For years no one had paid much attention to the dying seaside resort. It was such a dead end, Bruno, who was known as the Gentle Don, would send the bad boys in his family to Atlantic City as punishment. But with the prospect of legalized gambling looming and all the money that could be made by infiltrating the unions and ancillary services that are the lifeblood of the casinos, the Gentle Don made it clear that he wasn't about to share his good fortune with anyone else. The New York families saw it differently. They stared down the Garden State Parkway and viewed Atlantic City as close enough to their turf to get in on the action.
Killing a boss is dicey business, and normally this kind of rubout must be approved by the Mafia Commission. Tieri passed the word to the Philadelphia family's ambitious capo in Newark, N.J., Anthony "Tony Bananas" Caponigro, that he had the go-ahead to assassinate the Philadelphia boss. On March 21, 1980, Bruno took a shotgun shell to the back of the head while he sat in his car after dinner in Philadelphia. Weeks later, Tony Bananas's naked body was found in the trunk of a car. He'd been stabbed, strangled, and brutally beaten. Multiple $20 bills had been "stuffed into every orifice of his body, a symbolic gesture, indicating that it was greed that killed him," writes John William Tuohy in his article "The Puppet Boss." Caponigro had committed the mortal sin of taking it upon himself to kill a boss without sanction, and so he was punished accordingly. With the Philadelphia family in confusion as it tried to settle on a new leader, the New York families converged on Atlantic City.
Tieri has the odd distinction of being the first man ever convicted under the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act, better known by its acronym RICO. The RICO laws allowed prosecutors to pursue mob bosses for taking part in a "pattern of racketeering activity," according to Tuohy. Mafia chieftains could no longer claim that they had nothing to do with the crimes their underlings had committed. In January 1981, the government sent a chill through the ranks of the mob when Funzi Tieri, after a lifetime of avoiding convictions, was found guilty. When he rolled into court in a wheelchair for his sentencing, he showed the judge a scar from a recent operation and said that he was a "sick man, very sick" hoping for leniency from the court. He was given a 10-year sentence but died peacefully in the hospital two months later while on bail.
After Tieri's passing, Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno was promoted from consigliere to boss of the family. Author Peter Maas in his book Underboss: Sammy "the Bull " Gravano's Life in the Mafia, describes Salerno as "almost a caricature of an old-line hoodlum, with his cap and baggy pants, his teeth invariably clenching the stub of a cigar, his undershirt peeking above his unbuttoned collar" But Salerno lived up to his tough-guy image. Before becoming boss, he maintained a vise-grip on rackets in Harlem, exacting a percentage from every hood�black, white, or Hispanic� who operated there. In 1986 Fortune magazine put him at the top of their criminal executive list. He had homes in Manhattan and Miami Beach and a 100-acre estate in Rhinebeck, N.Y.
Salerno's criminal career sputtered when he was indicted on RICO charges along with the heads of four of the five New York Mafia families in what became know as the Commission trial. He was eventually convicted and sentenced to 100 years. Five years into his sentence, he died in prison.
Though the government viewed Salerno as one of the mob kingpins in New York, it's now believed that he was just a figurehead, an "up-front boss," like his predecessors. Tommy Eboli and Funzi Tieri had in fact taken orders from little-known mobster Philip "Benny Squint" Lombardo who had ruled the family from behind the throne until his death in 1981. Salerno, after suffering a stroke that same year, became yet another "up-front boss," taking his orders from the strangest gangster in the history of the American Mafia, a man who wandered the streets in his bathrobe and slippers, constantly seemed lost and confused, and forbid his underlings from uttering his name. The press dubbed him The Oddfather.
In the 1980s Vincent "Chin" Gigante was a familiar sight on Sullivan Street in Greenwich Village where he lived with his mother. The large middle-aged man was often seen wandering around in his pajamas, robe, and slippers with a cap pulled down over his head. He would mumble to himself as he shuffled along. Usually he showed a few days growth of beard on his sagging, expressionless face. His downcast eyes were dull and vacant, allegedly the result of his daily medications, which included Valium and Thorazine. His family, particularly his brother Father Louis Gigante, a Catholic priest, adamantly insisted that Vincent was mentally ill and suffered from diminished mental capacity, but the authorities contended that there was nothing wrong with Vincent and that he was in fact the boss of the biggest crime family in the country. In public Father Louis would point to his brother, a pathetic hulking figure who didn't seem to know where he was, and ask how a man in such a state could be the leader of anything. But the police felt that this was just an act and that late at night, when surveillance eyes weren't watching, the real Vincent Gigante emerged.
Gigante first used the mental-patient act to beat a conspiracy rap in 1970. He had been inducted for bribing the entire five-man police force of Old Tappan, N.J., in an attempt to obtain information regarding a state investigation into Genovese activities in that state. His attorneys hired psychiatrists who testified that Gigante was a "paranoid schizophrenic, suffering from hallucinations." The ruse worked, and Gigante was acquitted. He apparently decided that it was a worthwhile preventative measure because he continued to play the role for years to come, reinforcing it with voluntary visits to St. Vincent's Psychiatric Hospital in Harrison, N.Y. Between 1969 and 1990, he checked himself in 22 times. With support from his doctors, he managed to avoid prosecution for nearly three decades.