Chin Page 9
At one point Gigante ventured a little too far afield with the doctor. He popped a Thorazine “as if he were eating a potato chip.” Asked why, Gigante’s response was simple: “Needed it.”
“This kind of dramatic gesture,” Davidson wrote, “is sometimes seen in malingerers.”
The psychiatrist also raised the possibility of Ganser’s syndrome, strange behavior brought on by arrest or imprisonment. Law enforcement generally dismissed the psychobabble and “considered it faking,” the doctor said.
Five days later the authorities popped into the Triangle to make a gambling arrest. The Chin was not among those taken away by city cops.
Gigante finally arrived in court—he almost never missed a date—to hear his doctor Michael J. Scolaro testify that the Chin’s April 1970 admission followed an overdose of prescription medicine, which was possibly a suicide try. The Chin was also suffering from hallucinations, the doctor revealed.
Gigante’s FBI file for the first time made mention of Father G.’s presence in the courtroom. Newspaper clippings on the priest were soon a regular feature of the growing file.
Dr. Henry Davidson took the stand on June 4. The Chin’s performance made an impression, and the doctor acknowledged the veteran mobster appeared schizophrenic, but he added a caveat.
“Generally, schizophrenia begins in late adolescence,” he testified. “It is characteristically a disease which begins maybe at eighteen, nineteen, twenty years of age. It is quite rare to have it begin in the fifth decade of life, which is the forties. This is quite rare.”
Davidson didn’t stop there. Rather than a two-week hospital stop on his own terms, the doctor maintained, the Chin needed “intensive treatment.” He suggested electroshock therapy, a conclusion that the defense fought mightily to circumvent.
The sanity struggle came to a bit of a crossroads at a June 11, 1971, hearing. Judge Morris Malech noted that the defense wanted Gigante declared crazy, but not too crazy.
“It seems to me somewhat anomalous to say this defendant is insane insofar as his ability to stand trial, his competency to stand trial, so that he’s too insane to be tried and yet he’s not insane enough to be treated properly,” the judge told attorneys for both sides. “You understand? It is a problem.”
As the hearing was winding down, a voice came from the audience in the Hackensack courtroom.
“Your Honor, may I approach the court?” the man asked.
“No,” shot back Malech. “It is improper to do so.”
The man in the crowd was undeterred: “Why is it improper?”
“I’ve said it was improper,” the judge volleyed back.
“It’s impossible that a citizen cannot address the court?” the man asked theatrically.
“When I say that, for all I know, you may be about to award me a commendation,” said Malech, who later put off a decision on Gigante’s mental state. “Frankly, I don’t know what you have to say. It’s improper to have a citizen at any time just get up in this courtroom and speak because he’s wearing the robe of a priest. It is improper.”
Father Louis Gigante was quick to respond.
“It’s not impossible,” the priest responded, “if you wish to speak.”
And Father G. was a man prone to speaking his mind.
CHAPTER 6
WITH GOD ON OUR SIDE
LOUIS GIGANTE’S METAPHORICAL ROAD TO DAMASCUS BEGAN ON the streets of the Village, detoured south through Georgetown University, and led him into the South Bronx.
From the start the youngest of the Gigante boys was a smart and athletic kid who developed into a basketball prodigy. He attended the local Catholic school, Our Lady of Pompeii, where the religious youth developed a close rapport with one of the nuns. She wound up steering him toward the priesthood—not that it took a lot of nudging.
“I always remember wanting to be a priest,” recalled Father Gigante, who kept a correspondence with his mentor-in-a-habit for decades.
He recalled fond memories of his youth on Thompson Street and the surrounding environs.
“I grew up on that block,” he reflected decades later. “I became a great basketball player from that Boys’ Club. They took the immigrant kids, and we went into that club. I learned there, became a basketball player, went to Georgetown.”
Young Louis became an all-city basketball star at Cardinal Hayes High School in the Bronx. His game had been honed on the courts of the West Side, where the Village’s West Fourth Street court remains one of the game’s legendary outposts. At five-ten, Gigante was a scorer, a lightning-quick scrapper and a demon on defense.
His hoop dreams came true when Louis Gigante earned a basketball scholarship to the Catholic university, moving to Washington and joining the Hoyas. Though later to become an NCAA powerhouse, Georgetown was a middling program at the time: they earned just one postseason bid between 1943–1970.
They had Gigante to thank for that single trip.
In the 1952 through 1953 season, with junior guard Louis Gigante running the show, the Hoyas—led by the future priest’s seventeen points—knocked off NCAA-bound Navy and nearly upset eventual NCAA champion LaSalle and its star, Tom Gola.
Father Gigante giddily recalled an upset victory over Maryland when he shut down future NBA star Gene Shue, who managed just eight points against his stifling defense.
Georgetown received an NIT bid, with Louis Gigante returning to play in the old Madison Square Garden on Eighth Avenue before a hometown crowd of fifteen thousand (Louisville beat the Hoyas, 92–79, despite his thirteen points).
The senior cocaptain, known to teammates simply as Lou, returned to the Garden for the twelfth game of the next season against mighty NYU, its campus just a jump shot from his old haunts. It was the last contest of his college career: Lou suffered a season-ending broken foot.
The charismatic Lou became a leader around campus, too, as he struggled with doubts about following his vocation. There was a girlfriend, and a decision to be made. Lou’s mom dealt with the issue in the way that she knew best.
“I prayed a lot for her,” she said. “Now she’s married, and has four children.”
Father G. went to St. Joseph’s Seminary in Yonkers, and was ordained in 1959. Vincent was thrilled by his kid brother’s vocation.
The neophyte priest spent two years in Puerto Rico, becoming fluent in Spanish, before returning to St. James Church on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The young priest earned a small measure of notoriety by halting a “rumble” between two local youth gangs and earning a reputation as a guy who could get things done.
“I was never one to push myself on the public,” Father G. recalled. “People were pushing me. If you look up my life—I mean, the News, the Post, the Times, they liked the story. They liked the priest who was out in the street. They liked that stuff.”
He landed in the South Bronx at St. Athanasius in 1962 and never left the beleaguered parish. His brother Vincent was about halfway through his stretch in Lewisburg by then. The young priest harbored no illusions about the Chin’s position in the old neighborhood.
“He controlled it. He controlled all the crime,” said Father G. “Made sure nobody was getting hurt. Men [or] women with problems went to him. And he had his little bundle of friends. What did they do? Play cards. I cannot tell you. I didn’t get involved in the intricacies of it. But I certainly knew. My brother was a good man. And he had to abide by the rules and regulations he accepted to be what he wanted to be.
“And he did. And he knew that he could depend on me and trust me. And he was very proud of me.”
If the working-class Bronx neighborhood around the church was devolving into a nightmare of arson, drugs and poverty, the parish had a good reputation: Cardinal Terence Cooke once served as its pastor. Those days, as the priest would learn, were well in the past. The parish’s eight thousand members, who once filled the church for a dozen Masses each Sunday, dwindled to about two thousand within a decade of Father G.’s arrival.
Father G. was one of five parish priests who became a band of South Bronx brothers.
“My best friend was one of the priests,” Father Gigante said decades later. “We loved it. It was tough work, but we loved it. The only place we ever recreated was in the room, around eleven o’clock at night, having a few drinks, ’cause we lived together. That was great.”
The neighborhood’s steady, incessant decline lit a fire in the priest, who was known to walk the area while wielding a baseball bat. Yet even as he became the South Bronx’s most vocal advocate, he stayed in touch with his Village roots and the family.
“I came home sporadically to see my mother on Sullivan Street, around the block,” he recalled. “Get to see my brother Vincent all the time, but life went on.”
So did Louis Gigante. He earned a master’s degree in psychological counseling at Iona College. When the archdiocese tried to move him to another parish, Father Gigante politely refused to leave St. Athanasius.
“I really believe a priest should move to a place, and live and die there,” he said in 1981. “Otherwise, if it’s three years here and three years there, it’s just like pumping gas. You never really get to know the people.”
Father G.’s ministry was all-inclusive. He served as chaplain for the Italian-American Civil Rights League, which was Mob boss Joe Colombo’s brazen attempt to deny the very existence of the Mafia. When Colombo was gunned down during a 1971 rally, the priest heard the news on his car radio. He immediately drove to the hospital to perform the last rites on the wounded don–who was paralyzed, but lingered for another seven years
Father Gigante was introduced to the group’s lawyer, a formidable young attorney named Barry Slotnick. The lawyer’s legal role models included brother Vincent’s old defense attorney, Maurice Edelbaum. Interestingly, Father G. also baptized the children of a future Bronx prosecutor, Philip Foglia. The powerful priest had the ear and the support of his bosses: Cardinals Cooke and John O’Connor.
Up in the increasingly lawless Bronx precinct known as “Fort Apache,” the priest improbably went into the construction business. The South East Bronx Community Organization, also known as SEBCO, was formed in the fall of 1968, with thirteen organizations banding together in an effort to rebuild the area.
When his secular efforts ruffled some feathers in the church’s Fifth Avenue chancery, Gigante invited Cooke for a tour of the neighborhood to set a few things straight.
“He may not have understood what I was doing, because nobody around him tells the truth,” the priest said bluntly. “They all have their axes to grind.”
His political career launched in April 1970, when the cigar-smoking priest—with an abandoned car and a vacant, trash-covered South Bronx property as a backdrop—announced a bid for the U.S. Congress. He became the archdiocese’s first political candidate, finishing third in a six-man field.
A year later, Father G. founded the Bruckner Democratic Club to build a constituency beyond the pulpit. In 1973 the priest was elected to the city council. When redistricting forced him to run again one year later, he was returned to office.
Although he opted not to run again in 1977, Louis Gigante was a guy with more than a little political sizzle when he left the business. He considered running for city council president, but his ambitions were trumped by unspecified “family reasons.” By now, his brother Vincent, who was solidly into the insanity act, was living on Sullivan Street with their mom.
There was, at one point, a conversation about Father Gigante following in La Guardia’s footsteps, from Greenwich Village to City Hall.
“Look at me,” Father G. now says self-deprecatingly. “I was asked to run for mayor one time. I said, ‘You’re out of your mind! I’ll get killed.’ I was hot.”
SEBCO, with a staff of three, opened its own offices in January 1978, and was formally incorporated as a not-for-profit a few months later. Father Gigante served as its president, and collected a salary for his efforts. He told the New York Times that the money allowed him to support his widowed mom.
Unmentioned: the priest also footed the bills for Vincent’s legal bills.
“I didn’t take a vow of poverty,” Father G. said of his SEBCO income. “People think that I don’t get paid and that I’m a saint for doing it. That’s their problem.”
Louis Gigante, in the nascent days of the post–Stonewall Riot gay rights movement, became one of the most vocal supporters of legislation to bar housing and workplace discrimination against homosexuals. He specifically blasted the church hierarchy; this was a typically ballsy move for a priest whose bosses would fight against gay marriage well into the next century.
“The chancery is presuming that all homosexuals are perverts who want to grab kids and hunt them, which is a horrible accusation,” he said in 1974. “I am troubled as a Catholic. They have encouraged bigotry and irrational fear. The real threats to family life are poverty, ignorance, hopelessness, blind fear and lack of loving communication between human beings. The values which sustain family life are trust, compassion, dignity and love.” (The sexual orientation of the Gigantes’ gay brother, Pasquale, remained a family secret.)
When not saying Mass or saving his slice of the South Bronx, the priest was soon palling around with one of Vincent’s friends: Morris Levy of Roulette Records.
“He became very close to me, and loved me, and we just hung out together,” the priest recalled. “And so he went upstate and bought some eight hundred acres and built a mansion. And so when I was fatigued from everything I was doing, I’d run up there on a Friday and come back Sunday morning at six o’clock to do Mass. Two or three Masses. I loved it. When I got up there, I just slept.”
The two socialized in the city, too, with the so-called “slum priest” sometimes coming down to Manhattan to hit the clubs. On the night of February 26, 1975, the two men were joined at the Blue Angel nightclub by Nate McCalla and an attractive young woman. Father Louis was wearing a three-quarter-length leather coat, with his Roman collar tucked into a pocket.
As they left the club on East Fifty-Fourth Street, they encountered a city police lieutenant, another cop and a third man heading out from dinner at a restaurant named Jimmy Weston’s. Lieutenant Charles Heinz noticed the good-looking lady as the two groups passed.
“You’re a beautiful young woman,” witnesses recounted Heinz as saying.
Not a word was spoken as McCalla grabbed the cop and pinned his arms down while Levy rained punches on the helpless lieutenant’s face. The beating was so fierce that the outnumbered cop, a fourteen-year NYPD veteran, lost an eye.
The priest broke up the fight—blessed are the peacemakers—and the trio climbed into a waiting limo and left, police later said. The injured officer noted the license plate on the fleeing vehicle, and the car was traced to its owner. When questioned, the man recalled that one of the people in the limo was a priest.
As the investigation heated up, Father Gigante walked into a Bronx police precinct and asked if the cops were interested in speaking with him. Tips had already led the cops to Levy and McCalla after the injured cop, with his one good eye, picked the pair out of a lineup.
The story exploded once the Daily News reported the priest, along with his religious vows, had taken an oath of omerta and refused to testify before a grand jury. His two pals were nevertheless indicted for assault.
The priest insisted his decision not to take the stand was done on the advice of his lawyer after prosecutors asked him to sign a waiver of his immunity. Gigante claimed that he offered four times to testify without the waiver, but prosecutors refused. Father G. insisted he was walking toward his own car when the brawl broke out behind him.
“I heard shouting and screaming,” he told the Daily News. “I turned around and saw three men fighting with Levy. The report said the men weren’
t intoxicated, but believe me—they were drunk and assaulting people.”
The priest’s leather coat was torn before things subsided.
The case mysteriously disappeared before McCalla and Levy went to trial, although Heinz brought a civil suit that was settled out of court. The priest’s ties to the well-connected Levy fueled speculation of a connection with his brother’s life of organized crime; the talk proved nothing, although rumors resurfaced across the years.
But Father G. was always treated with deference by Vincent’s Genovese associates. FBI agent Charlie Beaudoin, who worked the Gigante case in the 1980s, said the priest carried himself with a touch of gangster swagger.
“People are still afraid of him,” said Agent Beaudoin. “He was treated like a capo when his brother was alive. He was like a PR guy for Vincent.”
Father G. was back in the headlines in October 1979, when the priest spent seven days behind bars after refusing to testify about conversations he had with city prison officials on behalf of mobster James Napoli. The chats, where Gigante urged authorities to cut Napoli some slack from the rigors of life behind bars, were secretly taped.
The priest was unrepentant about his efforts. Napoli was an “old and dear friend,” and Father G. argued that he was entitled to keep their conversations private because of his vocation. He appealed a contempt citation all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, only to lose.
Supporters turned out in Lower Manhattan to give him a hero’s farewell when the priest went off to do his ten days of time, trimmed by seventy-two hours for good behavior.
CHAPTER 7
A PAWN IN THEIR GAME
WHILE BROTHER LOUIE WAS MAKING HIS WAY THROUGH THE POLITICAL jungle in the Bronx, the Chin was stuck fighting the charges in New Jersey—and the former boxer was winning on points in a battle that promised to go the full distance.