It’s quite possible that Rudy Giuliani would be dead today were it not for Vincent (the Chin) Gigante, the cunning Mob boss who oversaw the Genovese crime family in the nineteen-eighties and nineties. In 1986, the leaders of the five major New York Mafia families voted on whether to kill Giuliani, who was then the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York and leading an aggressive push to prosecute Mob leaders. John Gotti—the most famous mafioso of his day—led the faction in favor of the motion, but Gigante cast the deciding third vote against it, and the idea was dismissed.

It was a shrewd move by Gigante. Giuliani, in his years as a U.S. Attorney, had an impressive run prosecuting Mafia figures. This track record helped set up his successful run for New York City mayor, in 1993. But he never brought down Gigante, the biggest boss in town. Gigante was a brilliant Mafia innovator. He spent years pretending to be developmentally disabled and schizophrenic, shuffling around Greenwich Village in a bathrobe and pajamas. He relied on a “front boss,” installing Anthony (Fat Tony) Salerno as the nominal head of the Genovese family while he, Gigante, retained most of the actual power, to run his organized-crime empire at a remove, discreetly issuing his orders through the ever-loyal Dominick (Quiet Dom) Cirillo. In 1986, the same year that the Five Families voted on whether to kill Giuliani, Salerno was convicted as part of the Mafia Commission Trial. Gigante remained free for another decade.

In this way, Gigante and Giuliani were allies. They both had an interest in high-profile, tabloid-cover prosecutions of loud, famous Mob figureheads. I have to assume that Giuliani understood the arrangement. He got his heads on a pike, and Gigante stayed out of the spotlight. Gigante was finally convicted—of racketeering and conspiring to kill other mobsters—in 1997, years after Giuliani stepped down as U.S. Attorney. However discreet he had been, Gigante had, on a small handful of occasions, allowed some of the younger guys in his organization to meet with him—and that was his downfall. After decades of committing and ordering murders, and running countless illegal schemes, he was sentenced to twelve years in prison, where he died, in 2005.

What would the Chin make of this week’s madness? What would he think of Giuliani’s oafish, self-destructive, client-destructive blathering on television? On Sean Hannity’s Fox News program Wednesday night, Giuliani—unprompted—revealed that President Trump had lied when he said that he knew nothing about the election-season payoff that Michael Cohen, his longtime fixer, made to Stephanie Clifford, the porn actress known as Stormy Daniels. Giuliani—not heeding Hannity’s panicked warnings—went on to confirm that Cohen almost never did legal work for Trump. This undermined the argument, recently put forward by Cohen’s lawyers, that the records the government seized last month in Cohen’s office are protected by attorney-client privilege. On Thursday morning, Giuliani compounded the damage on “Fox & Friends,” where he first said that the payoff to Daniels—who claims to have had an affair with Trump, in 2006—had nothing to do with the election, before quickly contradicting himself and saying that it had everything to do with the election: an assertion that would support the argument that Trump and Cohen violated election laws.

There are a set of requirements for any successful conspiracy. The flow of information has to be carefully controlled, by limiting all knowledge to as few people as possible, and each participant must have a well-established loyalty and a shared incentive to keep the conspiracy secret. If the conspiracy involves putting forward a false narrative—that a Mob boss is mentally ill, say, or that a President has been successful and ethical in his business dealings and has nothing to hide—then all players must be disciplined in the retelling of that narrative. (It was remarkable, in the early nineteen-nineties, to watch members of Gigante’s criminal and actual family provide rich, detailed testimony about his supposed mental incapacity; his mother and his brother—a priest and onetime New York City councilman—played particularly compelling roles.) Any minor slipup in maintaining such a fiction can be devastating. If Gigante hadn’t allowed Sammy (the Bull) Gravano to meet with him a couple of times, he might never have been caught.

There was always a certain irony embedded in the name of the Trump Organization: there was nothing very organized about it. The company consisted of a few dozen independent actors pursuing their own self-interest but presenting money-making opportunities to the boss, Trump, as if they were all his ideas to begin with and would further his greater glory. Trump does have a few longtime aides who appear to be truly loyal, particularly Allen Weisselberg, now C.F.O. of the Trump Organization, and Matthew Calamari, Sr., who rose from security guard to C.O.O. But most of Trump’s business has been carried out by a frequently changing cast of characters. It’s striking that Michael Cohen, the man whom Trump entrusted with some of his most sensitive secrets, entered Trump’s world only about a decade ago. The President’s relationships with his other public and legal defenders, such as Giuliani, who was added to his legal team last month, are even more tenuous.

It’s impossible to know precisely what Giuliani thought he was doing in his various television appearances this week. I suspect he believed that it would be better for Trump, legally, if the Stormy Daniels payoff was cast as a private matter that Trump paid out of his pocket, as having nothing to do with the election and, therefore, nothing to do with campaign-finance laws. One problem, though, was that Trump had said publicly that he knew nothing about the payoff. Aha!, Giuliani seems to have thought, we can say that Cohen’s monthly retainer from Trump was designed for just this sort of thing: to allow Cohen to take care of problems without bothering Trump with them. It would explain everything: the payoff that Trump didn’t know about but also authorized, the fact that Trump now seems to know about the payoff that he didn’t know about, and the idea that this was not a campaign-related expense. This is precisely the kind of too-clever idea that a lawyer should put to his colleagues before presenting publicly. Did Giuliani allow anyone around him to challenge the logical inconsistencies in his argument? (The Washington Post reporter Robert Costa has said that Trump and Giuliani are “running” their own strategy.) How can it be that the Stormy Daniels payment has been the subject of public debate for months, and yet Trump’s defense team still hasn’t settled on how it is arranging the known facts? The reason is this: everyone around Trump sees his role as performing publicly on Trump’s behalf, to earn the big man’s fickle favor. A shared narrative, repeated with discipline, would guarantee that Trump would find the performance boring and look to someone more forceful and creative.

This, I believe, is roughly how Giuliani found himself on national television saying words that made sense in his head but were obviously absurd when said aloud. Trump’s tweets on Thursday notwithstanding, “people of wealth” do not go around paying six-figure sums to other people who make up accusations against them. Lawyers do not “take care of problems” without letting their clients know. Huge amounts of money paid by a Presidential candidate to prevent salacious information from becoming public in the last weeks of a Presidential campaign are not independent of that campaign. These assertions are so nonsensical that even the Fox News hosts saw through them. (During Thursday’s broadcast, the “Fox & Friends” co-host Ainsley Earhardt let out a seemingly heartfelt “I feel sorry for Melania in all of this. It’s humiliating.” Giuliani forgot to tell her that, per Trump’s own theory, there is no need to feel sorry for Melania because nothing happened, there was no affair, and her loving husband only paid the money to protect her from the embarrassment of false rumors.)