He could often be seen shuffling around his Greenwich Village neighborhood in pajamas, bathrobe and slippers, mumbling to himself and appearing to be a disturbed but harmless person. Gigante, the guise that he adopted in the mid-1960's - behavior that won him the nickname Oddfather - took considerable effort to maintain. His lawyer, Benjamin Brafman, offered the explanation that "I think you get to a point in life - I think everyone does - where you become too old and too sick and too tired to fight."įor Mr. Gigante - that he headed the Genovese organized crime family. Specifically, he acknowledged running a con on the legal system that delayed his racketeering trial from 1990 to 1997 while his sanity was being examined.Īs part of the plea, three more years were added to his prison term, but he avoided a lengthy trial on the other charges, which amounted to an accusation - long denied or sidestepped by Mr. Leo Glasser in Federal District Court in Brooklyn and pleaded guilty to obstruction of justice. Gigante, whose nickname was "Chin," painstakingly maintained the fiction that he was incompetent until April 2003, when he appeared before Judge I. Officials at the prison medical center where he died did not provide the cause of death but noted that he suffered from heart disease. Gigante died while serving a 12-year sentence imposed in 1997 after he was convicted of racketeering and conspiring to kill other mobsters. Vincent Gigante, who feigned mental illness for decades to camouflage his position as one of the nation's most influential and dangerous Mafia leaders, died today in federal prison in Springfield, Mo., officials told The Associated Press.
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