Manhattan Mafia Guide (11 page)

Chin’s lifelong loyalty to Vito Genovese was said to have originated from an incident in Vincent’s childhood. Genovese allegedly assisted the Gigante family financially when he heard mother Iolanda needed an operation, and young Vincent was forever grateful. By the time Gigante fought his last professional contest in 1949, he had racked up multiple arrests and formed close relationships with several organized crime figures. His boxing manager was none other than Thomas “Tommy Ryan” Eboli, a Genovese strong-arm and future acting family boss.

181 Thompson Street today.
Courtesy of Shirley Dluginski
.

Vincent “Chin” Gigante mug shot, 1960.

In 1947, Gigante was arrested and charged with arson and grand larceny, though these charges were reduced to malicious mischief, and he was placed on four years’ probation. In June 1950, while on probation, Gigante was sentenced to sixty days in the workhouse for his role in an illegal gaming scheme, which operated betting pools at several Brooklyn colleges. Twenty-one-year-old Gigante was charged with distributing betting cards at various local campuses, where students gambled on basketball games.

During the 1950s, Gigante provided muscle for Genovese’s Little Italy crew and “made his bones” on May 2, 1957, by brazenly attempting to murder family boss Frank Costello in a bid by his mentor to take over the organization. Costello survived the hit, and Gigante went underground, as word that he was the triggerman had reached authorities. While detectives were staking out Chin’s apartment at 134 Bleecker, they stopped two of Gigante’s brothers, Mario and Ralph, who had driven by the location. Mario struck one officer who was questioning him and had to be wrestled to the ground. In the car, they found a hatchet and a baseball bat. Mario Gigante was charged with felonious assault, carrying a concealed weapon, driving without a license and vagrancy, but the brothers did not give up the location of Vincent.

Three months after Costello was shot, on August 19, 1957, Gigante walked into the West Fifty-fourth Street police station with his lawyer and turned himself in. Gigante was charged with attempted murder in the first degree and pleaded innocent. During the May 1958 trial, Costello testified that he did not see who fired the shot that should have killed him and that he had never seen Vincent Gigante before. The prosecutors’ star witness, a doorman at the swanky apartment building where the shooting occurred, was painted as incredulous by the defense, and the case fell apart. (The man apparently suffered from “poor vision in one eye.”) On May 29, 1958, after thanking the jury “from the bottom of [his] heart,” Gigante walked away a free man. He told reporters, “I knew it had to be this way because I was innocent.”
⁶¹
He then claimed to be headed back to work as a truck driver and resume a normal life; however, he returned to the courtroom less than a year later for his alleged role in an international narcotics trafficking ring.

On April 17, 1959, fifteen co-conspirators in the federal trial received a total of 162 years in prison. New family boss Vito Genovese was sentenced to fifteen years, and Natale Evola received a ten-year term, while Gigante only received seven. The judge in the trial granted Chin leniency, persuaded by a “flood of letters from reputable citizens” who testified to Gigante’s “good works for juveniles in the Village.”
⁶²

Gigante was promoted to capo of the Genovese family after his release from prison in the mid-1960s and inherited the Little Italy crew he was initiated into, which he ran out of the Triangle Social Club at 208 Sullivan Street. Here, Gigante’s odd behavior began to take shape, as his power within the Genovese family grew. The former prizefighter was often seen wandering around the neighborhood mumbling, wearing nothing but pajamas and a bathrobe. His lawyers and family members declared that he was mentally incompetent; however, law enforcement officials and turncoat Mafioso claimed Chin was feigning mental illness in order to mislead authorities.

By the end of the 1960s, while continuing to base his operations out of Lower Manhattan, Gigante purchased a home in Bergen County, New Jersey. In February 1970, Old Tappan Township police chief Charles Schuh was suspended from the force for accepting money from Gigante’s common-law wife, Olympia, and passing payments off to fellow officers. Gigante was accused of bribing the local police force in order to receive tips on law enforcement activities, but charges were dropped in October 1973, when the forty-two-year-old mobster was declared mentally unfit to stand trial.

Over the next couple of decades, Gigante divided his time between the crew’s Sullivan Street headquarters, his New Jersey home, his mother’s apartment at 225 Sullivan Street (Apartment 3D) and a town house apartment on Park Avenue and East Seventy-seventh Street. The FBI maintained almost constant surveillance on the curious mobster and, on several occasions, witnessed him enter his chauffeured town car in ratty pajamas, only to emerge at his destination suited for a night on the town. His influence extended into several profitable rackets, including shipping, construction, gambling and loan-sharking.

When elevated to boss of the Genovese crime family in the early 1980s, the elusive Gigante implemented a rule that no family member was to ever mention his name again, under any circumstance. It is alleged that, instead, mobsters would point to their chin or shape a letter “C” with their hands when referencing the boss in conversation.

Despite such tight security restrictions, authorities had built a case against the mob boss and indicted him in 1990 on several charges of racketeering, conspiracy and murder. The mental illness claim kept him out of court for several years; however, Gigante was ultimately brought to trial in 1997, largely due to the testimony of Mafia turncoats like Sammy “the Bull” Gravano.

Gigante was sentenced to twelve years in prison in July 1997 and spent the last years of his life in a federal penitentiary. A former FBI supervisor, John S. Pritchard, said of Gigante, who is said to be the inspiration behind the character Junior Soprano on the popular HBO series
The Sopranos
, “He was probably the most clever organized-crime figure I have ever seen.”
⁶³

I
ANNIELLO
, M
ATTHEW

384 Broome Street, 1930; 123 West Forty-ninth Street, 1950s

Alias: Matty the Horse, Sweet Sixteen

Born: June 18, 1920, New York City

Died: [?]

Association: Genovese crime family acting boss

This 220-pound Little Italy native was a Mafia heavyweight in every sense of the word, with controlling interest in New York’s most powerful criminal organization and dozens of semi-legitimate operations by the 1970s. The Horse was a notorious kingpin of New York’s infamous (pre-gentrification) seedy underworld, presiding over his empire from an apartment above the original Umberto’s Clam House at 129 Mulberry Street.

Ianniello’s father, Pietro di Biagio (February 8, 1893–April 15, 1976), was born in Naples, Italy, and arrived in New York in 1910 at seventeen years of age. Pietro was living at 140 Mulberry Street and had changed his last name to Ianniello by the time he married East Harlem native Michelina Zarrella (October 8, 1897–April 20, 1974) in December 1915. The couple had had their first of eight children, Oscar, in 1917. (Matthew was the third oldest.)

One theory suggests that while growing up at this Broome Street address, young Matty was christened with the nickname the Horse by neighborhood friends because of his stocky, five-foot, eleven-inch frame and impressive physical strength. Another theory claims that he earned the name after being arrested for receiving and selling twenty-two pounds of heroin in 1951, though all charges were dropped.
⁶⁴

384 Broome Street, the childhood home of Matty Ianniello, today.
Courtesy of Sachiko Akama
.

Matty “the Horse” Ianniello, Seward Park High School yearbook photo, 1939.
Courtesy of David Bellel, knickerbockervillage.
blogspot.com
.

It is unclear how exactly Ianniello was initiated into the Mafia, but records allude to the fact that he worked as a waiter for his uncle, Joseph Zarrella, in 1940, then in the shipyards of Brooklyn between 1941 and 1943, before joining the war effort. After serving a tour of duty in the South Pacific, Ianniello returned a highly decorated war hero and made his first foray into restaurant/nightlife entrepreneurship when he and Joseph Zarrella partnered to open the Towncrest Café in 1949 at Forty-ninth and Broadway. The Towncrest was a supper club where young Tony Bennett got his start, singing for “coffee and cake.”
⁶⁵

By the 1970s, under Ianniello’s thumb were the thriving topless bars and adult theaters of Times Square; tattoo and massage parlors; after-hours nightclubs, casinos and gay bars; restaurants and cafés; vending machine and garbage collection routes; construction and transportation unions; and even the New York public school bus industry.

With a criminal career spanning several decades, Ianniello spent remarkably little time behind bars as a youth. However, his luck ran out in December 1985, when the sixty-four-year-old veteran gangster was sentenced to six years in prison for “skimming more than $2 million from bars and restaurants” under his control.
⁶⁶
The federal government took over control of Umberto’s for the following seven years in an attempt to curb organized crime in the Little Italy district.

While in prison, Ianniello, along with fifteen others, was sentenced to an additional six years on several RICO counts of “labor racketeering, construction bid-rigging, extortion, gambling and murder conspiracies.”
⁶⁷

Released from jail in 1995, the Horse took over as acting boss of the Genovese family by 1997, when Vincent Gigante was sentenced to twelve years in prison for racketeering and conspiracy. Freedom did not last long: Ianniello found himself behind bars again by 2005, this time for extorting a medical center. Two more consecutive convictions would keep him incarcerated until his release on April 3, 2009, at the tender age of ninety-four.