CRIME HUNTER: The Oddfather kept cops and wiseguys guessing

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The New York tabloids had a field day with the head of the notorious Genovese crime family.

They called Vincent “The Chin” Gigante “The Oddfather.”

Gigante discovered fairly early in his criminal career that if he acted like a nut, mumbling to himself and wandering the streets of New York’s Greenwich Village wearing a bathrobe and pajamas, it could buy him leverage.

His lawyers would say he was schizophrenic and suffering from a tractor-trailer load of other mental health maladies. But it was all an act – and it worked for a very long time.

“The Chin was a long way from being nuts,” former Gambino underboss Sammy the Bull told me. “He was the smartest guy in the room.”

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Gigante was born in 1928 to an Italian immigrant family in Greenwich Village, his redoubt for decades. Three of his brothers followed him into the underworld, and his other brother, Louis, became a priest.

A tough kid who dropped out of high school early, Gigante began boxing, then heavily controlled by the mob. He clocked 25 fights, losing just four.

But by the late 1940s, he had fallen under the spell of vicious mobster Vito Genovese, becoming something of a protégé. When the older mobster paid for his mother’s surgery, Gigante’s loyalty was won.

Mostly, he was a petty criminal around Greenwich Village and was nabbed on countless occasions for a slew of crimes, including gambling, loansharking and bookmaking. He told cops he was a tailor.

By 1957, the big time was on his doorstep. Genovese decided to take control of the borgata by rubbing out Lucky Luciano’s proxy, Frank “The Prime Minister of the Underworld” Costello. Gigante was the triggerman, and while Costello only took a superficial wound, he retired from crime.

At Gigante’s trial, Costello testified that he saw nothin’.

After a five-year jolt for heroin trafficking, Gigante returned to the Big Apple as capo of the Greenwich Village crew. Where he got the idea to play crazy man, no one knew, but he began his act in the 1960s.

“I would characterize Gigante as a legendary figure in the annals of organized crime because he bridges several eras going back to the 1950s when La Cosa Nostra was in its heyday,” Matt Heron, head of the FBI’s Organized Crime Division, told the New York Post in 2005.

“He was a traditional mob boss, who in later years put on a charade with a bathrobe and slippers, and to give the devil its due, it worked for quite a number of years.”

Still, the Oddfather was smart enough to try and bribe a small New Jersey police force to let him know if the feds were around. Then, there were the psychiatric reports.

He was, in the opinion of headshrinkers, mentally unfit to stand trial. Gigante also had a low IQ, they stated.

“Vincent Gigante has been diagnosed since 1969 as suffering from schizophrenia, paranoid type with [periodic] acute exacerbations which result in hospitalization,” his psychiatrist, Dr. Eugene D’Adamo, said.

Yet, despite his “limitations,” The Chin became Genovese top dog in 1981. Under his auspices, his empire of crime and vice included all manner of lucrative rackets. He even squeezed vendors at the famed Feast of San Gennaro in Little Italy.

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The Chin proved to be a worthy adversary for the feds and the NYPD. He barely spoke above a whisper and did most of his business doing walk-talks around the Village. He avoided the phone and always made sure someone was at his house, knowing the feds would plant a bug.

What the FBI and local cops did know was that Gigante had a secret mistress and second family on the Upper East Side. And he always conducted his business at night.

Gigante was so secretive that his underlings were forbidden from even using his name. Instead, they’d rub their chin or make the letter C.

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The Genovese kingpin managed to delay his day of reckoning for years until he was convicted in 1997 of racketeering, extortion and plotting to murder Gambino boss John Gotti in 1986. Six stoolies pointed the finger at the Chin, and it was game, set and match.

They painted a portrait of an omnipotent mob boss who knew everything that was going on.

During his trial, the feds managed to acquire taped phone conversations of Gigante sounding like a Harvard professor. Scratch that, smarter than the denizens of the faculty lounge.

In court, the Chin finally confessed: He was not insane, never had been.

He was sentenced to a lenient 12 years in prison. And that was where he died on Dec. 19, 2005, at the U.S. Medical Center for federal prisoners in Springfield, Mo. He was 77.

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To longtime mob observers, Gigante was the real deal. Gotti was an egotistical, not particularly bright, money-hungry poseur. And he was greedy, whereas Gigante was not.

“Chin was very well-liked by his crew because he didn’t ask for a lot of money from his capos, his soldiers,” federal prosecutor Greg O’Connell later said.

Gravano agreed: “He ain’t that interested in the money. He already had a ton of money. His biggest problem was where to hide it. He didn’t take money from most of his captains.”

Sammy told me that when Gotti told Gigante that John Jr. was going to be made, the old gangster replied: “I’m really sorry to hear that.”

bhunter@postmedia.com

@HunterTOSun