Vincent Gigante, The Mob Boss Who Faked Insanity For Years To Avoid Prosecution
U.S. Department of JusticeVincent Gigante pretended to be mentally ill for many years in order to eventually elude prosecution.
Starting in the 1960s, New Yorkers living in Greenwich Village became familiar with a stooped figure who’d shuffle down the street in a bathrobe. The man appeared to be mentally unstable. But he was not what he seemed. His name was Vincent “The Chin” Gigante and he was actually a mob boss who faked insanity to avoid jail time.
Born on March 28, 1928, in New York City, Gigante became a protégé of Mafia boss Vito Genovese at a young age, allegedly because Genovese helped out his family by paying for his mother’s surgery. Nicknamed “The Chin” — from the diminutive of Vincent Vincenzo — Gigante swiftly accumulated a lengthy rap sheet.
Gigante was willing to go to great lengths for Genovese, as he proved in 1957. Then, as Genovese tried to seize control of the Luciano Family from Frank Costello, Gigante allegedly attempted to assassinate Costello. The New York Times reports that a doorman identified Gigante but Costello, who afterward ceded control to Genovese, said that he hadn’t recognized the gunman.
Apic/Getty ImagesVincent Gigante after his failed assassination attempt on Frank Costello. August 20, 1957.
Genovese became the head of the Luciano Family, renamed the Genovese family, and Gigante followed in his footsteps in the 1980s. By then, Gigante had begun his infamous “insanity” charade. Because he knew he was under police surveillance, the mob boss would wander around his New York neighborhood in a bathrobe and feign mental illness.
All the while, he was secretly busy at work building the Genovese Family into one of the country’s most powerful criminal organizations.
But the authorities eventually caught onto Vincent Gigante. In 1996, a judge ruled that Gigante was mentally competent to stand trial on murder and racketeering charges. He was found guilty in 1997 and sentenced to 12 years in prison, where Gigante died in 2005.
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