The Rev. Louis R. Gigante, benefactor and hero to the poor and disadvantaged, Roman Catholic priest, the son of Italian immigrants and brother of New York mobsters, swept through the crime-ridden and crumbling South Bronx with a baseball bat and a development company that built thousands of apartments for the poor. He transformed some of the worst New York city slums into thriving and safer neighborhoods with thousands of new homes.
He was a savvy street priest, a political and spiritual leader for thousands of residents who, a city medical examiner said, had only a 1-in-20 chance of dying of natural causes. All four of his brothers were mobsters, including Vincent (“the Chin”) Gigante, boss of the Genovese Mafia family that dominated organized crime in New York City for decades.
He became a city councilman, a developer with clout in Washington, the chaplain of the Italian American Civil Rights League and an outspoken defender of criminal kingpins. In short, Father Gigante was both powerful and humble.
But as The New York Times reports today, “even the legend could not live up to the true scope of Father Gigante’s full life.” After he died in October, his will revealed that he was a multimillionaire, and that he had a 32 year-old son, Luigino, born when he was still a priest. He left nearly all his fortune of 7 million dollars to that son.
The revelation discloses publicly that Gigante had flouted one of the basic tenets of the Catholic Church, that priests must remain celibate. The discovery was made in recent weeks by the journalist Salvatore Arena, a former New York Daily News reporter who is preparing a book proposal about Father Gigante and looked up his last will and testament. “I almost fell out of my chair,” Mr. Arena said.
As Arena noted, Father Gigante also appeared to have made minimal effort to hide his son from the outside world in the way that other priests have in the past. The reverend’s personal life had been the subject of decades of whispering in the Bronx and was an open secret among those closest to him but this revelation transforms the rumors into a reality.
A spokesman for the Archdiocese of New York, Joseph Zwilling, said Sunday that several individuals he had spoken to in the church knew nothing about Father Gigante’s son “beyond rumors.”
“While each case would be evaluated and addressed on its own merits, a priest who fathers a child would be expected to provide support for the child and mother. In general, though, priests who have children leave the priesthood, usually voluntarily,” Mr. Zwilling said.
Two lawsuits were filed last year charging that Father Gigante had sexually assaulted a girl in the early 1960s when she was about 10 years old and a boy in the mid-1970s when he was 9 or 10 years old. Both cases are pending in State Supreme Court, according to court documents. Father Gigante did not comment on the suits at the time.
Luigino Gigante said he had been told over the years that the archdiocese hierarchy was aware that Father Gigante had a child and chose to look the other way. He said he was told a version of this scenario as recently as his father’s funeral.
As for his $7M fortune, in the past, when asked about his wealth, he shrugged. “I didn’t take a vow of poverty,” he said in a profile in 1981. That much is true, but he did take a vow of chastity. None of this seemed to have bothered the provocative priest, “People think I don’t get paid and that I’m a saint for doing it. That’s their problem,” he said.
