You're listening to Law and Order Criminal Justice System, a production of Wolf Entertainment and iHeart podcasts.
In the criminal Justice System, landmark trials transcend the courtroom to reshape the law. The brave man and women who investigate and prosecute these cases are part of a select group that is defined American history. These are their stories. Sunday, April thirteenth, nineteen eighty six, early afternoon, Benson Nurst, Brooklyn.
It was a quiet day outside the Veterans and Friends Social Club. A Genevese associate approached a gray Buick Electra. He slit a brown paper bag under the passenger door, then walked away like it was just another afternoon. That car it belonged to Frank de Chico, the newly minted Gambino underboss and the right hand man of John Gotti. Watching from nearby was Lucsey soldier Anthony Gaspipe Casso, notorious for his brutal tactics, but today he wouldn't need a
pipe to get the job done. The order from the Genovise bosses was simple, get Gotti.
Today.
One man was killed and another critically injured when their car was rigged with a bomb in Brooklyn.
In the kitchen having coffee. It's just sitting there and all of a sudden, moms, just like that. I thought it was back in a war.
Sources within the police department said that the man killed was a lieutenant to John Gottie, the reported godfather of the Gambino crime family.
You're not with them because you want to be. It's the gangster that decides whether you're his associated on.
If you like your life, you will vote to acquit.
I'm Aniseega Nicolazzi.
My father should have been a dead.
Man from Wolf Entertainment and iHeart podcasts. This is law and order, criminal justice system. How did the Genevise family avoid federal prosecution for so long through a brilliant act of leadership deception. For years, prosecutors were convinced that Fat Tony Salerno was the boss of the Genovese. His conviction should have brought the organization down like the other mafia families.
But what the government didn't know There was a clue buried deep within hours of surveillance that things were not as they seemed. On a nineteen eighty four wire tap, Salerno, frustrated for a list of recruits, was overheard saying and I quote, I don't know none of them, but I'll leave this up to the boss. That single sentence, I'll leave this up to the boss was a bombshell. Salerno, the man authorities believed to be the boss, was revealing
that there was someone even higher. This comment shattered the long held belief that Salerno was the one in charge. Here's defense attorney James Leonard.
When I first became aware of the Geneese crime family, it was seeing fat Tony Salerno, the alleged boss. The United States government sentenced him to one hundred years and they got their guy, and the entire time he wasn't the boss. That's what made me want to dive into who are these guys that fooled the United States government, fooled the media, ooled some of the other organized crime families.
Rumors began circulating that the real head of the family was Vincent the Chin Gigante, a man who managed to stay in the shadows while Sealerno took the heat. Gigante's low profile wasn't just luck. It was a calculated plan that kept him off the radar of both law enforcement and the media. This strategy wasn't new. As far back as the nineteen sixties, a former Genovie's boss known as Benny Squints had created the role of front boss, a
decoy to protect the real leadership. Former FBI supervisor Jim Kostler explains.
The Genovie's family there were secret of these people would tell you if your hair was on fire.
The idea was simple, Sellerno would be the public face, while Giganty really called the shots.
So they came to an agreement that that Tony would be the titular boss and call the shots, with the approval of Jinger Ganty. They kept it that way for a long time.
And so Vincent Giganti began his covert reign out of sight, shielded from prosecution. His administration was so cautious, secretive, and powerful that it was described as the most sophisticated family in the US. While federal prosecutors were busy rounding up other mafia leaders, Giganty remained untouchable. Here's Michael Cherdoff.
We had to focus on the people that we had evidence were part of the commission actively. You know, there were no recordings of Giganty. There was really no evidence that we could.
Use Salerno's conviction and the belief that he was the Genovese boss added a final layer of protection for Gigante. But who was Vincent Giganty? Law enforcement knew parts of his criminal history, but much about him remained a mystery, a man shrouded in both myth and legend. One person, however, knew the truth about arguably the most powerful boss in organized crime, someone who called him Dad.
Rita Gigante. I am the daughter of Vincent Giganty.
As a child, Rita was left largely in the dark about her father's chosen profession, but his presence still loomed large in her life.
As a child, I can remember myself sitting in the classroom, very depressed, crying all the time, wanting to go home, never wanting to be in school. And I never understood why I would be home a lot. My mother would keep me home. So those are my first memories of him. I would have to say, probably about eight years old. I would get sick a lot physically, so he used to comfort me. I would lay on his lap and he used to rub my back when I was young,
and I would fall asleep. That was one of the first memories.
Rita grew up between two homes, her mother's home in New Jersey and her grandmother's New York City apartment.
We moved out here when I was about six months old, and then about a year after we moved, my dad picked up and went back in the city with his mom. This was in Greenwich Village, the Lower West Side, and he lived on Sullivan Street with my grandmother. Kids were split from him, and my mom and him were split even though they were together, so we would be visiting
back and forth to see him. I had two older sisters fifteen and sixteen years older than me, and then two older brothers ten and twelve years older than me, So I was pretty much a change of life baby or oops, you know. So, my brothers and sisters experienced a very different energy and a very different father. By the time I came along, he was very caught up in his business, so he had less time and less energy to connect to me.
His business was running the Genevies crime family, but as Rita remembers it, he still found time for his immediate family too, gathering at her grandmother's house for weekly dinners.
It would be at least twice a week, if not three times, but always on a Sunday Sunday dinner. We always went to spend at my grandmother so he would be there. It wasn't exciting, let's put it that way. And there were no real conversations between me and my dad other than maybe ten words each time I saw him, and that was how are you house school? You're taking care of your mom. To be that young and being asked that you're taking care of your mom, you kind of think that's your job.
To Gigante, family was everything. His own father had died young, so he put a heavy significance on a child's responsibility. He loved and took care of his own mother, and while she loved him back, she also did approved of his lifestyle.
My grandmother couldn't stand what my father did. She wanted him to go to school, She wanted him to become something. This began back in Italy. My great grandfather was a pharmacist and doctor and he witnessed a crime by the black Hand. Now the black handed in Italy back then was the mafia. The black hand approached him and told him, if you testify, we're going to kill your whole family. And honestly, back then that's what they did. It was very different in Italy than it is here. He ended
up killing himself. He took cyanide poisoned himself, and that's how everything altered in my grandmother's life. She met my grandfather Salvatore, and he wanted to come to the United States because his family was here, and so she followed him, left everything, left all the wealth.
Then my father, comes Gigante, grew up during the Depression on the West Side of Manhattan. His father there was a watchmaker and his mother a seamstress who doted on Vincent and his three brothers. But it was another woman who would steal his young heart, his future wife, Olympia.
They knew each other as babies. My grandmothers were friends, so they grew up together. They had their first kiss at twelve years old. But my mother remembers him as this nice young boy who was very respectful. It was that side of him that she could not get out of her mind, and it's really why she never left him, because she really loved him. It's like they never parted, you know. And then they eventually got married.
But in the fifties, Lower Manhattan was not the wealthy enclave of hipsters and fashionistas it is today. And to survive the mean streets of his youth. To guant, he knew he would have to use both his wits and his fists.
They were broke. I think he wanted to make sure that he could provide for family. So my dad, he's in the street, and eventually he wants to start boxing. He starts to train and wants to be a boxer, and all that he gets like a little name in the street that he's a good kid, he's reliable. That so Vito takes some men underneath his wing, and that's how it all begins.
Veto, as in Vito genovis top brass in the Luciano crime family and a cutthroat gangster with his eyes on the throne.
He started driving for him. He started doing little things here and there, and he start to build his reputation and his name at that point. And I think once he got a taste of the power and the connection to the man Veto that really loved him, his ego just got swept in and it was very easy to get caught up in it.
By the time Gigante was in his twenties, he was Genoviz's top enforcer, and as his reputation grew, he was given a nickname that stuck. Here's prosecutor Guilt Childers.
He got the name Chinn because he was an amateur boxer, you know, a chin of granite, so he was a very physical guy. He made his bones through murder and other violence, you know, launch sharking, collection and things like that. That's sort of how he roast to the ranks.
The moment to Ganty truly earned his mafia spurs came in nineteen fifty seven when he walked up to the boss of his own crime family, Frank Costello, pointed a gun at his head and shot him point blank.
This was sanctioned by Vito Genevies and this is how someone moves up in the ranks. They show their loyalty. That's something my father had to do.
And though Costello miraculously survived the shooting, he refused to identify Giganty at the trial, which remains one of the most famous examples of omerta in mob history.
My dad knew going in he was never going to be convicted because nobody he was going to write on anybody's soul. Frank bowed out.
Giganty was either destined for mob glory or perhaps he was just lucky, because typically in Kosinostra bungling a hit does not bode well for the would be assassin.
Now, the fact that he missed my father should have been a dead man, because if someone screw something like that up, there's no room for them to stay. But Vito was He just loved my father. I can't explain it. There was just this connection between them. But surprisingly they didn't take my dad out, and then he began to rise further.
And rise he did. Over the next two decades, Giganty climbed to the head of the Genevese family, his power and survival a result of both his ferociousness and his cunning. So how did Giganty do it? How did he manage to run New York's most powerful family right under the knows of one of the largest federal investigations in American history, with perhaps the craziest KHN in mafia history.
The recruitment process starts, usually with young teenage kids, and they visualize the glory of being in that life.
During his career in the FBI, special agent Mike Campy spent two decades battling organized crime, and there is perhaps no better authority on what gangsters call the life.
So say you grow up in a neighborhood and you have social clubs where you'll see the wealth that somebody may generate, or attractive women cars that can lure somebody into it. That may not be what you would describe as the best student. He thinks he's a tough guy. The fistfights then changed into guns where you sort of want to become a gangster, and you may align yourself as an associate with an individual who is in organized crime.
Over the course of his career, Mike put away and flipped dozens of associates, soldiers, captains, and bosses. Mike also had an aptitude for numbers, which led him to pursue a degree in accounting.
I did probably about three years in accounting and realized that I could not visualize myself doing this as a career, so I dropped accounting immediately, and about a year later, coming home from working in the summer, I met an individual named Jack McKenna who was an FBI agent, and we had a conversation about FBI.
Similar to other investigators we spoke with It was a family friend that set Mike on his proper path. He arrived at the New York Field office at the hight of the investigation into the Five Families.
I got to New York in nineteen eighty five. At that time I was involved in labor racketeering investigations.
He immediately put his accounting skills to good use and did so well that he even developed a reputation on the streets.
I remember one time meeting a guy from the Bureau of Prisons. He looked at me and he said, you're Campy and I said, yeah, what, And he said it. You don't know how often I heard your name on prison calls. And I said, can you recall one? And he said, oh, I remember somebody calling from prison to a guy outside who said that he was just visited by Mike Campy at FBI agent. And the inmates said, hire an attorney and plead guilty. He said, but he didn't charge me with anything, And he said, hire an
attorney and plead guilty. I'll see you in a few months. I mean, I took that as a big compliment.
With his number crunching prowess, Mike Campy was just the rite agent for tackling the Genovies mobsters because one of the family's foremost talents was making obscene amounts of money. Here's defense attorney James Leonard.
There were books written about John Gotti and the Gambino crime family, but separated apart the genez crime family.
In addition to their usual income from gambling rackets, the Genevies had their hand in almost everything, and Mike was uncovering a lot of it.
They can generate money through bank robbery and loan sharking, extortions, the stock fraud business, with the check cashing, I mean, there was another scheme where they were talking about a blocking sewers scheme. On a holiday weekend, they would block the sewers outside huge buildings in Manhattan with the purpose of an individual in charge of approving an emergency to unblock the sewer that they prevented the flooding in the buildings.
It was like a simple process outside which took nothing, and they cited like making a million dollars on a weekend, and they'd split it amongst themselves.
In other words, even as the Commission trial was dismantling the Concrete Club, the Genovise family was still raking in the cash. They controlled the Fulton Fish Market, ports and waterfront services, shipping container companies, convention centers, trade shows, as well as garbage collection in all five burroughs, and if another company attempted to encroach on Genovi's profits, they were met with horror, like when a waste removal company began
competing for the city's business. One morning, the sales manager found a dog's head on his front lawn. Stuffed in its mouth was a note reading, Welcome to New York.
These are not people that go to work. These are people that just talk kind of regular basis, how they're going to use somebody in a business to generate money for them.
And behind it all the family's cutthroat and elusive boss, Vincent Gigante, who even had the audacity to extort the biggest religious festival in little Italy.
At the Feast of San Gennaro. Historically it goes back decades. It's as though it's a charitable organization, that the church is generating money, but the reality is it's just a front for organized crime. The city charges twenty five percent of what they're collecting from the vendors, and the vendors
fill out forms with the city. Say, for instance, they're being charged five hundred dollars for the stand, where in reality they may be charged five thousand, depending on where they're located, Like if they're right at Mulberry Street, just off Canal, there's higher fee charged by the mobsters.
That to me is a perfect example, as you're saying it of exactly how so many people are just victimized. Here you have a food cart vendor, right, but like where they should be paying, making the number up five hundred, they're having to pay up the little that they have to the mob to even get that business, which they should have every right to do for whatever it's supposed to.
Cost, right, and the city loses out. It's like hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, you know. I remember the priest fled New York to go to South America because his life was in jeopardy because he didn't want the church to be a sponsor of crime. And it wasn't benefiting the church, it was benefiting organized crime.
A lot of what Mike learned about these criminal operations was from wiretaps planted in Genevie's social clubs. But there was one person that continued to avoid ever being recorded the boss himself, Vincent Giguanty. Here's Jim Costler again.
We did try to put microphones on, but we weren't successful because he was that.
Secretive, employing a front boss that was just his first layer of insulation. Giganty was known to only speak to a select inner circle of trusted mobsters. Former Colombo capo Michael Franzis, who managed to escape the life in the early nineties, had this to say.
I'll tell you one thing about Chin.
He didn't care who you were. If he didn't want to meet you.
Made guy Coppo on the boss Boss, he wasn't going to meet you.
That was it.
He was the real power in New York for quite a long time.
Anyone outside of Giganti's trust circle would receive messages second hand, and even those communications came with a dire warning. If a mobster was ever caught on a wire speaking Chin's name, the punishment was death. So during his investigations, Mike learned of a type of sign language mobsters would use.
I made recordings where they wouldn't say his name, where they would refer to Chin Gigante by just putting their finger to their chin. They're talking crimes. But they would say this guy and I I'm sure, and align it to the recording where this guy was chin because they'd point to this chin. He had the respect of the people under him and they feared him.
Gil Childers also learned of a code name they used.
He was extremely careful. Another case I did, which was a Genevie's family case, the guys were on tape talking about I've got to go downtown and see my aunt. They always referred to him as a female, so that was another part of his thing. But of course the conversations that were on tape roysoul be like tell my aunt I love him, mixing up the gender so it became obvious who they were talking about.
Rita was no stranger to her father's covert communication style. In fact, she often had a front row seat.
By the time I reached the age of seven or eight. There was always this knowing that he was more than what they were telling me, because I remember the phone would always be off the hook. He never ever spoke on a phone. These men that would come into my grandmother's apartment very nice men. They would kiss a silo,
sit down, around the dining room table with him. The TV was on, the radio was on, lad and I would see these pieces of paper being you know, they were just notes to give him information, and then he would write back, and then they would take them and rip them up and either flush them down the toilet or they would burn them. Nobody ever really spoke above a whisper, and if they wanted to directly speak to him, they had to go up to him and whisper in
his ear. He would give them a direction to go and do something, and they would nod and go one by one. So this I knew was something's he's important. I don't know how he's important, but he is.
When Rita asked about her father's job, the answer was a lie, and.
She knew it. I was told several different things. He worked for a hat company, trucking. Those were the two most that I remember.
But secrets can be kept only for so long. One way or another. They forced their way out, and being an unwitting accomplice to her father's secret life was taking a dangerous toll.
I was sixteen, so I was in high school and there was this girl, typical eighties girls, big hair, all of that and she would spew a lot of stuff about my family and me being a mafia princess and all of that, and so many people were afraid of us, and kids couldn't hang out with me. And I think I was so angry because it was probably a piece of me that knew there was something to it, but
I didn't know what. I was having a really bad day, and I cornered her in the bathroom, and before she could even try to make a move to get out of the bathroom, I just wrapped my hand around the back of her thick hair and I pulled her head right into the sink and I just slammed her head in the sink. She fell to the floor. She was bleeding. I stepped on her face and I said, I'm done with you. And I remember instantly a brief flashback, but
I didn't know where it came from. Then all of a sudden, I snapped out of it, and I walked out of the bathroom, and I'm like, where did that come from?
In her heart, Rita knew that her violent outburst had its roots in her traumatic childhood, and in one memory in particular.
I remember clearly as a flashback, not so much that it was part of my memories until I had the flashback. So I remember being underneath my grandmother's dining room table. I was five years old, and I was playing and there was always a radio and a TV on, and they were pretty loud, you know, just in case anybody was talking or anything, it could be buffled out. I
could hear like a struggle coming through the door. I remember being under the table, and I remember hearing the scuffle coming through like the hallway, and then it ended up where my grandmother's dining room entrances. I knew like something was going on, but I didn't know what it was. So I backed up and I kind of just wrapped my arms around my legs and I, you know, covered
my mouth and I was just quiet. And then I remember hearing like like someone punched somebody in the face and the man fell to the floor and he was bleeding. Blood was starting to trickle out of his nose and coming towards me. But I remember very vividly my father's hand and the only reason why I knew it was
his hand was because of his pinky ring. You know, I'm under the table, he's above me, and I see his hand, you know, hitting this man like over and over again his face to the point where the guy was, you know, unconscious. And then the last thing he did was take his foot and just step on his face and like in a very grave, low voice, he said, don't ever disrespect me again. And then he told them get him out of here.
Rita was frozen in fear, shaking silently underneath the table. She was one of the few people to witness her father's violent temper and live to tell about it.
You know, what happens to all children, I think when they have that kind of trauma, is they go inward. They know not to speak a word. I remember at that moment, I just started to shake from the inside out. It was probably minutes later where I heard my mother and my grandmother calling for me, because nobody knew where I was. When they looked on the kneath the table, they saw me shaking and crying, and my mother pulled me out and she was holding me, and I was
just told, you know, it's okay. Daddy was just angry. You're safe, You're this, you're that. But I don't ever remember seeing my father's face. It was like I buried my face in my mother's chest area, and they just kind.
Of ripped me out of there and that was it. It was the memory of that day that came back to her when she attacked her high school classmate. It left her wanting answers.
I was flipping out, what is this? Why are people calling me mafia princes? I said, I know he's important. I know people go to him fit things, but I don't know what it is that he actually does. So my sisters sat with me and they described everything and went through the whole thing from the beginning.
The truth about her father and the magnitude of his power came as a massive shock. It was information that very few people possessed, including the FBI.
I was told he was the head of the Genevese crime family and the head of the Commission, which meant he was the head of all five families, which means nothing could be sanctioned unless somebody came to ask my father, especially if someone wanted to kill someone. And that his hand stretched across the country.
Because by the nineteen eighties, Gigante was not just the most powerful Boston, New York. His authority extended over crime families in New England, Buffalo, Philadelphia and the Midwest, and with profits of over one hundred million a year, the Genovese family was earning more than half the companies on the fortune five hundred.
I had no idea, no idea.
For his youngest daughter. It was a staggering revelation.
All the pieces of the puzzle start to snap into place at that age, the people around the table and all things that I questioned, I began to come to the realization of, Okay, this is why. So there was a lot of different emotions that came with it. One was relief in finally knowing everything, the idea that he was this force of nature that people didn't cross. Actually
I felt very protected by it. And then the other part of it was like, oh my god, like the Feds could come at any time and take him down. They could take us with him, because we were all part of this. So there was this struggle inside of me of this is my family. I love them. I would never utter a word to anyone about it other than therapy, and I knew that they were sworn that they couldn't say anything unless they felt I was in trouble. Oh my gosh, I'm.
Just picturing the therapist when you say, like my father's head of a major organized crime family.
She went white, like everything drained out of her. But she was very good at recovering, and she helped me tremendously.
For Rita, therapy became a refuge from the guilt and anguish caused by the knowledge of what her father did for a living and what he was capable of doing. It was a burden few people could bear, and in fact, even the boss himself was starting to show outward signs that the mob life was taking a significant psychological toll.
Giganty has taken to walking the streets near his Greenwich Village home, unshaven and wearing just a bathrobe. His friends and family say Giganty is mentally unbalanced. I already say it's an elaborate hoax.
But was Gigante really starting to crack or was his insanity act just another smokescreen to protect him from prosecution. It would take a showdown with the Feds and an up and coming rival to finally reveal the truth. With federal investigators bearing down on all the top bosses of organized crime, one boss was deploying a myriad of tactics to avoid prosecution. While the Commission trial was a sweeping success.
It also showed the government's hand, revealing the many ways they had successfully infiltrated organized crime, and Vincent Giganty was taking note. From refusing to use telephones, speaking in code, and even deploying a front boss to act as as representative, Giganty avoided leaving any incriminating evidence for Feds to use against him. But none of these strategic deceptions could hold a candle to his most impressive ruse.
Vincent the China Ganti has appeared as a mentally ill invalid who for years has walked around New York streets in a bathrobe, mumbling to himself. To the FEDS, that's been an elaborate act. To his family, it's the truth.
There's no cure for what he has. Andrew Weisman began his career as an AUSA in the Eastern District of New York in nineteen ninety one.
When I started, I was in a tiny little office that I think had been the equivalent of like a broom closet, and my supervisors had below ground offices where people could go by. You could see them peeing on the street and throwing trash, but you know what, I've never been happier. So the physical space was pretty bad, but the work was so great that you never even thought about the physical conditions.
Andrew worked his way up to deputy chief of the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section, and for years he watched Gigante's increasingly bizarre public behavior.
People talk about the Godfather, but he was known as the odd Father for many, many, many years, decades. He had been viewed as and presented himself as incompetent. He had run around the village in a bathrobe and pajamas and looked disheveled.
His appearance was a far cry from the slick suited image of his mafia predecessors, and his behavior disguised his true role as the boss. In public, Gigante would mumble and stumble his way through the streets of Greenwich Village. FBI agent Charlotte Lang recalls one time when a couple of her colleagues paid Giganty a visit and were met with a curious surprise.
He was at his mother's apartment and she goes, yeah, I go in, you can talk to him. And when the agents walked in, he was in the bathroom, standing in the shower stall with an umbrella, holding an umbrella up.
Within law enforcement, Gigantes's antics earned him the nickname the Enigma in a Bathrobe, but according to Gil Childers, there was a growing suspicion amongst his colleagues that Gigante's incompetence was all in act.
He would roam the streets by day in his bathrobe, mumbling to himself, urinating on fire hydrants, and doing all sorts of things to make himself look like he was crazy, so he figured that would insulate him from prosecutions.
But there was some evidence that perhaps it wasn't an act at all. Multiple doctors and psychiatrists issued reports that Giganty was, in their words, a psychotic, a mute, or possibly schizophrenic. Others that his mind was quote infantile and primitive, with a below normal IQ of sixty nine to seventy two.
Not what you'd expect of an alleged organized crime boss, and relatives of the god he's saying he's not a boss, he's a paranoid schizophrenic, wanders around hallucinating and has to take florazine four times a day.
These diagnoses and his public reputation as someone with severe mental impairment created a cloud of uncertainty about his role in the Genevese leadership. After all, how could someone with his disability be the dawn of Don's It was also laying groundwork for a clever defense in the face of a potential federal prosecution, because being deemed mentally unfit to stand trial might just be the get out of jail free card he was hoping to receive. So was Vincent
Gigante as mentally unfit as he said he was. Here's his daughter, Rita.
At some point I was told it's got paranoid schizophrenia. I never thought it was real because I started to see patterns of when he would do it. One of the doctors came to visit. I mean immediately everybody went into role. At that point, it was like my grandmother, hurry up, get him his medicine. He's not well today. The TV would have cartoons on. He'd be mimicking the cartoons and he was good. I'm gonna tell you, he was good. The doctor would come in evaluate him, and
then once he was gone, that was it. He was my father again.
According to Rita, her entire family was in on the ruse which often included accompanying her father on his walks around the neighborhood.
So you tell me, come on, I'm gonna walk. I'm like, oh, God help me. He would leave his pajamas on, put his robe on, mess up his hair, even if he wore a hat. You know, he would never be clean shaven. He would like stumble in the streets. He was five ten, five eleven. I'm five to one on a good day. He'd whisper to me, make like you're holding me up, and I'm looking at him like really, people are not
really gonna believe this. And then he would stop and talk to the tree or the parking met or whatever it was. He'd make statements, it's the parking meter. It's a nice day today. God told me to say this, you know something along those lines. He would mumble and say just words like sporadic words and stuff. Wasn't always like a full sentence, you know what I mean. And then it with people coming down the block. Those who knew him would tip their hat or smile at him.
Others that didn't know him would walk to the other side. They would look at us like we were crazy. Not an easy task.
Let me tell you for nearly two decades.
Vincent Gigante's relatives have said he walked around in the bathroobe talking to himself because he was emotionally and physically ill.
Her father had been committed to his Mental Illness Act for as long as she could remember, even willing to check himself into the psychiatric word to maintain the charade.
He was checking himself into three weeks at a time whenever the fens were getting close to him. But I think going in and experiencing him checking himself into an institution where these people were on the third floor, the ones that were the sickest. This was brutal, especially for me. They would be roaming the floors, they would be cursing
at you. It was sad because I thought to myself, these are people that are sick, like there really need help, and you're in here faking like you're making a mockery of this illness. I was beside myself with it.
But Gigante's deception came in handy, especially when the FEDS were turning up the heat on his fellow mobsters.
Actually, shortly before the commission case was brought, vinc Giganti had a law enforcement source and knew that the indictment was coming down, and thus checked himself into a hospital before the commission case happened.
As it turns out, it wasn't just the federal government that Giganty was worried about, because while the Chin continued his mental masquerade, he was also contending with his biggest adversary, a brand new Gambino boss whose public image was a far from the boss in the bathrobe.
The New York tabloids had christened John Gotti the Dapper Don, And anytime you would see John Gotti, he's wearing a two thousand dollars suit, hand painted silk ties. His hair is perfectly quaff. And then Vincent Chin Gaganty out of the fanfare, never clean shaven, always wearing a natty bathrobe, in a hat, wandering the streets holding somebody's arm, mumbling
to himself. And that guy was more powerful than John Gotti, and he could not have been more polar opposite in the image that was projected.
In the nineteen eighties, Gotti's star was on the rise, and his conspicuous display of flash and style was obscene to Giganty. But there was another reason that Giganty wanted Gotti dead. He had broken Kosen nose ST's most fundamental rule.
You can't kill a boss without approval from the Commission, and obviously bosses and other families would take that role particularly seriously for their own self preservation. Well, John Gotti had killed Paul Castellano outside of sparks.
Castelano's murder was not a sanctioned murder by the Commission. The Lucasi and Genovese family were an agreement that the retaliation is to occur.
Gigante had ordered a Luksi soldier to kill John Gotti and his underboss Frank to Jacob, but there was an unusual twist. The hit had to be done with a bomb, and according to Special Agent Mike Campy, this method of murder was supposed to be off limits even for the mob.
The car bomb situation, that's what they do in Italy. That's not how you're supposed to kill here in the US. That's prohibited.
Tipped off that Gotti and his deputy would be at the social club that day, gas Pipe and his crew approached Gotti's car with the homemade bomb, using a detonator made from a toy car remote. The blast killed two people, but incredibly, Gotti was not one of them. It turns out that he was tipped off about the potential hit and stayed away from the meeting.
Sunday afternoon, a police officer had carried Jajico's body from this car. The Chico, second in command of the Gambino organized crime family, had opened the passenger door. A bomb under the front seat exploded, killing him. Why the most popular law enforcement theory revenge.
With the failed hit, the beef between the reclusive Giganty and the flashy Gotti was brought into the open, and while the teflon Dawn never seemed to be afraid of the spotlight, it was clear that Giganty too would no longer be able to work in the shadows.
You could look at it in this way too. There were men dressed in three thousand dollars suits getting away with all kinds of things, being very showy. But then there's this man who is now dressed in the bathrobe, slippers and pajamas, who you could say, well, that would draw attention as well, right, and.
Make the government really want to get him and prove that it's false.
Exactly, so, did he bring the heat not the way other families conducted themselves, not in that way, and that really did not help moving forward, because once you bring that heat, they're just going to stay there till they figure it out. They needed him because he was the head of the commission, and they were going to get him at all courts.
This is Vincent Gigante, aka the Chin. Now take a good look. According to a judge, he avoided prosecutors for twenty seven years by pulling a crazy act. According to most cops, it was worthy of an oscar performance. Cops say he's the last of the big time organized crime bosses. Now he's set to go on trial.
Next time on law and order criminal justice system.
Vito Genevies and some of the others they were ruthless and they would kill someone at the drop of a hat. My father was not that way.
He got a phone call in the middle of the night from Euganti's right hand man, told his wife, this is it. I guess I'll never see you again.
He was forewarned that Sevino was a rat and he was trying to warn others to stay away from him.
Vincent Giganti had a wife named Olympia. He also had a girlfriend named Olympia.
Law and Order. Criminal Justice System is a production of Wolf Entertainment and iHeart Podcasts. Our host is Anna Sega Nicolazi. This episode was written by Chandler Mays and Anna Sega Nicolazzi. Executive produced by Dick Wolf, Elliott Wolf, and Stephen Michael at Wolf Entertainment on behalf of iHeartRadio. Executive produced by Alex Williams and Matt Frederick, with supervising producers Trevor Young and Chandler Mays and producers Jesse Funk, Noms Griffin and
Rima Elkayali. This season is executive produced by Anna Sega Nicolazzi, story producer Walker Lamond. Our researchers are Carolyn Talmage and Luke Stentz. Editing in sound design by Rima Alkali, original music by John O'Hara, original theme by Mike Post, additional music by Steve Moore, and additional voice over by me Steve Zarnkelton. Special thanks to Fox five in New York, ABC and CBS for providing archival material for the show.
For more podcasts from iHeartRadio and Wolf Entertainment, visit the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or Wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Thanks for listening.