Thursday, March 23, 2006

The Pajama Hearsay Game?

Remember Vincent Gigante? He was the mobster who, starting in the mid-60s(!), feigned mental derangement to avoid criminal punishment. See Selwyn Raab, Mob Boss Who Feigned Incompetence to Avoid Jail, Dies at 77, NYTimes (Dec. 20, 2005). Gigante, nicknamed variously Chin, Oddfather, the Enigma in a Bathrobe, was nothing if not persistent: As the moniker Enigma in a Bathrobe suggests, one of his strategies was to walk around Greenwich Village in pajamas while muttering nonsense words. Well, that's all very interesting. But what I want to know is whether his kind of pajama-walking and nonsense-talking is hearsay.