Vinnie the chin is no more

Mobster died in prison hospital.

And, until his 1997 conviction, Gigante had served only a five-year heroin rap in 1959. He also turned his claim of mental illness - first used to escape trial in a 1970 police-bribery case - into a full-time strategy, behaving oddly in public, checking into psychiatric treatment clinics whenever the FBI turned up the heat.

Once, agents serving a subpoena found Gigante standing naked in the shower, holding an umbrella. Another time, upon spotting agents watching him, he fell to the sidewalk and prayed.

But the good times ended in July 1997 when he was convicted of racketeering.

More here.

UPDATE: In other dead news, columnist Jack Anderson is dead. Described by J. Edgar Hoover as "lower than the regurgitated filth of vultures," Anderson was the author of the nation's longest running political column.

Mr. Anderson's decidedly roguish techniques included eavesdropping, spiriting off classified documents, rifling through garbage (Mr. Hoover's, in particular) and sometimes blatant threats - methods he defended as justified in his lifetime campaign to keep government honest. His printing of verbatim transcripts of the secret Watergate grand jury thwarted Mr. Nixon's efforts to stonewall the scandal by hiding behind grand jury secrecy.

Not only was Mr. Anderson on Nixon's notorious list, but G. Gordon Liddy, a Watergate burglar, plotted his murder.