If in the past he feigned symptoms, he was able to do so not out of great psychological insight, but because he had to do no more than continue or copy those symptoms he could not help exhibiting during his episodes of acute illness.
Agent Charlie Beaudoin testified, too, recounting his nightly viewings from the yeshiva. When Slotnick challenged his eyesight, the FBI agent correctly identified—from fifty feet away—a driver’s license.
* * *
Nickerson took a few weeks to review the testimony before issuing his opinion on May 15, 1996. The ruling was devastating to the defense, and provided prosecutors the first sign that the strategy hatched years earlier by O’Connell and Rose was now bearing fruit.
The evidence before the court clearly establishes that Gigante was a forceful and active leader of the Genovese family from at least 1970 on, that he became the boss of the family . . . and exercised his prerogatives until at least up to September 1991, that his actions and decisions were wholly inconsistent with the behavior observed by doctors, Nickerson wrote in his rebuke of years of psychiatric exams.
His motive for putting on a “crazy act” all those years was to avoid apprehension by law enforcement.
Nickerson specifically cited the refusal of other Mafia families to murder Savino over the Chin’s objection, even though letting him live could put them all in jail. The federal judge, in closing, said he agreed with Gigante’s Mob contemporaries that the Chin was “not an incompetent.” But, rather, Vincent Gigante was an “active and potentially dangerous force with extensive knowledge and understanding of their world.”
After Nickerson ruled that the Chin was the sane and rational head of the Genovese family, he asked the original Fab Four of psychiatrists to reconsider their opinions in light of his decision.
“The psychiatrists will be asked to say to what extent, if any, these findings alter their assessments of Gigante’s competency to stand trial,” the judge ordered. The two prosecution doctors quickly reversed field.
The new details “make me think that it is quite possible that [Gigante] is competent to stand trial, and that much or all of his mental illness has been malingered,” Rappeport testified on May 28. He was now convinced “to a medical degree of certainty” that the Chin’s insanity was a scam.
Schwartz concurred: testimony about Gigante’s lethal rule atop the Genoveses “convince me that he is fit to proceed.”
Defense psychiatrist Portnow hedged his bets. Chin was competent to stand trial back when he first examined the Mob boss in 1991, but he went around the legal bend in 1995 and was currently incompetent.
“His greatest enjoyment in life is to enjoy cartoons,” Portnow testified at an August hearing that finally wrapped up the long-running sanity sessions. “He became as animated as I’ve ever seen him when he talked about animals coming from the sky and Martians in the cartoons. [It was] the only time I ever saw a real smile come over Vincent’s face.”
Nickerson, in another scathing decision, questioned the validity of Portnow’s new diagnosis.
It was unclear to the court just how someone incapable of functioning in any area of life, as Dr. Portnow and others had previously described Gigante’s condition over the years, could have deteriorated still further, he wrote in an August 28 ruling.
The judge also noted that Chin’s symptoms had never changed over the intervening three decades—contradicting defense claims that his condition was steadily worsening. Nickerson then lowered the boom on Gigante and shattered the crazy act for good.
Gigante deliberately feigned mental illness from the late 1960s until at least September of 1991, the federal judge wrote. As he has presented no convincing reason for the court to conclude otherwise, the court finds that the symptoms that Gigante has demonstrated since that time are also the product of his malingering.
Nickerson wasn’t done. He took a direct shot at the defense shrinks, who now claimed the Chin’s condition had gone further south in the years since his 1990 arrest in the Windows Case.
As Gigante has feigned illness for over twenty years, the reasonable inference from the appearance of any exaggerated symptoms . . . is not that his condition has deteriorated, but rather that the imminent threat of prosecution has increased his incentive to malinger, wrote Nickerson in a dagger to the defense.
And then he unloaded on the Chin’s wife and mother as enablers who helped the Mob boss launch the crazy act back in the 1960s. The two created a new psychiatric and medical profile for Gigante once he sought “help” for his mental illness.
The examining psychiatrist [received] a revised account of his childhood and medical history, Nickerson wrote. Gigante’s wife and mother reported that as a child, he suffered from “severe temper tantrums, phobia for the dark, truancy at school, obesity and learning problems” and that at 16 he was deferred from the Army for “psychiatric reasons.”
Accordingly, the court deems Gigante fit to stand trial and directs that he appear for arraignment on the indictment, he wrote. So ordered.
* * *
Chin was ordered to return on September 6, 1996, to face the charges. For prosecutors it was the payoff for waging a long, difficult, endlessly challenging legal battle to unmask the Mob boss who for so long covered himself in the cloak of mental illness.
“I remember the look of delight on Andrew’s face after Judge Nickerson’s ruling,” said coprosecutor Dan Dorsky. “It was all so silly—walking around in a bathrobe and drooling on himself for the public. And, otherwise, here’s this fearsome and vicious leader of a very large and lucrative gang.”
The Chin’s return to Brooklyn Federal Court, his first public appearance in nearly six years, was a deranged tour de force. He arrived in a blue windbreaker over a white T-shirt, sporting his usual stubble. His eyes darted madly around the courtroom as he entered, accompanied by his personal cardiologist.
As the judge and attorneys conferred, Gigante spoke to himself in an indecipherable internal monologue. His legs trembled, and Gigante stroked his chin. The twelve-minute appearance was so spellbinding that prosecutors apparently forgot their plans to make a bail revocation motion.
The Chin’s new attorney, the veteran James LaRossa, entered a plea of not guilty more than a decade after his representation of Castellano in the commission trial.
“Just getting Mr. Gigante here was an incredible task,” he said.
Neither the disquieting courtroom appearance nor Nickerson’s decision did little to change the opinions of those on either side of the debate.
“Boss? What boss?” his ever-loyal mother, Yolanda, asked a reporter for the New York Post that summer. “He’s boss of the toilet. My son is sick. Boss of shit. Six years he lives here with me. Every day I care for him. I feed him. I wash him. I cry over him.”
Lewis Schiliro, FBI special agent in charge of the criminal division in Manhattan, took the opposing stance: “The Chin is the number one show in the country, without question.”
But Nickerson’s was the only opinion that mattered—not that the defense was ready to wave a white flag just yet. The battle to delay the trial would soon stretch into a seventh and final year.
CHAPTER 18
NEIGHBORHOOD BULLY
THE UNLIKELIEST GIGANTE TO APPEAR IN A CRIME STORY MADE headlines in the summer of 1996: Chin’s mother, Yolanda. As her son fought to dodge prosecution, the elderly widow was mugged by a career criminal, who couldn’t plead guilty fast enough once he was clued in about his thieving idiocy.
Willie King, a street thief with twenty-one arrests already on his résumé, headed to Greenwich Village for a little late-afternoon larceny on July 21, 1996. King, thirty-seven, spied what looked like the easiest pickings in the whole neighborhood: a frail, tiny, ninety-four-year-old woman with a cane—walking on the arm of an elderly priest.
Jackpot! Except the woman was the Chin’s mother and the priest was her son, Father Louis.
King snatched Yolanda’s wallet from her housecoat in broad dayligh
t as she returned to her apartment at 2:55 P.M. after a trip to the grocery store. The purse snatcher outran the winded, nearly sixty-five-year-old priest; the aging hoopster gave up the chase after a block.
“I was yelling, ‘Thief! Thief! Thief!’” the priest said. “I lost him. . . . I went home.”
An in-line skater and a cabbie picked up the chase, flagging down an NYPD patrol car. Inside was Lieutenant Robert McKenna, a fitness devotee who ran six miles a day. He needed just four blocks to collar King. The arrest likely saved the mugger’s life, since the petty thief’s odds of survival on the street in a post-mugging-the-Chin’s-mom world were poor, at best.
“The best part was in the car when I said to him, ‘You are the world’s worst mugger,’ ” the Sixth Precinct lieutenant recalled. “I said, ‘Do you know who you mugged?’ When I told him, he just slumped in the seat and rolled his eyes.”
Yolanda Gigante nearly cried when McKenna returned the wallet holding $90 and a treasured old family photo. The elderly woman pulled out the picture and kissed it. Father G. bemoaned the changing neighborhood. “They’re going after old women now,” the Village native told McKenna.
A day after positively identifying King as the mugger, the priest told the press that King had no reason to fear retribution from the Genovese kingpin despite his obvious mistake. He made reference to the Chin’s mental woes in declaring that King would remain safe and sound.
“This is stupidity,” said Louis Gigante. “I know you like to talk about my brother. I just want to be left alone. My brother is sick.... He’s home with Mama.”
The priest said his brother was actually unaware of the crime or the arrest.
“He was sleeping,” said Father G. “Should I wake him up and tell him? It’ll make him so upset. He’s depressed.”
A laid-back and apparently unconcerned King appeared for his arraignment in Manhattan Criminal Court with a smile on his face. After King was charged with petty larceny and possession of stolen property, his lawyer said there would be no application to hold his client in protective custody.
“He does not seem to have any fear,” said defense attorney Steven Warshaw. “Mrs. Gigante was not injured in any way. And other than the alleged reputation of the family, I don’t think he has anything to worry about.”
The arraignment was delayed for several hours when a criminal court judge, who once worked as a prosecutor in the Manhattan DA’s office, recused himself, citing his role in a prior investigation of the Chin.
It took less than a month for King to reconsider his defense strategy. The thief entered a guilty plea on August 9 and offered a heartfelt apology to the Chin and his mother.
“He came to his senses and decided to come clean,” explained Warshaw. “His motivation was to apologize to the Gigante family and Mrs. Gigante. In this way he is trying to put this behind him, and he also hopes the Gigante family puts this behind them.”
King agreed to a sentence of 1½ to three years in prison, which sounded a whole lot better than whatever the Chin might consider appropriate for robbing his beloved mother. The defendant, in a strange sartorial choice, sported a shirt with the word BOSS on its front when he arrived for the August 19 sentencing. King whined that the sentence was too stiff for the crime.
“I guess you’ll do the best you can,” he finally told the judge.
Though none of the Gigantes were in court, Warshaw took the opportunity to deliver one final mea culpa.
“My client wishes to express great remorse,” the lawyer said. “He does apologize to Miss Gigante and the Reverend Gigante. He’s admitted his guilt at the earliest opportunity because he wants to put this incident behind him, and he hopes the Gigante family will, too.”
* * *
Yolanda Gigante survived the mugging, but the beloved family matriarch was nearing the end of her long and complicated life. The mother of both a Mob boss and a priest died nine months later, more than seven decades after arriving in Greenwich Village from her native Naples. She was mourned by, among others, eight grandkids from Vincent’s two families.
Yolanda passed away at St. Vincent’s Hospital on May 8, 1997, shortly after complaining of stomach pains during dinner. Just hours earlier, Father Louis accompanied his mom to a Greenwich Village Laundromat. Her death came three years after another of her boys, reputed mobster Ralph, passed away. After decades of tending to her beloved Chenzino, Yolanda died without learning his legal fate.
In another strange twist dictated by the Chin’s twisted family tree, his mother had spent time recently recovering from a broken vertebrae at the New Jersey home of her son’s wife, Olympia 1. Gigante had appealed to the court to join his mother back in Old Tappan, apparently bereft by her absence. He also received the okay to visit with Olympia 2 three times a week.
The family initially decided to keep the devastating news of Yolanda’s death a secret from Vincent, who did not attend his mother’s wake or funeral—one of the more devastating consequences of his chosen career.
“He doesn’t even know his mother passed away,” said his latest defense attorney, Michael Marinaccio. “And I don’t know that he is going to be told.”
Bronx borough president Fernando Ferrer, a longtime friend and vocal supporter of Father G., was asked about the propriety of attending the wake of a mobster’s mom.
“I didn’t expect my attendance at a wake and praying for the dead to be an issue anywhere,” he said. The other mourners, he noted, included Cardinal John O’Connor, who “is much bigger than I.”
He dismissed talk about the Chin’s relationship with Father G.
“I’ve never related to him on that level,” he said. “The issue here is ‘Did Father Gigante ever do anything wrong?’ And the answer is ‘No.’ In fact, in my view, he did a great many things right.”
The funeral was held just after Mother’s Day, with six pallbearers in Armani suits carrying Yolanda’s bronze-colored coffin into Our Lady of Pompeii Church. Father Gigante blessed the casket with holy water, and kissed his mother’s coffin good-bye.
He also addressed the assembled media: “Vincent is not here. I know that’s why you’re here, and I’m sorry to disappoint you.”
Yolanda Gigante left Greenwich Village for good in a silver hearse, followed by a procession of twenty-one cars, including three black stretch limousines and a flower car filled with pink roses, white azaleas and yellow lilies. She was laid to rest at St. John’s Cemetery in Queens, among the many Mob bosses already buried there: Lucky Luciano, Joe Profaci, Joe Colombo—and even John Gotti eventually.
CHAPTER 19
TANGLED UP IN BROOKLYN
GIGANTE UNDERWENT A SECOND OPEN-HEART SURGERY IN EARLY 1997, and his Brooklyn trial was postponed until April 14 to allow a full recovery. A second continuance was granted on a defense motion citing his continued health worries.
A hard-and-fast June 23 date was set for opening arguments, with a warning from Judge Nickerson that no additional delays would be acceptable unless the defense came up with something new to stall the proceedings. And they quickly did.
The new claim abandoned the insanity defense to assert that Gigante was now incompetent for trial because the Genovese boss was afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease on top of his assorted other physical woes.
Nickerson, whose spouse was legitimately battling the devastating disease, quickly recused himself. The case was assigned on May 13 to the no-nonsense dean of the Brooklyn Federal Courthouse, senior district judge Jack Weinstein.
The jurist was immediately greeted by a defense motion that claimed that pretrial publicity could prevent the selection of an impartial jury. Weinstein, one month into the case, shot it down—only to field another defense claim that Gigante was afflicted with potentially cancerous nodules on his thyroid. Oh, and blood in his urine. And there was a problem with his pacemaker. And also he had need for immediate dental care.
Weinstein didn’t bite. On June 16 the judge informed both prosecution and defense that the
case of U.S. v Vincent Louis Gigante would proceed to trial in one week, just as his judicial predecessor had ordered.
It was finally showtime, but Barry Slotnick was no longer a part of the courtroom drama. Disgusted by the government’s relentless pursuit of the Chin, he walked away.
“Ultimately, I withdrew because I didn’t feel it was appropriate for them to continue doing to Vincent what they were doing,” he said recently. “It was wrong.”
* * *
The long-awaited trial—dubbed the “Never Ending Soap Opera” by longtime Mob scribe Jerry Capeci—finally began not with the bang of Judge Weinstein’s gavel, but with the gripe of a pissed-off prosecutor.
George Stamboulidis, standing in the well of the Brooklyn federal courtroom, turned to see Gigante arriving for opening statements in a wheelchair—with a cane across his lap. Father Louis pushed the Chin toward the defense table.
“I objected to the two props,” recalled Stamboulidis. “I said, ‘Your Honor, I don’t mind one—but two props?’ And Judge Weinstein said, ‘I don’t want it.’ So I said to the defense that the judge said he didn’t want it, get rid of one. And they did. They removed the cane from Chin’s lap.
“Later someone pointed out that when the judge said he didn’t want it, he might have meant he didn’t want to hear my objection,” the prosecutor said with a chuckle. “But everyone heard the judge, and I did quote him correctly to the defense.”
So began the contentious court fight to put the sixty-nine-year-old Gigante behind bars for the first time in thirty-two years. It had taken seven years since the Windows Case indictment to get the Chin behind the defense table. The elusive Gigante, to prosecutors, had become Moby Dick in a ratty bathrobe—and the pressure was on to nail their wily adversary in what shaped up as their last and best shot.
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