Chin

by Larry McShane

  * * *

  Gravano returned for the rematch looking more relaxed in a blue-gray suit, with a black golf shirt buttoned to the top. Not a hair was out of place; he looked ready for dinner at some suburban country club after eighteen holes of golf.

  The defense lawyer, who hailed from the Bronx, began quoting liberally from the Maas-penned biography to illustrate Gravano’s long history of treachery, mendacity and homicide. Gravano, under oath, did little to counter the image.

  There was a recounting of Gravano’s bloody decades in the Life, including his admission that it was “one double cross after another, one scheme after another, one betrayal after another.”

  “So facing a life sentence without parole, it took an epiphany to make you see that?” Marinaccio asked in mock disbelief. “You know what an ‘epiphany’ is?”

  Gravano turned his palms upward and rolled his eyes in the same direction: “The way you said it, I get the idea.”

  Marinaccio asked about the 1986 murder of Gambino associate Robert “DB” DiBernardo, whose murder was ordered by Gotti based on a tip from Gravano that DB was running his mouth.

  “DB was a good talker, a smart guy,” Gravano explained when asked if secondhand info on the mobster was enough to justify his killing. “This is the way the Mob runs. It’s not if [it’s] good enough for me. It’s not if it’s good enough for you. You’re a lawyer. It’s good enough for the Mob.”

  The dead man’s daughter, sitting in one of the coveted courtroom seats, gasped as tears welled in her eyes. She stared angrily at the witness before bolting for the hallway. Marinaccio, a copy of Underboss at the ready, inquired about the murder of John “Johnny Keys” Simone.

  “On page one hundred twenty-six, you say, ‘Deception is at the core of a clean mob hit,’” the defense lawyer read. “Deception—that’s something you were very good at?”

  “I guess,” Gravano conceded.

  “Deception all around?” the lawyer pressed.

  “Yes,” the Bull replied.

  “And you were at the center of it?”

  “I’m at the trigger end,” Gravano fired back.

  Marinaccio referred repeatedly to the Gravano book, its pages covered in brightly colored Post-its to mark the passages significant to Chin’s defense. He asked how Simone was executed.

  “I believe it was a single shot with a .357 Magnum to the back of the head,” said Gravano, his voice as flat as if reading from a phone book. “I don’t recall three shots.”

  The defense lawyer produced a 1993 FBI interview with Gravano where he never mentioned Gigante’s name in connection with the Philly hit before honing in on the witness’s cold-blooded approach to murder—asking about the 1981 killing of Frank Fiala. The Bull’s unfortunate business partner agreed to pay Gravano $1 million for a Brooklyn nightclub; after Fiala handed over $750,000, Gravano settled the rest of the debt by murdering the man.

  “That [money] rang your greed bell?” Marinaccio asked.

  “That million seemed to ring it every time,” said Gravano.

  By this point of the questioning, Gravano was listening to the questions intently. He rested his head on his hand, or gently touched his right index finger to his lips. Asked a series of questions about Mob construction business meetings, he rubbed his chin—without irony or intent.

  The cross-examination turned to the murder of Gambino soldier Louis DiBono, murdered after Gravano tipped the killers to a parking lot beneath the World Trade Center, where the victim left his car.

  “I didn’t accomplish nothing except to give John [Gotti] that information,” said Gravano. “If you want to make that a major accomplishment . . .”

  Gravano recounted how the Gambinos, gathered at Castellano’s Staten Island estate, learned about Chin’s 1981 hospital ascension to the top of the Genovese family.

  “I was in Paul’s house when word came,” he recounted. “Tommy Bilotti brought it in. Tommy said that Fat Tony had a stroke and stepped down, and Chin was made the boss.... I had it at the table out of Tommy’s mouth.”

  “We can’t ask Tommy Bilotti,” Marinaccio inquired, “because he’s dead?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We can’t ask Paul Castellano because he’s dead?” the defense lawyer pressed, exposing Gravano’s treachery within his own family.

  “Yeah.”

  “And you were involved in plots to kill both?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  Gravano even admitted a plan, conjured with murdered underboss DeCicco, to kill their pal Gotti. “John Gotti had the brains and the nerve to run the family,” he said. “But he had some bad habits. Frankie told me, ‘If it doesn’t work out, we’ll whack him out. I’ll be the boss, and you’ll be the underboss.’”

  Gravano remained unfailingly polite as the questioning intensified. The man who seemed incapable of uttering a sentence without an F-bomb on government wiretaps apologized at one point for using the term “screwup.” He acknowledged the Genovese plot to whack Vincent Gigante, but said he wasn’t too good with times and dates of the payback plan. Occasionally the old street tough returned from beneath the cool exterior.

  “Again, that’s one of those slick lawyer moves,” Gravano responded to one question. “He asks, ‘Did I ever hear a rumor?’ No, I didn’t.”

  When Marinaccio read a lengthy book excerpt about the infamous 1988 commission meeting with Gotti and Gigante, Sammy asked to take a look.

  “That’s a mouthful,” he said. “I’d like to see it, if possible, so I can understand your question.”

  When Marinaccio quoted from Gravano’s direct testimony, he took a jab at the government’s lawyer: “This is direct examination. The prosecutors. No slick lawyers here.”

  Sammy disagreed: “Why not? They’re lawyers, too.”

  The defense lawyer, hell-bent on discrediting the star witness, quoted again from his earlier answers to the prosecution questions.

  “Do you recall hearing those questions and giving those answers?” asked Marinaccio.

  “Sounds like me,” Sammy said brightly.

  Gravano insisted his testimony was 100 percent legit, as required by his deal with the FBI. “There’s no reason for me to bob and weave and not tell you the truth, when you know the government’s not after you,” he said.

  He even maintained a sense of humor as the withering questions continued. Marinaccio read from a transcript of a December 12, 1989, conversation at Gotti’s Ravenite Social Club, where Sammy’s various business interests were discussed at length.

  “Busy little guy, huh?” said Gravano, with laughter breaking the courtroom tension.

  In the same conversation an angry Gotti talked about “busting him (Sammy) tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow never came,” Gravano responded with a touch of snark.

  Gravano also insisted that Cindy DiBernardo and the other mourning relatives would never see a penny of his book money. “I intend to fight that law,” he said.

  Marinaccio started another query with yet another reference to Underboss: “On page two hundred seventeen of your book—”

  Gravano interrupted. “Don’t quote me on my book,” he replied curtly. “I’m talking to a person who wrote this book. This is not a book. This is a trial. I’m under oath.”

  The jury, which never heard a word about the Chin’s extensive psychiatric history, was read a scathing excerpt, instead, from a March 1995 government psychological profile of the Bull when he was under consideration for the Witness Protection Program.

  The candidate presents a good social façade that masks extremely shallow emotionality, high impulsivity, irresponsibility and unpredictability, a federal shrink concluded. His outward presentation conceals a self-centered personality that is primarily, if not completely, driven by internal needs without regard for the needs of others.

  The evaluation made Gravano squirm before another uncomfortable moment: He acknowledged collecting another $20,000 off the book. Gravano was paid $10,000 for doing a c
ommercial voice-over, and another ten grand for providing the publisher with personal photos. By the end, in his final turn as a government witness, the questions—even from the prosecution—were about Gravano’s book and not Gigante.

  “Are you here to publicize the book?” asked Assistant U.S. Attorney Weissmann in an effort at damage control.

  “No,” replied Gravano before departing.

  * * *

  The Gigante clan offered their harsh reviews of Gravano’s testimony outside the courtroom.

  “He’s here, in our opinion, to promote the book,” said the Chin’s daughter Yolanda. “If you ask me, this is just a promotional stop. He’s a pathological liar and a psychotic murderer.”

  Father Gigante said Gravano’s appearance was enough to make him lose his faith . . . in the criminal justice system. “I’m more upset with the way the government is operating in collusion to prosecute a sick man,” the priest declared.

  After the Bull had put three dozen of his former crooked colleagues behind bars, Marinaccio’s combative cross—with its incessant references to Gravano’s literary effort—had ruined Sammy as one of the feds’ most reliable voices. He would never again take the stand against his Mob cronies, his usefulness ruined by a best seller.

  “It’s not a good idea,” said former U.S. Attorney Andrew Maloney of Brooklyn, “for a government witness to write a book.”

  * * *

  Next up was Little Al D’Arco, the memory of his explosion at the sanity hearings still fresh in the minds of prosecutors and the press. But before he said a word, Judge Weinstein lobbed a verbal grenade at prosecutors. Was there, he asked, “any witness” at all who would directly tie Gigante to the crimes charges in the indictment?

  “Yes, Your Honor,” came the reply from the prosecution table.

  “Then let’s have those witnesses,” he instructed the three-man government team.

  The respected jurist offered a similar rebuke to defense attorney Foglia as he questioned Philadelphia mobster Eugene “Gino” Milano about the killings of Bruno and Testa.

  “What sort of harm did he do to the defendant that you want to cross-examine him about whether he pistol-whipped somebody when he was eighteen or nineteen?” the exasperated judge asked.

  “I think it goes to his credibility as a witness,” said Foglia.

  “How long is this cross-examination going to last?” Weinstein inquired. “Let’s get to the merits of the case. It seems to me we’re wasting a great deal of time. He didn’t connect your defendant with the murders, did he? So, why are you wasting all this time cross-examining him and emphasizing it?”

  Enter Little Al. He was the witness the federal judge was waiting to hear.

  * * *

  The diminutive D’Arco, now the highest-ranking Mafia member to ever flip to the feds, was cool and composed as he recounted the Chin’s long-ago approval to run a gambling operation out of a luncheonette. He told of “getting messages from the Chin” about Mob operations in far-flung Kentucky. And he gave his version of the 1988 commission meeting, complete with the treachery of Amuso and Gigante to lull Gotti into a false sense of security. The turncoat testified that he learned of the Gotti murder plot from other mobsters, and he never doubted its veracity.

  “You get killed for lying,” he declared. Little Al was now facing the same penalty, albeit at a slower rate: lying would jeopardize his government deal, and he would likely die behind bars for his crimes.

  He offered an insider’s view of the Triangle, where the conversations were conducted in barely audible whispers and the walls warned of government bugs. D’Arco then detailed the Chin’s bizarre embrace of Savino despite warnings from the other families that Black Pete was working for the other team.

  He recounted Gigante’s 1991 call to the Luccheses, trying to arrange the gabby Savino’s murder. “Chin wants a favor from you,” D’Arco quoted Genovese family leader Jimmy Ida telling him. The Genovese boss had a tip that Savino was living in Hawaii. D’Arco said he turned down the request after conferring with the Luccheses’ two fugitive leaders, Casso and Amuso. It was a sign of how far the Chin’s fortunes had fallen.

  “Is there any doubt in your mind that Vincent Gigante was of sound mind up until 1991?” asked Stamboulidis.

  “No doubt,” replied the dapper D’Arco, who would celebrate his sixty-fifth birthday later that month in the gentle embrace of witness protection.

  Marinaccio, on cross-examination, was hardly as tender. And the hotheaded D’Arco once again surfaced. On his third day as a witness, D’Arco was queried about FBI reports that contained no mention of Gigante during his debriefing.

  “So you’re saying the agents made a mistake?” Marinaccio asked pointedly, pacing in front of the witness stand.

  “I don’t know what they put in their reports,” he shot back. “I’m telling you what I said. What they do is their business.”

  As the grilling continued, the murderous mobster turned to Weinstein for help. “Judge,” he declared, “he’s abusing me.”

  But D’Arco wasn’t shaken from his main claim: the crazy act was indeed a performance and one that was known throughout Mafia circles, despite Gigante’s secretive nature and wild public meanderings.

  And Little Al remained unapologetic about turning on his old mob pal. “I was told that I should say every crime that I can remember,” D’Arco declared. “And fortunately for some—and unfortunately for others—I have a good memory.”

  “The government told you that if you tell them all the crimes you committed, you would get a pass. Isn’t that right?” asked Marinaccio.

  “Absolutely not,” D’Arco spat back. At another point, Little Al derisively referred to his inquisitor as “Mr. Mariachi.”

  The defense feared that D’Arco, with his Brooklyn accent, combative style and street smarts, had charmed the jurors during his long stay on the stand. In closing arguments Marinaccio would warn the panel deciding Chin’s fate that Little Al was “not a Damon Runyon character, some benign mobster out of Guys and Dolls.”

  * * *

  By the time the prosecution called Peter Savino to the stand, the onetime mobster was a dying man. He was gaunt, shaky and in obvious pain as he testified from a wheelchair via closed-circuit television from an empty courtroom in an undisclosed location.

  The defense fought mightily to keep Savino from appearing at all. At a hearing outside the presence of the jury, Gigante’s lawyers argued that allowing the devastating witness to appear via television violated their client’s right to confront his accuser. In a ruling that noted the Chin’s own health issues, Judge Weinstein overruled the defense motion. Savino would testify in the highly unusual arrangement, with the government providing transportation to the location where he would speak.

  One attorney for the defense—it would be Phil Foglia—and one for the prosecution would join Savino, accompanied by a third party chosen by the judge. “None of them,” the judge warned ominously, “will reveal this place to anyone.”

  The Brooklyn courtroom was packed as the onetime Mob bon vivant appeared like a ghost on the screen, using a white handkerchief to wipe the rivulets of perspiration rolling down his pale face. As he began to testify against his old boss, Savino was mortally ill, suffering from cancer of the lung, liver and pelvis.

  The witness, when referring to Gigante, showed they were on a first-name basis; he referred to the Chin only as “Vincent.”

  His answers were measured, precise—and vitally important to the prosecution, although his dramatic appearance drew little of the media attention generated by Gravano or D’Arco. It was Savino who directly linked the Chin to the Windows Case and the murder of Gerry Pappa.

  “Vincent told me Gerry Pappa was killed for shaking down the drug money,” he testified.

  Gigante, as noted by D’Arco and charged by the feds, had also plotted to whack Savino. Gigante, for his part, seemed disinterested in the appearance of his former underling. The Chin dozed off several tim
es as Savino laid out their crooked history.

  Savino detailed his face-to-face meetings with the Chin: “Twenty, thirty, maybe more.” Some were business, others personal—he knew both Gigante’s wife and mistress, along with Chin’s children. More importantly, he was able to lay out the massive Windows Case scheme, from its infancy to the original indictment naming Gigante seven years earlier.

  The dying witness’s failing condition was evident even on the courtroom’s TV monitors. He requested several recesses to gather his strength for another round of questioning. “I need to stop a minute now, guys,” he declared at one point.

  Savino later paused to request another break. The voice of an off-screen prosecutor sitting with the ex-mobster was clearly audible: “The witness is in a lot of pain.” By the time he was finished testifying, so were Gigante and his lawyers. Savino emerged as the trial’s true star witness—his testimony the last act of a dying man.

  Even Weinstein was taken by Savino’s bravura performance, although he expressed concerns about the witness’s obvious poor health and whether he would even survive until cross-examination. “He’s an important witness who has given extremely damaging testimony,” the judge noted.

  If Savino couldn’t answer the defense questions, “we [would] have a problem and I’m anxious not to have a mistrial,” said the judge.

  Savino returned via the monitor, with the defense questioning his testimony about his initial meeting with Gigante and the rest of the Genovese hierarchy in the early 1980s. The get-together was not mentioned in his FBI debriefing reports, Chin’s lawyers noted. Savino had no idea why it wasn’t there, and remained resolute in his testimony before stepping down.

  While Savino was initially slated as the last government witness, Stamboulidis had one last mobster in mind for a grand finale. And what a show it was.

  * * *

  Former Genovese underboss Venero Mangano arrived at the Brooklyn Federal Courthouse in a prison-issued blue jumpsuit. He did not apologize for his jailhouse outfit—or for anything else.