Chin

by Larry McShane

  The delays would last another six years, a bitter and seemingly endless battle waged as Gigante remained the unquestioned overlord of the Genovese family.

  None of the lawyers on either side of the contentious March sanity hearing would be around at the end of the Chin’s traipse through the legal system. Neither would the judge. Bill Clinton would serve most of his two terms in the White House, and Rudy Giuliani—the old prosecutor—would become mayor of New York.

  A rookie shortstop named Derek Jeter debuted in pinstripes, and the Yankees hired a washed-up ex-Mets manager named Joe Torre to run the franchise. O.J. Simpson was arrested, tried and acquitted for the savage killings of his ex-wife and her waiter friend.

  What the defense could not foresee was the sudden flood of Mafia turncoats eager to save their own skins by tossing aside their oaths of omerta like these vows were so many half-eaten pastries. This new breed of Mob informants weren’t like Cafaro—low on the Mob food chain, hedging their bets when meeting with the feds. They were bosses and underbosses, and they were willing to talk with authority about the highest levels of organized crime.

  “Our case only got stronger,” said O’Connell. It was the opposite of the old defense saw: justice delayed is justice denied.

  Prosecutors were soon getting the skinny on Gigante from the unholy trinity of Mob informants: Sammy Gravano, Alphonse D’Arco and Philip Leonetti. The three, who were once among the truest believers in the world of Cosa Nostra, came to the feds with their own reasons for walking away from the Life, to incriminate their friends, crime partners, bosses.

  And, in Leonetti’s case, family.

  * * *

  Phil Leonetti was a kid from Atlantic City, born to the sister of the renowned and feared Scarfo. He was groomed from a young age by his uncle to join La Cosa Nostra; Leonetti grew up with a reverence for the Mob that most kids his age might hold for their favorite football team. His first bit of Mob business came when at age nine, he rode as a decoy in Uncle Nicky’s pickup truck.

  In its bed was a murdered corpse, headed to Philadelphia for butchering and disposal.

  Leonetti killed with the zeal of a true believer—participating in ten murders, including a pair where he pulled the trigger. Crazy Phil’s decision to flip came in a holding pen where Scarfo, a less-than-model father, tried to place the blame for his son Mark’s suicide attempt on Leonetti.

  “I made up my mind right there in that split second . . . that I was going to live the rest of my days for me, for my son, for my mother, not for my fuckin’ uncle and not for his La Cosa Nostra,” Leonetti later recalled.

  Testifying against Gigante was a big deal for Leonetti, who once considered the Genovese boss as the ultimate man of respect.

  “As far as gangsters go, Chin was my kind of guy,” Leonetti said. “He was a very honorable, very well-respected man. Nobody would utter a bad word about him.”

  There was another reason that taking on Gigante was a big deal.

  “He was a stone-cold killer,” said Leonetti. “He’d have a guy whacked like ordering a sandwich, that’s how easy it was for a guy like Chin. He was a no-nonsense motherfucker.”

  * * *

  Convinced his old boss Gotti was going to sell him out to beat their upcoming federal racketeering rap, Gravano reached out to the FBI from the Metropolitan Correctional Center. He turned the Dapper Don’s betrayal upside down, joining the federal forces and providing information gleaned as Gotti’s powerhouse number two man.

  Meanwhile, D’Arco was perhaps the most unlikely of the trio to go rogue. He was older than the other two, and his entire identity was rooted in the Mafia life. D’Arco spoke of his years of service for the Lucchese family with a gangster’s hard edge and a poet’s turn of phrase.

  “I was a man when I was born,” Little Al once bragged. He committed every crime except pimping and pornography, which he deemed beneath his dignity. Murders? He committed eight while rising through the Lucchese ranks.

  D’Arco grew up near the Brooklyn Navy Yards, a neighborhood of heavyweight mobsters—some his relatives. His childhood, D’Arco once recalled, was “like being in the forest and all the trees were the dons and the organized crime guys.”

  He walked into the woods without hesitation. And he didn’t leave until September 1991, when he had risen to the position of acting family boss—and learned that the Luccheses’ fugitive boss Vic Amuso and underboss Gaspipe Casso had added his name to their ever-expanding hit list.

  * * *

  D’Arco was called to a September 18, 1991, meeting at the Kimberly Hotel on East Fiftieth Street—and quickly became convinced his summons to the Lucchese get-together was actually an invitation to his funeral. After a sweat-soaked sit-down, D’Arco walked out quickly, happy (and surprised) to be alive.

  He cold-called the FBI office, and a star witness was born. Little Al later said he believed that Gigante—an old friend—was in on the plot to murder him.

  “I know that they would have to ask Mr. Gigante, being that I was in the administration of the family,” D’Arco said. “The only way they could kill me is they have to okay it with the other bosses, and he was one of the bosses. And he still is a boss. And that’s why Mr. Gigante is just as guilty as Vic and Gaspipe.”

  The Chin’s betrayal rankled a bit more than the involvement of the other two.

  “Mr. Gigante knows my whole family,” D’Arco said. “His daughters hung out with my daughters, and everything else. He knows the kind of family we are.... He’s supposed to step up and say, ‘Hey, hold on. What do you mean that Al is a rat?’ But he was part of the plot. That’s what it is.”

  * * *

  Before any of them took the stand against the Chin, “Fat Tony” died behind bars in July 1992, his oath of omerta unviolated. But the new generation of turncoats sent many more of Gigante’s Mob compatriots headed off to die behind bars, even as the Chin’s fight to avoid joining them dragged on.

  By the time the turncoats stopped talking, hundreds of their associates landed in federal prisons. Leonetti, Gravano and D’Arco were personally responsible for scores of convictions.

  First to go was Chin’s underboss Benny Eggs, convicted in the Windows Case in October 1991 after Savino spent two months on the witness stand. Going down with him were Colombo consigliere Benny Aloi and a family capo, Dennis “Fat Dennis” DeLucia.

  John Gotti, after surviving the Chin’s wrath, was convicted of racketeering and murder on April 2, 1992, buried by Gravano’s damning recollections from the witness stand and his own voice on an assortment of wiretapped conversations in the apartment above the Ravenite. He would die behind bars a decade later.

  Lucchese boss Little Vic Amuso was finally tracked down and brought to the Brooklyn Federal Courthouse. A jury, after hearing from Chiodo and Savino, found him guilty of all fifty-four counts in his racketeering indictment, including nine murders. His underboss Casso pleaded guilty on March 1, 1994, to fourteen murders—and improbably agreed to become a government witness, too. (Casso was later tossed after lying to investigators).

  The first verdict on the Windows Case was a split decision; five of the defendants, including Peter Gotti, were acquitted. The jury decision led to speculation that the Chin’s insanity defense might have finally come back to bite him. If he had taken his shot in the first trial, perhaps he would have walked with his accused co-conspirators.

  The odds of acquittal were better than anyone knew. O’Connell said prosecutors later learned of jury tampering, with two members of the panel recruited by the Mob to fix the case. One was dismissed; the other was “strongly suspected,” but stayed on through deliberations, he said.

  The juror was later placed under FBI surveillance and spotted dining with a Genovese associate. O’Connell recalled that Rose was still upbeat about nailing Mangano and the other two.

  “Look at it this way,” Rose told him. “Any prosecutor can win a conviction with a regular jury. But you’ve got to be great to do it with a tampere
d jury!”

  * * *

  Working off information from the informants, old and new, Rose and O’Connell assembled a new grand jury to consider new charges against the Chin—including counts of murder. On June 10, 1993, a federal panel returned a streamlined six-count superseding indictment with Gigante as the lone defendant.

  The confident feds flatly declared that Chin was the quite rational and quite lethal head of the Genovese crime family. Its members eagerly joined with Gigante in creating the image of the doddering old man with more than a few screws loose. The indictment charged: Gigante . . . and his fellow members and associates of the enterprise engaged in elaborate efforts to conceal Gigante’s role in the Genovese crime family. Those efforts included defendant Gigante’s affecting an appearance of incompetency, ordering members and associates never to utter Gigante’s name, conducting meetings in early morning hours, and limiting direct contact with Gigante to only a few trusted subordinates.

  In the end none of it worked. In addition to the Windows Case charges, Gigante found himself accused of murder and murder conspiracy in the Philadelphia Mob war killings. He was accused of ordering the shotgun hit on Pappa, of plotting to murder the turncoat Savino and of ordering the revenge hit on Gambino boss Gotti.

  For good measure the feds threw in charges of extortion and labor payoff conspiracy—with a list of twenty-nine alleged payoffs to the Ironworkers Union, most funneled through Savino’s American Aluminum.

  “It’s all bullshit,” sighed Father G.

  When the indictment was made public, Gigante was ensconced at St. Vincent’s for another well-timed tune-up. Under his strange bail arrangement, the accused murderer was allowed to stay at his mother’s home, provided that he remain within a ten-block radius of her apartment. At this point, after six decades as a Village fixture, nobody considered the Chin a flight risk.

  Gigante’s case, once severed from the other Windows defendants, wound up before Federal Judge Eugene Nickerson, one of the most respected jurists in the Brooklyn courthouse. Nickerson’s twenty-four years on the bench included his deft handling of the Abner Louima police brutality case and the John Gotti prosecution. His wife would eventually end up struggling with Alzheimer’s disease.

  Her illness would provide yet another detour in the Chin’s endlessly winding trip to trial.

  While there was a new indictment, Gigante was sticking with the same old defense—and additional psychiatric evaluations ensued. Halpern, at the request of the defense, conducted two more sessions with Gigante, on October 6, 1993, and January 19, 1994. The psychiatrist offered a medical opinion to boot: Gigante’s failing health alone was enough to spare him from trial.

  The Chin’s blood pressure was high (unsurprisingly, given his legal woes). And his heart problems were well documented.

  “Mr. Gigante is not only mentally and physically unfit to stand trial, or participate at a hearing, but is extremely unlikely to regain competence,” he concluded.

  Dr. Schwartz, on behalf of the state, evaluated Gigante on August 15, 1995, during one of the mobster’s getaways to St. Vincent’s.

  “I don’t want to go to no court,” the Chin declared. “I didn’t do nothing wrong. God knows, I didn’t do nothing wrong.”

  The psychiatrist also noted that Gigante’s son, Andrew, told him the old man’s relapses became evident through nervous behavior, body shakes and the silent movement of his lips.

  There were five more visits to St. Vincent’s, bringing Gigante’s total to twenty-eight. He was once again under the care of Dr. Eugene D’Adamo after arriving on July 23, 1996—the same period when Nickerson was holding the hearings that would determine the Chin’s competency to face prosecution.

  He was visited there by Dr. Portnow, one of the defense psychiatrists. The Chin took just a single shower during his stay, and complained about his mother’s failure to visit. Twenty-three days later, a reinvigorated Gigante was sent home—unaware that his decades-long bluff was about to be called by Judge Nickerson.

  * * *

  After six fitful years of stops and starts, prosecutors would finally get their chance in court to demonstrate the Mob boss was anything but demented. A two-part process was involved: First, they would need to demonstrate that Gigante was the rational and undisputed head of the Genovese family during the time covered by the indictment. Second, if part one was proven, the four psychiatrists who examined the Chin way back at the start of the decade would consider—given the new information about his criminal exploits—how the news would affect their diagnoses.

  The government, at long last, was ready to pull back the shower curtain and expose the true Chin.

  A new lead federal lawyer, George Stamboulidis, had stepped in to replace the departed O’Connell and Rose, gone on Labor Day, 1994, to launch their own Fifth Avenue law firm. The new guy, coming off a winning Mob prosecution of Colombo family head Little Vic Orena, knew this was a case like none before—or since.

  “The competency hearings were a real challenge,” recalled Stamboulidis. “For years this was the battle of the forensic psychiatrists, forensic psychologists and Chin’s cardiologist. At one point the Chin fooled even the government-retained psychiatrists who examined him. The biggest hurdle was getting to trial.”

  Stamboulidis began work as a federal prosecutor with the Newark Organized Crime Task Force, joining the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Brooklyn in 1989 as acting chief of the organized crime section. His résumé would come to include three citations from the Justice Department for superior performance.

  The prosecutor’s first close-up look at the mythic mobster did not disappoint.

  “There he was, obviously with his act in full swing,” said Stamboulidis. “He came in looking like his disheveled self. The Chin put a lot into his act. And it served him well for decades. He played the part exceptionally well. If he was an actor, his performance may have earned him an Academy Award nomination. It worked so well for so long.”

  * * *

  The hearings began in the first week of March 1996, with Gambino family turncoat Gravano taking the stand for the first time since slipping into the Witness Protection Program. The Bull, in rebutting claims of the “crazy act,” recounted his first meeting with Gigante a full twenty years earlier—and he detailed four other Mob-related get-togethers over the next two decades.

  Not even the Chin’s standard business outfit of bathrobe and nightclothes gave Gravano second thoughts about Gigante’s sanity.

  “If I thought he was crazy, how would I know what he was doing?” Gravano asked. “He could walk right into a police station after the meeting.... I wouldn’t be at a meeting if I knew somebody was crazy.”

  Under questioning by Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew Weissmann, Gravano testified that he never saw the Genovese boss mumble incoherently, appear unsure or otherwise exhibit a single instance of strange behavior.

  “Not at all,” he told AUSA Weissmann. “I thought he was pretty sharp.”

  The Bull added that his impression was Gigante didn’t have much use for his predecessor, Salerno.

  “They weren’t real tight,” said Gravano. “He made faces behind Fat Tony’s back and it was pretty obvious they didn’t get along.”

  * * *

  The real fireworks ignited when fiery bantam D’Arco took the stand. His testimony under questioning from prosecutors was damning, and it provided a bit of rarely heard Mob history as D’Arco emerged as a witness with uncanny recall of details and dates.

  D’Arco was unflinching in his recounting of Chin’s job description: “He ran the whole show there. He was very capable.”

  The ex-Lucchese acting boss, asked about the Mob’s handling of the mentally ill, said it was standard practice to simply whack the afflicted Mafiosi in the interest of insuring their everlasting silence.

  “If someone developed mental illness, they would be killed,” he said flatly. “It’s like a mercy killing.”

  He even provided two examples, both from
the Chin’s own family: Genovese capo Willie Moretti, who began running his mouth after contracting syphilis, was executed. Ditto Genovese soldier Anthony “Hickey” DiLorenzo, killed after he “flipped his lid.”

  DiLorenzo drew attention for associating with suspected informants while behind bars, and then began jabbering about Mob business following his release from prison. His freedom was short-lived, as DiLorenzo kept speaking out of turn about various Mob pursuits.

  Hickey’s bullet-riddled body was found on the patio of his West New York, New Jersey, home on November 25, 1988.

  D’Arco’s cross-examination displayed the combative, volatile nature that earned him the fear and respect of his fellow mobsters during his decades in the Lucchese family. Defense attorney Michael Shapiro began grilling D’Arco about the terms of his cooperation deal with the feds.

  “I have no control of what I am going to get,” said D’Arco, his face turning red.

  “I understand,” said Shapiro. “But that’s not my question.”

  “I hope to get nothing, if you want to know,” shouted an enraged D’Arco, nearly bolting from the witness stand. “I hope to get nothing. But if I get life, that’s it. I didn’t do this for that.”

  Nickerson interrupted—“Gentlemen, stop”—and Stamboulidis objected. D’Arco ignored them both.

  “Don’t break my chops,” D’Arco told the defense attorney. “I didn’t do this for that. I’ll break yours, too.”

  “I’m sure you would,” replied Shapiro.

  D’Arco offered an apology of sorts: “First time I ever blew up like that, but this is the first time I ever had anyone like this ball breaker. Excuse me, he’s disrespecting . . .”

  “In my courtroom,” Nickerson chided the witness, “you shouldn’t do that.”

  The defense, scurrying to undo the damaging testimony, filed a posthearing memo with an interesting argument.

  Even if there were something to the government’s contention that the defendant sometimes feigned psychiatric symptoms in the past . . . Vincent Gigante has been the victim of episodic mental illness and a deteriorating overall level of mental functioning, the defense wrote.