to kill three others, including Gotti. At sanity hearings in March 1996, Sammy "The Bull" Gravano, former underboss of the Gambino family, who became a cooperating witness in 1991, and Alphonse "Little Al" D'Arco, former acting boss of the Lucchese family, testified that Gigante was lucid at top-level Mafia meetings and that he had told other gangsters that his eccentric behavior was a pretense. Gigante's lawyers presented testimony and reports from psychiatrists stating that, from 1969 to 1995, Gigante had been confined twenty-eight times in hospitals for treatment of hallucinations and that he suffered from "dementia rooted in organic brain damage". In August 1996, Judge Eugene Nickerson of the United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York ruled that Gigante was mentally competent to stand trial; he pleaded not guilty and had been free for years on $1 million bail. Gigante had a cardiac operation in December 1996. On June 25, 1997, Gigante's trial started, which he attended in a wheelchair. On July 25, after almost three days of deliberations, the jury convicted Gigante of conspiring in plots to kill other mobsters and of running rackets as head of the Genovese family but acquitted him of seven counts of murder. Prosecutors stated that the verdict finally established that Gigante was not mentally ill as his lawyers and relatives had long maintained. On December 18, 1997, Gigante was sentenced to twelve years in prison and fined $1.25 million by Judge Jack B. Weinstein, a lenient sentence due to Gigante's "age and frailty", who declared that Gigante had been "finally brought to bay in his declining years after decades of vicious criminal tyranny". While in prison, Gigante maintained his role as boss of the Genovese family while other mobsters were entrusted to run its day-to-day activities. Gigante relayed orders to the family through his son, Andrew, who visited him in prison. On January 23, 2002, Gigante was indicted with several other mobsters, including Andrew, on obstruction of justice charges due to his causing a seven-year delay in his previous trial by feigning insanity. Several days later, Andrew was released on $2.5 million bail. On April 7, 2003, the day the trial began, Prosecutor Roslynn R. Mauskopf had planned to play tapes showing Gigante "fully coherent, careful, and intelligent", running criminal operations from prison, but when Gigante pled guilty to obstruction of justice, Judge I. Leo Glasser sentenced him to