[link:
|
"Alleged head of the Genovese crime family, Vincent Gigante (1928-2005, pictured in 1990) evaded conviction for decades by feigning mental illness. Gigante was known for walking the streets of New York City in a bathrobe while talking to himself".
Rudy Giuliani and the Desperate Campaign to Protect the President
"It’s quite possible that Rudy Giuliani would be dead today were it not for Vincent (the Chin) Gigante, the cunning Mob boss who oversaw the Genovese crime family in the nineteen-eighties and nineties. In 1986, the leaders of the five major New York Mafia families voted on whether to kill Giuliani, who was then the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York and leading an aggressive push to prosecute Mob leaders. John Gotti—the most famous mafioso of his day—led the faction in favor of the motion, but Gigante cast the deciding third vote against it, and the idea was dismissed.
It was a shrewd move by Gigante. Giuliani, in his years as a U.S. Attorney, had an impressive run prosecuting Mafia figures. This track record helped set up his successful run for New York City mayor, in 1993. But he never brought down Gigante, the biggest boss in town. Gigante was a brilliant Mafia innovator. He spent years pretending to be developmentally disabled and schizophrenic, shuffling around Greenwich Village in a bathrobe and pajamas. He relied on a “front boss,” installing Anthony (Fat Tony) Salerno as the nominal head of the Genovese family while he, Gigante, retained most of the actual power, to run his organized-crime empire at a remove, discreetly issuing his orders through the ever-loyal Dominick (Quiet Dom) Cirillo. In 1986, the same year that the Five Families voted on whether to kill Giuliani, Salerno was convicted as part of the Mafia Commission Trial. Gigante remained free for another decade.
In this way, Gigante and Giuliani were allies. They both had an interest in high-profile, tabloid-cover prosecutions of loud, famous Mob figureheads. I have to assume that Giuliani understood the arrangement. He got his heads on a pike, and Gigante stayed out of the spotlight. Gigante was finally convicted—of racketeering and conspiring to kill other mobsters—in 1997, years after Giuliani stepped down as U.S. Attorney. However discreet he had been, Gigante had, on a small handful of occasions, allowed some of the younger guys in his organization to meet with him—and that was his downfall. After decades of committing and ordering murders, and running countless illegal schemes, he was sentenced to twelve years in prison, where he died, in 2005.
What would the Chin make of this week’s madness? What would he think of Giuliani’s oafish, self-destructive, client-destructive blathering on television? On Sean Hannity’s Fox News program Wednesday night, Giuliani—unprompted—revealed that President Trump had lied when he said that he knew nothing about the election-season payoff that Michael Cohen, his longtime fixer, made to Stephanie Clifford, the porn actress known as Stormy Daniels. Giuliani—not heeding Hannity’s panicked warnings—went on to confirm that Cohen almost never did legal work for Trump. This undermined the argument, recently put forward by Cohen’s lawyers, that the records the government seized last month in Cohen’s office are protected by attorney-client privilege. On Thursday morning, Giuliani compounded the damage on “Fox & Friends,” where he first said that the payoff to Daniels—who claims to have had an affair with Trump, in 2006—had nothing to do with the election, before quickly contradicting himself and saying that it had everything to do with the election: an assertion that would support the argument that Trump and Cohen violated election laws."
read more
https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/rudy-giuliani-and-the-desperate-campaign-to-protect-the-president
Edit history
= new reply since forum marked as read
