CHAPTER 15
WANTED MAN
VINCENT GIGANTE HAD NO IDEA WHAT HIS FUTURE WOULD HOLD the first time he sat in a room across from Genovese family associate Peter Savino.
Savino, on the other hand, was pretty certain that he was about to take his last breath. The summons came two months after Pappa had already done the same.
It was 1980 when Savino walked inside Ruggero’s, a Mob-owned restaurant on Grand Street in Little Italy, to answer the call from on high. It was dark inside, and he was directed to an office upstairs.
“As we were walking up the stairs, there were no lights on, and we came to the top of the stairs, and I expected to be shot at any moment,” he later recalled.
To Savino’s surprise, he was still alive after reaching the landing. He walked into the office and his heart almost stopped: There was Gigante, along with Funzi Tieri and other high-ranking members of the Genovese hierarchy. He knew the Chin only by reputation, and found Gigante in the flesh to be even more terrifying.
Their first request proved almost impossible: “They asked me not to be nervous.”
The next question involved his street boss, Genovese capo “Sally Young” Palimieri: Did the captain take control of Pappa’s street business, including a lucrative loan-sharking operation? Savino conceded that he had.
Gigante spit on the floor in disgust.
“Are these the new rules?” asked the defiantly old-school boss. “We take money from widows and orphans?”
Savino then confirmed the capo was handling drug money. Young was instantly demoted, and Savino learned he was about to be reassigned. “They said to me that I didn’t have to be with Sally Young anymore, if I wanted to pick someone I would be comfortable with,” Savino said.
In a strange and ultimately life-defining decision, Savino landed with the guy who made him most uncomfortable: Vincent Gigante. In an equally unlikely choice, the Chin, whose Mob radar was generally unerring, eventually took a shine to the quivering Savino.
But business would come before friendship. Though Savino was attached to the Chin, he would report to Genovese capo Joe Zito.
“We will tell you what to do through Joe,” Gigante announced.
Savino would also need to repay a $1 million debt owed Vic Amuso and Gaspipe Casso as the Genovese family took over the business that he shared with the two high-ranking Luccheses. The two soldiers, a pair of wild cards who would share a murderous rise to the top of their family, had invested $500,000 with Pappa in a scam involving four Mob families.
They wanted the money repaid—plus another $500,000 in profit for their troubles.
Savino considered the 100 percent markup a reasonable price to pay for his life. He sold $250,000 in bonds to make the first installment on his debt, delivering the cash inside a Sunkist orange crate during a meeting inside a Brooklyn bar. Zito tagged along with his new recruit.
“They were upset that the money was in fives, tens and twenties,” Savino said.
Zito rose quickly to his defense: “What is the difference? You got two hundred fifty thousand. That is what is important.”
* * *
The payoff was linked to what became known as “the Windows Case,” a massive Mob conspiracy concocted by the crafty Savino in the late 1970s. At the time the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) launched an ambitious program to cut heating costs dramatically in public housing through the installation of new windows.
Tall, dark-haired and handsome, Savino looked into the double-glazed windows and saw millions of dollars in ill-gotten gains. To pull it off, he would need the full weight of New York’s families working in concert.
The Brooklyn-born Savino, a World War II baby, was involved with both organized crime and Local 580 of the Architectural and Ornamental Ironworkers Union during the 1960s. Both affiliations proved quite lucrative as the 1980s approached.
The Genovese family, through Savino, served as the lead group. The Luccheses controlled the window workers union, so they were given a piece. The Gambinos and the Colombos owned window-manufacturing companies, as did Savino—Arista Windows and American Aluminum. The bumbling Bonannos were frozen out.
“There are too many junk guys,” sniffed Salerno.
His partners in the business were Casso and Amuso, who made a single contribution to the operation: they built a handball court behind the Brooklyn offices, as Little Vic Amuso was an aficionado.
The operation was simple yet ingenious: Thirteen Mob-run companies rigged the bidding process, insuring the low bidder would win the contract at an outrageously high price. Any non-Mob window companies would pay a $2-per-window Mob tax for a piece of the installation action. The union, in addition to installing windows, would shatter any glass put in place by outsiders. Bribes paid to city officials kept everything running smoothly.
Savino once explained to a Colombo associate that winning a bid was like flipping a coin among the families.
“All right, you won this toss,” he said. “Now you get that one. The next one, I get.”
Savino wasn’t afraid to get his hands dirty to keep things running smoothly. When a Genovese-affiliated window manufacturer began listening to Lucchese overtures about switching affiliations, Savino and a second mobster turned up at their storage yard.
The pair, armed with machine guns, opened fire. When the bullets stopped flying, two hundred windows were reduced to glass shards.
Prosecutors later said the Mob won $151 million of the $191 million in window replacement contracts from the New York City Housing Authority between 1978–1989, turning a crooked profit estimated in the tens of millions of dollars.
The case offered yet another peek into the Gotti-Gigante dynamic—and their relative spots on the Mafia food chain. While the Chin and the Genovese family were making millions off the window scam, Gotti complained that his group—specifically, his brother Peter—were getting short shrift.
“Joe ‘Piney’ (Armone) and Sammy (Gravano)—he made my brother Pete get involved with that fucking asshole with the ‘Windows,’” Gotti moaned in a December 12, 1989, conversation above the Ravenite. “Never made a dime. He’s going to jail for it.”
Benny Eggs Mangano, by now the Genovese underboss, had previously rebuffed a Gambino family bid for a bigger piece of the multimillion-dollar action.
If their first meeting was fraught with terror on Savino’s part, his well-deserved reputation as one of the biggest earners in the Genovese family soon won Gigante’s admiration and respect. He dealt mostly with Mangano, who provided a quick primer on the family rules.
Number one: “Point to your chin and say ‘This guy.’”
Number two: “If anyone asked about the Chin’s act, reply only that ‘Vincent’s crazy.’ ”
Savino became a habitué of the Triangle, embraced by the Chin and welcomed into the boss’s tight inner circle.
“Savino is directly with Chin, face-to-face,” said ex-federal prosecutor Greg O’Connell. “The Chin took Petey under his wing. He loved Petey. Petey was a charismatic guy who was a huge moneymaker for the family.”
Although Savino was never inducted as a made man, his new status came with some strange and scary turns.
On one Triangle visit for a discussion of the labor racketeering business, the perpetually paranoid Gigante brought him into the back bathroom and turned on all the faucets. Only then did the Chin put his unshaven mug against the guest’s ear and whisper.
He asked, with unusual concern, if anybody in the Genovese family or the union was hitting Savino up for free windows. (Chin later asked for installations in Old Tappan for his wife and on the Upper East Side for his mistress.)
“Okay, I wanted to know if anyone was taking advantage of you,” the Chin said. He paused before continuing.
“Don’t be afraid to tell people I’m crazy, because you know I am crazy, right?” he said.
“Yes, I know you are,” Savino wisely responded.
He was summoned again in June 1982 to hear a request just as terrifying as Gigante’s call for Savino to chill out during his first trip to the Triangle. This time he was led through the side door connecting to the adjoining apartment building and taken to a first-floor landing to freeze out even the social club’s regulars.
Gigante, joined by consigliere Manna, had Savino in mind as a hit man. Could Savino, they wondered, get close enough to do the job? The target was a seventeen-year-old suspected of killing Edward Lanzieri, the father of a Genovese made man named Edward “Eddie Buff” Lanzieri.
“Take him out,” the Chin ordered icily.
The unnerved Savino, though a veteran of Mob murder from his days working alongside Pappa, knew the target. Instead of killing teenager Enrico “Eddie” Carini, he procrastinated until the plot eventually disappeared from the Chin’s radar.
There were lighter moments. Savino was invited back to Ruggero’s, this time to dine with Gigante. Capo Zito—owner of the restaurant—took a shot at his crew member’s lack of sartorial style, which ran to burgundy track suits and spotless white sneakers. The words were barely out of his mouth when the Chin rapped Zito between the eyes with the wooden duck’s head handle of a nearby umbrella.
“He dresses okay for me,” Gigante declared.
Savino was perhaps never as rattled as the time he was rousted from slumber and summoned to the Village by a 3 A.M. phone call from Canterino. “Get down here, right now,” growled Baldy Dom. It did not sound like a social call.
The two men met in the darkness on an empty Sullivan Street, walking through the stillness to a barbershop near the Triangle. Savino was certain he was about to get killed; why else avoid the endlessly bugged and FBI-monitored Triangle?
He arrived to find Vincent Gigante clutching a clothes catalogue in his hands. A light went on for the suddenly relieved Savino, who recalled giving Chin the catalogue, along with a promise to get Gigante any items that he desired.
He desired three jogging suits, in red, blue and green.
“It’s not for me,” Gigante allowed. “It’s for my kids. You can go now.”
Things turned heavy when Savino’s old body-burying buddy Ferenga was busted on a drug rap in 1987. The arrest of the truly obscure crook, in a truly unexpected turn, would lead prosecutors directly to the Chin. And it was all because the drug-slinging Bobby Ferenga believed chivalry was not dead.
* * *
Bobby Ferenga was a wisecracking mobster with a rapid-fire “dese and dose” style of speech honed on the streets of his native Brooklyn. Nobody considered him among the sharpest tools in the Mafia’s shed—not even Ferenga himself.
On Mob trips to Vegas with Lucchese associate Peter “Big Pete” Chiodo and other gangsters, Ferenga would visit the roulette wheel and plop down $50,000 on a single spin.
“I just want to get the losing over with,” he would moan.
On another occasion a prosecutor offered Ferenga a “Queen for a Day” deal—lawyer-speak for a one-time-only sweetheart plea bargain.
“Now dis guy’s calling me a queen!” the insulted mobster complained.
Ferenga was lying in bed one night in November 1987, warmed by both the presence of his girlfriend and a $20,000 windfall in a coke deal, when the FBI bashed down the door of his apartment. Agents waved guns and a warrant. Ferenga left in handcuffs.
The feds were steered to Ferenga by another low-level crook, David Negrelli, a confidential informant for Brooklyn assistant district attorney Mark Feldman. The ADA shared his snitch with the FBI, and Negrelli steered them toward Ferenga, among others.
Negrelli was an unlikely candidate for the first falling domino in the probe. His strange ways led investigators at the Drug Enforcement Agency to blackball him, leaving Negrelli adrift until Feldman recognized his usefulness. He implicated Ferenga in a drug gang operating in Brooklyn.
More than twenty codefendants were busted, mostly organized crime guys, but the haul also included Ferenga’s girlfriend and her mother. There was even worse news for Ferenga: The coke deal was a sting, and he was caught on wiretaps discussing his illegal exploits. Ferenga was facing a twenty-five-year jail term. His leverage at this point was less than zero.
“Bobby Ferenga was a mess,” recalled O’Connell. “But being a chivalrous guy, Bobby had a guilt complex about the women.”
U.S. Attorney Charles Rose initially played hardball with the gangster.
“He was brought into our office, and we laid out the law for him,” Rose recounted four years later. “I told him, ‘You’re going to jail for the rest of your life. What can you tell us?’”
After a bit of back-and-forth, Ferenga confessed he was most bothered by the arrests of his gal pal and her mom. An offer was made: The charges against the women, peripheral figures at best in the case, would disappear if Ferenga agreed to flip. He briefly pondered his position, and reached a decision.
“Mr. O’Connell, I wouldn’t do this except for my girl and her mother,” said Ferenga, who was soon going steady with the Brooklyn prosecutors. Oddly enough, Ferenga’s beloved wound up dating another mobster, who landed in jail based on Bobby’s testimony two years later.
A street crook like Ferenga was never any closer during his life to Vincent Gigante inside the Triangle than he was to Pope John Paul II inside the Vatican. But O’Connell and the feds decided to roll the dice, squeeze their new informant and listen to his tale.
“Once you have a chance to poke your nose into the tent, good things happen for law enforcement,” O’Connell explained. “It wasn’t a shot in the dark for us. We knew this guy was connected, and could become a great source. When we were debriefing him, it was crystal clear that narcotics were secondary to a potential organized crime investigation.
“He opened the window, so to speak, for us.”
O’Connell recalled his first meeting with Ferenga, a super-secret session in the DA’s office. The prosecutor and his colleagues were joined by the FBI, a couple of Brooklyn DAs and two NYPD homicide detectives. While the feds were looking at the big picture, the cops’ concerns were more immediate.
“Greg,” said one cop, an inch of ash hanging from a still-burning cigarette, “we’re looking for bones. Give us some bones.”
Ferenga did just that, steering the squad to Savino’s old Brooklyn warehouse for a gruesome nighttime dig that was by parts macabre and comical. A search warrant was obtained, and Ferenga accompanied the law enforcers to Scott Avenue to point out the seven-year-old concrete graves.
The building’s head-turning current owner appeared to let the investigators inside.
“She’s wearing a cocktail dress—bright red—and she’s got her lawyer and the keys,” O’Connell recounted. “The lady in red stumbles as she steps into the building, and Bobby catches her arm. She says, ‘Thank you, you’re a gentleman.’
“And Bobby, without missing a beat, says, ‘Lady, I ain’t no gentleman. I am a criminal.’”
The digging commenced near the loading dock ramp, with the NYPD team using a backhoe and jackhammers in their search for Tommy “Shorty” Spero. The first bones they came across were too small for human remains, but Ferenga recognized them immediately: he, Savino and Pappa shared a take-out order of fried chicken while burying Spero’s body.
This was the right spot. When Spero’s body was found, Ferenga solemnly looked to the heavens as if in prayer.
“What are you looking up for?” asked an FBI agent.
“You’re right!” replied a tickled Ferenga, instantly tilting his head toward the hole.
Next was Richie Scarcella, buried beneath a urinal in a bathroom. How was Ferenga so sure of the location? The burial site became a running joke among the killers, who would use the bathroom and announce, “I’m pissing on Richie.”
Scarcella’s body came up, too. And so did the name of Peter Savino, who was joined at the hip with Ferenga in a variety of ways that would land him in jail, too.
“That night a decision was made to arrest Savino and try to roll him,” said Rose.
* * *
Savino, the Mob moneymaker and Chin comrade, was bizarrely enough already on the FBI books as an informant. Busted in 1973 on a New Jersey rap for smuggling bootleg cigarettes, he became among the most uncooperative of cooperating witnesses in history over the next fourteen years.
“I never volunteered information,” Savino later admitted. “I answered questions when they called, but withheld important information.”
This time, with two bodies attached to his old warehouse and Ferenga pointing the finger, Savino faced a far more troubling situation. Rose wasted little time in explaining the situation. He made no threats and provided zero wiggle room. Rose, instead, offered a simple recitation of the facts over coffee in a diner on East Twenty-Third Street. The whole thing lasted twenty minutes.
Rose later recalled his pitch—a fastball, high and tight: “I told him he was going to be indicted for homicide and racketeering, and he would go to jail for the rest of his life. I told him there was only one way out. Plead guilty, wear a wire against whoever we directed him to . . . and that he would have to testify against whoever we caught.
“He was in shock. I told him it was a ‘take it or leave it’ deal. There are no negotiations. I gave him forty-eight hours to make a decision.”
Savino was out of options. He agreed, for real this time, to go undercover for the government. And he reached the decision with hours to spare.
“He knew we had him dead to rights,” recalled O’Connell. “There was no need to persecute him. As we used to say, ‘When you’ve got ’em by the balls, the hearts and minds soon follow.’ ”
As O’Connell recalled, the directions to their new informant were simple: “We told him to talk to every wiseguy he saw, and we’ll see what happens. Now he’s going out to talk to people who would kill him in a heartbeat. He was seeing these guys all the time, and he was at risk of dying every day.
“It’s a very ballsy thing to do. Not many people in the history of organized crime had the balls for that.”
Not only did the feds need to protect Savino, they needed to keep Ferenga’s cooperation a secret. O’Connell recalled the crafty Benny Eggs, smelling a rat (or two), monitored Bobby’s case closely in search of even a tenuous link to Savino or any level of law enforcement.
Adding to Savino’s stress was a strict ban on FBI backup as he met day after day after day with high-ranking associates of the four families involved in the “Windows” operation. The operation went on for sixteen months, with Savino capturing hundreds of hours of incriminating Mob chatter—all while worrying that each day would be his last.
The pressure of his undercover work, hobnobbing with murderous mobsters, literally left Savino scared shitless. A report discussing his time as an informant noted that he was victimized by “periods of diarrhea” that were “associated with his undercover work.”
* * *
The case was almost blown up by a turf war between the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s Office, headed by Giuliani, and the Brooklyn office, where Rose and O’Connell were based. Giuliani’s crew, fresh off the commission victory, caught word of Ferenga’s arrest and decided to claim the witness as their own. They arrested Ferenga on a mail fraud charge and threw him in jail.
O’Connell recalled receiving a collect call from Ferenga, made from the federal lockup across the East River in Lower Manhattan.
“Mr. O’Connell,” the witness began, “you’re never going to believe what happened today. These guys just arrested me. And they said, ‘The only reason you’re in handcuffs, Bobby, is those two fucking scumbags, Rose and O’Connell.’”
Ferenga paused for effect.
“I don’t like these guys, Mr. O’Connell,” the loyal informant continued. “If they think my prosecutors are fucking scumbags, what do they think of me?”
The Brooklyn team sprang their witness from his cell, and the dispute was settled by a grand meeting at the FBI’s Manhattan headquarters in Federal Plaza. Giuliani was there, along with Brooklyn federal prosecutor Andrew Maloney. Both sides gathered to make their case to FBI officials in the crowded main conference room.
O’Connell told the tale of the phone call, and the Brooklyn office carried the day. Afterward, Chief Assistant U.S. Attorney Larry Urgenson of Brooklyn came over to O’Connell, who still remembered his boss’s one-liner: “That was really cool, the way you got ‘fucking scumbags’ in there twice.”
Now the work began. Savino signed off on a deal admitting to his part in the Spero and Scarcella murders, along with four other killings, and pleaded to a racketeering charge. He would face a maximum of twenty years in prison if he held up his dangerous end of the bargain.
Bugs were placed inside Savino’s Brooklyn office in early 1988. And he began wearing a concealed body mike to an assortment of Mob get-togethers, including meetings in the Village with Mangano. By now, Benny Eggs had developed a strong distaste for the high-rolling Savino, who, flush with the window cash, was living in a bigger Staten Island home and driving a black Rolls-Royce with a sand-colored leather interior.
During one March 1988 conversation Mangano sharply shut down a Savino line of inquiry.
“Vincent said when it comes time to . . . ,” Savino began.
“Don’t mention that guy,” Mangano snapped.
“Okay, I won’t mention him,” Savino apologized. “All right, he said to go out and bid the work.”
“Yeah,” grunted Mangano.
A few months later, back in Ruggero’s restaurant again, Savino delivered the news to Mangano that Gaspipe Casso of the Luccheses and John Gotti’s brother Peter were looking to make more cash off the window scam.
“It’s all ours,” said Mangano, reminding the man who started the scam exactly who was in charge. “Nobody’s supposed to touch it.”
The investigation soon settled into a routine: Savino would hit the streets and make his multiple Mob meets. He would make a secret tape drop every few days. The prosecutors would review the tapes, which were stored inside a safe in the U.S. Attorney’s office. Then every two to three weeks, Savino and the prosecutors would get together for a full review of what the latest round of death-defying cloak-and-dagger work had turned up.
“He couldn’t come see us at the U.S. Attorney’s office or at FBI offices for fear that someone would notice him,” said O’Connell. “So we’d find these mountain retreats and go away for the weekend. We’d be living together, debriefing him and strategizing, asking him what was important.
“We were one hundred miles away in these secure mountain retreats. We always took circuitous routes to get up there. Every turn was part of keeping the secrecy of the investigation.”
* * *
One thing became immediately clear: The Chin had emerged as their number one target. The feds even fitted Savino with a special miniature device, a recorder designed specifically to capture Gigante’s customary whisper.
Not everyone agreed that Gigante, doddering through the Village in his nightclothes, was worth the effort. Many in law enforcement believed that the Chin was now the “capo di tutti-frutti,” with his crazy act the real thing based on his age and legitimate health woes. The Brooklyn prosecutors pressed on despite the naysayers.
“When we were running Peter Savino on the street with a wire, Charlie and I met with a lot of skepticism about Chin’s competency,” said O’Connell. “There were a lot of people who thought he was already living in his own jail. They didn’t want to proceed, but our office did.”
While Savino worked the streets, FBI agent Tom Rash began assembling a two-decade history of Gigante’s twisted tarantella with law enforcement. Poring through FBI surveillance reports and Gigante’s medical history, he pieced together a chronology demonstrating that Chin’s well-timed “tune-ups” were inevitably followed by a hasty return to the Triangle.
There was never a single public episode of Gigante breaking down during his daily walks or his late-night wanderings. He was never taken to nearby Bellevue Hospital, but, rather, always to the leafy, suburban facility to walk the grounds, see the same doctors and expand his résumé of mental-health woes.
Chin’s old prison records were fodder for the mill, and turned up no history of psychiatric issues. The resulting chronology, so obvious it seemed impossible that nobody assembled one earlier, was incredibly damning for Gigante. O’Connell remembered how blatantly obvious everything was once laid out by Rash.
“Family members would bring him to the hospital and say he was hallucinating,” the prosecutor recalled. “After a week he was cured. We looked at this and it was like, ‘St. Vincent’s has done its magic again!’”
Savino captured other incriminating conversations, including one featuring representatives from all four families and Local 580 head John “Sonny” Morrissey. The outraged labor leader griped that a non-Mob company had actually managed to land a NYCHA contract, and recounted how he handled the situation: threatening to smash every installed window, and banging them for $14 kickback per window in the future, instead of the typical $2.
In another taped conversation Colombo family associate Vincent Ricciardo proposed a similarly violent solution to handling a contractor who flinched at the $2 payoff.
“I’m throwing him out that window,” the enforcer declared. “I’m telling you, he’s getting it. He don’t want to pay nobody.”
* * *
The tapes were astounding, but Savino’s high-wire act of walking among the Mafiosi was reaching its end. Incredibly, despite the suspicions of Mangano and others, the first word of his defection came from inside the NYPD.
The leak came through Burton Kaplan, the old Casso friend and associate. A crooked officer from Brooklyn’s Sixty-Second Precinct—Eppolito of the “Mafia Cops”—delivered Kaplan a police report that seemed to insure Black Pete’s lifespan was growing short. Kaplan delivered the damning paperwork directly to Gaspipe, who had archly taken to describing Eppolito and Caracappa as his “crystal ball.”
“It said Pete Savino was cooperating with the government.... [The] whole Sixty-Second Precinct was involved with Savino,” Kaplan later recounted. Casso quickly went to the trusted Mangano, who returned to Gaspipe with assurances of Savino’s trustworthiness.
“Benny Eggs came back a week later and said that they took Black Pete down in a basement and they put a gun in his mouth,” Kaplan recounted. Savino apparently convinced Mangano that he was on the level.
“He believed, and other people in the Genovese family believed, that Pete wasn’t an informant,” Kaplan said.
Casso claimed that he also asked for a sit-down with the Chin. It was agreed they would meet at 3 A.M. in Yolanda Gigante’s Sullivan Street apartment.
Casso, accompanied by Amuso, recalled meeting Mangano. The underboss climbed into their car and took the pair on a circuitous tour of the Village to insure they weren’t the targets of a tail. Once satisfied, Mangano had the two park the car and follow him into the basement of a tenement on the same block as Mrs. Gigante’s home.
They trekked through the underground passageways between buildings, a subterranean world of vermin and raw sewage. “It’s like Wild Kingdom down here,” Casso said.
When they finally arrived, the Chin was sitting at the kitchen table in a bathrobe. A bottle of good cognac sat in front of the Genovese boss. Amuso was the only one drinking. Gigante sat impassively as Casso insisted that Savino was wearing a wire for the feds. There was a moment of silence before the Chin spoke.
“I’ll take care of it,” he said.
End of discussion.
Gravano and Casso later approached Mangano a second time to reiterate their concerns and arrange for Savino’s murder.
“I don’t like him,” Mangano told his two business partners, “but Chin loves him. We’re not going to be able to do nothing.”
Lucchese boss-in-waiting D’Arco recalled that Gigante had an unexplained blind spot when it came to Savino.
“Vic (Amuso) told me he was trying to tell the Robe that Petey Savino was a rat,” D’Arco recounted. “But he said Gigante wouldn’t hear of it. He defended the guy to them.”
When the rumors and concerns about Savino were finally confirmed in 1989, Amuso vented his disgust with the Chin: “That asshole should shoot himself now.”
Gigante, late as it was for the realization, decided shooting Savino was the more prudent move. The Chin inquired with the Lucchese family about killing the informant—a hit that never happened.
Savino learned that his cover was blown in a chilling June 1989 phone message.
“We know you’re a rat,” said the voice, recorded by authorities. “We saw you with federal agents.”
It was Negrelli, who had since dropped out of the federal Witness Protection Program and had returned to his old friends and evil ways.
It was time to shut Savino down. The investigation was officially over, with Rose and O’Connell left to put together their sprawling prosecution. The authorities prepared search warrants for more than a dozen window manufacturers. They convinced a half-dozen businessmen to cooperate with the probe about extorted payments.
For the first time in three decades, federal prosecutors were preparing an indictment for Vincent Gigante.
* * *
As the peripatetic Savino kept busy bouncing between families with his ever-present wire, prosecutors were already taking down other members of Chin’s inner sanctum as the federal Mafia crackdown of the 1980s finally reached the Genovese family—and beyond.
The Chin’s handpicked man atop the Philadelphia family, Scarfo, was busted in January 1987 for a $1 million extortion plot on the City of Brotherly Love’s waterfront. The next year he was charged in a massive RICO indictment, and was sent off to serve a fifty-five-year term in 1989. It was an almost guaranteed life sentence, with Little Nicky’s earliest release date set for January 2033.
Even worse, the Atlantic City mobster’s once-loyal crew was flipping against him; his disgusted nephew Phil Leonetti, Scarfo’s born-and-bred right-hand man, went to work for the FBI and became one of their star witnesses.
* * *
The news was just as bad for longtime Genovese associate Morris Levy, the music industry maven who was at one point under investigation by federal grand juries in Los Angeles, New York and New Jersey. The focus was a deal to peddle bootleg albums between Levy and a company called Consultants for World Records.
Among the “consultants” were Fritzy Giovanelli and fellow Genovese member Rocco Musacchia. Baldy Dom Canterino was eventually implicated as well. “An interesting combination,” Levy deadpanned in a 1986 interview about the company’s top echelon.
That same year, FBI agents visited with Levy and his lawyer in the record executive’s Manhattan office. Their mission became clear: They wanted to convince Levy that cooperating with federal investigators against his Mob cohorts was now in his best interests. Prosecutors had served Olympia 2 with a subpoena regarding the town house sale, a move guaranteed to irk the Chin.
It was pointed out to Levy the possibility that his life may be in danger, read an August 1986 FBI document recounting their sit-down with the music mogul. Levy stated he was not in fear of his life and was not concerned about this investigation because he has been federally investigated numerous times in the past without success.
When the agents urged Levy to turn informant, the veteran businessman turned a deaf ear: He replied that the witness security program was a joke and could not adequately protect witnesses. The agents left their business cards and headed back to Lower Manhattan.
The music executive’s decades-long dodge of prosecution ended on a very sour note: Levy and Canterino were convicted in May 1988 for conspiracy in a $200,000 extortion, which was relatively small change for the colorful record company mogul.
Five months later, Levy was sentenced to ten years in prison by federal judge Stanley Brotman at a hearing in Camden, New Jersey, far from the Broadway lights where the kid from the Bronx had found his calling. Canterino received a dozen years.
Levy appealed his conviction, and was freed on $3 million bail. He died of liver cancer in May 1990, his lips still sealed, without spending a day behind bars.
* * *
The law enforcement noose had tightened much closer to home, a harbinger of the uncertain future for the Chin and his crime family. Federal prosecutors in New Jersey unveiled a damning 1988 indictment, the result of a staggering 2,500 hours of wiretaps, charging trusted consigliere Manna with a plot to kill Gotti and brother Gene, along with another pair of Mob murders: hits on the obese con man Irwin Schiff one year earlier, and Frank Bok Chung Chin, who was killed in January 1977, after agreeing to testify against family waterfront power John DiGilio.
The trial was a long time coming for Manna, who had operated in North Jersey for decades with little concern for law enforcement. Manna was so feared and respected that his July indictment and incarceration did not stop his underlings from continuing to pay him tribute: the cash was delivered to his wife, Ida.
In the 1960s and early 1970s, Manna ran the family’s loan-sharking and gambling operations in Hudson County. He was implicated, but never charged, in the 1962 Tony Bender Strollo hit, and was reportedly a witness to the 1960 murder of Salvatore Malfetti, who was shot eight times at close range after authorities identified him as a witness to a 1959 Mob hit. Nearly thirty years later, the authorities finally had Manna in a courtroom.
Schiff’s association with the Genovese family dated to 1964, when he met family associate Joseph Pagano behind bars. Once released, Schiff was soon providing family-run clothing stores with bogus designer-label pants.
Schiff was executed on August 8, 1987, just after putting down a $30 tip on dinner at the Bravo Sergio restaurant on the Upper East Side. He never saw the gunman, who was wearing a dark suit, enter through an emergency exit. Neither did his comely, young and blond dinner companion.
Schiff took two bullets to the back of the head. Authorities suggested his fatal mistake was skimming cash owed to the Genovese family in a $25 million money-laundering scheme. It was later revealed that the big man, who stood six-four and weighed in at 350 pounds, had also worked as an FBI informant.
The prosecutor, three years off his commission triumph, was Chertoff, who was now working the other side of the Hudson River. The case boasted star power beyond its notorious lead defendant: Chertoff’s boss in Newark was future U.S. Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito, and the federal trial judge was Maryanne Trump Barry, the older sister of billionaire developer Donald Trump.
Chertoff, in the new millennium, would go on to become a federal appeals court judge and the head of the nation’s Homeland Security office.
Once again, Gigante—although the power behind the Gotti plot—avoided prosecution as an unindicted co-conspirator. New Jersey authorities flatly said the Chin needed to okay any and all murders committed under the Genovese banner, but Gigante remained a moving target.
“I don’t think we had him,” Chertoff explained years later. “He wasn’t on tape, and the evidence in the case was driven by tapes. But the way it worked, murders had to be approved by the top three guys in the family. And Gigante was the boss.”
The Oddfather still loomed large over the case, even if his name (as the Chin preferred) was never mentioned. Chertoff invoked the infamous Triangle at one point while addressing the jury, presenting the dingy outpost as the epicenter of the unforgiving Genovese universe.
“It’s not pretty to think of a world where disputes are adjudicated in front of the Sullivan Street social club, where life and death were decided,” Chertoff told the jurors.
Jury selection began on February 27, 1989, to assemble an anonymous panel—an effort to keep the jury free of Mob tentacles.
The prosecution announced its witnesses would include the recently rehabbed Fish Cafaro in his courtroom debut. But the case swung mostly on the tapes, which captured a pair of Mob associates heaping praise on the gunman who blasted Schiff in the middle of a crowded restaurant.
“It takes guts to do it like that,” said Frank Daniello, a former Hoboken cop. “This kid is a . . .”
“Stone killer,” interrupted co-conspirator Casella, the restaurant owner.
“He was sitting there with a blond bitch, and they hit him,” said Daniello.
One of the key defense claims was that Manna was attending his son’s twenty-first birthday party on the day he was caught on tape discussing the Gotti hit. Photos from the event were produced. Chertoff pointed out to jurors that the clock in the background showed the defendant arrived ninety minutes after the incriminating conversation occurred.
“What was so important to Bobby Manna that he would be late for his own son’s twenty-first birthday party?” Chertoff asked now. “The only thing that important would be plotting John Gotti’s death.”
The trial stretched across four months, with the jury returning after five days of deliberations: Manna and the rest were guilty. The Thin Man showed not a flash of emotion as the devastating cascade of “guilty” verdicts echoed through the Newark courtroom.
The jury foreman, completely shaken by his four-month crash course in Genovese business practices, held the hands of two fellow jurors for support as he announced their decision.
“This is a tremendous verdict, and a tremendous blow to organized crime in New Jersey,” said Alito. “Any organization that can plot to kill John Gotti is a powerful force.”
Manna, sixty at the time, returned to court three months later for sentencing. Dressed sharply in a dark suit, he sat at the defense table with his head held high and his mouth shut tight. The implacable gangster flatly rejected a chance to address the court, and took his eighty-year prison term the same way he took his visit to the prison dentist—without flinching.
There was one final twist to the trial: Years later, Manna, who was now working as his own attorney, claimed that Barry was prejudiced before meting out his sentence after learning of Mafia death threats against her, Chertoff and the future Supreme Court justice. Manna’s court papers indicated that he was the source of those threats.
“That’s news to me,” Chertoff said with a laugh. “I completely missed it. I’m still alive. I spent the last ten years dealing with terrorists. In a way you’re almost nostalgic for the days of that kind of criminal.”
* * *
The only other legal action involving the Chin was brought by his brother Louis just prior to the Manna trial. The Gigante family petitioned a New York State judge to declare Vincent as mentally incompetent to handle his own affairs. It was a bold move as prosecutors moved in on the Mob boss; the petition could not be challenged by the federal or state investigators pursuing Gigante.
A finding of incompetence would give the Mob boss a permanent stay-out-of-jail card to play.
A psychiatrist retained by the Gigantes provided an affidavit declaring that the Chin “suffers from auditory and visual hallucinations,” as well as from “delusions of persecution.” Father Gigante asked Manhattan State Supreme Court acting justice Phyllis Gangel-Jacob for the appointment to manage his brother’s affairs.
According to an affidavit from the priest, he and his mother now served as primary caregivers for the troubled Vincent. The Chin was living full-time with his eighty-eight-year-old mother in her Village apartment. Father G. further stated that his older brother owned “no real or personal property.” A court-appointed guardian was appointed to submit yet another report on Gigante’s mental health.
Law enforcement sneered at the family’s petition—which was filed one day before federal prosecutors in New Jersey named him in a civil RICO suit intended to cut off Gigante’s control of the Garden State waterfront. The feds flatly identified the alleged “daffy don” as the current boss of the Genovese crime family, and drily noted that a finding of mental incompetence would spare the Chin from any government seizure of his assets. They assessed these as far more valuable than the priest did.
“As far as we’re concerned, he’s still the boss of the family and this could be a legal move to avoid an indictment,” snapped Jules Bonavolonta, head of the FBI’s organized crime operation in New York.
In an old familiar move by this point, Gigante’s attorney had already moved to have his client declared mentally incompetent to answer the Jersey suit. But one year after he filed, Father Gigante dropped the legal effort on his brother’s behalf.
“I wish to spare my brother and members of his family from the probability of a circus-like atmosphere that would attend a hearing on my petition,” the priest said in an affidavit.
Court-appointed guardian Peter Wilson said he believed the original effort was not a scam, but “was brought in good faith.” Attorney Barry Slotnick, speaking for the Gigantes, said the decision to drop the mental-incompetency case had nothing to do with Vincent’s faltering competency.
“His mental state is such that he couldn’t be the boss of a candy store,” Slotnick declared in a remark quoted endlessly over the next several years.
* * *
Father G. made headlines in another unrelated case. The city was shaken to its core in 1989 by the alleged gang rape of a white jogger by a pack of black teens in Central Park, a crime with repercussions that lingered for decades. The woman was sexually assaulted and beaten so savagely that she was comatose and almost unrecognizable.
The outrage was immediate and palpable, and only escalated when five local teens were arrested for the attack. Billionaire Donald Trump took out full-page ads in four city newspapers calling for the return of the death penalty.
Gigante posted $25,000 bail for one of the defendants, Kevin Richardson, creating a media firestorm.
“An angel came to us,” said the young suspect’s attorney. “Rich people and gangsters shouldn’t be the only ones who are freed on high cash bail.” The irony of his comment was apparently lost on the lawyer.
The priest broached the decision with his South Bronx congregation during Mass. Kevin Richardson deserved a chance at rehabilitation, he contended. The fourteen-year-old and his codefendants were eventually cleared of the charges, after years in jail, when another man confessed to the crime.
Years later, Louis Gigante shrugged off the personal attacks that followed his financial backing of the jailed teen.
“That’s the newspapers,” he says. “I don’t think of the newspapers. You think I thought about the newspapers, publicity? I’ll tell you what I was thinking—I’m a priest.”