Chin by Larry McShane

Author:Larry McShane [McShane, Larry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Kensington
Published: 2016-06-09T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 14

IT AIN’T ME, BABE

THE COMMISSION CASE FINALLY WENT TO TRIAL IN 1986, WITH A brilliant young prosecutor named Michael Chertoff winning convictions across the board after a ten-week trial that drew unprecedented media attention. All nine defendants were found guilty, with the jury forewoman brushing away tears as she read the lengthy verdict.

Salerno and the rest showed no emotion during the twenty-minute recitation. The triumphant Chertoff declared the newly convicted Mafiosi were “directing the largest and most vicious criminal business in the history of the United States.”

Salerno and the other bosses were sentenced to the max: one hundred years, with no possibility of parole. He would die three years later after suffering a stroke at the federal prison medical center in Springfield, Missouri. By then, the rest of the world would know the secret that Fat Tony took to the grave: Vincent Gigante was the true head of the Genovese family.

Salerno, while awaiting the commission trial, was indicted again that same year in another RICO case, with fourteen other defendants, including old pal Fish Cafaro. But the two had a falling-out over cash, and Cafaro became the first Genovese family made man to turn government witness since Valachi more than two decades earlier. He proved every bit as chatty as his infamous Genovese predecessor.

With Salerno placed in prison, Gigante’s name began surfacing in random news stories speculating about the new boss of the Genovese family. But the Mob power remained a cipher to most of America; those aware of the name most likely recalled apocryphal tales of the old mobster wandering the Village as if dressed by a color-blind homeless man.

The Chin’s long subterfuge was presented to readers of the New York Times in February 1988, when the newspaper exposed his strange existence in a 2,300-word piece by longtime organized crime chronicler Selwyn Raab. The exposé ran just two months before Fish Cafaro exposed the inner workings of the Genovese crime family before the U.S. Congress.

Almost every afternoon, a graying, unimpressively dressed man emerges from an apartment building on Sullivan Street in Greenwich Village and gingerly crosses the street to a dingy store, where he spends several hours playing cards and whispering to confidantes, Raab wrote to start his piece.

Although he behaves oddly at times in public, law-enforcement authorities say the man, Vincent (the Chin) Gigante has created one of the most impregnable mob strongholds in the country.

The story noted: [Gigante] was lightly regarded by law enforcement mob experts as a potential candidate for the hierarchy of the Genovese family. He was generally viewed as an old-fashioned capo who was so distressed by the fear of arrest that he feigned mental illness in an attempt to discourage attention from the authorities.

And it quoted Goldstock, the former head of the state Organized Crime Task Force, about Gigante’s strange reign—unlike that of any Mafia chieftain dating back to the creation of the five families in 1931.

“It is like a Howard Hughes syndrome,” Goldstock observed. “He locks himself up in a small area, and it is hard to understand what enjoyment he gets from being a mob boss.

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