How Did Vincent Gigante Die?
Mobsters DailyVincent "Chin" Gigante died on December 19, 2005, at the U.S. Medical Center for Federal Prisoners in Springfield, Missouri — the same facility where John Gotti had died three years earlier — while serving his sentence for racketeering and obstruction. He was 77, and the empire of whispers he built had already passed to quieter hands.
Prison, the plea, and the admission
Gigante's 1997 racketeering conviction brought a twelve-year sentence, but the government was not finished: a second indictment charged that he had continued directing the Genovese family from prison and had obstructed justice with his insanity performance. In April 2003 he pleaded guilty to obstruction and — as detailed in the Oddfather profile — admitted the mental-illness act on the record, receiving three additional years. The plea was partly practical: it spared his family further prosecution exposure and ended a legal war that had run since the 1980s.
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The final years at Springfield
Transferred to Springfield for medical care as heart and other health problems compounded, Gigante spent his last period as the facility's second famous mob death in three years — Gotti, the boss whose publicity Gigante had always despised, had died there in 2002, a fall chronicled in the Gravano story. Gigante died in December 2005 and received a quiet funeral in New York, deliberately unlike the media spectacles of the Gotti era. His family kept his name; his instructions, reportedly, were that no one speak it.
He remains the strangest boss in Mafia history: a man who shot Frank Costello at 29, ruled a family by pretending he could not rule anything, and confirmed the whole performance himself — the only mobster whose confession was that he had been sane all along.
Frequently asked questions
When did Vincent Gigante die? December 19, 2005, at the federal medical prison in Springfield, Missouri.
How old was Gigante when he died? He was 77 years old.
Where is Vincent Gigante buried? He was given a private funeral in New York after his body was returned from Springfield.
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