Last Big Mafia Boss: Is He Demented - Or Crazy Like A FOX?

NEW YORK - Vincent Gigante, the last big-name Mafia boss in America, is mentally incompetent. Demented. Schizophrenic.

Gigante, 69, is in a neurological fog of agitation, paranoia and confusion. Or so say his lawyers and doctors.

He is, they argued recently, incapable of caring for himself. More important, they contend, he is unable to participate in his defense in a criminal case in which he is charged with running the most powerful organized-crime family in the U.S.

Although dressed up in fancier medical and legal terms, those were the arguments offered in a federal courtroom in Brooklyn, as defense attorneys launched yet another attempt to keep Gigante from standing trial on federal racketeering charges that date back to 1990.

The trial is scheduled to begin June 23. The case includes seven murders and three attempted murders, all allegedly carried out on Gigante's orders as a leader of the Genovese crime family. Among the hits were six gangland slayings that changed the face of the Philadelphia mob in the early 1980s.

Prosecutors contend that Gigante, who did not attend a recent hearing, has been feigning mental illness for years to avoid prosecution. His act, they say, has included a penchant for walking around his Greenwich Village neighborhood in a bathrobe and mumbling to himself. More recently, they said, he has claimed to hear voices and to communicate with God.

"God is my lawyer. . . . He takes care of me," is what one medical expert, testifying for the defense, said Gigante told him last month.

The expert, neuropsychologist Wilfred van Gorp of Cornell University Medical College, said tests that he and a colleague administered indicate Gigante has an IQ of 68, which would place him in the bottom 2.2 percent of the population.

But prosecutors, referring to an earlier court ruling that labeled Gigante a "shrewd, able and powerful man," contended that the hallucinating and the low test scores are just an act.

"He's crazy, all right," said one federal investigator. "Crazy like a fox."

U.S. District Judge Jack Weinstein appeared to agree. On Tuesday, he dismissed a defense motion to bar the start of the trial on grounds that Gigante was suffering from dementia brought on by vascular problems related to a heart condition or by the early onset of Alzheimer's disease.

Weinstein said that new evidence offered by van Gorp and another medical expert was simply not persuasive and that Gigante and his lawyers should prepare for trial.

Gigante, who was under court-ordered guard in a New York City hospital for the past month, was released on $1 million bail on June 5. He returned to the Upper East Side townhouse of his girlfriend, Olympia Esposito, with whom he has lived off and on for 20 years.

Gigante has three children with Esposito, law-enforcement authorities say. He also has three grown children with his wife, also named Olympia, who lives in New Jersey.

Bizarre behavior has been documented over the years. Once, detectives who went to his home to serve a subpoena found Gigante standing fully clothed in a running shower. About that time, in the mid-1980s, he was often seen walking around near his mob clubhouse in bathrobe and slippers.

"He puts on a show if someone is watching," said Ross.

But law-enforcement sources say the Genovese crime family remains one of the best organized and most disciplined in America.