... For Mr. Gigante, the guise that he adopted in the mid-1960's - behavior that won him the nickname Oddfather - took considerable effort to maintain. He could often be seen shuffling around his Greenwich Village neighborhood in pajamas, bathrobe and slippers, mumbling to himself and appearing to be a disturbed but harmless person. Law-enforcement agents, prosecutors and Mafia defectors described his behavior as a staged performance calculated to evade prosecution for his activities as head of a crime family that under his leadership became the wealthiest and most powerful in the nation.