A 1985 FBI report flatly identified Gigante as his family’s underboss, with Salerno running the family.
The New York State Organized Crime Task Force, in response to a Freedom of Information Act query for information on Gigante from 1970–1985, said it had “conducted a diligent search and has located no records that respond to your request.” The same group planted a bug inside the car of Lucchese boss Anthony “Tony Ducks” Corallo, a devastatingly successful maneuver.
Sammy Gravano, who attended a meeting between Gigante and Gambino family head Paul Castellano around this time, said there was no doubt among the Mafia cognoscenti about who was in charge.
“It was clear as a bell who was the boss,” he said—and Gigante was not afraid to flex his muscles. Castellano, who fancied himself as much a businessman as a mobster, would hold “mini-commission” meetings to discuss concrete, construction and other joint enterprises.
“Paul loved that shit,” said Gravano.
The Chin? Not so much.
“He was pissed,” recalled the Bull. “He said that commission meetings should be just about family business, not the construction business or any other business. These things should be handled by the captains and never even reach the commission level.
“The Chin said, ‘What are we doing at these fucking meetings, sitting around talking about bullshit? Does that require this? What if we take a surveillance?’”
The Genovese boss, at one of the meetings, made it clear he wasn’t willing to risk anyone seeing his lucid side. “I’ve invested many years in this crazy act,” the Chin declared.
Regarding business, Gigante was just as resolute: the bosses should only gather in matters of life or death, or to set policy that would affect all five families.
“The Chin made some good points,” said Gravano. “I had to agree. He didn’t sound so crazy to me.”
There was another, subtler example of Gigante’s expanding reach when his brother Mario was busted once in 1982, this time for extortion and loan-sharking. Mario was by now a Genovese capo, and the charges were for muscling a customer with a $20,000 debt and a late-payment schedule. The high-interest welcher received some advice from Mario about his need to get current: “I’d like to take your fucking skull and just open it up.”
Mario settled for punching the man in his jaw. It took a Manhattan federal jury four days to convict him. Mario was categorized by prosecutors as a “rich and feared captain in the Genovese family of La Cosa Nostra.”
Mario arrived for sentencing on June 15, 1983, bringing along a sheaf of two hundred laudatory letters, which was a move right out of the Chin’s old drug case playbook. The ploy worked, to a degree.
“It’s clear to me that you’ve done a lot of good things in your life,” said federal judge Charles Stewart before imposing an eight-year jail term. Father Gigante appeared to defend a different brother, calling the allegations that Mario was a capo in the Genovese crime family nothing more than a “myth.”
The sentence was substantially shorter than the twenty years max carried by the conviction, but it was still too much for the Chin and Father G. A year later the priest went calling on Senator Alfonse D’Amato with an appeal for leniency. The politician then personally lobbied U.S. Attorney Rudolph Giuliani to give brother Mario a lesser term.
The Chin simply dispatched Fish Cafaro to see notorious attorney /fixer Roy Cohn with a $175,000 payoff to get his brother a sentence reduction of two years. Vincent Gigante opted for the lower payout: three years off was going for a cool quarter-million dollars, Cafaro later said.
“I know this because we discussed it,” Cafaro allowed. He acknowledged that it was unclear how the money was distributed, and no one was ever charged with a crime for the payoff reportedly made in three payments delivered to Cohn’s office.
Either way, Mario’s term was trimmed by two years in 1985. Father Gigante’s efforts remained a secret for five years, finally emerging as Giuliani—with D’Amato’s support—mounted his first run for New York City mayor.
* * *
Pritchard’s pursuit of the Chin eventually led to a face-to-face meeting with Gigante that neither man anticipated, expected or particularly wanted. The FBI boss was leaving his Manhattan office on the evening of January 21, 1986, when he ran into a pair of NYPD detectives assigned to his squad: Anthony Venditti and Kathy Burke.
“We went down in the elevator together,” Pritchard recalled. “I never said, ‘Be careful,’ because I thought whatever the hell happens out there, he will survive. Tony was a helluva detective. Kathy too.”
Both detectives were longtime law enforcement hands: Venditti was a veteran of undercover work, with twelve years on the force and a history of making gambling and Mob cases. Burke joined the department in 1968, and had since worked on the NYPD’s renowned Major Case Squad.
On this night, they were conducting surveillance on Giovanelli, a close Gigante associate and a regular guest at the Triangle. The pair climbed inside their vehicle, a 1977 brown Lincoln Town Car, despite their concerns that Giovanelli now recognized the car as a tail.
When they spotted the Genovese associate driving a BMW near his Queens hangout, the veteran investigators were convinced that Giovanelli had identified them, so they decided to call it a night. Venditti suggested they stop at the nearby Castillo’s Diner so he could use the men’s room and grab a cup of coffee.
Burke quickly noticed the BMW still driving behind them, now with its lights off, and became alarmed. Venditti brushed her concerns aside; there was a long-standing Mafia prohibition on killing anyone in law enforcement. Giovanelli apparently missed the Mob memo.
Venditti went inside the diner as Burke parked their car. She spotted another car behind her, and bolted toward the diner to alert her partner. When she arrived, Venditti was holding a paper bag with his coffee as three men stood around him. When one of the men ordered the five-two female officer to go stand alongside Venditti, she went for her gun—and a bullet slammed into her chest.
Venditti was unable to reach the weapon in his ankle holster. He was shot four times and killed.
The night after the Venditti murder, New York law enforcement turned out en masse in every organized crime hangout across the city as they hunted the killers. Pritchard was dispatched to the Triangle to grill the Chin. He walked inside and went right up to Gigante.
“We dragged Chin outside of the Triangle, right onto Sullivan Street,” Pritchard recounted. “We talked to Chin separately, away from his minions. We took him outside, and we talked to him like you and I are talking right now. There was no crazy act. He was clear as a bell.
“He apologized for what happened, but he took no responsibility. He said nothing off-color, no wiseass remarks. He communicated like any other human being. This was just one more indication that he was crazy like a fox. I knew he was sane, and he knew I knew that he was sane. It only reinforced what I knew.
“I do believe,” Pritchard added, “that he was concerned on some level that a cop was shot.”
Loyalist Canterino, pulled in by the FBI a few days later, was outraged by the brazen confrontation of his boss. If he was there, Baldy Dom declared, he would have stopped the agents from entering the Triangle. Gigante was a sick old man, and Canterino offered to produce “medical records going back ten years” to prove that the Chin was “mentally unstable,” an FBI summary of the chat reported. Canterino explained that “The Chin” is like a brother to him, the summary stated.
Giovanelli was nevertheless arrested the next day, along with fellow gangsters Steven Maltese and Carmine Gualtieri, setting off a nearly decade-long legal odyssey with four separate trials. Two state prosecutions ended with deadlocked juries for Giovanelli and Maltese, and an acquittal for Gualtieri.
The trio was convicted on federal racketeering charges in 1989, including the murder count—although the charge was later overturned on appeal. One final state trial ended with Maltese and Giovanelli walking on the murder rap.
CHAPTER 11
EAST SEVENTY-SEVENTH STREET REVISITED
FBI AGENT CHARLIE BEAUDOIN IS THE KIND OF GUY WHO BELIEVES the shortest distance between two points is a straight line.
When he transferred to New York from Erie, Pennsylvania, he bought a home in New Jersey off the interstate—a straight shot down Route 78 to the FBI’s headquarters in Lower Manhattan. And once he landed on the Genovese Squad, he was among the agents who popped in uninvited at the Triangle for a closer look-see at some new faces spotted during federal surveillance.
If the Chin was stunned by the presence of the FBI in his Village hideaway, Beaudoin was equally surprised by the sight of the powerful Mafiosi decked out in a ratty bathrobe and a pair of sweatpants. Gigante immediately rose and challenged the badge-waving intruders.
“He actually stood up and started asking me, ‘What are you guys doing in here? I thought we had a deal that you guys would not come into my place?’” Beaudoin recalls with some amusement. “He’s speaking quite cogently.”
And then, almost as if a lightbulb flicked on, the Chin considered the situation and turned off his anger. His voice and demeanor changed entirely, as did his rancorous behavior.
“He reached into his pocket and pulled out a handful of religious medals,” the agent said. “He told me, ‘I have change for a dollar. I can help you. I have change.’ Once he went into crazy mode, I realized, ‘That’s it, we’re done.’ ”
The short bit of face time illustrated the FBI’s biggest hurdle in tracking the Chin. The Triangle was nearly impregnable, and anyone inside was unlikely to say anything of value—particularly about Vincent Gigante, given the sanctions involved.
Efforts to get information on the Village streets were equally ineffective, with the neighbors alerting Gigante or his minions whenever the FBI was spotted. The insular area served as a human early-warning system for the Mob boss.
“He had hundreds of eyes working for him in the neighborhood,” recalled Pritchard. “The FBI was in no part a favorite in that ’hood. And Chin was a popular guy.”
Pritchard recalled the feds buying a small prefab storage shed to use as a lookout point, putting it together on the roof of a school opposite the Triangle.
“It was really just an observation point to look down on the entrance to the club and see who was coming and going,” he said. “We came back the next night and found the thing destroyed.”
* * *
There was one tactic rejected out of hand by the investigators: trying to infiltrate the Chin’s inner circle. Mangano, a valued capo and future underboss, was a longtime associate from the same section of the Village. Cirillo was a friend from Gigante’s days in the fight game, and Canterino was a trusted right-hand man and bodyguard. Manna was an unrepentant killer, valued earner and a true Mob believer.
None would ever cooperate with the authorities, as one infamous tale about Manna illustrated perfectly. When jailed in the early 1970s for refusing to speak before a Jersey organized crime probe, he was thrown in jail. The gangster agreed to open wide, only after he developed a tooth abscess while inside the State Prison in Yardville, New Jersey.
The treating dentist wanted to pull the offending tooth in a painful procedure. Fearful he might speak if given a painkiller, Manna refused a shot of Novocain.
“The story is they pulled his tooth out, and he didn’t flinch,” recounted onetime federal prosecutor Michael Chertoff. “From the corner of one eye, there was one little teardrop. He had a rep as a stone-cold guy. Not to be messed with, and not much of a sense of humor.”
The thought of an outsider infiltrating the top level of the Genovese family, a ploy used by FBI undercover Pistone with the Bonannos, was broached and quickly dismissed.
“Near impossible,” said Pritchard. “You were dealing with old-timers in the Genovese family. . . . Then you look at the people who are closest to Chin. The people around him, he knew them his whole life. Somebody new was not going to get in too deep.”
Beaudoin recalled the squad’s growing frustration: “He had an entire network.... It’s fair to say that every attempt at surveillance of the Chin had failed. Oh yeah.”
One of those efforts included trying to track Gigante’s nocturnal wanderings. This led his Mob pals to refer to Chin jokingly as “the Vampire” or “Dracula.” (Never to his face, of course.)
The seemingly simple plan proved treacherous for the assigned agents. The Chin’s chauffeur—the boss wasn’t crazy enough to drive himself—whipped through the streets of the Village in a style more Mario Andretti than Genovese soldier. Vito Palmieri would pull up outside the apartment building where Gigante lived with his mother and wait for the boss to exit.
And then it was off to the races. Palmieri would run red lights, ignore one-way signs and accelerate like a madman.
“His driver always lost us,” said Beaudoin. “But he was always heading north, toward the Upper East Side. It was decided we were going to find out where he was going.”
The feds finally tailed the runaway Cadillac to its destination and found their answer: Gigante was visiting a luxury duplex at 67 East Seventy-Seventh Street, in between Park and Madison Avenues. It was, much to their surprise, the home of Chin’s longtime mistress and mother of three more Gigante progeny.
The Chin—surprise!—was leading a double life inside his double life.
* * *
Olympia Esposito was nicknamed “Mitzi” by friends and family, but she quickly acquired a second alias from investigators—one that referenced Gigante’s wife across the Hudson. Esposito henceforth become known among the investigators pursuing the Chin as “Olympia 2.” Mrs. Gigante was dubbed “Olympia 1.”
The feds first heard mention of the second Olympia via phone taps, only to assume their targets were speaking about Chin’s long-suffering bride in the Jersey suburbs. Now, on the tony Upper East Side, they laid eyes on the matriarch of the Chin’s secret extramarital family. Gigante would typically spend the night in the comfy digs, leaving early the next day to Sullivan Street and his official duties.
A little digging exposed the details of exactly how Esposito was able to move on up to the East Side. The building was once owned by Morris Levy, who quite generously transferred the property into her name for only $16,000, a year after buying the town house for $500,000. Esposito’s neighbors included three-time Tony nominee Sandy Duncan, the actress best known for her work in the Broadway revival of Peter Pan and the television hit The Hogan Family.
The discovery of the high-end hideaway was great news for the feds chasing the Chin.
“Pritchard said, ‘The first team to find a spot to set up [surveillance] wins,’” Beaudoin said. “Wins? They won maybe a round of beers.”
The agent and his NYPD partner, Detective Bill Murnane, took an undercover scouting trip through the neighborhood in late 1985. There was a place for lease in the building next door, directly alongside the Esposito residence—a huge space with an outdoor patio.
“We walked in and pretended we were partners in a CPA firm, Bradley and Kennedy,” he recalled. “I went to a local printing place and had cards printed up. I was ‘Charles Bradley.’ You always use your real first name. In case anybody says, ‘Hey, Charlie, ’ you want to make sure you answer.”
The fake accountant proved pretty good at real estate speculation. Beaudoin proposed the FBI buy the place for $1.2 million, a suggestion rejected in short order by the suits in Washington. They wound up settling for a one-year lease at $1,400 a month, with an option to buy.
Five years later the space was worth $10 million.
The next step was finding a vantage point to watch the Chin in his somewhat unnatural habitat. Agents settled on the Ramaz Yeshiva, home to a prestigious Jewish school on East Seventy-Eighth Street, after a visit under the pretense of a security check for an upcoming United Nations General Assembly meeting in October 1985.
To reach the spot with an optimal view, a terrace on the school’s back end, Beaudoin too
k the most direct route: the agent, a daily jogger with a runner’s build, simply jumped the two-foot gap from his patio to set up surveillance from a distance of about fifty feet away.
For the next four months, from January through April, through the cold, rain, snow and darkness, this became Beaudoin’s al fresco office.
The eagle-eyed Beaudoin carried just a pen, a notebook and a flashlight. The Chin would typically arrive around midnight. The agent decided to go low-tech in his surveillance because using a camera or binoculars could lead to complications if and when he had to testify about all he had seen.
A second team was set up to watch the building entrance, with another team member stationed at nearby Lenox Hill Hospital across the street.
“Outside, he would need help walking—one guy on each side, holding him up,” the agent recalled. “He’s tripping on the sidewalk. And then, when he gets inside, it turns into Father Knows Best. He would walk in, and hug and kiss [Esposito]. You could see them talking like normal people. He takes off his cap and puts it on the shelf. Then he takes off his old bathrobe and puts it on a hanger.
“He changes into nicer clothes. His common-law wife brings the paper over, and he sits at the dining-room table. He’d have dinner and a little bit of conversation. It’s like the guy just came home from work. He’s the boss, sitting right there at the head of the table.”
The typically grungy Gigante would enjoy a relaxing shower. He would flip on the apartment’s big-screen television and take in a movie, flip the light switches off when he left a room. When it was time for bed, he walked over and punched the button for the elevator and his bed upstairs. The next morning, Gigante would depart the building in the same ratty outfit that he wore inside the night before.
Beaudoin, watching in disbelief from his perch behind some planters on the adjoining terrace, recalled the thought that passed through his head: “This is crazy.”
In between his arrival and bedtime, the Chin was all business in what basically served as the uptown, upscale version of the Triangle.
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