Chin

VINCENT LOUIS GIGANTE, THE FOURTH OF SALVATORE AND YOLANDA Gigante’s six boys, arrived in a home still shrouded in loss and grief.

The parents were Italian immigrants, married in their native Naples on October 20, 1920, before setting off for New York City in the era’s tidal wave of new arrivals from their homeland. Records from Ellis Island show Salvatore and Yolanda (her name misspelled as “Iolanda”) arrived three days after New Year’s in 1921, crossing the Atlantic Ocean aboard an Italian ship, the Pesaro.

He was twenty-five, and his pretty bride just eighteen.

At five-four, with black hair and brown eyes, Salvatore listed his occupation as “workman,” while Yolanda described herself as “housewife.” Handwritten beneath a question about their intended length of stay was the notation “perm”—permanently. The newlyweds would find a home in Manhattan, joining relatives already living in Greenwich Village.

As they did for all new arrivals, the ship’s captain and surgeon signed off on documents attesting to the Gigantes’ mental and physical well-being. Both Gigantes checked the “yes” box when asked if they could read.

The couple settled into a tenement at 181 Thompson Street, sharing the space with Salvatore’s brother Louie and his wife. Salvatore and Yolanda would spend their whole lives in the neighborhood, never moving beyond a radius of a few blocks, relocating only to find space for their expanding family or to stay ahead of the wrecking ball in the constantly evolving area.

The Gigantes soon welcomed three boys: Pasquale, Mario and Vincent. Salvatore, a jeweler by trade, hustled to support the family; and like many of the local women, Yolanda picked up work as a seamstress, specializing in piecework for ladies’ coats. It was during a rare vacation that the hardworking young couple endured a heartbreaking blow.

During a 1925 trip home to see family in Naples, eighteen-month-old Vincent suffered horrific burns from an accidental spill of a large pot of water boiling for pasta. The child spent two agonizing weeks in the hospital before dying. The devastated Gigantes returned to the Village, where they welcomed their fourth child on March 29, 1928. There was little debate; the new arrival, another boy, would be named for his late brother. An unbreakable bond between mother and son was forged, one that would last two lifetimes.

Vincent’s doting mom provided her boy with the nickname that followed him through life. Although the name would one day echo with menace, it sprang from her love.

“My mother, as a Neapolitan woman, would call him ‘Chenzino. ’ It’s the diminutive of Vincenzino, ‘little Vincent,’” explained Louis Gigante. “That’s how he got the name, ’cause Mama would call him ‘Chenzino.’ She never spoke English to him. Vincenzino. So the kids called him ‘Chin.’”

The Village was already heavily Italian by the time the Gigantes arrived. More than fifty thousand Italians settled in the neighborhood between the 1880s and 1920s; the vast majority were young, single men. By 1920 the area was about 30 percent Italian and supported a pair of churches catering to the new arrivals: Our Lady of Pompeii, on Carmine Street, and the nation’s oldest Italian-American parish, St. Anthony of Padua, incorporated in 1859 and located on Sullivan Street.

The city’s first Italian-American mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, was born in 1882 on the same street as both Vincents.

The Village had also earned a reputation as a haven for artists and eccentrics. Mark Twain once walked the local streets, as did bohemian/social activist/journalist John Reed. The insular neighborhood was also home to a long tradition of taking care of its own and minding its own business, particularly among its Italian immigrant community. The Village’s padrone was a local fixer, able to provide an assortment of services for his constituents. It could be anything from a job opportunity to notarizing documents to arranging steamship tickets for a trip back to Italy.

Among the first padrones was Louis Fugazy, who immigrated to the Village in 1869 from his hometown of Liguria. Fugazy was still living on Bleecker Street when Louis Gigante arrived; the old man died in 1930. A Neapolitan immigrant named Vito Genovese would fill his shoes.

With the arrival of Ralph and their last son, Louis, the Gigante family was complete. The five sons were raised as devout Roman Catholics, with Sunday Mass a regular part of their routine. Yolanda always favored Our Lady of Pompeii on Carmine Street.

The Bureau of Prisons, in a 1960 evaluation, characterized Chin’s childhood as “normal . . . and healthy.” Louis Gigante said the brothers, though born years apart, remained a tight-knit group despite the difference in ages. The connection to one another and to the Village streets remained, and it endured unbroken as they grew into adulthood.

During a sit-down years later with prison officials, the Chin recalled the number one household rule: “Respect your parents.” Each boy was assigned regular household chores, and Gigante’s only bad memories of childhood were dealing with a speech impediment and a minor heart condition. Gigante, who described Salvatore and Yolanda as a loving couple, could not recall a single instance where he watched his parents fight.

Salvatore was only occasionally moved to spank one of the misbehaving boys. Mom Yolanda’s method of discipline involved a paralyzing stare, which young Vincent inherited, using it to great effect in later life. “A happy childhood” was Gigante’s recollection decades later. By all accounts, the future Mob boss with a penchant for bathrobes dressed quite normally, too.

The Chin specifically mentioned that he was always quite close with his mother. There were, he added, no family secrets, although there was one sad chapter in their history. Gigante’s maternal grandfather committed suicide at age thirty-seven. The circumstances were strange. He swallowed poison to avoid testifying against “the Black Hand,” a Mafia-esque group operating in Naples. Fearful his family would be targeted if he took the stand, Pasquale Scotto took his own life.

Though living in the nation’s largest city, the boys were raised as if they remained in their late grandfather’s homeland.

“My mother and father were not American,” said Louis Gigante. “They were Neapolitans. Their culture and everything [was] completely imposed on us, the way they knew life.”

The Gigante kids learned English on the streets and at school as their parents spoke strictly Neapolitan at home.

“Never spoke English until I was in school,” recalled Louis Gigante. “Being the youngest, the other four [brothers] spoke English to me. I just never heard it from my mother.”

Salvatore landed a job on Canal Street with a jewelry business started by another immigrant: William Kelly.

“He hung out with the Irish jewelers. . . . You know how he made his money?” asked Louis Gigante. “He worked there with them, and then he would be their representative in the Italian neighborhood. Every woman who was getting married would go to him, and he would display the rings in the house.”

With the onset of the Great Depression and hard times in the jewelry business, Salvatore took other work, including one stint with the New Deal-sponsored Works Progress Administration (WPA).

“I was very proud of him,” recalled Louis. “My father worked all his life. He made a living, and supported us very well.”

Yolanda chipped in, too, bringing sewing work home to the cramped apartment—much to Salvatore’s dismay. A good Neapolitan wife was supposed to raise the children and cook the meals. Salvatore, his pride stung, took his wife’s sewing machine and sold it.

“I was angry a little,” she recalled decades later. “But don’t you worry. I bought a secondhand machine for ten dollars. I worked day and night.”

The Gigante family’s economic fortunes improved once Salvatore landed a better job in the jewelry trade, but it required a long commute.

“Newark. Poor guy had to go to Newark all his life,” said Louis Gigante. “And he was an engraver in a big jewelry company. That was what he did. He didn’t just engrave initials. He’s cutting the stones.”

Each night the entire family would gather at the dinner table to discuss the day’s events in two languages. It was an essential part of their life, with each of the boys expected to contribute to the ongoing conversation. The sons addressed each other in English, while the parents spoke only in their native tongue.

* * *

As young Vincent was finding his footing in the world, the nascent American version of La Cosa Nostra was starting its bloody evolution into the powerful institution that became an integral part of New York City for the next eight decades.

Gigante’s Mob mentor, Vito Genovese, was smack in the middle of the Mob wars that gave birth to the five Mafia families of New York. The crime family that would carry the Genovese name emerged from a period of unprecedented bloodshed and betrayal.

Genovese arrived in the New World in 1913, a teenage boy whose family left their own village in Naples to settle south of the Gigantes on the Lower East Side. The young man quickly gravitated toward a life of crime and easy money, falling in with a group of like-minded and ambitious Italian immigrants.

A Sicilian youth named Giuseppe Bonanno—rechristened “Joe” in his new country—followed the same path. Bonanno eventually became the right-hand man of Salvatore Maranzano, known respectfully as “Don Turrido.” Maranzano was a barrel-chested bull capable of breaking a man’s neck by using only his thumbs, a very useful skill in their new enterprise.

The boss carried himself with an air of class and legitimacy despite his illegitimate business. Maranzano boasted of speaking Latin and Greek, and proclaimed himself well-versed in classical literature. He attended the seminary, studying to become a priest, before opting for a more secular career. A handsome and understated man, the only jewelry he wore was a watch and his wedding ring.

“He looked just like a banker,” said Joe Valachi, a street hustler later inducted into the Maranzano ranks. “You’d never guess in a million years that he was a racketeer.”

Maranzano established an import/export company in Little Italy as a cover for his booze business during Prohibition. Decades later, in his novel, author Mario Puzo’s fictional Corleone family did much the same with their “olive oil” operation.

But the dominant family belonged to Giuseppe “Joe the Boss” Masseria, who rose to prominence during the bootlegging days of the Roaring Twenties. His group was rife with young, hungry talent, which included a quartet of future bosses: Charles “Lucky” Luciano, Gaetano Lucchese, Vito Genovese and Francesco Castiglia, who later was reinvented with an Irish-sounding first name and surname, “Frank Costello.”

Barely five feet tall, Masseria would casually demolish a five-course meal—complete with wine—with the gusto of a dog tearing through a bucket of steaks. He did so with about the same amount of grace.

The two factions were soon at odds, with a demand by the imperious Masseria setting off a bloodletting later dubbed “the Castellammarese War”—a nod to a small Sicilian coastal town once called home by many of Maranzano’s troops. The boss demanded $10,000 in tribute from his underlings, asserting it was his right as the capo di tutti capi. Conflict inevitably followed.

Maranzano presented himself as the populist choice, the antithesis of the greedy Masseria in the bloody battle that ran roughly across eighteen savage months in 1930 through 1931. The fighting became so fierce that Bonanno delayed his wedding to work full-time for the Maranzano forces. Dozens of men on both sides were killed in the struggle.

The need for soldiers led to Maranzano’s induction of Valachi in a secret Mafia ceremony. The East Harlem resident’s life of crime began as an eighteen-year-old getaway driver for a burglary ring, and ended decades down the road with his decision to become the first Mafiosi to turn informant.

An act of pure treachery would end the war, with Luciano—an up-and-comer growing increasingly frustrated by Masseria’s intransigence in the ways of making money—finally selling out his boss. It was anything but lucky when Luciano invited Masseria to lunch in Coney Island on April 15, 1931.

Before meeting with Joe the Boss, Luciano—reportedly accompanied by Genovese—arranged a quiet meeting with Maranzano and concocted the plot that would end the hostilities. They met at a private home in Brooklyn, where the conversation, fraught with importance, was nonetheless clipped and quick.

“Do you know why you are here?” Maranzano asked in Sicilian.

“Yes,” Luciano replied.

“Then I don’t need to tell you what has to be done?” Maranzano inquired.

“No.”

The lunch date was set for the Nuova Villa Tammaro restaurant on West Fifteenth Street, near the renowned Luna Park and a relatively new attraction, a roller coaster known as the Cyclone. The typically wary Masseria arrived in a steel-armored sedan with inch-thick windows. Luciano later recounted Masseria’s last meal: a three-hour orgy of food and drink consumed in a veritable feeding frenzy.

The meal was followed by a card game, with Luciano excusing himself to use the men’s room. The sounds of gunfire soon rang out inside the quiet Italian restaurant. According to Luciano, the shooters included Genovese, Siegel and Albert Anastasia. Masseria’s body was riddled by a half-dozen bullets, and his body was found still holding the ace of spades in one hand.

The killing, rather than assuring peace, brought only more death. Luciano expected the murder to grease his ascension as a boss equal to Maranzano—only to find the new boss was just like the old boss. Maranzano declared himself king of the New York underworld and the number one boss in the nation. Luciano’s anger festered and his impatience grew.

His feelings were shared by colleagues who felt Maranzano was just another Mustache Pete, their derisive term for mobsters past their expiration date. Another plot was hatched. On September 10, 1931, four men appeared waving badges at Maranzano’s tony offices atop the landmark Grand Central Terminal. The boss’s unarmed security force, surprised by their arrival and cowed by the badges, let them inside.

Maranzano was stabbed and shot repeatedly, his blood pooling on the office floor as the life ebbed from his body. The Castellammarese War was over, with both its chief combatants claimed as Mob fatalities.

The survivors sorted things out, agreeing the day of a single boss claiming infallibility while lining his pockets was done. There would instead be five bosses, each with a vote on business and a seat on what became the Mafia’s ruling commission. The head of the family that would become known as the Genoveses was headed by Luciano himself. Genovese became his right-hand man, and Frank Costello among his top lieutenants.

The Mob’s boom years were about to arrive. And so was Vincent Gigante, just three years old when the war ended.

* * *

The Chin was an undistinguished schoolboy, posting average grades before dropping out of school in his sophomore year of high school. He later enrolled in a trade school, where he played on the football team and—by his own recollections—became “socially active.... School was fun.”

Years later, he recounted a suspension from that time, although he could not remember the details. The first hints of his future career soon appeared, although the details are lost to history: Gigante’s initial arrest came when he was age fourteen, with the juvenile record sealed. Even federal prosecutors decades later knew nothing of the case.

When he was sixteen years old, the Chin was finished with his formal education and eager to learn the lessons of the crowded neighborhood streets. Gigante was never bothered by his lack of schooling, and later in life he turned it into a punch line.

Asked decades down the road to spell “world” backward, he informed an inquiring psychiatrist, “We’ll be here all day.”

Vincent’s posteducation interests were simple: the boxing ring and the street corners of the Village.

“Vincent was what he was—a kid from the block,” said Louis Gigante. “What did he do as a kid, sixteen years old? He was running crap games. A sin? Maybe, in the eyes of some jerks back then. Las Vegas—the whole world was gambling. This whole neighborhood was full of gamblers.”

The priest recalled a Sunday afternoon when he stumbled across his brother’s busy dice game, where Vincent was likely the youngest of the ten men looking to roll a natural.

“I must have been about ten years old,” he recounted. “He had a big game . . . and I’m walking on the street. I live around the block here, on the corner. He says, ‘Louie, Louie, c’mere.’ So, anyway, that’s first time I ever shot dice. He says, ‘Take the dice. Throw them.’ I did it to satisfy him. ‘Maybe we’ll get lucky with the kid.’”

On another night their mother dispatched the family’s baby to deliver a message to his big brother. Young Louis initially had no idea where to look, but then decided to check in a spot unknown to the local police. He walked into a nearby tenement, up the dark stairs and into a hallway on one of the upper floors. There was Vincent, running his floating crap game.

“The building’s still there!” the priest recalled. “And that was his game, and he made money. He knew what the rules were, but everybody did it. So that was his life. He was a street kid all the time.”

One of the rules was that Chin kicked up some of his cash to the neighborhood’s bigger fish. By then, Vito Genovese was back in town after his extradition from Italy, where he fled for eight years to dodge a murder rap. He was quickly accepted as the new padrone of Greenwich Village, and took young Vincent under his wing.

“Vito Genovese was the most honored man in this neighborhood,” recalled Louis. “Took care of everybody’s needs. On Christmas, on holidays, he sponsored programs for the poor. That’s how they operated.”

The Chin took his first adult pinch in 1945 for receiving stolen goods, the first of seven arrests before his twenty-fifth birthday. He recalled those years as a time when he ran with local street gangs and took no lip. If somebody somehow irked the young Chin, he responded with his fists.

The teenager moved from corner to corner back then: first on Sullivan Street, then in the renowned Stillman’s Gym at 919 Eighth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan. The dank boxing hangout between Fifty-Fourth and Fifty-Fifth Streets featured two rings and a permanent funk conjured from years of perspiration and minimal attention to cleanliness.

It was home to some of the fight game’s big names: Rocky Graziano, Jack Dempsey, Georges Carpentier, Primo Carnera, Fred Apostoli, Joe Louis and Rocky Marciano. All the fighters, champs and chumps, paid the same fifteen-cent entry fee to enter a school of boxing higher education: “Eighth Avenue University,” as it was known.

Vincent Gigante, like his brother Ralph, and a strong, silent Village kid named Dominick Cirillo became students of the fight game, hanging at Stillman’s in an era where the city gyms served as petri dishes for Mafia moneymaking schemes.

Jake La Motta was another Italian-American kid who turned to the ring for salvation, only to find a cesspool of corruption. He was forced to take a dive on November 14, 1947, against an otherwise overmatched fighter named Billy Fox, who was managed by the mobbed-up Frank “Blinky” Palermo, a Philadelphia gangster later jailed for extortion.

LaMotta famously received a title shot after throwing the fight, and he captured the middleweight title. He told the whole sordid tale thirteen years later to a U.S. Senate subcommittee investigating the fight game. Later, Robert De Niro won an Oscar for his portrayal of LaMotta in Raging Bull.

The same year as the fixed LaMotta fight, middleweight champion Rocky Graziano rejected a $100,000 bribe to dump a bout, which was later canceled.

Managers were, by and large, a collection of thieves and almost to a man tied in with the mob, LaMotta wrote in Raging Bull, his pull-no-punches autobiography. And I also noticed that around the gym all the time there were the mob guys, for the very simple reason that there’s always betting on fights, and betting means money, and wherever there’s money there’s the mob.

So it was no surprise that when Gigante stepped into the ring for his first bout, his manager was Thomas “Tommy Ryan” Eboli, a future head of the Genovese family. Or that his sparring partner Cirillo would become a longtime friend and confidant as the two drifted into organized crime. Or that his brother Ralph would also move from the ring into the same illegal arena.

Chin apparently used the birth certificate of his brother and namesake, dead nineteen years, to land a professional boxing license. The fighter was just sixteen when he stepped into the ring against Vic Chambers in Union City, New Jersey, on July 18, 1944. It was an even pairing, with Chambers fighting for only the third time. The Chin lost on points, but returned to the ring eleven days later.

The precocious boxer, standing six feet tall and fighting in the 175-pound light-heavyweight division, reeled off ten straight victories by decision, and twice fought on the undercard at Madison Square Garden. He scored the only knockout of his career in a two-round defeat of undistinguished Frankie Petrel on February 2, 1945. The loss put the beaten fighter’s career mark at 4-6-1.

He returned to the mecca of boxing four months later to lose a four-rounder against a fellow fighter with the same 10-1 record, Vic Chambers, whose only defeat had come in a rematch with Gigante. The Chin took their third fight in a four-round decision.

Kid brother Louis recalled attending one of Vincent’s fights at the Ridgewood Grove in Brooklyn—the closest thing the Chin had to a home base. Gigante fought there a half-dozen times, winning five. His last bout came there on May 17, 1947, when Jimmy Slade scored a seventh-round TKO against the Chin.

“He was a very good, very good boxer,” his brother Louis recalled. “He fought a lot, and then he gave it up.”

Vincent Gigante stepped out of the ring with a career mark of 21-4, despite his lack of a power punch—a problem the Chin would rectify in the years ahead. Gigante underwent surgery on his nose in 1950, a remnant from his brief time as a fighter.

Brother Ralph followed Chin into the ring in 1948, the start of a truncated career that lasted just ten months and fourteen fights. While compiling a mark of nine wins, three losses and two draws, the 152-pounder made the pages of the New York Times after an October 8, 1948, six-round decision over Chino Prado of Mexico.

The headliner that night was middleweight Rocky Castellani, another Italian kid, this one an import from Luzerne, Pennsylvania. He scored a seventh-round knockout over hometown favorite Walter Cartier of the Bronx before a crowd of 2,465 at the St. Nicholas Arena, knocking the local kid on the floor three times in rapid succession—the last with a right to the jaw that put him down for good.

Castellani was an up-and-comer managed by none other than the ubiquitous Eboli, whose connection to the city’s fight game ended with his arrest in Madison Square Garden. After Castellani lost a January 11, 1952, fight to Ernie Durando, the manager ignited a brawl by punching referee Ray Miller in the ring.

The mobbed-up Eboli, apparently expecting a different result, flew into a rage when Miller stopped the fight in the seventh round after Castellani—a marine who fought at Iwo Jima—was knocked down twice. Two of Castellani’s other cornermen could do nothing to halt the rampaging Eboli, possessor of an Irish temper reflecting his mob nickname: Tommy Ryan.

Eboli and his brother Patsy continued the rampage in the locker room, where they delivered a beatdown with fists and feet to “matchmaker” Al Weill. They knocked him to the floor and broke his glasses. Eboli was convinced the dicey Weill was somehow behind the defeat.

The assault, in addition to landing Eboli in court, was featured in Life magazine with a picture of the enraged manager on the ring apron as he advanced with menace toward Weill. The magazine recounted the bizarre scene in a long exposé of boxing corruption just months after the beating. According to the report, there were rumors that Weill had “double-crossed” Eboli—raising the specter of a fixed fight. In a rematch two years later, Castellani won easily.

Eboli’s license was immediately suspended for life, and he spent sixty days in jail after pleading to a reduced charge—not that it mattered much. By then, Eboli and Gigante were ready to move up in class.