Mobsters and lawbreakers took it on “the Chin” from former prosecutor George Stamboulidis

For thirty years, New York mobster Vincent “the Chin” Gigante had stayed out of jail by feigning mental illness and shuffling through New York in his pajamas. “He claimed that he was mentally incompetent to stand trial because he was a paranoid schizophrenic,” says George Stamboulidis, the U.S. attorney who finally put “the Chin” behind bars. “He had invested a lot of years into that phony, crazy act.”

By Dimitri C. Michalakis

“The Chin” periodically checked himself into St. Vincent’s Psychiatric Ward for what friends euphemistically called “tune ups,” had doctors prescribe him psychiatric drugs like Thorzine to create a paper trail and generally mumbled incoherently on the phone when he thought he was being bugged. “The reason he got the nickname Chin is because he didn’t want people to use his real name, Vincent,” says Stamboulidis, twelve years after he prosecuted the case still mildly-amused at the antics of “the Chin.” “But then he didn’t want his nickname overheard on tapes and he told his ‘family’ and friends to point to their chin when referring to him. And that’s what they did. We had all these tapes where people are saying, ‘This guy’ and ‘That guy’ and you don’t know what they’re talking about, but if you were in the same room you could see them pointing at their chins.”

Eventually, Stamboulidis got Gigante in the replacement windows caper (where the Chin got a piece of every window replaced in New York City high-rises) and he was indicted, stood trial (showing up in a wheelchair and a cane and feigning tremors in what turned out to be the wrong leg, until Stamboulidis pointed out the error) and he went to jail, where he died last year serving out a fourteen year sentence. “I got a call from a reporter who told me, do you have any comment?” says Stamboulidis. “I said, about what? Vincent Gigante died in a federal prison today. And my reaction was, he’s faking. Only he wasn’t faking it this time.”

Stamboulidis, 44, left the Justice Department after 13 years in 2001 to become a partner in the litigation group at Baker Hostetler in New York and head their white collar defense and corporate investigations group. “I do some of the same work and have some of the same psychic income when I represent corporations which are victimized. I represent employees and officers of corporations, investors who get victimized by unscrupulous stock brokers and others, and sometimes I do represent those who are alleged to have committed crimes as well. My years as a prosecutor and my years of cutting my teeth on difficult issues and cases have given me the skill set to succeed as a defense attorney.”

One of the most extraordinary cases he prosecuted for the government was the 2000 indictment against former Los Alamos nuclear scientist Wen Ho Lee for improperly handling classified information. Classified secrets could not be presented as evidence or mentioned unless mentioned in code, according to the Classified Information Procedures Act (CIPA). “So for example,” says Stamboulidis, “if you’re trying a case on what our nuclear designs are like and what our bomb codes are about and how someone would build a nuke you can’t present your evidence in open court so everyone can hear it.

You have to come up with a substitution that CIPA allows you and that the parties would know, and you’d let the jurors know, but the public wouldn’t know it. You can’t have spies from some other country sitting in the gallery of the courtroom and essentially taking notes on how to make nukes.”

The case of Lee was sometimes criticized as an example of prosecutorial overkill, but Stamboulidis defends it: “I don’t think Wen Ho Lee was a scapegoat. He was charged, and thoroughly charged, I would say, with mishandling classified information, which included bomb codes and bomb designs. And that’s serious stuff: we’re not talking about losing a can of beans or a widget, it’s protected for a reason and everybody who works with it knows that.”

After he left the Justice Department, Stamboulidis was named an outside independent monitor for Merrill Lynch in the wake of the Enron case. The firm had been accused of manipulating profit statements for Enron, or what Stamboulidis calls “accounting gymnastics.”

“Justice really started seriously looking into corporate America and really wanting to make examples,” he says. “And that’s still the environment that we live in where it’s open season on corporate America, at least from the perspective of the Department of Justice and the FCC and other regulatory agencies and other prosecutors.”

Is he now defending corporate America as zealously as he once prosecuted it? “It’s a little bit of overkill,” he argues. “Prosecutors are turning standard and somewhat innocuous business practices into criminal behavior. In other incidents, obviously, there were crimes committed, as the people who pled guilty in Enron make clear. The accounting fraud cases against corporate America are going to continue. It’s happening in just about any industry and I’m certain that corporate America has gotten the message.”

When he worked as a prosecutor putting mobsters in jail did he ever get “the message” to back off? “There were threats,” he concedes. “But to tell you the truth, I never took it personally. I wasn’t so worried about mobsters killing me as I was about becoming the victim of a random street crime. I worked in tough neighborhoods, at all hours. And I also prosecuted tax protestors and sometimes they could be even more dangerous than Cosa Nostra hitmen. If you’re ever in a courtroom where there’s a tax protestor case, generally you see more armed federal agents and more high-powered weapons than you would if there was a mobster in the courtroom. You’re dealing with people who are not stable. Wise guys are generally predictable.”

If they were to whack me, so to speak, they knew there would be ten more of me to take my place. Generally when mobsters want to end a case, killing the prosecutor is not a cost effective way to do it.”

Besides, Stamboulidis was famous for the tenacity even mobsters would fear. “If you were going to take the stand and commit perjury and lie and I was going to cross examine you, I’d say you’d be quite nervous,” he says, calmly. He says he likes to practice law by the motto he once saw on a plaque on his father’s desk: “It said, ‘What you might like to believe is the truth may not be the truth.’ And then it said, ‘Don’t stretch it to be the truth.’ As a prosecutor that’s good advice. A prosecutor has a duty to uphold the truth and justice. And that’s why I really love my job now, because as a defense attorney I get to point out to jurors when a prosecutor just wants to win and forgets what was on that plaque in my dad’s office.”

©2009 NEOCORP MEDIA


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