Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (99 page)

Besides his Mob deals, Mangano was successful in the wholesale clothing business. He founded M & J enterprises, a company that bought surplus designer jeans, shirts, and other garments at a discount and resold them in the country and overseas. For his bodyguard, Mangano selected John “Sausage” Barbata, a former gambling wire-room operator and a loan-shark enforcer on the New Jersey waterfront. The link between gangsters nicknamed for food—Benny Eggs and Johnny Sausage—prompted agents to refer to them as “Chin’s Breakfast Club.” (Gigante eventually rewarded Mangano by promoting him to underboss.)

In his day and nighttime wanderings, even in heavy rain, Gigante routinely dressed and acted abnormally. He would stop in his tracks, expose himself, and urinate in the street. Once, on a twilight meander, he spotted an FBI surveillance team. Abruptly, in front of St. Anthony of Padua Roman Catholic Church at Sullivan and Houston Streets, he dropped to his knees as if he were praying.

Normally, Chin appeared feeble, barely able to creep along without someone at his side. A New York detective, Gaetano Bruno, attached to an FBI task force, saw a different aspect of Gigante’s physical agility. With a bodyguard holding him by the arm, Gigante was slowly crossing busy Houston Street, when the traffic light turned against them. Without difficulty, Gigante sprinted like a hare and beat his escort to the safety of the sidewalk. He then resumed his leaden-footed pace.

Gigante’s bizarre behavior was also exhibited in his mother’s fourth-floor apartment. A tactic, known as “tickling the wires,” is employed by prosecutors and agents to encourage mobsters to exchange ideas and news on telephone taps and bugs. To get them worried and gabbing, subpoenas for possible evidence or grand jury testimony are simultaneously served to several members of a family or crew. One day, agents Pat Marshall and Pat Collins knocked on Yolanda Gigante’s apartment with a subpoena for her son. Chin was standing in the bathtub, under a closed shower head, wearing a bathrobe. He had an open
umbrella over his head, sported a wide smile on his face, and mumbled incoherently.

Turning to the agents, Gigante winked mischievously at them. Collins stuck the subpoena in Chin’s bathrobe pocket. “He’s nuts,” Collins told Yolanda Gigante, and left.

Gigante’s relatives, protesting that he was mentally ill and was being cruelly and unjustly harassed, hired lawyer Barry Slotnick to halt the FBI’s pursuit of him. “He has been psychiatrically disabled for decades and it is inconceivable that he would be the leader of some organized-crime network,” Slotnick said. “He couldn’t run a candy store, much less a crime family.” (In New Yorkese, “candy store” refers to a simple soda fountain, usually run by a man and wife, which also sells ice cream, candy, magazines, and newspapers.)

Relatives maintained that Gigante was so incompetent that he had to be assisted everywhere he went and that he often embarrassed them. The Gigantes’ family dentist, Herbert Rubin, would only treat Vincent at night after other patients had left. Rubin explained that he could not allow a disheveled, deranged patient wearing a bathrobe and pajamas into his office during regular hours.

Chin’s most ardent defender was the Reverend Louis Gigante, who frequently was at his brother’s elbow on rambles in their old neighborhood. Known affectionately as “Father G,” and as a “Ghetto Priest,” he was renowned for his slum-clearance and housing-rehabilitation projects. Unlike his older brothers who were school dropouts and who early on became entangled in crime, Louis graduated on a scholarship from Georgetown University, where he was a basketball star. Ordained at twenty-seven, he became the pastor of St. Athanasius Roman Catholic Church in the South Bronx, an impoverished, crime-ravaged district. Almost single-handedly, in the late 1960s, Father Gigante organized the South East Bronx Corporation (SEBCO) to provide decent homes for thousands of residents at a time when the South Bronx housing stock was devastated by arson and decay. Overall, SEBCO built more than two thousand sorely needed new and renovated housing units, affordable apartments for low-income families and seniors. “Father G” was acclaimed as the driving force behind the stabilization of a huge swath of the Bronx. John Cardinal O’Connor, the Archbishop of New York, hailed him in the 1980s as the “Church’s Master Builder.”

In a move rarely undertaken by priests, Father Gigante used his prominence
and success as an urban reformer to launch a political career. After a losing race for Congress, he was elected in 1973 and served one term as a representative from the Bronx’s Hunts Point section to the City Council, New York’s legislative body. Whenever given the opportunity as a clergyman and councilman, he refuted the existence of the Mafia, denouncing the media and law enforcement for inventing the concept of Italian organized-crime groups. Aligned with the Italian-American Civil Rights League, he was at the 1971 Columbus Circle rally when Joe Colombo, the Mob boss, was shot and paralyzed. Rushing to the speaker’s platform, the priest helped restore order by leading the frenzied crowd in prayer.

Inevitably, the identification of his brothers Vincent, Mario, and Ralph as mafiosi, and his own personal associations with reputed mobsters led to controversies for Father Gigante. In 1979 he was called before a grand jury investigating his efforts to ease the rigors of prison for a convicted gangster James “Jimmy Nap” Napoli.

Jimmy
Nap was no small-time neighborhood bookie or amateur gambler. A big-time Genovese earner, he had a lengthy yellow sheet for trying to fix boxing matches, for murder conspiracy, for felonious assault, for loan-sharking, and for heading a $35-million-a-year policy and horse-race-betting network in Manhattan. Prosecutors accused Father Gigante of dodging questions before a grand jury looking into attempts by the gangster and his pals to bribe prison officials for a Christmas furlough and early release from jail for Napoli. The bribes had enabled Jimmy Nap to have restaurant-catered meals and wine served in his cell.

Father Gigante contended that questions about his conversations and relations with Napoli, “an old and dear friend,” infringed on his priestly duties. Defending himself against a charge of contempt of court, he cited the confidentiality of his “clerical privilege” and his First Amendment right to practice his religion without interference. The arguments and protest demonstrations in his behalf by other priests failed to impress the presiding judge. Found guilty of evading questions put to him before the grand jury, Father Gigante served seven days of a ten-day jail sentence.

Another Mafia-related issue popped up when Father Gigante issued a personal appeal for leniency in behalf of Steven Crea. Identified by the FBI as a Lucchese capo and a power in construction-industry rackets, Crea was convicted in 1985 of conspiracy in a murder plot. The priest, in a letter to the sentencing judge, called Crea a “special friend” who had aided him to resist the
“onslaughts of crime and housing deterioration” in the South Bronx. (Crea’s guilty verdict for murder conspiracy was overturned. Known to his Mob admirers as “Stevie Wonder,” he later rose to the rank of Lucchese acting underboss, and was imprisoned in 2004 after pleading guilty to extorting a major construction company and to “enterprise corruption” involving contractors and unions.)

Despite his intervention on behalf of known mafiosi, law-enforcement authorities concur that there has never been a scintilla of evidence that Father Gigante was involved in a crime, let alone a Mafia activity. But newspapers raised questions about SEBCO, his housing corporation’s affiliations with contractors identified as having strong ties to mobsters. The New York Times reported in 1981 about business relationships between SEBCO and Vincent DiNapoli, a Genovese soldier and construction-rackets specialist. Companies in which DiNapoli was a partner or an investor had obtained, without competitive bidding, a large share of drywall (interior walls and paneling) and carpentry contracts with SEBCO and with many other federally financed projects in the Bronx. DiNapoli’s outfits raked in more than $25 million in public contracts in the late 1970s.

The Village Voice
asserted in 1989 that drywall, carpentry, and construction-debris hauling firms allied with mobsters as officials, shareholders, or consultants, had obtained work totaling more than $50 million from SEBCO projects. Again, companies linked to DiNapoli, a convicted labor racketeer, and to Crea were profiting from SEBCO contracts.

Over the years, Father Gigante declined to discuss the propriety of the contracts obtained by the Mob-tainted companies. Other SEBCO officials stressed that none of the work had been directly awarded by SEBCO; instead, they were obtained through subcontracts with the general contractors in charge of the projects. The general contractors, however, must have known that SEBCO raised no objections to the Mafia-affiliated contractors, and that by employing these companies they would probably avert union problems and costly work stoppages. It was a convenient package for all concerned.

One Bronx mobster, Pellegrino Butcher Boy Masselli, a Genovese gangster, proudly exhibited his admiration for Reverend Gigante. On the front of his trucking company office and underworld headquarters in Hunts Point, Masselli placed a banner reading, “If You Can’t Trust Father Gigante, Who Can You Trust?”

While Father Gigante was reluctant to discuss SEBCO’s subcontractors, he
often lashed out against what he termed law-enforcement authorities’ “misuse and abuse of their power.” He characterized the criminal records of his three brothers as nonviolent “gambling” arrests, and was particularly incensed in the mid-1980s at the “persecution” of Vincent

In fact, the FBI was increasing its vigilance, trying to close in on Chin Gigante. As the FBI’s Commission investigation wound down with the indictment of Anthony Salerno, naming him as the Genovese boss, some agents wondered if
Gigante loomed
as a possible successor.

A new Genovese Squad supervisor, John S. Pritchard III, was convinced that Gigante was sane and powerful. He ordered increased surveillance and a sharper eye kept on Gigante and the Triangle Club. One of his first steps was building a concealed observation post, a shed on the roof of a nearby New York University building, equipped with zoom-lens cameras to spy on everyone entering the club or appearing with Gigante on the sidewalk. Tailing Chin one night, Pritchard glimpsed his dual personality act. The agent saw him, wearing a bathrobe, shuffling slowly to a parked car with Baldy Dom Canterino. As Gigante ducked into the vehicle, he handed the ratty robe to Canterino and for a second exposed the well-tailored gray sharkskin suit and the necktie that he was wearing.

In 1985, agents finally turned up a meaningful discovery about Vincent Gigante’s activities. “The enigma in a bathrobe,” as FBI wags characterized him, had two homes, two love lifes, and two separate intimate families. Gigante and his wife, Olympia, raised two sons and three daughters in their New Jersey home in Old Tappan. His other home was in a town house on Manhattan’s fashionable East Side, where he spent most nights with another woman. Her given name was also Olympia. (In affairs of the heart and voicing names in romantic moments, Chin was a prudent man.) Olympia “Mitzi” Esposito had borne him two daughters and a son.

Chin was conducting his daytime business affairs in the vicinity of Sullivan Street; he never left the New York-New Jersey area for even the briefest vacation or trip. After some difficulties, agents traced him to his posh nighttime nest. Charles Beaudoin and other agents spent hair-raising moments keeping up with Gigante once he left Lower Manhattan. Late at night, Vito Palmieri, a soldier and chauffeur with the skills of a racing-car driver, picked up Gigante in a Cadillac or other large-sized car for a pulsating trip. “He was hard to
trail,” Beaudoin marveled, as Palmieri defying speed limits and red lights, swerving the wrong way into one-way streets, weaved uptown. To determine if he were being followed, Palmieri engaged in “many risky maneuvers,” Beaudoin reported.

Despite the evasive, high-octane tactics, Gigante was tracked to the hideaway, a town house on East 77th Street between Park and Madison Avenues.

It was a handsome building on an elegant block; a four-story white-bricked edifice with black trim, red doors framed by replicas of gas-flamed lanterns, and a tile frieze highlighting the top floor’s brickwork. The stately dwelling was a virtual gift to Olympia Esposito from Morris Levy, the owner of recording companies and night clubs, who for decades had been mixed up in opaque financial transactions with top Genovese mobsters. According to real estate records, through a friend, Levy in 1983 transferred the town house, valued on the open market at close to $1 million, to Olympia for $16,000. Levy had acquired the property the year before for an estimated $525,000 but apparently was willing to absorb a huge loss on an extremely desirable building.

(In another real estate transfer with a Gigante relative, Levy in 1979 donated land on his sprawling two thousand-acre Sunnyside Farms, where he raised thoroughbreds in upstate Ghent, New York, to Father Gigante. A ranch-style house was built on the property, which Father Gigante claimed in court records was used almost exclusively for needy parishioners from his Bronx church. Nearby Ghent residents said in the 1980s that Father Gigante was frequently seen at the house with guests.)

The principal owner of Roulette Records, an independent record company, and the proprietor of nightclubs, including Manhattan’s famed Birdland, Levy was dubbed by insiders as “Godfather of the Music Business.” His thick FBI dossier, compiled over thirty years, described him as having been involved in loan-sharking, extortion, and money laundering for the Philadelphia crime family and for the Genoveses. Levy could never become a made man because he was Jewish, but FBI agents said he loved playing a tough-guy role and was a frequent visitor at the Triangle Club. “He never hid the fact that he was connected,” John Pritchard recounted. “His associations with wiseguys made people afraid of him and helped his business.” Levy, said to be worth $75 million in the mid-1980s, was a big earner for Genovese chiefs by cutting them in as discreet shareholders in his wholesale record-sales and music-publishing companies. The mobsters returned the favors by helping Levy’s chain of Strawberry record shops and music companies in important ways: guaranteeing that he
had no union problems and by “influencing” popular entertainers to cut records for him at favorable contract terms.