Squint Lombardo had retired in poor health to Florida, leaving the family in the care of a new boss, Anthony Salerno. As the perceived godfather, Fat Tony was the squad’s foremost objective, and his East Harlem headquarters in the Palma Boys Social Club was under intensive surveillance. But as yet no big case was brewing against him.

Expanding the range of targets, Richards decided to focus on the downtown Genoveses, particularly on a storefront hangout called “the Triangle Civic Improvement Association.” The club, on Sullivan Street, between West Third and Bleecker Streets, was across the street from the apartment building where Vincent Gigante’s mother lived and where he often stayed. The Triangle was a dimly lit hovel, stocked with worn chairs and tables, and with an espresso machine mounted on a small bar. Gigante spent most afternoons there. A white, gummy substance smeared on the club’s plate-glass window blocked a view of the interior from the sidewalk. Inside, signs on the wall read: “Tough Guys Don’t Squeal,” “Don’t Talk. This Place Is Bugged” and “The Enemy Is Listening.”

Although the FBI was uncertain whether Gigante was mentally disturbed, officials were confident that in the Genovese pecking order he retained at least the rank of capo and headed a crew. There was another reason for homing in on the Triangle. It was a meeting place once a week for another recognized downtown Genovese capo, Matthew Ianniello. There was no question about his mental state. He was better known as “Matty the Horse,” the gangster present in his brother’s restaurant, Umberto’s Clam House, when Crazy Joey Gallo was shot to death there in 1972.

Agent Richards reckoned that with two capos using the Triangle as a refuge, it was a prime site for surveillance. From an observation post in an apartment
across the
street from the club, FBI men saw Gigante talking with soldiers as they ambled with him along Sullivan Street. Richards’s request for long-range parabolic microphones to eavesdrop on Gigante’s walk-talk sidewalk conversations was vetoed by the Justice Department. Government lawyers cautioned that evidence gathered that way probably would be declared inadmissible; parabolic equipment intruded on the conversations of passersby and was not restricted to targeted suspects and a specific site.

Next, Richards placed miniature listening devices in the rearview mirrors of bureau cars parked on Sullivan Street. If Gigante stopped to talk near one of the rigged autos, agents in the observation post could activate a microphone through remote control. Technicians tinkered with the devices for a
month but abandoned them after failing to clearly pick up any of Chin’s conversations.

Bugging the Triangle was rejected as an unpromising venture. The small room, often packed, was so noisy that voices would be indistinguishable and worthless as evidence. The FBI’s sparse information indicated that Gigante, when he did speak inside the club, whispered in the listener’s ear. “There are too many guys talking in there at the same time for a bug to be of any value,” Richards decided. He wanted to find quieter locations where Gigante and Ianniello felt more secure, and where mikes and telephone taps would be more productive. (What the FBI did not know was that, as a precaution, Gigante had the club swept once a month to detect electronic snooping.)

By employing “psychological warfare,” Richards hoped Gigante and Ianniello would become wary of using the Triangle Club and lead agents to their private sanctuaries. “We want to drive them out of there,” he urged his squad. On Richards’s orders, agents camped openly in a restaurant directly across the street from the club and could be seen photographing everyone entering and leaving. Periodically, agents patrolled Sullivan Street, jotting down the license-plate numbers of every car parked near the club. A singular hoax was displaying the agent wearing a paper bag mask, posing as an informer. “There’s no doubt that they think we have a rat-snitch fingering them,” Richards rejoiced.

The obtrusive surveillance apparently failed to worry Gigante, who continued venturing into the club most afternoons. Agents believed he usually discussed important Mob matters at night, when it was more difficult to follow him in the South Village area near Sullivan Street and in nearby SoHo. On occasion, he entered il Bocconcino on Houston Street and Ruggiero’s on Grand Street, neighborhood restaurants. The walk-talks and meets at the restaurants were largely restricted to a tiny knot of trusted, longtime lieutenants: Dominick “Quiet Dom” Cirillo, a soft-spoken gangster from the Bronx; Venero “Benny Eggs” Mangano, who obtained his nickname because his mother ran an egg store; and Dominick “Baldy Dom” Canterino, whose hair thinned at an early age, and who frequently chauffeured Gigante. Mangano and Canterino were old friends of Gigante.

Seven years older than Gigante, Mangano had spent his entire life near Chin in the Village and, when not at the Triangle, operated out of his own nearby club on Thompson Street. Short and paunchy, Mangano was a neighborhood character, particularly liked because he permitted old-timers—mostly
non-mafiosi—to play cards and socialize in his club. The place was bedecked with American flags and photos of Frank Sinatra, Perry Como, and other Italian-American entertainers and celebrities. Although he had never served time for a felony, Mangano had a thick police record for gambling arrests, was listed in FBI files as active in bookmaking, loan-sharking, and labor extortions, and had been permanently banned as an “undesirable” from entering Atlantic City casinos because of gambling and shake-down allegations.