Mafia Prince: Inside America's Most Violent Crime Family

by Phil Leonetti

  Using his many connections to the New York underworld, which included a deep personal relationship with the powerful Carlo Gambino, Bruno got the Commission to depose Pollina and Bruno was anointed his successor.

  Showing a level of mercy not often displayed by men in his position, Bruno spared Pollina’s life. Instead of killing him for his indiscretion, he banished the defeated former boss into retirement.

  The controversial move earned Bruno the nickname, the Docile Don.

  What the future would hold for Bruno and those operating in and around the Philadelphia mob, which now included rackets in neighboring Atlantic City, would be anything but docile, especially once Nicky Scarfo and his nephew Philip Leonetti gained control.

  Young Philip

  My name is Philip Michael Leonetti, and I was born on March 27, 1953, in Philadelphia. My father’s name was Pasquale Leonetti and my mother’s name was Annunziata Scarfo, but everyone called her Nancy. I was born into this life, the Mafia, La Cosa Nostra. It was inevitable for me. It was literally in my blood.

  Both sides of my family, the Leonettis and Scarfos, had immigrated to the United States from Naples and Calabria, and both families had strong ties to the Mafia in Italy before I was born.

  My grandfather Christopher Leonetti was a mob-connected hood who ran with a crew of guys in Manhattan’s Little Italy. In the ’20s, he got killed after his crew tried to shake down a couple of guys they thought were low-level greaseballs, siggys, but turned out to be high-ranking Sicilian gangsters. They ended up whackin’ him and leavin’ him in the street.

  Growing up, my Uncle Nick would tell me, “The Sicilians, the siggys, they are not like us, they can’t be trusted.” It’s something I would never forget.

  My father, Pasquale Leonetti, was a well-respected gambler who was picked by Angelo Bruno to oversee many of the mob-controlled card and dice games that operated in and around South Philadelphia in the late ’50s and early ’60s. Angelo Bruno was the boss of the Philadelphia mob; he was the Don.

  Back then the mob had games in the back rooms of almost every restaurant, neighborhood bar, corner store, and social club in South Philly. Knock-around street guys from the neighborhood would come and gamble, drink booze, smoke cigars, and escape from their wives or girlfriends for a few hours in these joints, and the mob was making money catering to them.

  First of all, the mob ran the games, which means they won more than they lost. The house always wins. Second, they were selling booze to the gamblers, which means they were making money on the booze and the gamblers would get drunk and end up gambling more than they should. That’s when one of the mob guys who was workin’ in that joint would pull the gambler aside and loan him money at a high-interest rate so that he could keep drinking and gambling, or use the money to pay the rent or the electric bill.

  If a guy borrowed $10,000 and the loan shark charged him two points, he would have to pay $200 a week in interest—which was known as the vig or the juice—every week, and he still owed the $10,000. So let’s say it took him 10 weeks to pay the money back; he’d pay $2,000 in juice money and the $10,000 in principal, so he’d end up paying $12,000 on a $10,000 loan. If it took him a year to pay back, he’d pay over $10,000 in interest and still owe the $10,000 in principal. This is primarily how the mob makes its money even today—illegal gambling and loan sharking.

  Now my father had a reputation as a serious gambler, not only in South Philadelphia, but in Jersey and even New York. He was so well known and respected that Walter Winchell, the famous journalist, wrote a piece on him. This is why Ange picked my father to run those games. He was that good. But when it came to being a father, he was no good; he was a bum.

  After his luck took a turn for the worse, Pasquale went from running the mob’s top card games to owing the mob the money he lost and couldn’t pay back when he gambled himself. Pasquale Leonetti had crapped out.

  When Philip was just a baby, Pasquale left Philadelphia and headed south to Florida, leaving Nancy and young Philip to fend for themselves. Angelo Bruno had taken Pasquale’s exterminating business as a way of clearing his debts. Philip and his mother were left with nothing.

  By this time Nancy’s parents, Philip and Catherine Scarfo, had also left South Philadelphia, moving 60 miles east to Atlantic City. The once booming seaside resort known as the World’s Playground had fallen on hard times and was considered down and out by the early ’60s. It had literally gone from boom to bust.

  The Scarfos purchased two connecting apartment buildings at 26-28 North Georgia Avenue in the city’s Italian enclave known as Ducktown. Each building stood four stories tall and was two and a half blocks from the world famous Atlantic City Boardwalk and the sandy beaches leading to the Atlantic Ocean, and was surrounded by other similarly structured row homes.

  Nancy’s father, Philip Scarfo, was a laborer who worked at Atlantic City’s prestigious Chalfonte-Haddon Hall Hotel.

  My grandfather, Philip Scarfo, was a wonderful man. I was named after him. When I was little and we lived in South Philadelphia, he had a job where he had a horse with a wagon and he used to give me rides around the neighborhood. He’d also take me crabbing when I was a little boy. He was a hard worker his whole life and was never involved in the mob or anything illegal. He was 100-percent legit.

  Nancy’s mother, Catherine Scarfo, was a homemaker and a devout Catholic who faithfully attended Mass every morning at St. Michael’s Church, which was located less than 50 yards from the Scarfo family home.

  My grandmother was the typical old-school Italian matriarch. All of her grandchildren called her Mom-Mom. She went to church every morning, not just Sundays, and her cooking, my God, nobody cooked like her. She was a real character, one of a kind. She was well liked in the neighborhood; if someone had a problem or needed advice, they’d come and see Mom-Mom.

  Her three brothers, Nick, Joe, and Mike Piccolo, were all well-respected soldiers in the Bruno crime family, which was based in Philadelphia but maintained a strong presence in New Jersey, particularly in the cities of Trenton, Newark, and Atlantic City. Each had been adorned with the same nickname; they were known respectively as Nicky Buck, Joe Buck, and Mikey Buck, and owned and operated Piccolo’s 500, a notorious mob hangout that grew into a popular restaurant and club in South Philadelphia. Michael “Mikey Buck” Piccolo was Philip Leonetti’s godfather.

  My great-uncle Mike used to take me fishing when I was a little boy with my cousin Ronald. He was a nice man, a gentleman.

  My great-uncle Nick Piccolo, Nicky Buck, who was on my mother’s side, was married to my grandfather’s sister, my aunt Mary, on my father’s side.

  This marriage strengthened the Scarfo–Leonetti bond.

  Then there was Philip’s Uncle Nick.

  Uncle Nick

  NICODEMO DOMENIC SCARFO WAS BORN ON MARCH 8, 1929, TO PHILIP AND CATHERINE SCARFO IN BROOKLYN, NEW YORK. IN 1941, WHEN NICK WAS 12 YEARS OLD, THE SCARFO FAMILY, WHICH NOW INCLUDED YOUNGER SISTER ANNUNZIATA (NANCY), LEFT NEW YORK AND SETTLED IN SOUTH PHILADELPHIA, WHICH WAS BY THEN HEAVILY POPULATED BY SECOND-GENERATION ITALIAN FAMILIES.

  As a young boy, Scarfo spent his summers working in the sprawling blueberry fields in Hammonton, New Jersey. Known as the Blueberry Capital of the World, Hammonton is a small town located 30 miles east of Philadelphia and 30 miles west of Atlantic City. It sits smack dab in the middle of the 60-mile corridor that connects the two cities with the Atlantic City Expressway. Scarfo had learned first-hand about the tireless life of a laborer, a life that he wanted no part of as an adult. His big dreams didn’t involve picking blueberries for a living. To him, people who worked for a living were “jerk offs,” and Nicky Scarfo didn’t fancy himself a “jerk off.”

  Scarfo, who would come to be known as Little Nicky for his diminutive size, stood a mere 5′5″. He was voted most talkative by his classmates at Benjamin Franklin High School, which he graduated from in 1947, and his senior yearbook declared the same year that he was out to “lick the worl
d.” What Scarfo lacked in height, he made up for in fearlessness. Despite his size, he began to box in his late teens under the name Nick Scarfo and amassed an impressive record in small clubs fights on the Philadelphia boxing circuit. But as the 1950s came, the bantamweight Scarfo decided that he was better suited for life outside the ring.

  Nicky Scarfo wanted to be a gangster, just like the movie-star mobsters he grew up admiring in the shoot-’em-up flicks he would sneak into the theater to see as a kid. Guys like Paul Muni in the 1932 gangster classic Scarface, not the top baseball players of the late 1940s like Stan Musial and Ted Williams, were Nicky Scarfo’s idols. Like the working stiff, athletes were also “jerk offs” to Little Nicky.

  It’s sad to say, but my uncle looked down on his own father because he was a hardworking guy and not a gangster. He was never outwardly disrespectful to his father, but they weren’t very close. My uncle’s only ambition in life was to be a gangster, even from the time he was young.

  In the late 1940s and early ’50s, Scarfo began his mob apprenticeship, working as a bartender and a bookmaker at Piccolo’s 500, where his schooling in the ways of La Cosa Nostra began under the direction of his uncles, the Buck brothers. While Nicholas “Nicky Buck” Piccolo was teaching his nephew about the ins and outs of mob business life—like how to be a bookmaker and run numbers—Felix “Skinny Razor” DiTullio, one of the mob’s most feared hit men, was teaching him how to be a killer.

  My uncle’s first hit, he did it with Skinny Razor. There was a guy in South Philly who had a fruit stand; they called him the Huckster. The Huckster’s brother had a problem with Skinny Razor and Skinny Razor got the okay to kill him. So him and my uncle went to the guy’s store in South Philadelphia. It was during a real bad snowstorm and the guy let them into the store and they killed him. They stabbed him to death. When they were done, they cut his balls off and put them in the guy’s mouth. That’s how my uncle learned about killing, from being around Skinny Razor.

  Felix “Skinny Razor” DiTullio took an early liking to the young Scarfo, and Little Nicky was an eager student. Bonding in bloodlust, Skinny Razor taught Scarfo the art of the mob hit. It was a skill he would cherish, continue to hone, and eventually master.

  By 1954, at the age of 25, Nicodemo “Little Nicky” Scarfo had acquired the reputation in the underworld that he had sought: he was known as a mad-dog killer, thanks in large part to the teachings of his mob mentor, Skinny Razor DiTullio. Scarfo was proposed for membership in La Cosa Nostra by DiTullio and his uncle Nicholas “Nicky Buck” Piccolo, and as a result was formally inducted into the mob by then-Philadelphia mob boss Joseph Ida at an official making ceremony held at a restaurant and lounge named Sans Souci in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, just over the bridge from Center City Philadelphia.

  Two of Scarfo’s uncles, Tony and Mike Piccolo—the younger brothers of Nicholas “Nicky Buck” Piccolo—were also inducted into La Cosa Nostra at the same ceremony.

  Nicky Scarfo had achieved his dream: he was a bona fide wise guy, a made man.

  The blueberry farms of Hammonton were ancient history. He would never again be a working stiff, a civilian, a “jerk off.”

  Back then it was almost unheard of to be made at such a young age in Philadelphia. My uncle was only 25. His uncles, Tony and Mike Buck, who were made at the same time, were twice his age—they were close to 50 at the time.

  Even then, Nicky Scarfo was on the fast track in La Cosa Nostra.

  Because he was with Skinny Razor, my uncle got to meet a lot of gangsters in North Jersey and New York and they respected him because Skinny Razor had a reputation of being a stone-cold killer and everyone knew it. He was both feared and respected on the streets, and my uncle looked up to him. He wanted to be just like him.

  In 1957, with Pasquale out of the picture, Nancy and four-year-old Philip would leave Philadelphia and settle into the Scarfo family compound in Atlantic City, which at the time was more than a decade past its prime.

  Nancy would take a job in Atlantic City working for the Bureau of Children Services, which functioned like an adoption agency and provided care for underprivileged children. With his father out of the picture, Philip gravitated towards Nancy’s older brother, his Uncle Nick, as a father figure.

  At that time, it was just my mother, my grandparents, and myself living on Georgia Avenue. My father was gone. I was just a little boy, maybe five or six years old. My uncle was still living in South Philadelphia, but he used to come down a lot to see us or to do business with Skinny Razor.

  In the 1950s and ’60s, Felix “Skinny Razor” DiTullio was a mob captain, a caporegime, and the Philadelphia mob’s top guy at the Jersey Shore. And Nicky Scarfo was quickly becoming his No. 1 protégé.

  When Philip was seven years old, his great-grandmother, Catherine Scarfo’s mother, died and the wake and funeral remain etched in Philip’s memory more than five decades later.

  Back then, the Italian wakes lasted three days. I remember my grandmother and her brothers, the Piccolo brothers—Joe, Mike, and Nick—were standing next to the coffin, and all of these people were coming in to pay their respects. I was standing in the audience with my Uncle Nick and in walked a man with several guys around him. Everybody was going over to pay their respects to him and shake his hand or kiss him on the cheek. I remember this man looked very important, like the president. So I said to my uncle, “Who’s that guy?” And he said, “That’s Angelo Bruno, he’s the boss of the family.” And even though I was only seven years old, I understood what he was talking about.

  As I got older I started spending more time with my uncle. He was like my father because my real father was gone. When we were alone he would talk to me about what La Cosa Nostra was all about, how we were different from everyone else, and how we had certain rules that we had to follow. This is how I was raised, from the time I was a little boy.

  When Philip was eight years old, his Uncle Nick was given an order by his mentor, Felix “Skinny Razor” DiTullio. A wayward mob associate named Dominick “Reds” Caruso had disrespected Joseph “Joe the Boss” Rugnetta, the consigliere, or counselor, to the family’s boss, Angelo Bruno. And Bruno had handpicked Skinny Razor’s up-and-coming protégé, Nicky Scarfo, to oversee Caruso’s murder. Scarfo was happy to oblige and show Bruno and DiTullio that he was an able killer, a real gangster.

  To kill Reds Caruso, Salvatore “Chuckie” Merlino, one of Scarfo’s oldest friends, would go to Caruso’s home in South Philadelphia and tell him that Scarfo wanted to see him. Like a scene out of the very type of movie he loved so much as a young boy, Scarfo lulled Caruso into a state of relaxation, taking him to a bar in Vineland, New Jersey, that was owned by an associate of the Bruno crime family.

  Two more Bruno associates, Santo “Little Santo” Romeo and Anthony Casella, were inside the bar, with Romeo working as a bartender.

  Shortly after arriving at the bar, Scarfo wasted little time in carrying out the hit. Little Nicky pulled out a handgun and shot Caruso six times at point-blank range. But Reds Caruso was still alive.

  My uncle told me the guy was lying there after he shot him and he said, “You got me, Nick,” and my uncle grabbed an ice pick from the bar and he stabbed him over and over again in the back until he died. He told me he stabbed him so hard that the ice pick got stuck in his back and part of it broke off when he tried to pull it out.

  But killing Caruso wasn’t enough; the Sicilian-born Bruno had wanted him killed in a certain way to send a message. And while he wanted Scarfo to oversee the murder, he wanted another up-and-coming mobster to actually commit it.

  Ange had ordered that this Reds Caruso be strangled to death, not shot, because he had talked fresh to Joe the Boss, and he wanted Santo Idone to strangle him and send a message that his mouth had gotten him killed. These siggys were big into sending messages.

  But what happened is, Santo Idone was late getting to the bar and by the time he got there, my uncle had already killed the guy. Now when the boss says he wants
a guy killed and he wants it done a certain way, that’s the way you gotta do it. So when Santo got there, my uncle had him choke the corpse with some rope and leave marks around the neck so just in case they found the body, Ange would know that he had been strangled like he ordered.

  Scarfo would also now have a lifelong ally in Santo Idone, who was born in Calabria, the same part of Italy where Scarfo’s family came from.

  My uncle told me that Santo told him, “Thanks for covering for me, Nick. I won’t forget it,” and my uncle said, “You and me are Calabrese; we gotta stick together around all these siggys.”

  The hit team led by Scarfo would leave Caruso’s dead body inside the bar as another team removed the body and moved it to another location, where a third team was supposed to dig a hole and bury the body, which was doused in lime to accelerate its decomposition.

  But what they did was they got a fourth group to dig up the body and move it somewhere else, so that way the guys who did the killing and the guys who moved the body and the group that buried the body the first time had no idea where the body was, in case someone flipped and ratted them out.

  As Caruso’s bullet-ridden corpse, still with part of an ice pick lodged in his back, lay buried in a makeshift grave somewhere in South Jersey, Scarfo still had work to do.

  Skinny Razor wanted my uncle to take the truck that had been used to transport the body back to Philadelphia so it could be destroyed—so no one could trace any evidence from the killing. My uncle decided to take me along because he thinks that he would look less suspicious driving this truck if he was with a little boy. I was eight years old at the time. As we were driving he told me that he had killed a very bad man the night before and he needed my help in getting rid of the truck they used to transport the body. Here I was, an eight-year-old kid, and these guys that I looked up to, they needed my help. I felt like I was doing what was right, because my uncle said the man they killed was a very bad man who had broken the rules, and when you break the rules, this is what happens. This was what La Cosa Nostra was all about—the rules. I understood this from a very early age. My uncle was always talking about the rules and how you can’t break them. I remember my uncle describing how he killed the guy, how he shot him and stabbed him with an ice pick, and what they guy said to him. Looking back, I didn’t think there was anything wrong with it.