37 Facts About Vincent Gigante

Vincent Gigante then started working as a Mafia enforcer for what was then the Luciano crime family, forerunner of the Genovese family.

Vincent Gigante was the shooter in the failed assassination of longtime Luciano boss Frank Costello in 1957.

In 1959, he was sentenced to seven years in prison for drug trafficking, and after sharing a prison cell with Costello's rival, Vito Genovese, Vincent Gigante became a caporegime overseeing his own crew of Genovese soldiers and associates based in Greenwich Village.

Vincent Gigante quickly rose to power during the 1960s and 1970s.

Vincent Gigante ordered the failed murder attempt of Gambino crime family boss John Gotti in 1986.

Vincent Gigante was indicted on federal racketeering charges in 1990, but was determined to be mentally unfit to stand trial.

Vincent Gigante died in the United States Medical Center for Federal Prisoners on December 19,2005.

Vincent Gigante had four brothers: Mario, Pasquale, and Ralph, who followed him into a life of organized crime; and Louis, who became a Catholic priest at St Athanasius Church in the South Bronx and city councilman.

Vincent Gigante graduated from Public School 3 in West Village, Manhattan and later attended Textile High School, but dropped out.

Vincent Gigante was a professional light heavyweight boxer between 1944 and 1947, who was known as "The Chin" Vincent Gigante.

Vincent Gigante fought 25 matches and lost four, boxing 117 rounds.

Vincent Gigante then fought Chambers a second time at the St Nicholas Arena on October 6,1944, and defeated him.

Vincent Gigante defeated him again on June 29,1945, at Madison Square Garden.

Vincent Gigante lived in Old Tappan, New Jersey, with his wife Olympia Grippa, whom he married in 1950, and their five children, Andrew, Salvatore, Yolanda, Roseanne, and Rita.

Vincent Gigante had a second family at a townhouse on the Upper East Side of Manhattan with his longtime mistress and common-law wife, Olympia Esposito and their three children, Vincent, Lucia and Carmella.

Vincent Gigante often stayed at his mother's apartment in Greenwich Village.

In 1959, Vincent Gigante was convicted, with Vito Genovese, of heroin trafficking and sentenced to seven years in prison.

In 1969, Vincent Gigante was indicted in New Jersey for conspiracy to bribe the entire five-member Old Tappan, New Jersey police force to alert him to surveillance operations by law enforcement agencies.

The charge was dropped after Vincent Gigante's lawyers presented reports from psychiatrists that he was mentally unfit to stand trial.

Since 1969, Vincent Gigante had been treated 20 times for psychiatric disorders.

Vincent Gigante has been diagnosed since 1969 as suffering from schizophrenia, paranoid type with [periodic] acute exacerbations which result in hospitalization.

Vincent Gigante was reclusive, and almost impossible to capture on wiretaps, speaking softly, eschewing the phone, and even at times whistling into the receiver.

On May 30,1990, Vincent Gigante was indicted along with other members of four of the New York crime families for conspiring to rig bids and extort payoffs from contractors on multimillion-dollar contracts with the New York City Housing Authority to install windows.

In June 1993, Vincent Gigante was under indictment again, charged with sanctioning the murders of six mobsters and conspiring to kill three others, including Gambino boss John Gotti.

At sanity hearings in March 1996, Sammy "The Bull" Gravano, former underboss of the Gambino crime family, who became a cooperating witness in 1991, and Alphonse "Little Al" D'Arco, former acting boss of the Lucchese family, testified that Vincent Gigante was lucid at top-level Mafia meetings and that he had told other gangsters that his eccentric behavior was a pretense.

Vincent Gigante's lawyers got testimony and reports from psychiatrists that from 1969 to 1995 Vincent Gigante had been confined 28 times in hospitals for treatment of hallucinations and that he suffered from "dementia rooted in organic brain damage".

Vincent Gigante pleaded not guilty and had been free for years on $1 million bail.

On July 25,1997, after almost three days of deliberations, the jury convicted Vincent Gigante of conspiring in plots to kill other mobsters and of running rackets as head of the Genovese family.

Prosecutors said the verdict finally established that Vincent Gigante was not mentally ill, as his lawyers and relatives had long maintained.

On December 18,1997, Gigante was sentenced to 12 years in prison and fined $1.25 million by judge Jack B Weinstein, a lenient sentence due to Gigante's "age and frailty".

Weinstein declared that Vincent Gigante had been "finally brought to bay in his declining years after decades of vicious criminal tyranny".

Vincent Gigante relayed orders to the crime family through his son, Andrew, who visited him in prison.

On January 23,2002, Vincent Gigante was indicted with several other mobsters, including his son Andrew, on racketeering and obstruction of justice charges.

Vincent Gigante was a cunning faker, and those of us in law enforcement always knew that this was an act.

On July 25,2003, Andrew Vincent Gigante was sentenced to two years in prison and fined $2.5 million for racketeering and extortion.

Vincent Gigante agreed to the deal to ease the burden on his relatives.

Vincent Gigante died on December 19,2005, at the Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri.