Mob Boss Convicted of Racketeering, Death Plots

In a mixed verdict in a crucial mob trial, a jury Friday convicted Vincent “Chin” Gigante, head of the Genovese crime family, of racketeering and two murder conspiracies but acquitted him of seven counts of murder.

Gigante, who claims to be mentally ill and who has wandered the streets of New York’s Greenwich Village in a tattered bathrobe, sat impassively in federal court in Brooklyn when jurors announced their decision.

The verdict, though split, brought down the curtain on the mob’s off-Broadway version of the “Pajama Game,” one of the nation’s longest-running organized crime productions. Gigante, 69, faces 30 years in prison--a virtual life sentence, given his age.

Jurors deliberated 16 hours over three days before ending the career of one of the last of the old- time Mafia dons, who was a contemporary of such crime bosses as Frank Costello and Vito Genovese.

Members of Gigante’s family, who had filled rows of the courtroom during the trial, wept when the verdict was read.

“People are crying all around him, and he doesn’t know what’s happening,” said Dr. Bernard Wechsler, a physician who attended the defendant in the court.

U.S. District Judge Jack B. Weinstein ordered Gigante to surrender within 24 hours at a federal prison in Butner, N.C., where the judge said medical facilities exist to care for his heart condition.

Government lawyers charged that Gigante, as head of the Genovese crime family, ordered the executions of seven lower-ranking mobsters and plotted to murder three others, all in revenge for unsanctioned organized-crime hits. In addition, Gigante was charged with authorizing a lucrative bid-rigging scheme involving windows in public housing projects.

He was convicted of conspiring to kill John Gotti, the boss of the Gambino crime family, and Gotti’s brother, Gene, in 1987, and another mobster in 1989. None of the planned mob hits were actually carried out.

Five years ago in the same courthouse, a jury found Gotti guilty of murder and racketeering. He is serving a life sentence in federal prison.

Gigante’s demeanor and style of dressing contrasted sharply with that of the boastful Gotti, who wore $2,000 suits and expensive hand-painted ties. An FBI agent testified that Gigante owned two bathrobes: a new-looking robe that he wore in the townhouse he shared with his mistress and a soiled, shoddy one that he wore on the street.

The first day of the trial, Weinstein ordered Gigante to shave and to wear a suit and tie. The judge eventually settled for the defendant wearing a jacket and a golf shirt.

Weinstein’s order prompted the headline in the New York Daily News: “Judge to Chin: Come Clean.”

“The Slobfather,” trumpeted another tabloid headline when Gigante showed up in court in rumpled clothes and unshaven.

The trial came after seven years of sparring in court over whether Gigante was mentally and physically competent to be judged by a jury.

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Defense lawyers said he was so seriously impaired that he was incapable of leading a major crime family. Government lawyers countered that his illness was an act.

If it was an act, he carried it out with flair. Once, FBI agents calling on Gigante to serve court papers found him standing naked in the shower holding an open umbrella.

In the courtroom, Gigante sat in a wheelchair, mumbling to himself. Sometimes his legs shook. To the outside world, he seemed oblivious of the proceedings against him.

Prosecutors called a parade of mob turncoats to testify, but only Peter Savino linked Gigante to any of the crimes.

Savino told the jury that in the early 1980s, a former associate of the Genovese crime family ordered him to kill a youth, which he declined to do.

Prosecutors also played tapes of Gigante sounding rational in ordinary conversations with his girlfriend. But an effort by federal agents to place a recording device in her upper east side Manhattan townhouse failed.

Instead, an FBI agent peered through binoculars at the alleged crime boss.

Charles Beaudoin, the FBI agent, testified he saw Gigante reading ledger books and newspapers and conversing with visitors in ways showing he was rational.