Vincent Gigante

From Includipedia, the inclusionist encyclopedia

Vincent "The Chin" Gigante (March 29,1928 – December 19, 2005) was a New York mobster who headed the Genovese crime family. Dubbed "the Oddfather," by the press, Gigante often wandered the streets of Greenwich Village, Manhattan in his bathrobe and slippers, mumbling incoherently to himself, in what police characterized as an elaborate act.

1 Feigning legal insanity
2 Conviction and imprisonment
3 Death
4 Further reading
5 Footnotes
6 External links

[edit] Feigning legal insanity

In 1969, Gigante started feigning mental illness to escape criminal prosecution. He escaped conviction on bribery charges by producing a number of prominent psychiatrists who testified that he was legally insane. The doctors said Gigante suffered from schizophrenia, dementia, psychosis, and other disorders. Gigante allegedly enlisted his mother and wife to help him in these deceptions. In 1986, the official Genovese boss, Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno, was convicted on charges of murder and racketeering and sentenced to 100 years in prison. However, former mobster and turncoat Vincent Cafaro soon revealed that Salerno was just a front boss, a figurehead; the real boss of the family since 1981 was Gigante.

In 1990, Gigante was arrested and charged with racketeering and murder; however, it wasn't until 1997 that he was brought to trial. During that time period, Gigante's lawyers produced witness after witness who testified that Gigante was mentally ill and unfit to stand trial. However, all this changed when a number of prominent Mafia members from various families began to cooperate with the government in the early 1990s.

Foremost among the cooperating witnesses was Salvatore "Sammy the Bull" Gravano, former underboss of the Gambino crime family, who became a cooperating witness in 1991. Gravano testified that on the two occasions he met Gigante, the mob boss was perfectly lucid and clear in his thinking. Other turncoat witnesses such as Phil Leonetti of the Bruno crime family of Philadelphia implicated Gigante in ordering the murder of several Bruno family members in the early 1980s. Additionally, Anthony "Gaspipe" Casso, former underboss of the Lucchese crime family, implicated Gigante in a 1986 plan to have Casso kill new Gambino boss John Gotti, Gotti associate Frank DeCicco and Gotti's brother Gene Gotti.

[edit] Conviction and imprisonment

In Summer 1997, Gigante was finally convicted on several racketeering and conspiracy charges and sentenced to 12 years in a federal prison. Despite his lawyers' and psychiatrists' claims that he has been legally insane for more than 30 years, the jury convicted him on all but the murder charges, which would have mandated a life sentence without parole.

On April 7, 2003, he pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice in Federal District Court, acknowledging that his "insanity" was a pretense in order to delay his racketeering trial. This was part of a deal to avoid another set of charges that would have brought on a lengthy trial (he was 75 at the time). Instead, he had another three years added to his sentence.^[1]

[edit] Death

In 2005, Gigante's health started to decline. He started suffering labored breathing, oxygen deprivation, swelling in the lower body, and bouts of unconsciousness. In November 2005, Flora Edwards, his lawyer, sued officials at the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri to transfer Gigante to an acute care hospital. Transferred to a private medical facility, Gigante rallied physically. In early December, he was transferred back to Springfield, where he died 10 days later on December 19, 2005.

On December 23, 2005, after a service at Saint Anthony of Padua Church in Greenwich Village, Gigante's body was cremated at the historic Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. He is survived by eight children (five from his wife and three from his mistress) and his prominent cousins from Boston. (The cousins spell their name both Gigante and Giganti.) Gigante's lawyer has said that the family intends to sue the federal government over Gigante's health care treatment while in prison.

[edit] Further reading

Capeci, Jerry. The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Mafia. Indianapolis: Alpha Books, 2002. ISBN 0-02-864225-2
Jacobs, James B., Coleen Friel and Robert Radick. Gotham Unbound: How New York City Was Liberated from the Grip of Organized Crime. New York: NYU Press, 2001. ISBN 0-8147-4247-5
Maas, Peter. Underboss: Sammy the Bull Gravano's Story of Life in the Mafia. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997. ISBN 0-06-093096-9
Raab, Selwyn. Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires. New York: St. Martin Press, 2005. ISBN 0-312-30094-8