INSIDE AMERICA’S MOST VIOLENT CRIME FAMILY
AND THE BLOODY FALL OF LA COSA NOSTRA
BY PHILIP LEONETTI
with Scott Burnstein and Christopher Graziano
© 2012 by Philip Leonetti, Scott Burnstein and Christopher Graziano
Published by Running Press,
A Member of the Perseus Books Group
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2012938752
E-book ISBN 978-0-7624-4687-2
987654321
Digit on the right indicates the number of this printing
All photos courtesy of Philip Leonetti
Cover design by Whitney Cook
Edited by Greg Jones
Typography: Garage Gothic, Sentinel, and Forza
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CONTENTS
Foreword by George Anastasia
Preface
ACT ONE
Little Nicky & Crazy Phil
In Plain Sight
La Cosa Nostra (This Thing of Ours)
Young Philip
Uncle Nick
Ducktown
Yardville
I’inizio (The Beginning)
The World’s Playground
The Resurrection
Becoming a Killer
Sending a Message
The Payback
Losing Control
The Big Shot Is Dead
The Ides of March, Part I (1980)
Blood Oath
Thank God for the American Jury System
The Ides of March, Part II (1981)
ACT TWO
The Dawn of a New Era
The New King Is Crowned
A Whole New Ballgame
The Fine Art of Revenge
The Prelude to a War
An Old Foe Returns
The Summer of ’82
Taking a Break
Business as Usual
Cleaning the Boat
Falling Apart
Back in Business
Dead Man Walking
Heading South for the Winter
Memories
The Underboss
The Beginning of the End
US v. Nicodemo Scarfo, Philip Leonetti, et al
ACT THREE
Good-Bye, Good Riddance
The End of an Era
On the Road Again
Starting Over
The Diary of a Madman
Lost at Sea
Going Home
The Back Nine
Looking Back, Moving Forward
The New Millennium
Que Sera, Sera
Epilogue
The Last Word
Dedications/Acknowledgments
Index
Photo Credits
FOREWORD
THEY WOULD MEET IN THE EDEN ROC HOTEL IN MIAMI, IN THE RESTAURANT THAT LOOKED OUT ON THE SWIMMING POOL.
Meyer Lansky, the aging underworld genius, would be sitting at a table in the corner. And here would come Nicky Scarfo, the Atlantic City gangster who was soon to be the most violent Mafia boss in America, and Philip Leonetti, Scarfo’s young nephew and future crime family underboss.
Three generations of American mobsters sitting around talking. Lansky, white-haired and thin, in his 70s at the time and fighting heart and stomach problems, would dominate the conversation with stories about the old days. Scarfo, in his late 40s, his brown hair combed straight back, his eyes darting around the room, would nod and occasionally offer an opinion. And Leonetti, trim and movie-star handsome, in his early 20s, would sit quietly.
Listening.
Learning.
Now one of the most important Mafia informants in history, Leonetti never said much during those meetings down in Miami. He was just happy to be there. He looked at Lansky the way others would look at DiMaggio, Caruso, or Hemingway. One of a kind. A man who defined the world in which he operated.
Lansky was there at the beginning, when it all started, when Cosa Nostra was formed. Leonetti, who rode to power with his uncle and who for a time controlled the mob’s rackets in Philadelphia and Atlantic City, is a man who helped bring it all to an end.
“This was back in the 1970s,” Leonetti said several years ago as he recounted those trips to Florida. “Any time we went, my uncle would call and we’d go over and see Meyer. He’d be sitting there in the restaurant. Him, Nig Rosen. Mickey Weissberg. They used to get together there every day. It was, like, Meyer’s hangout. They’d go there and play cards. Meyer liked us. He liked my uncle. So we’d sit around and he’d tell stories about the old days, about Benny and Charlie and how it used to be.”
Benny was Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel. Charlie was Charles “Lucky” Luciano. Siegel, of course, brought the mob to Las Vegas. He built the Flamingo Hotel Casino in 1947 and that turned the desert into a money machine for the mob. Then he forgot who his partners were. And so he was killed.
Years later, Lansky still talked about it.
“Meyer told us about how upset he was when Benny got killed,” Leonetti said. “He really loved Benny. But he said Benny was robbing them guys and he wouldn’t lilsten. He said Benny never liked to listen to the Italians. And that he thought the casino was his, which it wasn’t. It was theirs. Benny would only listen to Meyer and Meyer said he kept him under control the best he could, but when they decided to whack him, there was nothing he could do. It broke his heart when they killed him, but he couldn’t stop it. It was business.
“Then he looked at my uncle and he said, ‘Benny was a stone killer, Nick. But you know, there’s a lot of killers [in the Mafia].’ My uncle just nodded.”
Leonetti would eventually become one himself. That’s part of his story. How he became a hitman for his uncle, how he turned on the man who raised him, and how he eventually ended up on the witness stand are all part of what this book is about.
There has never been a Mafia witness like Leonetti. Not Joe Valachi. Not Vinnie Teresa. Not Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano.
Leonetti is the essence of what the America Mafia was in the 1980s and what it has become in the years since. His life was shaped, twisted, and nearly destroyed by it. His decision to cooperate has turned it upside down.
Call it a story of family values gone awry.
A bloody story of murder that ends with personal redemption.
Murder, extortion, loan sharking, and gambling, Leonetti did it all. Then, faced with the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison and looking at the possibility that his own teenaged son might be heading down the same road, he broke with his uncle, with the mob, and with the life.
From the witness stand he hel
ped bring down high-ranking mob figures in Manhattan, Brooklyn, Boston, Pittsburgh, Hartford, and Philadelphia. Leaders of the Genovese, Gambino, Colombo, Patriarca, and Lucchese crime families are behind bars as a result.
He was, without question, the reason Gravano agreed to testify and, consequently, the reason John Gotti was finally convicted.
Leonetti’s story is the saga of the American Mafia. It stretches from Lansky to Gotti, from Los Angeles to Palermo. It’s a tale of money, murder, and treachery that puts the lie to the so-called “men of honor.” It’s the view of a man sucked deep inside the underworld by the pull of a distorted sense of family, honor, and dignity. And it is a lesson in human redemption and second chances orchestrated by someone who had the intelligence, the strength, and the courage to break the chains that had bound him to “the life.”
For months after his defection, Leonetti had been trying to explain to the FBI and federal prosecutors what it meant to be part of that life. He wanted them to understand the twisted sense of values he had grown up with, about the Svengali-like influence his uncle—a surrogage father, in fact—had held over him.
“It was like walking with the devil,” he said as agents and government lawyers nodded and jotted down notes on the yellow legal pads they always brought to his debriefing sessions. Then they’d go on to the next question, the next topic, and the next chapter in the saga of the rise and fall of the Scarfo crime family. It was clear to Leonetti then that they really didn’t understand what Cosa Nostra does to a person, how it corrupts your soul.
But Leonetti wanted them to understand. After 20 years, he didn’t want to be part of it anymore. He was tired of the murders, worn out by the treachery, and sickened by the deceit. But unless he could explain, unless he could show them, he knew he’d never be able to put it behind him.
Finally, there was one moment when it all came together, when it all made sense.
He was on the stand in federal court in Philadelphia making his debut as a witness. This was in January of 1990, six months after he had broken with the mob and started talking with the feds. He was testifying against four of his former associates, detailing the operations of the crime family he and Scarfo had once controlled, and implicating the four mobsters sitting at the defense table in the organization’s activities.
Dressed in a blue blazer and gray slacks with a dark crewneck sweater over a white shirt and tie, he looked more like an accountant than a hitman. But his testimony was proving to be as deadly in court as his actions had been in the underworld.
Leonetti would admit his own involvement in 10 gangland murders as he testified about the secret organization, the code of silence, the extortions, the loan sharking, and the gambling.
On cross-examination, one of the defense attorneys set out to unnerve him, asking sarcastically if he knew “what it means to be ruthless.”
Leonetti paused briefly to think about the question.
That’s when it all came together. That’s when he was able to make them see. That’s when, in its own perverse way, it made sense.
“I know what it means to be ruthless,” he said in that quiet, firm voice that had the jurors hanging on every word. “But I don’t remember ever doing anything, as a matter of fact I know for sure, I never did nothing ruthless besides, well, I would kill people. But that’s our life. That’s what we do.”
In that life, there was no moral dilemma.
No debate over what it meant to murder another human being.
No question of right or wrong.
It was, simply, Cosa Nostra.
Phil Leonetti had finally made them all understand.
He has left that life far behind him.
This is the story of where he is and how he got there.
—George Anastasia, Crime Reporter, Philadelphia Inquirer
PREFACE
Somewhere Near the Atlantic Ocean, Spring 2011
HE WAS TAN AND FIT, AND WEARING A DARK WINDBREAKER-TYPE JACKET OVER NEATLY PRESSED DRESS SLACKS, WITH HIGHLY POLISHED BLACK ITALIAN LOAFERS. HIS GRAY HAIR WAS NEATLY STYLED, COMBED STRAIGHT BACK. HE WAS WEARING A PAIR OF BLACK DESIGNER SUNGLASSES.
The man seated inside an upscale hotel lobby bar looked like a country club golf pro and not a psychopathic Mafia killer worthy of the moniker “Crazy Phil.” Soft-spoken and polite, he was understated and handsome, and carried himself with an air of confidence.
After exchanging pleasantries, he removed his sunglasses and said, “You have to understand, I come from a very different world than you guys.” His tone was soft as he spoke, his eyes focused. “We live by a very different set of rules. In La Cosa Nostra, if you break the rules, you get this,” he said, shaping his hand like a gun and pointing it toward the ground. “And I broke the biggest rule of them all, I betrayed my oath.”
Philip Leonetti was right there in plain sight more than two decades removed from his life as the underboss of the Philadelphia–Atlantic City mob. Although he had once been a shark, a great white, swimming in a sea of other deadly and bloodthirsty sharks, he now appeared simply as a man—a man with a story to tell.
Over the next three days inside a plush suite high above the sandy beaches overlooking the Atlantic Ocean, Philip Leonetti would provide chapter and verse of his life, both inside the mob and out, to this book’s coauthors.
This was our first time meeting Leonetti face to face, but it wouldn’t be the last. Over the next year we would meet several times in major cities all over the United States, with our final meeting taking place in winter 2012 back in Atlantic City, just steps away from the Georgia Avenue compound where it had all started.
This is the definitive inside story of the bloody rise and treacherous fall of one of the most ruthless Mafia empires in American history.
At the epicenter are two men: Philip Leonetti and his uncle Nicodemo Scarfo.
Crazy Phil and Little Nicky.
What you are about to read is their story, told, in part, by the coauthors based on extensive research and personal interviews, and also by Philip in his own voice. Different typefaces are used throughout to distinguish the two.
It is part Godfather and part Goodfellas, with shades of Casino, Donnie Brasco, and The Sopranos spliced throughout.
But this isn’t a Hollywood movie or television show; this is the real thing.
ACT ONE
Little Nicky & Crazy Phil
DECEMBER 16, 1979
IT WAS A COLD WINTER AFTERNOON, THE TYPE OF DAY WHERE THE FRIGID AIR COULD LITERALLY TAKE A MAN’S BREATH AWAY. BUT ON THIS DAY IT WOULDN’T BE MOTHER NATURE PERFORMING THIS DAUNTING TASK; IT WOULD BE A 26-YEAR-OLD MOB KILLER WITH ICE IN HIS VEINS AND ORDERS TO KILL NAMED PHILIP LEONETTI, WHOSE NICKNAME, CRAZY PHIL, SAID IT ALL.
As the unmistakable sounds of the powerful and unforgiving white-capped waves pounding the shoreline a few feet away punctuated the crisp air on this dreary day, there was no force more powerful and unforgiving, more omnipresent in Philip Leonetti’s life than that of his 50-year-old uncle, Nicodemo Scarfo, the man who had raised him like a son after his own father had abandoned him as a child, and had turned him into a heartless stone-cold killer.
Scarfo, who was nicknamed Little Nicky, stood 5′5″ and weighed a mere 135 pounds. While he may have been small in stature, Scarfo had earned a reputation for committing acts of unspeakable violence that had made him a giant in the criminal underworld.
By 1979, he was the Philadelphia mob’s fastest rising star and had become the de facto boss of the boardwalk in Atlantic City, which, with the advent of casino gambling a year before, had become a boomtown for the mob.
His beloved nephew Philip Leonetti had become his right-hand man, his most trusted aide, and his most able killer. During the late 1970s, in the burgeoning Atlantic City underworld the ground shook when and where Little Nicky and Crazy Phil walked.
It was common knowledge to those doing business in Atlantic City that the equally feared and respected Scarfo and Leonetti were not to be fucked with
.
So when a young mob associate named Vincent Falcone drew the ire of the extremely volatile Scarfo, Little Nicky decided that the penalty would be death and that Philip “Crazy Phil” Leonetti would be the executioner.
Phil Leonetti spoke to Vincent Falcone as the two men stood in the kitchen of a friend’s beachfront home in Margate, an upscale New Jersey beach community a few short miles south of Atlantic City.
Come on Vince, let’s make some drinks.
Inside the living room, just a few feet away, sat Nicky Scarfo, his reading glasses perched low on his nose and his Italian leather shoes resting comfortably on a coffee table as he perused the Sunday edition of the Atlantic City Press while watching the Philadelphia Eagles battle the Houston Oilers, who were led by future Hall of Fame running back Earl Campbell.
“Vince, bring me a Cutty and some water,” said Scarfo in his trademark high-pitched voice, as Falcone set out two glasses for the boss, one to be filled with Cutty Sark, the blended scotch whiskey favored by Scarfo, and the other to be filled with water that Little Nicky used to dilute his drink.
Joining the trio of Scarfo, Leonetti, and Falcone on this fateful afternoon were two aspiring mobsters, young wannabe wise guys who, like Leonetti and Falcone, were members of Nicky Scarfo’s Atlantic City crew. The five men had gathered to have a preholiday celebration. Christmas, after all, was just nine days away.
But there was nothing festive about what would happen next.
After placing the bottle of scotch that his uncle had requested on the kitchen table, the 26-year-old Leonetti nodded toward Falcone.
Vince, get some ice.
The unsuspecting Falcone nodded in agreement and walked toward the refrigerator, turning his back to Leonetti and the others as he did.
Leonetti immediately reached into his black leather jacket and pulled out a small .32 caliber handgun that had been tucked in his waistband. Without hesitation, he moved swiftly behind Falcone and pressed the handgun to the back of his head, directly behind his right ear, and squeezed the trigger.
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