Chin Page 3

  “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 names
ake, 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.

  CHAPTER 3

  CHANGING OF THE GUARDS

  GIGANTE TURNED EIGHTEEN IN 1946, BETWEEN WORLD WAR II and the Korean War. Not that the service was ever in the cards for him: Vincent was qualified 4F, unfit for duty due to “antisocial behavior” apparently linked to his teen arrest.

  His new career with the Genovese family got off to a rocky start. There was a 1947 arrest for grand larceny and auto arson. He settled with a plea to the reduced charge of malicious mischief and probation.

  The Chin did his first bit behind bars in 1950 after District Attorney Miles McDonald of Brooklyn started cracking down on local bookmakers and corrupt cops, who took cash to look the other way. Gigante, along with a Sullivan Street pal named Peter Lombardi, was popped for distributing gambling cards to Brooklyn College students and other young bettors: “Even down to elementary school,” charged prosecutor Julius Helfand. “This was the eastern arm of a national betting syndicate” that extended to St. Louis and Minneapolis, he said.

  Gigante told the arresting officers that he was a “jobless tailor” living in the Village.

  Brooklyn college hoops star Michael DiTomasso, twenty-one, identified Gigante as the guy who provided the gambling cards, where bettors had to pick the winners of four games from a slate of contests across the country to collect a $10 payout. Anyone who could nail fifteen of fifteen would win $500.

  DiTomasso said his take for peddling the cards on Gigante’s behalf in December 1949 and January 1950 was $12 a week—on a good week.

  A second Chin codefendant was cleared of his part in the plot when he admitted printing the betting cards—but only, he insisted to authorities, because Gigante scared the hell out of him. Gigante was sentenced to sixty days in the Rikers Island workhouse by an avuncular judge, who passed along his advice for the Chin to wise up about the wiseguys.

  “We don’t think you’re totally bad,” declared the sentencing judge. “We would just like to pull you up by the bootstraps.”

  The year 1950 was big for Gigante on the home front, too. Once he came out of jail, he married a neighborhood girl, Olympia Grippi, in a traditional Catholic ceremony at Our Lady of Pompeii. The pair had known each other for years, with the Chin first falling for her when they were both kids. She, too, came from a big Italian clan, with six sisters and a brother.

  Gigante popped the question to his first love during Sunday Mass in the Village. They moved in with his parents and then had four children in rapid succession: Yolanda, Rosanne, Salvatore and Andrew.

  The growing clan moved several times as the family expanded, although they never went beyond a two-block radius of Thompson and Bleecker Streets. Newlywed Gigante was arrested once more in September 1951 after cops found him carrying two blackjacks.

  And he was put in cuffs three times in 1953: He paid a $1 fine for shooting dice, a throwback to his days as a Village teen. A disorderly conduct charge was resolved without prosecution. A bookmaking arrest resulted in a $75 fine.

  FBI documents indicate he was involved, but never arrested, for working with a car theft ring operating out of the Village in 1955. The Chin and pal Dominick “Fat Dom” Alongi were suspected of stealing late-model Cadillacs and selling the hot luxury cars out of state.

  And then the Chin disappeared from the police blotter as he moved off the streets and up the Mob ladder. With the powerful Vito Genovese as his guru, Vincent was soon working as a gofer, a bodyguard, and then the future don’s driver. The latter was a position of importance, trusted with guarding the gangster’s life.

  * * *

  By now, Vito Genovese had beaten his long-ago murder rap. The ambitious Mafioso was accused of killing one of his “business” partners during a 1934 dispute over cutting up the proceeds of a rip-off. After learning there was a witness ready to implicate him, Genovese bolted for his homeland in 1937. After years of wrangling, he was finally brought home to face the consequences.

  However, the guy expected to sing was suddenly silenced for good.

  Cigar salesman Peter LaTempa never reached the witness stand. While in police protective custody at a Brooklyn jail, the damning witness fell ill and was given prescription pain pills to combat a balky gallbladder. Instead, he wound up popping enough poison to kill eight
horses, according to an autopsy.

  It was hardly Genovese’s first murder to serve his own ends. Authorities had long suspected the widower had ordered the husband of his second wife strangled in 1931 to clear the way for their own marriage.

  The young Vincent Gigante was never accused of any killings, Mob or otherwise, but an FBI memo from the era flatly stated that he was up to the task. The Chin “obtained his status and position” via his “reputation as an efficient hit man,” the FBI document said, “as well as through his close association with [top Genovese associate] Frank Tieri.”

  Vincent landed a no-show job through the Mob as a Village building superintendent, where his lackadaisical approach to work nearly killed him. On the evening of May 12, 1956, Gigante arrived at St. Vincent’s Hospital with a stab wound to the right side of his chest.

  A report in the long-defunct World-Telegraph provided the details: The Chin wound up brawling with a black underling infuriated because he was left to handle most of the work in Gigante’s frequent absence. When some of Gigante’s Mob associates arrived to put a beating on the black man, a full-scale melee erupted as the victim’s friends flew to his aid.

  Other problems were less complicated. The Chin collected—and ignored—a number of traffic tickets.

  * * *

  At this point Genovese was openly feuding with family head Frank Costello. A bootlegger once financed by legendary gambler Arthur Rothstein, Costello assumed the mantle as head of the nation’s richest borgata (family) following Luciano’s conviction on a prostitution rap.

  Costello was regarded as the nation’s most powerful Mob boss, and was widely referred to as “the Prime Minister of the Underworld.” He arrived in New York from his native Italy in 1895 as a four-year-old boy, and he never looked back.

  He did a ten-month stretch in 1915 after his arrest for carrying a pistol before moving into organized crime. The dapper and savvy Costello worked his way quickly toward the top of the Mob hierarchy, and was credited with calling a “peace conference” in the wake of the 1929 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago.