Vincent Gigante was born on Sullivan Street in New York’s Greenwich Village in 1928, at a time when the Village had a substantial Italian immigrant population. His father, a tailor, had arrived from Naples seven years earlier. Vincent got his nickname, “Chin,” from the way his mother pronounced his name in Italian: “Cincenzo.” He dropped out of school at 16 and was arrested several times for minor crimes. He found a niche as a light heavyweight boxer, and won 21 of 25 fights. Gigante’s manager was Thomas “Tommy Ryan” Eboli, a member of the Luciano family; and through the Ryan connection, he started working for a crew headed by Vito Genovese. Don Vitone took a shine to The Chin, who became his bodyguard and chauffeur.
The Chin got his big break in 1957, when Genovese tapped him to be the triggerman for the attempted assassination of Frank Costello. Gigante walked right up to Costello, famously said, “This is for you, Frank,” and fired. The bullet only grazed Costello’s head—he walked out of the emergency room under his own power. Gigante was tried for attempted murder, but was acquitted when Costello, true to Mafia tradition, refused to identify him as the shooter.
Luckily for The Chin, Costello got the message from the shooting, and retired, leaving Genovese in charge. Don Vitone rewarded him by allowing him to participate in a big narcotics deal the following year. It was a setup: Genovese was arrested, along with Gigante and 37 others. The Chin shared in his boss’s fate: Genovese got 15 years in the Federal penitentiary in Atlanta; Gigante got seven in Lewisburg, Pa. But his brother, Father Louis Gigante, a politically connected priest, organized a letter-writing campaign on The Chin’s behalf, and he was out of prison in less than five years. Gigante returned to the streets of Greenwich Village as a capo.
He bought a luxurious home in Old Tappan, NJ, and promptly bribed the chief and all four members of the local police department to warn him about any law enforcement inquiries. This scheme was uncovered in 1969, and Gigante and the entire Old Tappan police force were indicted. That’s when The Chin hit upon his world-beating idea: to pose as mentally incompetent (in legal terms, non compos mentis). He checked into a mental institution and got several shrinks to testify that he exhibited symptoms of dementia, had an IQ of less than 70, and probably had brain damage from his years as a boxer. It worked: All the cops were convicted, but the indictment against Gigante was dropped.
Flushed with success, The Chin checked himself into mental hospitals almost 30 times in the next 25 years. He was a capo under Phil (Benny Squint) Lombardo, who was acting boss of the Genovese Family. Don Vitone died in prison in 1969, and when The Squint became boss, The Chin became street boss. Around 1982, The Squint, suffering from poor health, retired, and Gigante took over. But in another world-beating move, he designated Anthony (Fat Tony) Salerno as the family’s front man. Fat Tony attended Commission meetings and made day-to-day decisions from his clubhouse in New York’s East Harlem. But Gigante, under cover of his “mental illness,” made all the strategic decisions.
The Chin prowled the streets of Greenwich Village doing his non compos act—dressed in pajamas and bathrobe and escorted by his brother the priest and several others, he talked to trees and parking meters, and urinated in the streets, until he was ushered into his social club. There he “played cards” all afternoon. But he was hypersensitive about security and surveillance. Anyone who talked to him had to whisper in his hear. He forbade members of his borgata to even mention his name: when they referred to him, they had to say, “this guy,” and point to their chins; or allude to their boss as “my aunt.” :rolleyes: He even demanded that members of other Mob families avoid referring to him by name. This strategy worked: When the famous RICO “Commission” case came to fruition in 1985, Fat Tony Salerno was tried, convicted and, like other New York Dons, sentenced to 100 years in prison. The Chin wasn’t even indicted.
Gigante led two lives. After his day of talking to trees and parking meters in Greenwich Village ended, he was loaded into a car that sped him to a fancy East Side townhouse, where he enjoyed the favors of a mistress by whom he fathered several children. The FBI, always suspicious of his mental act, trailed him to the townhouse, set up a surveillance post in a parochial school across the street, rented an apartment in his mistress’s building, and set bugs in and around the apartment. But they never were able to obtain usable evidence to bring Gigante down.
And while the Gambinos got the most media attention, the Genoveses under Gigante became the nation’s largest and richest Mafia family. Their specialty was labor and business racketeering. Typically, the Genoveses infiltrated labor unions, then dominated and cartelized the industries they served by forming “trade associations” and requiring companies that wanted to do business to join and pay “fees.” The Genoveses shared in the “Concrete Club,” in which Mob families designated cement contractors and required them to pay a “tax” of several dollars per cubic yard of concrete poured. They knocked over the private garbage carting industry, forcing carters to pay to join their “association” and then assigning carters to specific businesses and stores, with no choice but to pay up.
The Genoveses completely dominated the New Jersey docks and the unions that loaded and unloaded ships. They controlled the $1 billion per year Fulton Fish Market, and forced seafood distributors to pay their unions and companies to unload crates of fish from ships, and then to load them onto trucks. Distributors who refused found their seafood rotting on the docks. The Genoveses ran the annual San Gennaro Festival in New York, and exacted bribes from every booth operator at the fair. When New York City built the Javits Convention Center in 1986, the Genoveses, through their control of the Carpenters Union, demanded payoffs from every exhibitor and carpenter.
As with other Mafiosi, greed finally did in The Chin. In the early Eighties, the New York City Housing Authority, attempting to save on energy costs, decreed that every window in every apartment in every housing project would be replaced with double-paned units. The Genoveses, through their domination of Local 580 of the Ornamental and Iron Workers Union, formed another bid-rigging cartel, headed by Pete Savino, a non-made associate with tentacles into the union and several window manufacturing companies. Savino also had several murders and drug deals under his belt. Through Savino, his union and his companies, the Genoveses made almost $150 million in the windows racket. The goldmine he opened up for the Mob endeared Savino to The Chin.
But when law enforcement found two bodies buried in a warehouse that Savino recently purchased, they started squeezing him. Ill with cancer, Savino agreed to wear a wire to spend his last days a free man. While the Savino wire never got The Chin on tape with any incriminating statements, it did get enough evidence on other Genovese capos and soldiers to build a RICO case against Gigante. He was arrested in 1993 in the “windows case”—and this time, a judge declared him competent to stand trial. He was convicted in 1997, fined $1.25 million and sentenced to 12 years in prison. In 2002, he was charged again, this time with running his borgata from prison. In return for a lighter sentence, he dropped the non compos mentis act and admitted that he had duped psychiatrists with his feigned mental illnesses. He will be eligible for parole in 2012, when he will be 84.
Vincent Gigante never took a vacation in his life. His incarceration in Southern and Midwestern prisons marks the first time he ever traveled more than 50 miles from New York City. His only pleasure in life appeared to be the power he wielded as a Mafia boss. Asked by a prison guard if other inmates were bothering him, The Chin replied, “Nobody f***s with me in here.”
