Vincent “The Chin” Gigante ran the most powerful crime family in New York — while pretending to be insane.
Ex-Mafia boss Vincent Gigante dies in prison
Mob boss Vincent “The Chin” Gigante, the powerful Mafioso who avoided jail for decades by wandering the streets in a ratty bathrobe and slippers, feigning mental illness, died Monday in prison, officials said. He was 77.
For thirty years, he wandered the streets of Greenwich Village in a bathrobe and slippers, muttering to himself, carrying an unlit cigar, and babbling like a lost soul. Neighbors thought he was harmless. The cops called him “The Oddfather.” But behind the act was one of the sharpest criminal minds in Mafia history — a man who turned madness into camouflage.
It wasn’t just performance. It was strategy.
Gigante started as a boxer — tough, quiet, calculating. He once fought Rocky Graziano. When the ring didn’t pay, he moved into hits. He became Vito Genovese’s protégé, his loyal trigger man. He even tried to kill Frank Costello, the sitting boss of the Luciano family, shooting him in the lobby of his apartment building. Costello survived — barely — but the message was clear: Vincent Gigante wasn’t a man you crossed.
By the 1980s, he controlled the Genovese crime family — the most disciplined, secretive, and untouchable of the Five Families. But law enforcement was closing in, bugging phones, flipping underbosses, building cases. So Gigante did something no mobster had ever tried: he went invisible.
He began the act. Slurred his words. Took slow walks in pajamas through Little Italy. Checked himself into psychiatric wards. Doctors diagnosed him with dementia and schizophrenia. The FBI watched helplessly as “The Chin” shuffled past them in slippers, seemingly lost in his own mind — then went upstairs to quietly run meetings from his bathroom.
For decades, he fooled everyone. Judges. Agents. Even psychiatrists. His men called him “The Pope” — not out of respect, but because his orders were whispered through layers of intermediaries, holy and untouchable. He’d meet capos in the shower, whispering plans under the sound of running water to block FBI bugs.
The charade worked. While other mob bosses were dying in prison, Gigante reigned — quietly, invisibly — for thirty years.
Until 1997.
When prosecutors finally confronted him with taped conversations proving his sanity, Gigante dropped the act. “It was all an act,” he admitted. “I fooled them.”
He’d turned madness into the perfect alibi. A Shakespearean mobster who used theater as armor.
But even geniuses run out of stage time. In 2005, in his final years behind bars, a priest asked if he regretted faking insanity. Gigante smiled and said, “Regret? I lived free while the rest died in cells.”
Vincent Gigante didn’t beat the law — he outperformed it. He wasn’t crazy.
He was criminally brilliant.
And in a world built on violence, he proved that the sharpest weapon a gangster could wield — wasn’t a gun.
It was an act.
Denying he was a gangster, Gigante would wander the streets of the Greenwich Village neighborhood in nightclothes, muttering incoherently. Relatives, including a brother was who a Roman Catholic priest, insisted Gigante suffered from paranoid schizophrenia, dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.