Chin

by Larry McShane

  Prosecutors decided at the last minute to bring the longtime Gigante loyalist in from a Loretto, Pennsylvania, federal prison to testify against the Chin. Predictably, the hard-boiled Benny Eggs didn’t crack.

  Mangano was four years into a fifteen-year bid for his conviction in the Windows Case. One of the evidence photos in that prosecution included Benny Eggs chatting up Savino on a Greenwich Village street; a print of the shot still hangs in the office of ex-federal prosecutor O’Connell.

  Prosecutors claimed their decision to call Mangano was the result of Weinstein’s critique of their case. It was a bit of legal gamesmanship, too: even if he remained loyal to his oath of omerta, prosecutors argued his silence would deliver a strong message to the Gigante jury.

  Calling Mangano as a witness is quite appropriate, given Gigante’s claim that the government should have produced witnesses with firsthand knowledge, Stamboulidis wrote in a letter to the judge. If Mangano refuses to testify it will also graphically illustrate why it is necessary to enter into agreements with people like the cooperating witnesses in this case.

  The late addition to the witness list, although more a legal roll of the dice than anything else, prompted howls of an ambush from the defense team. It took mere seconds for the crotchety Mangano to show that Chin’s lawyers had nothing to fear.

  Before Mangano even arrived in the city, his lawyer warned prosecutors that she had no idea whether Benny Eggs would accept an immunity offer from the feds to rat his boss out. But the expectation of Mangano flipping was, realistically, less than zero.

  Mangano, delivered by federal marshals with the jury out of the courtroom, wasted no time in making his utter contempt for the prosecutors and unbending support of the Chin evident as the two old gangsters shared a courtroom before a rapt audience.

  The Mob veteran was infuriated that prosecutors had publicly named him as a witness, suggesting to the world that he would turn his back on the very precepts and “family” that had defined most of his adult life.

  Stamboulidis rose to question Mangano, a true tough guy who served as a tail gunner during thirty-three bombing runs over Europe during World War II, including a pair on D-Day. The sight of a government lawyer in a suit threatening him with contempt of court was little more than the buzzing of a well-dressed gnat to the ex-underboss.

  Mangano refused to answer even the simplest of the prosecutor’s queries.

  “What do you want to do, shoot me?” he asked. “Shoot me, but I’m not going to answer any questions. You gave me fifteen years already, so do whatever you want.”

  “Did you have a nickname, Benny Eggs?” Stamboulidis asked.

  “I refuse to answer under my Fifth Amendment rights,” said Mangano.

  “Were you the underboss of the Genovese family?” the prosecutor pressed.

  “I refuse to answer under my Fifth Amendment rights,” the mobster replied. “Anything else that you’re going to ask me, I say the same thing. I don’t feel good, and I’m looking to go back (to prison).”

  “Mr. Mangano, would you refuse to answer all questions I ask?”

  “All questions, anything you want to ask,” sneered Benny Eggs. “I refuse to answer anything you ask. I don’t appreciate you going to the press and saying that I was cooperating. If you could make innuendos, certainly I can, too.”

  Weinstein, at the prosecutor’s prodding, declared Mangano in contempt of court. But Stamboulidis took one more shot at the stonewalling mobster.

  “Mr. Mangano, are you a member of the Genovese family of La Cosa Nostra?”

  “Stop wasting the court’s time,” snapped Mangano. “You’re not making me a part of this charade here from a mental case and a physical case, like they done to me. So I’m not going to answer any questions whether you dance, whether you put me in prison—”

  Weinstein interrupted: “All right. Stop.”

  But Benny Eggs wasn’t done.

  “So, do whatever ya want,” he concluded, stand-up to the end. “Your Honor, I don’t mean to be disrespectful to the court.”

  “I understand,” said Weinstein.

  “Do whatever youse want,” Mangano declared, bringing an end to his rant. “I don’t wanna answer nothing no more. I don’t want to be a part of this charade.”

  Weinstein showed the departing mobster some legal respect: he declined to impose any sanctions on Mangano for his refusal to testify, and declined to let the prosecution tell the jury that Gigante’s underboss had appeared and obstinately refused to answer any questions.

  Stamboulidis, years later, chuckled about his surreal showdown with the venerable Venero Mangano. “He had a lot of affection for me,” the lawyer said with a laugh. “I didn’t expect him to cooperate or be happy. He wasn’t happy, and he definitely wasn’t cooperative.”

  * * *

  As the trial reached the finish line, an unlikely courthouse reunion drew far less attention than Benny Eggs. For a single court session all eight of Chin’s kids—the five Gigantes and the three Espositos—sat as a group to watch the proceedings. It was the first time the Mob boss’s progeny were ever together at once, and their dad took notice.

  The Chin, rolling in his wheelchair toward the courtroom door, grabbed one of its wheels to stop his exit. He snapped out of his practiced stupor for a brief moment, turning to look at his children. And then he turned the wheel loose as his doctor pushed Gigante out of sight.

  In the end the government produced eighteen witnesses and more than 250 exhibits, including a montage of surveillance shots capturing the Chin in action. The prosecution—after seven long years of pursuit, after the bruising battle to prove his sanity and endless psychiatric exams, after decades of failed investigations by their federal forebears—then rested their case.

  “We thought we presented the case in its best light with the evidence we had,” said George Stamboulidis. “You never know. After that, it’s in the jury’s hands.”

  * * *

  The defense quickly followed suit without calling a single witness. Marinaccio and the rest of his team debated until about 2 A.M. on the day of the July 21 court session before opting not to bring in medical experts for testimony on Gigante’s mental health. Prior to trial they decided not to call Fat Tony’s old sidekick Fish Cafaro or the murderous Gaspipe Casso.

  The volatile Casso, after violating his cooperation deal, had become a toxic witness that neither side seemed willing to risk under oath. (Casso, irate at missing his shot in the courtroom spotlight, later accused witnesses Gravano and D’Arco of lying during the trial.)

  The defense decision sent the tacit message that they believed the government’s case was too weak to sustain a conviction of their client. After resting, the Gigante team moved for a dismissal of all charges, a fairly pro forma maneuver. Although in this case they argued that the testimony of the prosecution witnesses was a tapestry of hearsay with no corroboration.

  Weinstein disagreed, saying there was “ample evidence to support a verdict” on every count in the indictment.

  The prosecution was somewhat surprised by the defense decision—the Chin’s team had indicated they planned to call some witnesses. But they never, under any circumstances, expected Gigante to take the witness stand.

  The jurors, at the defense request, were instead read a stipulation that Salerno was identified during the commission case as the head of the Genovese family at a time when prosecutors now claimed the Chin was running things. This was the fallout from the commission case, when the government argued Fat Tony was the boss right through 1985.

  The panel also heard that the government had spent more than $2.5 million supporting the six ex-mobsters who took the witness stand before Weinstein sent the jurors home and the lawyers went to their respective corners to polish their summations.

  * * *

  When they returned a day later, Weissmann delivered the government’s final argument that the incoherent man in a wheelchair at the defense table was actually the craftiest, cruele
st and most cogent boss in the annals of La Cosa Nostra. The prosecutor, across five hours, neatly recapped the government’s case.

  “He couldn’t stop people from talking about him,” said Weissmann. “When there’s a large organization to run, you cannot erase yourself from the minds and, more importantly, the tongues of your conspirators.”

  He mocked the idea that Gigante’s lawyers would heap scorn on Gravano, D’Arco and the other prosecution witnesses.

  “Who in the world is Vincent Gigante to say that people in organized crime are terrible?” he asked. “This isn’t an ideal world. This is a world where organized crime exists, and it’s necessary to have cooperating witnesses.”

  Marinaccio unleashed an acerbic rebuttal, a ninety-minute scorched-earth attack on the prosecution’s reliance on “psychopaths and liars” to smear his client.

  “The government’s case amounts to little more than throwing mud at a wall and seeing what sticks,” the defense attorney declared.

  He also noted that barely a decade earlier, the feds had convicted Fat Tony as the head of the Genovese family in the commission case—a triumph that left prosecutors and FBI agents shouting about the most devastating takedown in the history of organized crime.

  “Boy, is the government running away from that now,” he said.

  Stamboulidis delivered the final word in the government’s rebuttal. The prosecutor, defending his most wanted witnesses, simply pointed at Gigante sitting a few feet away. “He’s the reason we need a Witness Protection Program,” he declared.

  * * *

  The jury began its deliberations on July 23 after two hours of legal instructions from Judge Weinstein. It took sixteen hours over three days for the panel to render its decision. Word of the verdict, declared in a note to Weinstein, spread quickly through the courthouse.

  Lawyers hustled back to the courtroom, which was filled to capacity with spectators and tension. The Gigante clan, led by Father Louis, found their familiar seats in the front row. Their patriarch was wheeled to the defense table to await his fate.

  It was a split decision: a conviction and a victory for the feds, but with a twist that would only become evident to prosecutors down the road.

  Gigante sat in his wheelchair, his face a blank slate, as the jurors convicted him of racketeering and two murder conspiracies—including the failed plot to eliminate Gotti. He was cleared in the Philadelphia Mob war murders, and acquitted in the Gerry Pappa killing.

  One courtroom observer saw the Chin’s eyes briefly widen as the verdict was read aloud. He then slipped quietly back into befuddled character, mum and semicoherent as reality sank in. His thoughts were his own.

  The Gigantes sobbed in unison as the mobster was convicted as godfather of the Genovese family a full sixteen years after taking the seat. Almost four decades after beating the rap in the Costello hit, more than three decades after walking out of Lewisburg Federal Prison, Vincent Gigante was a convicted felon headed back to jail.

  The announcement hit Father Louis hardest. For once, the priest had nothing to say. He rushed to Vincent’s side at the defense table to wheel his brother out of the courtroom. But even as the faint echo of the foreperson’s announcement hung in the courtroom, some could not acknowledge the dramatic end to an extraordinary era.

  “He doesn’t know what’s going on,” insisted Dr. Wechsler. “People are crying all around him, and he doesn’t know what’s happening.”

  The racketeering conviction alone carried a jail term of up to twenty years. The acquittal on the seven murder counts spared Gigante a life sentence, although he still faced a possible twenty-seven years after the jury found him guilty of thirty-three of the forty-one counts in the racketeering charge.

  Weinstein was right: Peter Savino’s testimony about the Windows Case was indeed devastating to his bathrobe-wearing pal. Much of the racketeering case focused on the long-running scam.

  “It was a good feeling when they polled the jurors: ‘So say you all?’ And they affirmed the verdict,” said Stamboulidis.

  The defense, shaken but unwilling to surrender, announced plans for an appeal and quickly moved to keep Gigante free on bail pending his sentencing—a move challenged by prosecutors. “His criminal charade is over,” said Stamboulidis, asking Weinstein to revoke Gigante’s $1 million bail. The prosecutor argued that the Chin—his wheelchair aside—was now a “tremendous flight risk.”

  Weinstein ordered Gigante to surrender within twenty-four hours. Any other ruling, the judge said, would be “unnecessarily cruel.” The man who for decades only left the Greenwich Village streets to further his deception was headed to a federal prison in Butner, North Carolina, where he would be evaluated in their special medical facility.

  Gigante would enjoy one final last night of freedom before starting his sentence—however long it turned out to be. Pumped-up prosecutors cheered their long-awaited victory against their elusive adversary.

  “His obstruction of justice is over. . . . Gigante has engaged in a charade his entire life,” said Stamboulidis, using the same word that Benny Eggs used to describe the trial. “When you’ve committed the kind of crimes he has, it is appropriate for that person to die in jail.”

  Marinaccio vowed the Chin’s legal battle was far from finished.

  “We will continue to fight what we believe to be a gross injustice,” he said. “We were hampered by the fact that Mr. Gigante has been and remains mentally ill and unable to assist in his defense.”

  After blasting the feds, the defense attorney turned his attention to the twelve people who just convicted the Oddfather.

  “The jurors weren’t able to put aside their preconceived notions about organized crime in general and Vincent Gigante in particular, because the evidence just wasn’t there,” he said.

  Stamboulidis, Weissmann and Dorsky left the courthouse for a celebratory lunch at an Italian restaurant near the Brooklyn Bridge. “A couple of slices,” Dorsky recalled of the low-key event. Stamboulidis called his wife to firm up plans finally for a long-delayed vacation. Dorsky had an even more pressing issue: his parked car had received a number of tickets for an inspection sticker that expired as he logged endless hours on the case.

  He would end up back in court to resolve the issue—but like the Chin, he couldn’t beat the rap.

  “I finally went before a judge and explained what happened,” he said. “I think he cut my fines in half.”

  Years after the trial was over, a top Justice Department official confided that one of his in-laws had saved the Chin’s life during one of Gigante’s tune-ups in suburban Westchester. When the Mob boss started choking on a piece of food, the relative—an employee at St. Vincent’s—applied the Heimlich maneuver and popped the food free as a grateful Chin resumed breathing.

  The relative was later offered a pricey trip in return for the impromptu rescue, which became a bit of a running joke within the family. “I used to tell her, ‘Imagine how much money you could have saved the government if you didn’t save him,’” the official recounted with a grin.

  CHAPTER 20

  DESOLATION ROW

  THE CHIN SHIPPED OUT TO THE FEDERAL CORRECTIONAL INSTI-tution (FCI)–Butner in North Carolina, arriving one day after the verdict. He was accompanied on the flight south by federal marshals—as well as some mysterious friends, who began appearing in his cell in the wee hours of the morning.

  There were dancers and violinists, children and a large black cat. There was even the biggest boss of them all, a fairly regular guest: God Himself.

  With Gigante’s racketeering conviction on appeal, there was still a chance of beating the case; and the defense, after losing the trial, resurrected his mental-health dodge as a reason to spare the Chin from sentencing.

  Sure, he was ruled competent to stand trial. And yes, the government’s argument of his sanity while running the family during the 1980s had carried the day and convinced a jury. But Chin’s lawyers now insisted he was too mentally feeble to se
rve any prison time.

  The defendant’s contribution to the cause quickly became evident: the catatonic Chin of the Cadman Plaza courtroom disappeared, replaced by the openly deranged Gigante of the Sullivan Street sidewalks.

  Given the crucial tug-of-war with the government, the FCI staff kept meticulous records of the Mob chieftain’s stay. Within weeks the Chin was fully immersed in his old role—De Niro in a prison jumpsuit, performing for a very select audience—and his bizarre presentencing stay in Butner was off and running.

  His admission interview was fairly tame: Gigante insisted he didn’t know the date, the time or even where he was. He couldn’t identify Bill Clinton as the president. A staff psychologist described the Chin as “alert, but not oriented in all spheres.” Within a week Gigante upped the ante.

  A mumbling Chin informed the staff on August 3 that “he was hearing bad voices.” These voices, he stated, were “telling him things too bad to reveal. Then God tells him good things.”

  Six days later a “calm and cooperative” Gigante reported a brand-new black car parked outside his cell in the morning. The next day brought a detailed report of a festive 2 A.M. gathering in the prison hallway.

  A doctor’s report read: He saw 30 people . . . outside his cell door in costumes. They were dancing to violin music and speaking in English. The men wore suits and hats (brown, black, dark colors) and women wore long dresses. He insisted they were real, not his imagination. He laid down for a while, and the people disappeared.

  The Chin paused at this point in his nocturnal narrative. “I’m not crazy, Doctor,” he announced. And then he began moving his lips without saying a word.

  The treating physician was not impressed: May represent fabrications or symptoms of med adjustments—I suspect the former. Despite the plan Gigante’s show still went on.

  The Chin refused offers of a shave or a haircut. He recounted visions of a prison unit sinking slowly into the earth, and a car driving into the building. A group of kids arrived to stage a musical production outside his cell. Gigante stated “it was enjoyable,” prison records showed.