With plenty of love to go around, Vincent Gigante included some of his family in his business affairs. According to a 1989 article by the Village Voice, Gigante's youngest brother, a prominent Bronx priest named Louis Gigante, was hailed for spearheading a housing project which built or renovated thousands of low-income homes.
The problem, though, according to a Village Voice investigation, was "the priest and his publicly financed developments have been a $50 million opportunity for the Mafia. The homes that Gigante's parishioners live in — senior citizen projects, one- and two-family houses, large and small apartment buildings — have been built, to a large extent, by companies owned by or affiliated with top-ranking members of the Genovese organized crime family."
For his part, Father Louis denied being involved in organized crime in any way, denied his family had any involvement in organized crime, and denied the mafia even existed, saying it was an Italian stereotype, per the Village Voice.
This was all going down in the mid- to late-1980s, when Gigante was becoming more powerful in the world of organized crime as the Genovese family boss. Simultaneously, Gigante was regularly spotted in the streets, bumbling around in his pajamas, slippers and a bathrobe (pictured above), per What New York, who also reported that from about 1970 to 1990 Gigante was admitted to 22 psychiatric hospitals. Law enforcement maintained it was all for show, and years later, Gigante admitted as much.
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