Vincent Gigante, like any other federal inmate, was well aware that all prison calls were taped by authorities. And while it seems shocking that Chin would speak so freely—a repudiation of the very mandate that spared him from decades of wiretaps—Dorsky wasn’t surprised, either.
“Two things—first, he wasn’t thinking that we would think like this, that we would still think about showing that he wasn’t crazy—that he was obstructing,” said Dorsky. “And the other half was that if you were in prison, and couldn’t talk to your family and friends, you would actually go crazy.”
But there was nothing loony about the prison conversations, where Gigante casually discussed his legal situation and his medical woes. One of the calls came after D’Urso’s role was exposed in April 2001 by a massive Mob sweep that used his information to net forty-five mobsters and associates—most from the Genovese family. While the Chin was not charged, prosecutors revealed in court papers that they had new evidence indicating Gigante was still running the family from his cell.
Gigante dialed his wife, Olympia, to discuss the latest development. “They say I’m indicted on something,” said Gigante, adding that a fellow inmate heard his name mentioned on the television news.
“All I know is they said some men were arrested,” she replied. “They said you were with a family, and you were running it from Texas.”
“I’m running it?” Gigante replied. “I’m running around the park.”
There was a brief pause.
“Call everyone,” the Chin declared before hanging up.
On Christmas Day, 2000, Gigante called Olympia 2 for a Yuletide chat.
“Merry Christmas,” he greeted her before the talk turned to one of their daughters battling a sore throat.
“She can’t talk,” Gigante said. “There’s something—she says she’s lost her voice.”
The Chin then poked fun at his loopy alter ego: “I says you, you got like me.” This was followed by a mumbling impersonation of his days wandering Sullivan Street. “She’s . . . she’s all right.”
A third call to his wife a few weeks later captured a long, coherent conversation about Gigante’s assorted health woes.
“I went to the doctor today,” Gigante began.
“You did?” she responded. “What did he say?”
Gigante, in great detail, recounted a hernia examination—complete with directions to turn his head and cough—before switching to his heart problems. The prison doctor offered his endorsement of the facility’s cardiologist to an unimpressed Chin.
“Then he told me that the heart doctor is a fine doctor,” said Gigante. “I says, ‘I didn’t say he ain’t.’ ”
The Mob boss then delivered a detailed recounting of their conversation, complete with medical jargon.
“He says, ‘You know, your ejections through your groin on the echocardiogram, your ejection fraction is down to thirty-five. Normal is sixty,’” Gigante said. “I says, ‘Then I’m in trouble.’ ‘Oh, no,’ he says. He says, ‘You’ll be all right.’ I says, ‘But the pains in the chest don’t mean nothing, Doc?’ [He says,] ‘Take your Nitrol.’ I says, ‘I do, but it gives me headaches.’ Uh, things like that, hon. He . . . he was nice. I ain’t saying he wasn’t there. He does the best he could.”
The most stunning of the tapes, never admitted as evidence or publicly released, came on September 11, 2001. As the World Trade Centers were burning after terrorists crashed two planes into the Twin Towers, word of the attacks, just two miles south of Sullivan Street, burned through the prison.
Gigante immediately grabbed a phone and dialed his son Vincent Esposito—the call came so quickly that the voice on the other end remained unaware of the horrors in Lower Manhattan.
“They didn’t even know what’s happened, and he’s telling the son that they’re under attack,” Dorsky recounted. “He’s letting him know, ‘Hey, kid, this is happening.’ ”
Gigante’s last words before hanging up the phone were those of a protective, if imprisoned, patriarch: “Make sure everybody is safe.”
* * *
The recordings were instantly seen in Brooklyn as the ultimate repudiation of Gigante’s “mental illness” scam—and in his own voice. Campi went to work alongside the prosecutor, listening in amazement to hours and hours of heavy New York and New Jersey accents.
“I personally transcribed months and months of coherent, cogent conversations,” Dorsky recalled. “Six months of this. He had to remember all the numbers. He had to remember who he was talking to—this is a guy with two families. He picked up on subtle things—in one [call] he was asking his daughter why she was yawning.”
The tedious task wore on Campi, who later joked about the playbacks. “I was just praying that I wouldn’t hear those voices in my sleep,” he wisecracked. “I was laughing . . . those voices.”
Campi even procured a prison videotape that illustrated the government’s case even better than the audiotapes. The three-minute clip captured the Chin with sons Andrew and Salvatore, accompanied by his cardiologist. The quartet engaged in animated conversation, with the elder Gigante even combing his famously unkempt hair.
“I’d see people, when they looked at that video, looked at how he treated people, and they knew, ‘This is not a crazy guy,’ ” said the FBI agent.
As he heard the voices on the tapes, Dorsky thought back to the first Gigante prosecution: “I wish those psychiatrists had been there to see how they reacted when we played all these tapes.”
He was also reminded of a 1998 60 Minutes piece that included an interview with Father Gigante, along with a video provided by the Gigante family. The clip featured a confused and clearly uncomfortable Vincent during a psychiatric evaluation from two years earlier.
“I done nothing wrong,” the Chin declared. “I ain’t done wrong at all. God is the judge. God will judge everything.”
The piece stuck in Dorsky’s craw for years.
There was another sign of continued prosecutorial interest that happened in the same year as the news magazine piece. In February 1998 federal officials raided the Newark, New Jersey, offices of a shipping container repair company linked to Andrew Gigante, the Mob boss’s oldest son. Documents and records were seized in what authorities described as a new probe into the waterfront, which was long dominated by the Genovese family.
The New Millennium
There’s a legitimate reason longtime Genovese waterfront boss George Barone looked like he was pulled directly from central casting: the gangster was once a member of the Jets, one of the two gangs immortalized in the 1957 Broadway production of West Side Story.
But Barone didn’t dance. And he wouldn’t sing . . . until Vincent Gigante ordered his murder.
The veteran mobster’s defection to the feds was the final nail in the Mob boss’s coffin. The move was as unexpected as productive for prosecutors: Barone had spent decades inside the Genovese family, doing the Mob’s bidding on the waterfront in New York and Miami.
He was a contemporary and onetime friend of family founder Vito Genovese. He was a killer and an earner and among the family’s truest believers. He did time in the 1980s without ever uttering a word about Mob business. Once he finally opened his mouth, what spilled out was a tale as riveting as any Hollywood screenplay.
Barone came to organized crime as a World War II hero, a participant in five Allied invasions—including bloody Iwo Jima—after enlisting in the Navy. His assorted military honors and ribbons included a Good Conduct Medal. His behavior changed quickly, once he joined the International Longshoremen’s Association in the late 1940s, working for a company owned by Albert Anastasia.
Violence became his stock in trade. In 1954 he was arrested—shades of On The Waterfront—for beating a longshoreman who griped about getting ignored for a work crew. There was little cinematic about the assault; Barone and two thugs dragged the man to a Ninth Avenue meat market and beat him unconscious.
The last words the battered man heard wer
e from Barone, who swung an eighteen-inch metal bar during the savage attack: “What are you, looking for trouble?”
Barone, who was bounced from his job for the beating, found work as a straight-up gangster. He found a kindred spirit in Johnny Earle, another kid from the neighborhood, and together they founded the Jets. Their “rumbles” with other West Side gangs inspired Leonard Bernstein’s most beloved score, but these Jets wielded more than just switchblades.
The duo’s biggest score came when they targeted a Long Island bank robber named Ninny Cribbens, recent beneficiary of a $650,000 score. The two slipped into a suburban cottage, where the cash was hidden, and waited for Cribbens to return. When he came through the door, Barone shoved him into a chair and shot Cribbens to death.
He eventually became closer to Genovese as the crime family took note of the Jets, and was even privy to the details of Gigante’s botched 1957 hit on Costello. There was a falling-out with Don Vito after the June 19, 1958, murder of Earle, who had become a protégé of Genovese.
Earle, shot three times while eating inside the Fifty-Seventh Street Cafeteria, died at Roosevelt Hospital “without giving any information to the police,” according to an FBI document. Though Barone denied any part in the hit against Earle, Genovese cut him off after the killing—and the aspiring Mafioso landed with Tony Salerno’s East Village crew.
Once installed there, Barone became a Mob killer and eventually Fat Tony’s representative for waterfront business. The killing part came first: Barone traveled to Kentucky to murder a man messing with the Genovese gambling operations in the state. The victim was an African-American man, and Barone never even learned his name—not that he cared.
“Black, green, yellow, whatever,” said the equal-opportunity hit man. He estimated killing somewhere between twelve and twenty victims. Pressed later for an exact number, Barone snarled his answer: “I didn’t keep a scorecard.”
He stayed local to whack a gangster known as Tommy the Greek for some ill-advised talk about Anthony Scotto, the Gambinos’ waterfront rep. When a problem arose within Salerno’s crew, Barone took care of him, too. Why? “Because Fat Tony told me to,” he explained decades later. “I did whatever he asked me to. He is my boss.”
Barone took the Mob’s policy of omerta seriously, too—even before he became a made man. He refused to answer questions when summoned in 1960 by the Waterfront Commission. Barone, who had half-Italian heritage, on his father’s side, was finally inducted at a ceremony in the early 1970s. It was a big day for the gangster, who dropped a malapropism in explaining its importance.
“I believed . . . that I would have loyalty to the family until death that departs,” he said. The East Harlem crew, numbering fifty men, then welcomed the new initiates with a big breakfast.
* * *
George Barone became vice president of ILA Local 1804-1, a notorious Genovese-controlled operation based in North Bergen, New Jersey. The money was good: he earned $50,000 a year in salary, and another $100,000 annually in crooked cash.
An ILA official testified to Barone’s continued hands-on approach, even as his job prospects improved. Harold Daggett said Barone surprised him inside an East Harlem grocery store when Daggett attempted to relocate the union’s office from Lower Manhattan to New Jersey. Barone put a gun to Daggett’s temple, cocked the trigger and delivered a simple message: “I’ll blow your brains all over the room.”
The terrified Daggett wet his pants before canceling the move.
The wild times on the docks ended in 1983, with Barone’s conviction for racketeering. He did seven years in prison, giving him plenty of time to reflect on where things went wrong. His mind kept returning to one thought: Andrew Gigante, the Chin’s son, was getting rich while he was sitting behind bars. He was just as angry with Burt Guido, a business owner with reputed Genovese ties.
Andrew Gigante was on Guido’s payroll, collecting a healthy $350,000 a year. Barone later said they made millions while he was locked away.
“Bitter,” Barone reflected years later. “Very bitter. I went to jail, and that was the end of everything.”
When Barone was sprung from prison, two old Genovese pals reached out to bring him back into the family fold: Barney Bellomo and Tommy Cafaro, son of the Fish. Around the turn of the new century, there was even a reunion with Andrew Gigante.
The Chin’s son was looking for Barone’s help in landing a contract for a new steamship line coming into the Port of Miami. Barone, still nursing his grudge, said he was willing to help if Andrew Gigante was willing to assist him in settling an old financial score.
“I asked him to prevail upon his partner, Burt Guido, to pay me monies that he owed me for a period of some twenty years before,” Barone recalled. “This had nothing to do with the waterfront. It had nothing to with anything illegal.”
Barone was still angry about getting stiffed on his slice of an expensive real estate deal. He told Andrew Gigante that he was owed $90,000, and he wanted Guido to pay up. While Barone had respect for the Chin, he had little for the Mob boss’s eldest progeny.
“A drunk, a junkie,” Barone later declared. “He’d go in the bathroom and come out flying like a kite, for chrissakes. You know, a known addict, between the vodka and the junk—who knows what?”
Around the same time Barone threatened to organize an army of two thousand Cubans and go to war with the Genovese family if he didn’t get the cash. According to the cantankerous Barone, he was visited by Guido with a $3,000 peace offering, which was quickly rejected. The aging gangster told Guido to bring young Gigante a message: “Stick it up his ass.” During one angry confrontation the old man even bumped the Mob scion—a potentially fatal faux pas.
* * *
Genovese soldier Falcetti, in one of his conversations with D’Urso, blasted Barone as a “senile old fucking man.” The family hierarchy also delivered word via Falcetti and Salerno’s East Harlem replacement Ernie Muscarella that Barone was no longer affiliated with the Genovese family.
“It was a hairy thing,” Falcetti recounted. Even hairier was Chin Gigante’s admonition—relayed by Andrew—to keep the ancient gangster “‘close’ to the family, and make him feel ‘comfortable, ’ so that he could be [murdered] when the time was right,” prosecutors later alleged.
Barone eventually received $45,000 on February 6, 2001, at a north Miami restaurant ominously named Shooters. Vincent Gigante signed off on the deal, and Falcetti delivered the cash. In a subsequent phone call that same month, Barone was told the other half was waiting for him in New York. But the caller was an old ILA pal, and his invitation came with a warning: any trip to the city would be Barone’s last.
Barone never went, and the FBI banged on the window of his Miami Beach home two months later. The aging gangster came to a hard-to-swallow realization: the feds were his last port in this storm.
The mobster flipped in April 2001, joining the limited ranks of Genovese defectors: Joe Valachi, Fish Cafaro, Black Pete Savino and Cookie D’Urso.
Barone took the stand against Peter Gotti in January 2003 and explained his motivation for testifying. “I wanted to get even,” he declared. “I wanted to survive. I didn’t want to get killed by them. I wanted the truth to come out about this whole sordid thing.”
“Was it an easy decision for you to cooperate?” the prosecutor asked.
“Of course not,” replied Barone, whose hearing was now so bad that he was at times reduced to lipreading. “Because it is a very, very difficult thing to be a witness against anyone, particularly in matters such as this. I am seventy-nine years of age. I lived all of my life without being an informer. Now I am. That is a difficult thing.”
His appearance served as a preview for Vincent Gigante’s defense team, with Barone clearly emerging as a damaging witness who could recite the crooked past of the mobbed-up waterfront as if reading from a history book.
* * *
All of this was old news to Dorsky, Campi and the rest of the team bent on nail
ing the Chin for a second time. Mike Campi, himself the son of an Italian father and Irish mom, quickly found common ground with George Barone as they spoke during debriefing sessions.
“I knew he was angry with them,” said Campi. “He was bitter about some monetary deal that was minimal. He was one of the most loyal guys, and he wouldn’t have cooperated except for the stupidity of how they were treating him.”
The Barone information also gave the feds a road map in deciphering some of the Chin’s jailhouse calls from Texas.
“Utilizing his knowledge, it became so easy to just go in and listen to the Chin’s conversations in prison,” Campi recalled. “The thing I found interesting about him was he would correct other agents. His statements were consistent. He would ask, ‘Did they read my reports?’”
With George Barone in their corner, prosecutors were ready to unveil the fruits of the latest, and ultimately last, federal prosecution of Vincent Gigante.
CHAPTER 22
I SHALL NOT BE RELEASED
GIGANTE WAS STILL INSIDE THE FEDERAL CORRECTIONAL INSTITU-tion in Fort Worth, Texas, when the January 23, 2002, indictment was made public. While the case against his Genovese codefendants focused on the usual—waterfront corruption, extortion and rip-offs of union benefit funds—the court papers clearly detailed how the Chin and his crazy act were square in the federal crosshairs.
Counts six and seven dealt directly with his long-running subterfuge. During the seven-year 1990s prosecution, [Gigante] knowingly and intentionally engaged in misleading conduct toward other persons, to wit: doctors evaluating his mental competence, with intent to influence the testimony of such doctors, read Count Six.
Count Seven raised the stakes. The indictment suggested the Chin’s long and successful crazy act was no one-man show. It specifically cited the same time period: [Gigante], together with others, knowingly, intentionally and corruptly obstructed and impeded and endeavored to obstruct and impede the due administration of justice, to wit: by feigning diminished capacity during the prosecution.
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