What Scarfo was doing by way of grooming Philip for life in the mob, Phil Testa was doing for Salvie.
I had known Phil Testa and Salvie since I was a kid. When I was a baby, Phil Testa would watch me when my mother went shopping on Seventh Street in South Philadelphia. Salvie and I were always very close; he was one of my best friends. We were basically raised the same, we were both taught about La Cosa Nostra when we were very young. Me and my Uncle would go see them in Philly, or they would come see us at the Shore. Chuckie was also close with Phil Testa and Salvie.
Salvatore “Chuckie” Merlino was Nicky Scarfo’s closest friend. Merlino, who was 10 years younger than Scarfo, looked up to him like an older brother and Scarfo mentored him in the ways of La Cosa Nostra, just like Skinny Razor had done for him. Merlino had assisted Scarfo in the Reds Caruso killing and was by his side when he killed William Dugan in the Oregon Diner.
Now, with Scarfo behind bars, Chuckie Merlino was running Scarfo’s operation in South Philadelphia and Atlantic City, carrying out Scarfo’s orders in the messages that Philip delivered to him, messages that soon included murders that the imprisoned Scarfo wanted carried out.
Chuckie was a great guy and he loved my uncle. He understood La Cosa Nostra from being around my uncle. My uncle had mentored Chuckie the same way Skinny Razor had mentored my uncle. Chuckie was a bookmaker and had his own crew in South Philadelphia, and they were all under my uncle, so they treated me with a lot of respect. When I’d go see him, we’d hang out together at the 9M Bar downtown; that was one of Chuckie’s main hangouts. He also had a social club at the corner of Shunk and Sartain Streets in South Philadelphia where there were always a handful of neighborhood guys playing cards or we would go to the city’s best restaurants like the Saloon or Bookbinders. Chuckie was a lot of fun, and I enjoyed being around him. He was a very classy guy and always dressed real sharp. He looked like the singer Al Martino who was also from South Philadelphia and had played Johnny Fontane in the Godfather movies. But most importantly he was fiercely loyal to my uncle. My uncle used to confide in him; he trusted Chuckie.
Another one of Scarfo’s close underworld associates was Nicholas “Nick the Blade” Virgilio, who was two years older than Little Nicky and a boyhood friend of Scarfo going back to their teenage days on Wharton Street in South Philadelphia. He would later join Scarfo in Atlantic City in the mid-1960s, becoming one of his bodyguards and top enforcers.
Like Scarfo and Leonetti, Virgilio and his family had left South Philadelphia and settled in a Ducktown row home right around the corner from the Scarfo compound on Georgia Avenue.
We called him the Blade because he stabbed a guy eleven times and killed him. The guy was a sailor and him and the Blade got into an argument. It happened in 1952, the year before I was born in South Philadelphia. If someone who didn’t know him would ask him, “Why do they call you the Blade?” he’d say, “Because I’m a sharp dresser. Sharp as a blade.”
But Virgilio would prove to be versatile in his murderous ways.
While Scarfo was in Yardville, Virgilio had killed a man on an Atlantic City street corner, shooting him right in front of a marked Atlantic City police cruiser and as a result was looking at a long prison stretch.
The Blade had a girlfriend whose stepfather was abusing her and she’d always cry to him about it. So one night when he was drunk, he sees the stepfather on the street and he shoots him, right in front of the cops. That was the Blade—he didn’t give a fuck that the cops were right there. He’d shrug it off and say, “That fuckin’ guy had it comin’, I don’t care who was watchin’.”
From jail, Scarfo had arranged for the Blade to get a lenient sentence using a wheeler-dealer Atlantic City lawyer and part-time municipal court judge named Edwin “Eddie” Helfant. Helfant was paid $6,000 to pay off the judge in Virgilio’s case in exchange for a reduced sentence. Helfant took the $6,000, and Virgilio got 15 years, not the lenient sentence he or Scarfo had in mind.
The Blade was like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. He was the nicest guy in the world when he was sober, but when he was drunk he was evil. He was like Skinny Razor and my uncle in the sense that was a no-nonsense stone-cold killer. The three of them used to hang together in Atlantic City in the early days, before Skinny Razor died. When my uncle got out of Yardville, the Blade was in prison. Judge Helfant had made a big mistake by crossing the Blade, but an even bigger mistake by crossing my uncle. On the very day he was released from Yardville, my uncle told me he was going to kill Helfant. The fact that Helfant was a judge meant absolutely nothing to my uncle—my uncle didn’t give a fuck. He’d say, “This Jew cocksucker wants to play games with me, we’ll see about that.”
A few days later he told me we were going to wait until the Blade got out of jail, because the Blade had gotten word to my uncle from jail that he wanted to do it himself. You’ve heard the phrase, forgive and forget? My uncle would never forgive and he would never forget. Once he got something in his mind, that was it, it was over.
When Scarfo got out of Yardville and returned to Atlantic City in the summer of 1973, his gang was beginning to take shape and things were on the upswing. In addition to Philip, who was now 20 years old and well schooled in the ways of La Cosa Nostra, Scarfo’s two childhood friends, Salvatore “Chuckie” Merlino and Nicholas “Nick the Blade” Virgilio, formed the inner circle of Scarfo’s gang.
With the Blade in jail and Merlino based in South Philadelphia, Scarfo decided it was time to infuse some new blood into his Atlantic City crew.
Among the new faces was Chuckie Merlino’s younger brother Lawrence, who had recently relocated from South Philadelphia and was living in an apartment inside the Scarfo family compound on Georgia Avenue in Atlantic City.
Lawrence was a great guy and, like his brother Chuckie, he was very loyal to my uncle. He and I were closer in age, so we spent a lot of time together.
One time I was at a bar in Atlantic City with Vince Falcone and a few girls and I got into a fight with some kid who was involved in a local motorcycle gang. We were at a place called the Sand Bar and this guy tried to pick up the girl that I was with. So me and him got into it, we got into a fight, and it had gotten broken up and we ended up leaving the bar. So I go home and I grab a ski mask and a pistol and I go back to the bar, I walk right in and the kid was still there with his whole gang, a bunch of wannabe tough guys. I walked right up to him, raised the gun, and shot him in the arm. I wasn’t trying to kill him, but I did want to send a message to him and his friends that you don’t raise your hands to us. That’s something my uncle always taught me. The guys he was with start running out of there. They are going out every exit, every door they could find. I think one of them jumped out the fuckin’ window. This kid I shot, this fuckin’ punk motherfucker is screaming, he’s going nuts, he’s crying like a little girl. This is in the early ’70s, before the casinos. Later that night, around 1:00 a.m., here comes all these motorcycles down Georgia Avenue, revving up their engines, making all this fuckin’ noise. They woke the whole neighborhood up. The leader of the gang is in the middle of the street and he is hollering, “Where’s Philip Leonetti?” He started banging on the door and he woke up my grandparents. These guys are looking for me because they knew I shot their friend.
Lucky for him, neither me nor my uncle were home at the time. We woulda killed him right there in the street and left him in the gutter. The next day we hear all about it from my mother and my grandparents. My uncle asks me what happened at the bar and I tell him the whole story about the fight and me shooting the guy in the arm. The whole thing was no big deal to me. Now my uncle is furious. He tells me, “You find out who this big mouth, cocksuckin’ jerk off is and where he lives and we’re gonna send this motherfucker and anyone connected to him a message, before they come around here and bother our people again. You understand?” My uncle told me to use Lawrence and he said, “I want everyone down here to get the message loud and clear.”
So I tell Lawrence what my u
ncle said and we find out who the guy was and that he lived on Chelsea Avenue. My uncle takes me and Lawrence down there and we see his house and we work out a route back to Georgia Avenue for after we shoot him. So one night me and Lawrence are watching his place and we see him leaving and Lawrence jumps out with a .22 and he shoots him in the stomach a few times, which is exactly what my uncle had ordered. My uncle had said, “If he dies, he dies. If he doesn’t, he doesn’t. Him and his friends will get the message either way.”
Lucky for the guy, he didn’t die, and after that we didn’t have any more problems with him or his gang and my uncle was happy. All the other tough guys in Atlantic City had gotten the message. Lawrence proved to my uncle that he would follow orders to a tee and that he wasn’t afraid to use a gun. It showed my uncle that Lawrence was a solid guy and that Chuckie had taught him all about La Cosa Nostra.
Two local cement contractors named Alfredo Ferraro and Vincent Falcone, who had befriended both Scarfo and Leonetti and were constantly in their presence, and a business-savvy, street-smart Jewish gangster named Saul Kane, who had relocated to the Jersey Shore from North Philly, rounded out the core of Nicky Scarfo’s Atlantic City crew in the mid-1970s.
I used to hang around a lot with Vincent Falcone, me and Lawrence. He was with me that night at the Sand Bar when I had the problems with the motorcycle guys. Vince was a few years older than me and he was married, but he used to go out and drink several nights a week. He always had a lot to say, he was very opinionated and had a bit of an ego. Vince was always complaining about money—who he owed, who owed him, how much he was making, how much other guys were making—just constant complaining. My uncle liked him but would always say, “He’s not Cosa Nostra,” meaning he didn’t have the right mindset or attitude.
Alfredo was a bit older, and he and Vince were very close. Their families had come to the United States together from Argentina. They were both Italian, but they were from Argentina. My uncle, he’d say things like, “These two guys, they’re not like us,” meaning they didn’t think like us. Both Alfredo and Vince were cement contractors and Alfredo had taught me the ins and outs of the concrete business.
Now Saul Kane was a character. He loved Meyer Lansky and he was Jewish, so we called him Meyer. Years later my uncle arranged for Saul to meet Meyer Lansky down in Florida. It was like a Catholic priest meeting the Pope. Saul was in heaven. Saul was a great guy and a lot of fun to be with. He owned a bar in Atlantic City, the My Way Lounge, and he worked as a bail bondsman. He used to hang out a lot with me and Lawrence either at the My Way or Teddy’s West End Lounge on Trenton Avenue.
My uncle loved Saul and would do like he did with Bobby Manna, tap his index finger to his head, meaning Saul was smart. But he’d say, “He can never get this,” and he’d rub his thumb and index finger together, meaning his button, because he was Jewish and not Italian. In this thing, La Cosa Nostra, you had to be 100-percent Italian to be made, that was one of the rules. We could do business with Saul and he could be with us, but he could never get straightened out and become a full-fledged member.
As Scarfo continued to build his mob crew, Atlantic City, the down-and-out seaside resort which Scarfo controlled, was about to be brought back to life with legalized casino gambling coming to town as a way to stimulate the once thriving resort.
Overnight, both Scarfo’s and Atlantic City’s futures began to look much brighter.
The World’s Playground
THE CITY ON THE ATLANTIC WAS FOUNDED IN 1854. ITS NAME WAS A TESTAMENT TO ITS LOCATION, WHICH WAS BUTTRESSED BY THE PICTURESQUE SEASCAPE OF THE ATLANTIC OCEAN’S WATERFRONT. THIS NEW CITY WAS UNCHARTED TERRITORY AND QUICKLY BECAME A REAL ESTATE DEVELOPER’S DREAM, RIPE WITH COMMERCIAL OPPORTUNITY AND PROMISE.
From the moment that Atlantic City was incorporated, it was designed to appeal to tourists from all over the world as a premiere resort locale and vacation destination with sandy beaches, fine dining, world-class entertainment and some of the nation’s most luxurious and lavish hotels.
The city’s crown jewel, the Atlantic City Boardwalk, would be constructed in 1870 and was a seven-mile stretch of oceanfront property that featured a diverse array of decadence and commerce.
In 1878, the Philadelphia to Atlantic City railroad was constructed as a means of bringing tourists to the seaside resort.
In 1880, the city was officially open for business.
Within five years, Atlantic City was one of the top tourist attractions in the world and by the turn of the 20th century the area experienced a massive real estate boom, finding itself on the cutting edge of both hotel architecture and high-society culture.
Extravagant hotels and posh restaurants and nightclubs dotted every inch of the boardwalk and its surrounding area and the city became a playground for the country’s rich and famous.
During Prohibition, Enoch “Nucky” Johnson, the colorful Atlantic County treasurer and racketeer ushered in an era that bolstered more corruption and decadence than the notoriously crooked coastal enclave had ever seen.
Controlling the state’s extremely powerful Republican political machine with an iron fist, Johnson became the unofficial ambassador for Atlantic City and oversaw a wide array of vice rackets that included bootlegging, illegal gambling, and prostitution. Nucky encouraged racketeers from all over the country to set up shop in Atlantic City and many obliged him, paying him for the opportunity to do so.
The city by the Atlantic was now the World’s Playground. With booze and broads by the boatload, it became the mecca of vice, in essence, the original Sin City long before modern Las Vegas was even contemplated.
Nucky Johnson’s life would forever be memorialized in HBO’s popular television series Boardwalk Empire, which chronicled Atlantic City in the 1920s from the perspective of a corrupt political boss named Enoch “Nucky” Thompson, a character played by actor Steve Buscemi and loosely based on Johnson and his political regime.
Nucky Johnson’s reign as both Atlantic City’s political boss and top vice lord crumbled in 1941 when he was convicted on charges of tax evasion for hiding proceeds from several policy lottery operations he was running throughout the city. He was sent off to federal prison for the next few years.
As World War II came to an end, so did Atlantic City’s tenure as the World’s Playground.
By the 1950s, Atlantic City had lost its luster. Year-round tropical destinations like Florida, Cuba, and the Bahamas had become cheaper and more popular alternatives with everyday Americans and the rich and famous, also heading west for Las Vegas, the up-and-coming desert oasis that had by then eclipsed Atlantic City as the new mecca of vice.
With the Atlantic City Boardwalk decaying and poverty engulfing the city’s economy, most of the grand hotels of yesteryear, like the Breakers, the Shelbourne, the Traymore, the Mayflower, and the Marlborough, were all demolished.
Drugs and crime replaced fun in the sun as the region’s most prominent features. Press coverage of the city’s plight, stemming from the conditions encountered by the national media when they descended on Atlantic City for the 1964 Democratic Convention sent tourists scurrying.
As the late 1960s became the early 1970s, the once bustling resort town had gone bust.
It was practically a ghost town.
It wouldn’t be for long.
And the “boardwalk empire” that Little Nicky was building would make Nucky Johnson wet his tweed trousers.
The Resurrection
THE DATE WAS JUNE 2, 1977, AND EARLY THAT THURSDAY MORNING THERE WAS SOMETHING IN THE AIR–SOMETHING THAT HAD NOT BEEN PRESENT IN THESE PARTS FOR MORE THAN THREE DECADES.
Hope.
Hope that the big announcement, scheduled for noon at Kennedy Plaza, the ceremonious pavilion in front of the mammoth Convention Hall on the Atlantic City Boardwalk would restore the city to prominence.
Hope that the governor’s announcement would breathe life into a city rapidly decaying under an increasing influx of crime, poverty, and negle
ct.
Hope that the second coming of Atlantic City was imminent and that the World’s Playground was about to be resurrected.
It was hope that filled the air that Thursday morning, hope mixed with optimism, skepticism, and a palpable sense of excitement that things were about to change.
As the crowd swelled, nearing 1,000, the dignitaries begin to take their seats behind the podium on the makeshift stage. Francis “Hap” Farley, the once powerful state senator who succeeded Nucky Johnson as the boss of the Republican political machine that controlled Atlantic City, was already seated. Once considered the most feared politician in the state, Farley was now a shell of his former self, and on this day he was merely a spectator.
Seated near Farley was the man who dethroned him, Atlantic City’s new state senator Dr. Joseph McGahn, the cosponsor of the bill that was about to change Atlantic City forever, the man who was once lauded by the New York Times as the “principal architect” that made that change possible.
But the star of the show on this day, the man everyone came to see was New Jersey governor Brendan Byrne. Byrne was here to announce that legalized casino gambling was coming to the Atlantic City Boardwalk.
But Byrne’s message of a renaissance for Atlantic City came with a warning—a warning for men like Angelo Bruno, Phil Testa, Nicky Scarfo, Nicholas “Nick the Blade” Virgilio, and Philip Leonetti:
“I have made this pledge before to all law enforcement agencies and I will repeat it again. We will keep the limelight of public opinion focused upon organized crime. I’ve said it before and I will repeat again to organized crime: keep your filthy hands off of Atlantic City; keep the hell out of our state.”
At that very moment, less than four blocks away in a small ground-floor office located at 28 North Georgia Avenue, Nicodemo “Little Nicky” Scarfo and Philip “Crazy Phil” Leonetti—precisely two of the men that Byrne was speaking of—were watching the pomp and circumstance on live television.
Mafia Prince: Inside America's Most Violent Crime Family Page 5