Chin

by Larry McShane

  “It’s rare to see made guys at any funeral, least of all a captain—someone so high up as Barney,” said the younger Barone. “They know the FBI will be there taking photos of potentially made guys. And the Genovese family is very secretive about who’s who in ‘the Life.’”

  Bellomo also helped Joe Jr. land a job at the Javits Convention Center, the massive Mob-controlled Manhattan convention hall. The payroll was heavy with Genovese associates, including capo Ralphie Capolla. Most paid a $20,000 fee to land their gig, but Bellomo brought Joe Jr. aboard for free in a nod to his old man.

  Joe Jr. was groomed from a young age for the Mob life, sometimes shadowing Joe Sr. on his daily rounds.

  “I used to tag along to pool halls and their clubs,” the younger Barone recounted. “I remember walking in and one of the guys said, ‘Hey, whaddaya got? Who’s that, your bodyguard?’ I was seven years old. These guys give you money and they give you a hug. They feed you. They say, ‘Hey, kid, ya hungry? Ya want somethin’ to eat?’ When you’re a kid, it seems like such a good thing. But it turns out they’re all cutthroat.

  “You emulate your father,” Barone continued without regret. “My father was who he was. So, what do you do as a kid? Who do you emulate? You try to be tough. You try to be strong. My father was a Genovese solider, and I was supposed to be in that family.”

  Barone Jr., instead, ended up with the Bonannos, working in a notoriously murderous crew headed by future family boss Vincent “Vinnie Gorgeous” Basciano, a fastidious Bronx thug and unlikely proprietor of the Hello Gorgeous beauty salon. The younger Barone became a Mob handyman, handling all sorts of business: a little muscle, debt collection, whatever came up.

  In his younger days Barone Jr. and his pals would rob lobster pots in the Long Island Sound and sell their fresh catch to the restaurants along Arthur Avenue in the Bronx.

  The Barones’ world went cockeyed when the FBI knocked on the door of Joe Sr.’s New Rochelle, New York, home. “I’m sure the agents thought they could flip my father,” Joe Jr. has said now.

  As the elder Barone pondered his options, he was called to escort Genovese associate Vincent “Vinny” Matturro from suburban Scarsdale to Brooklyn for a sit-down. The soldier was suspected (accurately, it turned out) as an informant. When the meeting ended, Barone drove Matturro home, where Vinny was soon found hanging from a rope.

  The official ruling was suicide, but Joe Sr. knew better. He was in on the Mob-ordered execution. Worried that he might be next, Barone Sr. decided to go on the run. He was headed south to Honduras, and summoned his son to deliver the news.

  “I asked him, ‘Why are you gonna leave?’” Joe Jr. recalled. “And he said, ‘Maybe they think I’m gonna say something, and this will put their minds at ease if I’m not around.’ ”

  In the elder Joe Barone’s case, absence made the collective Genovese heart grow blacker. The Chin was fighting the massive Windows Case indictment, with his pal Savino set to tell all. Gigante was still playing the crazy card, but there was a need to tie up loose ends if the psychiatrists failed the Chin and he landed before a Brooklyn federal jury.

  Joe Sr. settled into a Honduran villa, staying in touch with his son by telephone. The FBI was still tracking the mobster, still hopeful of turning Barone Sr. The Genoveses were tracking him, too, with more sinister intent.

  Barone Sr. told his son in late 1991 that he was coming home to undergo triple-bypass surgery—and would take the Fifth if he was summoned by the feds. The next time Joe Jr. laid eyes on his fifty-four-year-old father, he was staring at a series of gruesome autopsy photos in the hands of the FBI.

  Three Genovese hit men had somehow traced Joe Sr. to the Honduran village, where he was holed up, and savagely stabbed the mobster to death on January 12, 1992. The FBI showed up in Honduras the next day to find their target was already dead.

  The body was held in Central America for several weeks while the FBI attempted to get the remains shipped back to the States. But prior to the body’s release, the Honduran government conducted an “autopsy” done specifically to cover up the wounds, with a large V-shaped incision made in Barone’s chest to mask the stab wounds.

  Joe Sr. was finally buried alongside his wife in New Rochelle. Three months later the FBI had the body exhumed and the agents went to visit the slain gangster’s son in prison, where he was locked up for loan-sharking and gun possession.

  They laid a two-inch-thick stack of photos in front of the younger Barone, graphically illustrating how the father’s loyal years of service ended with a steel blade instead of a gold watch. The son immediately flew into a murderous rage.

  “You want to grab a gun and kill everybody,” he said. “But I’m not a killer.”

  Barone Jr., after examining the photos of his father’s decomposing corpse, decided to enlist with the feds. For the next eighteen years—triple the length of time spent undercover by the legendary Pistone—Barone moved in a shadow world between the FBI and the Mob.

  “It was always about my father,” he said. “It was always about that. ‘How could you kill a guy like my father?’ My father lived and died for this, and they leave him like that? He stayed loyal to the end to do what he believed, and right or wrong he was still my father and so I respect him for that.”

  In 2007, while working for the FBI, Barone Jr. caught wind of a plot that sounded both ominous and incredible: his old street boss Basciano, now head of the Bonannos, had ordered hits on U.S. District Court judge Nicholas Garaufis and federal prosecutor Greg Andres.

  Barone went to his FBI handler with the information, and the plots were thwarted. And so it was that Joe Jr., fifteen years after Chin Gigante ordered Joe Sr.’s death, spared the lives of two federal officials.

  Joe Barone Jr., now out of the FBI and Mob business and living with his wife far from the city, reflected on the decision that put it all in motion: the hit on his father.

  “I don’t know if they ever really thought he was a rat,” said Barone. “It was more like a Jimmy Burke thing, ‘Let’s get rid of everybody.’” Joe Jr. was referring to the Lucchese associate who methodically executed his co-conspirators in the infamous 1978 Lufthansa heist at Kennedy International Airport.

  “It’s funny how this really set the wheels in motion,” he continued. “It’s amazing how one moment can change your life forever—that moment for me was seeing the man I had looked up to my entire life, the man I had tried to emulate, lifeless and alone. It set everything in my life on a different course. It’s crazy what happens in life. Look what I did. I saved people’s lives. I musta done something right.”

  CHAPTER 17

  IDIOT WIND

  THE CURTAIN ON VINCENT GIGANTE’S LATEST INSANITY DEFENSE rose way, way, way off-Broadway, before an audience of one in a hospital just a short subway ride downtown from Sullivan Street.

  Gigante was suddenly facing his most serious charges since the long-ago drug case, and this time there was a witness far more legitimate than Cantellops waiting to identify him. Beating the Windows Case would rely on the Chin’s ability to sit down with four renowned psychiatrists and convince the quartet that he was not a Mob boss who helped arrange an ingenious scam to loot tens of millions of dollars for organized crime, but rather a paranoid schizophrenic prone to religious-themed outbursts and averse to razor blades.

  What followed was a star turn unseen in the annals of either psychiatry or law enforcement, a twisted mingling of Rain Man, GoodFellas and Groundhog Day. It was the role that Gigante had waited a lifetime to play, and he delivered a four-star performance that managed to channel both Olivier in Hamlet and Groucho in Duck Soup.

  Hallucinations? Check.

  Voices in his head? Done.

  Improvisation? Outstanding.

  Federal judge Raymond Dearie ruled the four experts would determine whether the wily Chin was cogent enough to face the racketeering charges. The defense chose Dr. Stanley Portnow and Dr. Abraham L. Halpern, while Dearie picked Dr. Jonas Rappeport and Dr.
Daniel Schwartz.

  Across nine months in 1990 through 1991, Gigante was examined twenty times by the psychiatrists across more than thirty hours. The show went on the road: Gigante met with the doctors at his mother’s apartment on La Guardia Place, the psych unit at Kings County Hospital, his old rehearsal hall, St. Vincent’s in Westchester, and the Beekman Downtown Hospital.

  Never once did he break character. Opening night came on June 14, 1990, with Portnow in a front-row seat at Beekman.

  Chin’s wardrobe was basic: plaid pajamas and three-day stubble. Portnow, who characterized the patient as extremely depressed, detailed what happened next.

  He was always very frightened and mistrusting of me, although this improved as time went on, his report to the court declared. At times he remained mute for long periods and could be observed mumbling to himself. This sometimes took the form of looking off at the ceiling or turning his head and looking at the floor.

  When asked what he was doing his responses were chiefly of a religious nature. He was either talking to God or engaged in some ambivalent struggle between good and bad voices.

  There were visions: He would suddenly see religious symbols on the wall or misinterpret what was in fact on the wall as a religious message to him.

  During one of his eleven visits with the Chin, Portnow asked about the pending racketeering case.

  “Windows,” he replied. “They can have my mother’s windows.”

  The Chin also delivered one of the most quoted lines in Mafia history. Asked about his legal situation, the Mob boss offered this divine dodge: “I don’t need an attorney. God is my attorney.”

  Amen.

  He was less kind toward the federal attorney handling his prosecution: “He lies about everything.”

  * * *

  Dr. Schwartz arrived on June 15, spending forty minutes of the twelve hours that he eventually invested in evaluating the Chin. He was greeted by an “affable but reserved” Gigante, who—when asked about the Windows Case indictment—allowed that, yes, he was accused of breaking a few windows.

  The court-appointed shrink described Gigante as “fully alert and reasonably cooperative.” The doctor also described the Chin as “reasonably well oriented in naming the location and approximating the date.” Other statements were “unresponsive, irrelevant and psychotic.”

  The mobster asked several times to go home and see his mother. When Gigante faced an uncomfortable question, he offered a stock answer: “God told me not to answer that,” the report revealed.

  There were infrequent flashes of the real Chin.

  All too rarely, his statements have a mature quality, Schwartz noted. Asked, for instance, why he was in [Kings County Hospital], he responds after a long pause, “I wish I knew.”

  When discussing Gigante’s notorious claim that “God is my lawyer,” Schwartz pointed out that Gigante had a lawyer three decades earlier when he went on trial with Vito Genovese.

  “And look what happened!” he announced. “I went to jail.”

  Schwartz remained skeptical if this was a “surreality” show or something scripted.

  As to malingering, I have learned long ago that this is always a possibility, he wrote. Indeed, with Mr. Gigante, I am still somewhat puzzled by the fact that he mumbles while he is allegedly hallucinating; one would expect a person to remain silent during a “conversation” so he can hear what God or the [D]evil is saying.

  * * *

  Dr. Halpern, asked by defense attorney Barry Slotnick to evaluate his client, found the Chin “appeared dazed, perplexed and bewildered” during both his examinations.

  Not enough, however, that he didn’t repeat the line about his mother’s windows and his celestial legal representation. [Gigante] verbalized with preservative consistency that he was hearing God’s voice telling him nice things and at other times voices telling him bad things, reported Halpern.

  Court-appointed psychiatrist Rappeport, like colleague Schwartz, sat across from the Chin with a bit of a “show-me” attitude.

  “There still remains some question in my mind whether Mr. Gigante may be willfully refusing to repeat the charges against him, which were explained to him,” said Rappeport.

  During one session with Rappeport, Gigante jumped up and walked out of the room—exactly as he did twenty years earlier during his session with Dr. Henry Davidson during the Old Tappan cop scandal. Gigante mentioned the good and bad voices that echoed in his head.

  “Tell me about the bad voices. What do they say?” asked Rappeport.

  “God helps me a lot. He tells me nice things,” replied Gigante.

  “Yes, but what about the bad voices?” the psychiatrist pressed.

  Silence.

  There were lighter moments. Rappeport was greeted with a perplexed look when he asked the Chin to spell “world” backward. The punch line came after a long pause.

  “We’ll be here all day,” Gigante finally replied.

  The Chin, during his session with Rappeport, did allow that he never used the telephone. When asked about his nightly excursions to see Olympia 2, Gigante said he had gone as far uptown as East Seventy-Seventh Street. However, he offered nothing more about the homey nocturnal visits monitored so closely by Agent Beaudoin.

  * * *

  There was one more interesting point, mentioned by each of the doctors: Gigante’s personal history, as given by family members to the doctors, now included some previously unheard details. He was twice hit by cars while running through the streets of Greenwich Village as a kid, and was knocked unconscious by the first accident. There was also mention of massive head trauma from a pair of head butts during his boxing career.

  In fact, his mother had long ago discussed his boxing career with no mention of head trauma. And Louis Gigante did not recall his brother taking any severe beatings during his time in the ring: “He got hit, hurt, but he never got seriously hurt.”

  A former federal prosecutor, even twenty years later, shook his about the twin car crashes.

  “It’s probably all bullshit,” he declared.

  The four doctors disagreed, and independently came to a consensus: Gigante was unfit for trial. Not just now, but ever. It was a sweeping victory for the defense after the Chin delivered like he was chasing an Oscar.

  Mr. Gigante suffers from a chronic form of mental illness, wrote Portnow. Mr. Gigante’s irreversible mental illness causes him to be incompetent to stand trial now or in the future.

  Halpern echoed the finding: Mr. Gigante is not mentally competent to stand trial because of an organic mental defect.

  Rappeport actually cited the Chin’s two decades of faux delusion and his years in organized crime in finding that Gigante was afflicted with schizoaffective disorder, organic personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder.

  It is very difficult for me to believe that any individual would malinger mental illness by allowing himself to be hospitalized on at least 21 occasions over a 20-year period, even in a private psychiatric hospital, for the purposes of preventing some legal action, he wrote. Also, mental illness is not generally acceptable in Mr. Gigante’s cultural and social circles.

  Even the skeptical Schwartz was swayed by what he saw.

  While Mr. Gigante has apparently been hallucinating for many, many years, he does not show the kind of mental deterioration or thinking disorder one would expect to see in a chronic schizophrenic, Schwartz noted.

  And yet, despite a diagnosis that mentioned “possible malingering,” Schwartz declared Gigante was unfit for trial.

  More than two decades after those reports, defense attorney Barry Slotnick insisted the doctors absolutely got it right.

  “It was clear to me that the government was going after Mr. Gigante,” the veteran lawyer said. “The U.S. Attorney’s Office had been going after him for many, many years. It was quite clear to me that he was not competent to stand trial . . . and I was backed by the psychiatrists, who also agreed that he was unable to assist his defen
se and incompetent to stand trial.”

  * * *

  There was one dissenting voice among those who spent time with Gigante during this period. Lenny DePaul was a federal marshal in Brooklyn, assigned to keep an eye on the Chin while he was hospitalized at Bellevue. Given their respective positions, the two hit if off fairly well.

  “He was fine, never caused any problems,” said DePaul. “I do remember him talking to me about his fighting days, about some fights. I said, ‘This guy is about as crazy as a fox.’”

  One quiet Saturday, Yolanda Gigante appeared to visit with her son.

  “His mother was great, a real sweetheart,” said DePaul. “She came in with a box of cannolis, and asked if it was okay to bring them inside. I told her sure, as long as I get one. She was very, very nice. His brother the priest came by, and three of his sons. Gigante never gave us any problems. Whatever his deal was, that was his deal.”

  DePaul, who knew all about the Chin’s crazy act, never saw a hint of lunacy from Gigante.

  “He knew what he was doing,” said DePaul. “He would tell me stories. I thought, ‘He’s not doing too bad for whatever he had.’ He was actually kind of a funny guy.”

  * * *

  The results of the months of testing were made public in a March 1991 hearing before Dearie, who severed the Chin’s case from the other ten defendants facing trial the next month in the Windows Case.

  And then prosecutors Rose and O’Connell tossed a legal “Hail Mary.” What if they could produce evidence that Gigante was rational during the 1980s, when the scam was initiated? Wouldn’t that trump the psychiatric reports?

  Slotnick dismissed the bid as a “last-ditch attempt to put off the inevitable finding that Vincent Gigante is incompetent to stand trial as of March 1991.”

  The judge agreed to let the prosecutors proceed. And the whole case against the head of the Genovese family boss, almost buried beneath a pile of psychiatric reports, was suddenly resurrected—although it was a slow and daunting comeback.