The Rev. Louis Gigante, a Catholic priest, politician and protector of his mob boss brother Vincent Gigante, died Wednesday. He was 90.
His demise was confirmed to The New York Occasions by Joseph Zwilling, spokesman for the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York. His reason for demise was not disclosed.
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The Greenwich Village native, the youngest of 5 sons born to Italian immigrants, emerged as his brother’s unapologetic protector as federal prosecutors pursued Vinvent, the Genovese household boss often called “The Chin.”
The elder sibling was infamous for his decades-long efficiency feigning psychological sickness to dodge federal investigators and prosecution.
Louis Gigante was an city developer and Metropolis Council member equally at residence within the pulpit and the general public eye.
He was a school basketball star at Georgetown College and have become deeply concerned in creating much-needed housing within the deeply poor and violence-ravaged South Bronx, primarily in Hunts Level.
In an interview with the Each day Information years later, in 2007, Gigante mentioned crime and neglect within the neighborhood had been forcing his parishioners from their properties.
“Our neighborhood was devastated fully,” Gigante mentioned. “Town had deserted us.”
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His Southeast Bronx Group Group (SEBCO) rehabilitated or constructed a number of thousand housing models within the needy neighborhood, and Gigante was awarded hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in grants and subsidies for his South Bronx tasks from the federal Division of Housing and City Improvement.
Gigante served two phrases as a Democrat on the Metropolis Council after a failed run for Congress in 1970, shedding a main bid to Rep. Herman Badillo.
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A statue honoring the activist priest was erected within the South Bronx, and he was honored in 2017 for his rebuilding efforts within the neighborhood.
Louis Gigante stood by Vincent earlier than and after the Mafia chief was convicted in 1997 of racketeering and different crimes dedicated as boss of the highly effective crime household.
Vincent Gigante died in jail in 2005 after avoiding prosecution for many years by pretending he was mentally sick and unfit for trial. The brothers had been typically seen collectively in Greenwich Village, the place Vincent lived and wandered the streets in a ratty bathrobe and mumbling to himself as a part of his legislation enforcement dodge.
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Louis Gigante attended Cardinal Hayes Excessive College within the Bronx and landed an athletic scholarship to Georgetown, as soon as scoring 24 factors towards George Washington College.
After getting into St. Joseph’s Seminary in Yonkers, he was ordained a priest at age 27 in 1959.
At his St. Athanasius parish within the Bronx, Louis Gigante’s congregation as soon as included future Supreme Courtroom Justice Sonia Sotomayor. He retired from the parish in 2002 and from SEBCO in 2007.
In 2021, Gigante was accused of sexually abusing a 9-year-old Bible scholar in his Bronx parish within the early Sixties and a boy age 9 or 10 within the mid-Seventies. Each circumstances had been pending in State Supreme Courtroom, in line with the Occasions, which cited court docket paperwork.
