Chin Page 4

  By the time Costello succeeded the deported Luciano as head of the family in 1946, he wielded considerable political power as well. Costello’s close ties with the Manhattan Democratic Party organization, aka Tammany Hall, gave him access to appoint judges and party leaders.

  Corruption-busting ex–New York governor Thomas Dewey once ripped Costello as the “gangster boss of Tammany Hall.” Costello, always tight-lipped about his business, once denied his role as a kingmaker by declaring he couldn’t even fix a parking ticket.

  During a 1951 appearance before the Kefauver Committee, the Genovese family boss deflected questions about his vast influence.

  “What was your ability to persuade politicians?” one senator asked in the nationally televised hearing.

  “I can’t explain it,” replied a raspy-voiced Costello.

  The California Commission of Organized Crime offered a more cogent explanation: Costello’s illegal businesses maintained a $400 million fund for bribing public officials. The West Coast agency also estimated that Costello’s slot machines alone pulled in $2 billion a year.

  Despite his time on the lam, Genovese believed himself the rightful heir to the Mob family throne. He was Luciano’s underboss before bolting to Italy, and intended to right the wrong of Costello’s rise. Bitterness festered in the capo—and he fomented the same ill will among the family rank and file.

  He would wait for more than a decade before making his long-planned move. Taking down such a formidable target required precise planning and a small, silent group of participants. It was eventually conceived as a two-man job: One shooter, one getaway driver. The gunman was reportedly handpicked by Anthony “Tony Bender” Strollo, a Genovese capo from the Village.

  On the evening of May 2, 1957, Costello went out for dinner and drinks on the East Side of Manhattan, a few blocks from his palatial apartment on Central Park West. He was joined by Philip Kennedy, a onetime semipro baseball player now reinvented as an actor and modeling agency manager. The two dined in Chandler’s Restaurant at 49 West Forty-Ninth Street before heading to meet Costello’s wife and National Enquirer publisher Generoso Pope at L’Aiglon on East Fifty-Fifth Street.

  The urbane underworld figure, who believed his problems with Genovese were a thing of the past, traveled the city without a worry or a bodyguard.

  Costello and Kennedy made one more stop, grabbing a drink at Monsignore down the block from L’Aiglon. When Kennedy suggested a final nightcap, he was overruled by the boss. Costello wanted to get home and field a phone call from powerhouse Washington lawyer Edward Bennett Williams, the future owner of the Redskins.

  The two hailed a cab outside Monsignore around 10:40 P.M. and headed uptown to Costello’s residence at the Majestic, just across the street from both Central Park and the equally upscale Dakota.

  Another car made the same trip earlier in the evening, carrying two men. The large black car, with fins on its rear, was driven by Tommy Eboli. Riding alongside him, armed with a revolver, was his old boxing charge, Vincent Gigante.

  The Chin had prepared for this night for weeks in advance, eating and shooting and shooting and eating. The formerly fit Gigante had intentionally bulked up to three hundred pounds, a hedge against future identification by any eyewitnesses. And he invested a considerable amount of time taking target practice in the week before the two men double-parked in the darkness on Central Park West, near Seventy-Second Street, and waited patiently.

  The cab with Costello stopped outside the thirty-story building with its spectacular views, and the boss walked inside as Kennedy paid the driver. Before the taxi could pull away from the curb, Kennedy recalled, he heard a blast “like a large firecracker.”

  Costello was inside the Art Deco building’s stately foyer when the hulking Chin blew past the building’s doorman in hot pursuit, a revolver in his right hand pointed directly at the shocked boss. As he approached Costello, Gigante delivered a menacing five-word line that proved more bark than actual bite: “This one’s for you, Frank.”

  Sufficiently warned, Costello spun, threw up his hand and instinctively flinched. The bumbling Gigante squeezed the trigger of a .38-caliber revolver from point-blank range—firing a single shot, which reverberated through the marble lobby like someone had just fired a cannon—and missed his target. The kill shot was a near miss. Costello suffered a gory-looking scalp wound, but nothing more.

  As the blood poured from Costello’s head, the rotund Gigante—more than one hundred pounds above his fighting weight—waddled from the scene without firing another bullet or checking to make sure the job was done. With the roar of its revving engine, the black car zipped away beneath the sparkling skyline.

  A stunned Kennedy paid the cabbie and ran inside to see what had happened. Costello was hunched over, holding a handkerchief now crimson with blood to the side of his bleeding head. Two terrified building employees stood frozen nearby in disbelief.

  With his night on the town having come to an abrupt finish, Kennedy ran back outside to hail another cab. He led the bleeding Costello to the street, loaded him into a cab and ordered the hack to hightail it toward Roosevelt Hospital on Tenth Avenue.

  Word of the attempted assassination tore across the city so quickly that cops and reporters were already there when Costello’s cab arrived at 11:08 P.M. The Mob boss later told his attorney that one thought ran through his mind during the ride downtown: he was going to die.

  He did not. The magic bullet had entered through the front of Costello’s fedora and exited through the back, traveling along his skull from left to right and tearing off a chunk of flesh above his right ear. The bullet slammed into the lobby wall, with cops later recovering two bullet fragments.

  Costello was quickly patched up and sent on his way, exiting the hospital with his hat—bullet holes in its front and rear—pulled tight over a head wrap. Bloodstains marred his pricey double-breasted brown suit as Costello waded into the waiting crowd. It became immediately evident that he had no intention of violating the Mob oath of omerta, and would keep his mouth shut tight about the entire near-death experience.

  “I didn’t see anything,” he told the disappointed homicide detectives at Roosevelt. On his way to a car parked outside, Costello was accompanied by his wife, who was decked out in a dress and a fur stole. Costello even flashed a smile for the horde of photographers. The New York Times ran a photo of Costello on its front page, while the tabloid Daily News went with large type only: FRANK COSTELLO IS SHOT.

  In smaller print below: Ambushed at Apartment Door.

  Below that came the news that red-baiting Senator Joe McCarthy had died.

  The building doorman, a gentleman named Norval Keith, got a pretty good look at the well-dressed and well-nourished shooter, who wore a dark suit with a matching hat.

  Cabdriver Samuel Miseveth, who rushed the bleeding boss to the hospital, gave a first-person account to the News about his famous fare.

  “It hits me like a flash, Frank Costello!” the cabbie recounted. Kennedy ordered Miseveth to mind his own business and drive before returning his attention to the bloodied Mob chieftain.

  “Don’t worry, Frank,” Kennedy had said. “Say a black Cadillac hit you.”

  Miseveth deduced there was more to the story: “There’s something crazy here, I figured. You don’t get hit by a black Cadillac in an apartment building lobby.”

  A pale and nervous Costello said little as they sped through Manhattan. Once at Roosevelt, Costello gave the cabbie $5 for a forty-five-cent fare.

  The audacious attempt on Costello’s life was a sensation from coast to coast, and the shooter was in the wind. The New York Police Department (NYPD) launched a full-court press to track down the would-be killer, with more than sixty detectives assigned to the investigation. They rousted more than two hundred people, including a who’s who of Mob bigwigs, and grilled them all.

  Concerned the assassin could return and finish the job, the cops assigned a pair of detectives to the lobby where
the bullet flew. The initial police description of the as-yet-unidentified suspect was “between thirty and thirty-five years old, six feet tall, heavy thighs, potbelly, wears a size-50 suit and waddles while he walks.”

  The city’s tabloid seized on the details, and the fugitive gunman became “the Waddler” or “the Fat Man.” Whatever you called him, the shooter with the flabby physique was the most wanted man in the country, with the combined forces of the FBI, the Coast Guard and—somewhat bizarrely—the Motor Vehicle Bureau all called into the pursuit. Even Western Union was alerted to keep an eye out for any kind of suspicious activity, particularly a money transfer.

  As the hunt for the shooter heightened, the architect of the hit—Vito Genovese—hunkered down in his Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey, compound. Bodyguards surrounded him in case the failed murder sparked a war within the family.

  The first break in the probe offered another clue to the amateurish effort: The black getaway car had an outstanding recent parking ticket that raised alarms. The cops ran the plates and discovered that Gigante purchased the car two weeks before the botched hit.

  By May 16, the cops had the Chin’s name. What they didn’t have was the Chin, or any idea how to find him, given the silence on the streets about the failed hit. A “49” notice was sent to every detective squad in the city, with a picture of Gigante and word that he was wanted for questioning in the Costello shooting.

  Word leaked to the papers in early June with the suspect’s identity, setting off another media feeding frenzy. Chief of Detectives James B. Leggett was uncomfortably fielding questions about the previously unknown Gigante, who had suddenly made the leap from Mob obscurity to fugitive celebrity.

  “I only wanted him for questioning because he answers the physical description of the man who did the shooting,” said Leggett, downplaying the news. He was blunter when asked about the Chin’s odds of survival now that his name was known: “If anything happens to him, it won’t be on my conscience.”

  Newspaper reports linked Gigante with Strollo, who had reportedly met with Costello earlier on the day of the shooting to get a handle on the boss’s evening itinerary. The Chin had served as an occasional bodyguard for his Village compadre Tony Bender.

  An ancient FBI document offered testament to Strollo’s loyalty to Don Vito and his résumé, which had just expanded to include attempted murder. The FBI summary stated: Strollo has a reputation of being a racketeer of the notorious hoodlum Vito Genovese and is considered the hoodlum who controls all the illegal activities in the Greenwich Village area. [Informant] advised that Strollo was the top man in shylocking, bookmaking and gambling activities in the Greenwich Village area.

  The Daily News expressed its dismay that the suspect wanted as the nation’s most notorious non-marksman was nothing more than “a fat ex-pug and underworld hanger-on.” Further media disappointment came when Gigante’s no-show handyman job became public knowledge. This nondescript schlub was the daring and elusive Mob killer who tried to take down Frank Costello?

  In the next few days, all law enforcement and court personnel in the city received a “Stop Card” calling for the Chin’s immediate detention. And the NYPD began to put the squeeze on the Gigante family, particularly Vincent’s pretty young wife and his two reputedly mobbed-up brothers, Mario and Ralph. Civilian sibling Pasquale was also questioned; kid brother Louis, two years away from his ordainment as a priest, received a pass for good behavior.

  Olympia Gigante, alone at their 134 Bleecker Street apartment, was visited anywhere from fifteen to twenty times by the NYPD. Dubbed a “sultry brunette” by the city tabloids, the young wife kept her mouth shut and stood by her missing man—a pattern that continued for the rest of her life.

  “He’s not around,” she told the New York Herald Tribune. “I don’t know where he is. He’s disappeared.”

  The loyal spouse gave police the same line. Their response was to put the Gigantes’ cramped Greenwich Village home under round-the-clock surveillance.

  Mario and Ralph took a more confrontational approach. Mario, thirty-three, was driving a car with a dead headlight when cops pulled him over on August 12, 1957, at the corner of Sullivan and Prince Streets. Riding shotgun was brother Ralph, twenty-seven, as things escalated from bad to worse.

  When a detective moved in to frisk the brothers, Mario, nabbed for driving without a license, uncorked a roundhouse punch at the unsuspecting cop. Both brothers were immediately arrested; Mario was charged with felonious assault and Ralph with vagrancy. Each carried a wad of cash, with $717 recovered from Ralphie and $671 from Mario. Cops found a hatchet and a baseball bat inside the car. Neither would be much help in changing a flat.

  Nine days later, when tempers on both sides cooled, Mario paid a $30 fine ($25 for a reduced charge of disorderly conduct and $5 for the headlight). However, three months after the Costello hit attempt, the cops were no closer to putting their cuffs on the portly prey. It was the Chin himself who finally ended the coast-to-coast manhunt.

  * * *

  Vincent Gigante looked quite a bit different when he walked into the West Fifty-Fourth Street police precinct on August 17 than he did departing the Majestic in haste three months earlier. The Chin’s expansive gut had noticeably receded over the summer, and Gigante had swapped his thick tangle of black hair for a crew cut. His new high-and-tight look was recorded for posterity in front and side views via his mug shot. His attorney, David M. Markowitz, accompanied him as he casually arrived around noon.

  Gigante was as terse in the precinct as he had been in the lobby of the Majestic: “Do you want me in the Costello case?” Then he stopped talking.

  Cops wasted no time in tracking down Costello, hopeful the slick boss’s memory could be jogged by the sight of the thuggish gangster in the much-thinner flesh. Costello was at the precinct by 4:45 P.M., arriving in an unmarked NYPD vehicle and accompanied by three city detectives.

  Fifteen minutes later, with a smile on his face and a cigarette in his hand, Costello strutted confidently from the precinct. He offered no comment to the reporters outside—or, as it turned out, to the investigators inside.

  Deputy Inspector Frederick Lusen nevertheless characterized the taciturn Costello as “very cooperative.” The feared mobster was later brought back for a second round of questioning, with the exact same results—nothing.

  Leggett described the suspect as “a small-time gambler,” while the Times expressed surprise that Gigante was still breathing after his monumental miss. In a rather un-Times-like passage, the paper raised the possibility that Gigante “had been feared the possible victim of a gangland ride.”

  Costello’s pal Kennedy seized the surrender as an opportunity to reiterate 100 percent that he absolutely, positively had no idea who pulled the trigger that spring night. He definitely had not identified the man who turned himself in: “It’s a closed incident, as far as I’m concerned.”

  Markowitz insisted his client, who had rarely, if ever, ventured beyond the Village, was living “about five hundred miles” from the city during the manhunt. North? South? West? The lawyer never offered any details.

  He additionally insisted that Gigante had an alibi: He was down in the Village when the shot was fired, and he had learned about the Costello hit from the radio. There were, no doubt, friends and family willing to swear to his whereabouts.

  Gigante’s sudden return thrust the case back into the national spotlight. After the Chin’s surrender, national gossip columnist Dorothy Kilgallen—right beneath an item on the debutante daughter of deep-pocketed philanthropist Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney—weighed in with the scuttlebutt on the suspect.

  On August 28, 1957, Kilgallen wrote: A surprising number of chaps in the underworld guffaw at the idea of Vincent (the Chin) Gigante being the one who shot Frank Costello. They admit he’s a rough type, but they don’t believe he’s the one who creased “Uncle Frank’s” skull.

  Prosecutors didn’t bother to call Kilgallen as a witness.
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  The legendary office of District Attorney Frank Hogan quickly asked for $150,000 bail on Gigante. That was a staggering sum for the times, and especially for a case that wasn’t murder. An outraged Markowitz dismissed it as a “sum which is entirely out of line.”

  Manhattan judge George Tilzer cut the defense lawyer short: “Gigante has shown an open defiance of law and order. This is a serious matter.”

  The assembled grand jury needed just one hour to return an indictment: Attempted murder one. Those summoned to testify included four witnesses, several detectives and Costello, who would only confirm that yes, indeed, somebody had shot him in the head on the night of May 2, 1957. He did not know who, and he did not know why.

  According to the charge, Gigante “willfully and feloniously with a deliberate and premeditated desire” had “attempted to kill [Frank Costello] with a pistol.” The penalty for conviction was steep: the street thug who once did two months in jail was now facing 12½ to twenty-five years.

  Gigante, casual in a suit with a gray polo shirt, sat impassively while chewing gum throughout the grand jury process. He was even mellower at his arraignment one day later, smiling at reporters and waving at the crowd of family members in court.

  “There is nothing more here than an assault—an attempted [assault],” claimed Markowitz, quickly correcting himself. “Just because a person is in the public eye doesn’t make it an attempted murder. They must convince Your Honor that this was an attempted murder.”

  The ensuing bail hearings became a contentious tale all their own. The $150,000 was initially granted, with the prosecution arguing their call to throw the suspect behind bars was solely motivated by their concern for Gigante.

  “There is a good possibility that his life night be in danger,” said prosecutor Vincent Dermody. “The safest place for him is in jail. Those who might have sent him to do the job on Costello would be the ones he would have to fear.”