Mafia Prince: Inside America's Most Violent Crime Family

by Phil Leonetti

  “What’s this guy talkin’ about?” Scarfo said out loud to Leonetti, “Doesn’t he know we’re already here?”

  Leonetti just laughed.

  There was nothing funny about what would happen next.

  Becoming a Killer

  IN FACT, SCARFO HAD BEEN ATLANTIC CITY’S PRIMARY UNDERWORLD FIGURE FOR MORE THAN A DECADE, HAVING ASSUMED THE POSITION LONG BEFORE ANYONE EVEN DREAMED OF LEGALIZED CASINO GAMBLING AND A REBIRTH FOR ATLANTIC CITY.

  My uncle had built a nice little crew. For the most part it was me, Chuckie, Lawrence, and the Blade. We were all with my uncle and my uncle was basically reporting directly to Phil Testa, who by now had become Ange’s underboss. We were the top guys in Atlantic City. Everything down there went through us. Nobody made a move or thought about making a move without checking with my uncle first.

  My uncle had two posters that hung on the wall of our office on Georgia Avenue, each showing a baseball field with all of the bases and home plate. My uncle never watched a game of baseball a day in his life and he thought baseball players, athletes, and anyone who wasn’t in the mob were jerk offs. But these posters weren’t about baseball to my uncle; they symbolized his philosophy of being a gangster.

  The first poster had the words “This is a Home Run” at the top and showed the hitter rounding the bases, touching each base and eventually crossing home plate. The second poster had the words “This is NOT a Home Run” at the top and showed the hitter rounding the bases, but missing second base. My uncle would show people those posters and say, “Ya see what happened?” and he would point to the second poster and say, “This motherfucker hit a home run, but he didn’t touch the base, so it didn’t count. This thing we’re doin’, this ain’t baseball and this ain’t a game. In this thing, if you don’t touch the base, you get this,” and he would make his sign like the sign of the gun. He wanted to know what everyone was doing at all times. Touching base with your superiors in the mob was also one of the rules.

  By this point Scarfo’s reputation as a killer had made him the premier force to be reckoned with in Atlantic City, and in 1976 and when a low-level card shark and hustler named Louie DeMarco had run afoul of the Bruno mob and was hiding out in Scarfo’s town, Angelo Bruno sent word from Philadelphia down to Nicky Scarfo in Atlantic City that DeMarco was to be killed.

  Scarfo was happy to oblige.

  This kid Louie DeMarco was robbing Chickie Narducci’s crap games in Philadelphia. Chickie Narducci was one of Angelo Bruno’s top guys. His crap games brought in a lot of money for the family. So Chickie Narducci goes and sees Phil Testa and Angelo Bruno and makes a beef about what is going on. Bruno and Testa tell Narducci they are gonna find Louie DeMarco and have him killed. Disrespecting a made guy is against the rules and Chickie Narducci was a made guy.

  So what happens is, Phil Testa waits a week before calling my uncle and telling him that he wants us to kill Louie DeMarco for robbing Chickie Narducci. Phil Testa and Chickie Narducci had a kind of love/hate relationship. They were always on again, off again, and at the time they were having problems, so Phil Testa was kind of dogging it. My uncle was unhappy because Phil Testa waited a week and didn’t tell him right away. My uncle wanted people to know what kind of people we were, that if we were asked to kill someone, we would do it right away, without any hesitation. Our philosophy was Bang! Bang! And that was that. So my uncle assigns the killing to me and Vince Falcone so we can prove to my uncle and guys like Ange and Phil Testa that we were killers and that we were serious men like my uncle.

  So we put some feelers out on the street to see if anyone has a line on where this Louie DeMarco might be hiding out at. We hear that he is staying at the Ensign Motel on Pacific Avenue. So I go see a guy I know named Harry the Hat who had a coffee shop on Missouri Avenue. It was like a hangout; everybody would hang there. Harry the Hat was Skinny Razor’s brother-in-law, and he knew everybody in Atlantic City. So I ask him if he knows who Louie DeMarco is and Harry the Hat pointed him out to me—he was actually sitting right there in the coffee shop playing cards. So I have Vince Falcone with me and we stay for a little while and when Louie DeMarco leaves, we follow him to the Ensign Motel. He has no idea who we are or that we are following him. There was a local bartender who was with us who had a room at the Ensign, and he gave us the key to his room so that we could wait until DeMarco came out of his room—so that we could get him.

  Philip Leonetti, just 23 years old, was about commit his first murder.

  I remember my uncle telling me and Vince that Chickie Narducci wanted this guy real bad and that if we killed him it would put me and Vince on the map with Philadelphia, which meant Angelo Bruno and Phil Testa and make my uncle’s stature in the family stronger, because everyone would know that his crew was serious and that we were gangsters and killers.

  I remember being nervous, but I wasn’t scared. I didn’t think I was doing anything wrong. Louie DeMarco was robbing Chickie Narducci and Chickie Narducci was in our family. Louie DeMarco had broken the rules and when you break the rules, you get killed. This is what my uncle had always taught me. This is what La Cosa Nostra was all about. Before the money, before the power, before everything came the rules.

  Louie DeMarco was getting ready to leave his room at the Ensign Motel and he had no idea what was coming.

  So we see him walking out and we run up on him. Me and Vince had masks and gloves on. We were behind him; he never saw us coming.

  I was the first one to shoot and I blasted him right in the back of his head. After I shot him I thought he was running away, but it was the force of the bullet that made him fly forward and he landed face down. Then me and Vince just emptied our guns into him. I think the first shot killed him. We did it right in the parking lot, right on Pacific Avenue in broad daylight. I remember standing over him and emptying my gun into him. I remember the feeling I had; I felt cold and I didn’t feel any remorse.

  Louie DeMarco was dead and Philip Leonetti was now a bona fide mob killer, just like his uncle Nicky Scarfo.

  My uncle had me and Vince go over an escape route a few days before the killing. We walked that route several times to make sure we knew where we were going. My uncle told us that after we killed him, he wanted us to throw the guns on the roof of a nearby building, which we did. We then followed the route that we had planned and my uncle was waiting there in a car to pick us up. We get in the car and no one says a word, we just drive to the apartment on Georgia Avenue.

  Now a few days before the killing, my uncle took me and Vince for a walk-and-talk through the neighborhood. My uncle didn’t discuss killings in the house, and he was paranoid about listening devices. He didn’t own a phone. Everything with him was face to face. So while we are walking he’s telling us that we can’t wear any jewelry when we do a hit, in case it came off and could be traced back to us. He told us not to say a word when we got in the car and not to speak about the murder when we got back to Georgia Avenue. He told us we had to immediately take a shower and wash real good under our nails and make sure that we had gotten rid of any possible gunpowder residue. He told us to take all the clothes that we had worn and to put them in a trash bag. After we got cleaned up, we would have to go somewhere outside of Atlantic City and dump the bag with the clothes in it. That’s what we did after a killing; that was the routine.

  Just like the lessons his uncle had repeatedly taught him about the rules of La Cosa Nostra when he was a young boy, Nicodemo Scarfo was still the teacher and Philip was still his student, his most prized pupil.

  Only now the lessons had advanced on how to commit murder.

  And with the DeMarco killing under his belt, Philip had just graduated into the big leagues.

  Chickie Narducci came down to see us, to thank us for what we had done. My uncle was ecstatic. The killing had enhanced not only his reputation within the mob, but mine as well. The guys in Philly knew what we were about, that we were killers, real gangsters. It’s what my uncle always wanted, ever sinc
e he was around Skinny Razor.

  It was a reputation that both Nicky Scarfo and Philip Leonetti would enhance, time and time again.

  Sending a Message

  SHORTLY AFTER THE DEMARCO KILLING, PHILIP HAD GONE INTO BUSINESS WITH A FRIEND OF HIS FROM THE NEIGHBORHOOD NAMED VINCE BANCHERI.

  We needed $12,000 to buy equipment so we could start our own concrete company. I had been working with Alfredo, but I told my uncle I wanted to do my own thing and he agreed, so I went into a business with a friend of mine from the neighborhood. My partner Vince Bancheri burned his house down and we used the insurance money to start our company. So one night, me and Vince go out and we stop by the Flamingo Motel on Pacific Avenue; they had a lounge that a lot of people liked to go to. Judge Helfant, the guy that had double-crossed the Blade, owned it. My uncle still wanted to kill him, but the Blade was still in jail, so we put killing him on the back burner for the time being. My uncle would say, “Let it simmer; let it be until our friend comes home.”

  So when we go in to the lounge, we see this kid named Pepe Leva who was a bookmaker who hung around Judge Helfant and the Flamingo. Vince had loaned him $3,000, and Pepe Leva was talking bad about Vince, like threatening him to people around Atlantic City saying he wasn’t going to pay him back. So Vince tells me about it and I called Pepe Leva over and asked him to step outside, I told him that I wanted to speak with him. So we go outside and I tell him, “You really shouldn’t be threatening people.” I tell him that Vince is my friend and I said, “You owe him the money; do the right thing and pay him.” I’m talking to him like a gentleman, that’s how I talked to people. I never came off like a tough guy unless I had to and usually at that point it wasn’t me, it was the gun doing the talking.

  Well this Pepe Leva starts talking sideways to me and I don’t go for that, so I punched him right in the mouth and knocked his tooth out. There was no more talking nice to him. This is in the parking lot right in front of the Flamingo. Judge Helfant comes running out and he is going nuts, yelling and screaming. He has no idea that we are going to kill him when the Blade gets out of jail. He thinks we don’t we know that he kept the $6,000 for himself. He just sees me punch this Pepe Leva and he goes crazy. So me and Vince leave.

  The next day, Judge Helfant makes an appointment to see my uncle. I think they went to the Lido restaurant. Judge Helfant says to my uncle, “Nick, your nephew hit this kid and he wants to press charges.” My uncle is placating him, telling him to relax. He says, “Take it easy, we’re all friends. Tell the kid to relax and not to press charges, and we will straighten it all out.”

  On June 28, 1977, two days after his fight with Philip Leonetti, Giuseppe “Pepe” Leva filed a criminal complaint in the Atlantic City Municipal Court charging Philip Leonetti with assault.

  So, what we did was, my uncle worked it out through one of his lawyers Harold Garber and Judge Helfant that me and Pepe Leva were going to meet and we were going to shake hands and bury the hatchet between us.

  So the next day, Pepe Leva and I meet up at the My Way Lounge, which was Saul Kane’s place, and my uncle makes us shake hands. He tells him, “We’re all Italian. We need to stick together.” My uncle tells him to go to the court and to drop the charges and to come back around the next day. So Pepe Leva comes back around the next day and tells me and my uncle that he dropped the charges and that he doesn’t want any problems with us. My uncle put his arm around him and said, “We have no problem with you. You’re a friend of Judge Helfant’s. We’re all friends.” So as Pepe Leva is leaving he apologizes again and shakes hands with my uncle, and then he shakes my hand. My uncle says, “See, it’s all over; we shake hands like gentlemen and that’s the end of it.”

  Four days later on July 3, 1977, Pepe Leva was found shot to death with the remnants of four .32 caliber slugs in his head. His body was found near a landfill in the Farmington section of Egg Harbor Township, less than ten miles from the Georgia Avenue apartment building where Nicky Scarfo and Philip Leonetti lived.

  Right after this Leva kid filed the charges against me, my uncle went to Philadelphia and got the okay from Angelo Bruno and Phil Testa to pop him, to kill him. This guy was going to testify against me and I might go to jail. My uncle wanted him dead even if that wasn’t gonna happen because he had dropped the charges.

  To my uncle it was a mortal sin that anyone would raise their hands to us or treat us with anything other than respect. That’s why he wanted me and Lawrence to shoot the guy from the motorcycle gang and that’s why he wanted Pepe Leva dead. He wanted to send a message to everyone that we weren’t fuckin around. So he got permission to whack him out. That was another one of the rules—you always had to clear a murder with the boss or you might be the next one to get killed.

  I was present when my uncle orderd the hit on Pepe Leva. A guy in our crew asked Pepe for a ride home from the city. On the way home, he said to Pepe, “Pull over, I gotta take a piss.”

  They got out to take a piss, and that’s when he shot Pepe in the head. They had pulled into a trash dump, a landfill. He emptied his gun into Pepe and then finished taking his piss.

  He then walked several miles through the woods to his home in the middle of the night. When we saw him a few days later, he was all cut up from the bushes. My uncle said to him, “Jesus Christ, what the fuck happened to you?” When he told my uncle what had happened and how he ran through the woods to get home, my uncle said, “Why didn’t you take the fuckin’ car; it was right there?” He tried to explain himself, but my uncle just shook his head and walked away. That’s how he was. Nothing was ever good enough for him.

  Nicky Scarfo’s gang had all participated in murders, which ingratiated them to the bloodthirsty Scarfo and to the mob leaders in Philadelphia—men like Angelo Bruno, Philip Testa, and Frank “Chickie” Narducci—and would one day make them eligible for initiation into La Cosa Nostra.

  Chuckie was with my uncle on the Reds Caruso hit; the Blade was in jail for murder; me and Vince Falcone had killed Louie DeMarco; Lawrence had shot the motorcycle guy; and now Pepe Leva was dead. My uncle loved it; he loved the killings. He used to say, “Do it cowboy style—bang ’em right out in the street in broad daylight.” He wanted people to know that we were serious, that we weren’t playing games.

  The Atlantic County Prosecutors Office knew that Nicky Scarfo and his gang were serious and charged Philip Leonetti with the murder of Pepe Leva.

  The detectives knew I didn’t kill Pepe Leva because they had me under surveillance the night that he got killed. I was in a bar the whole night and they were in there watching me the whole time, those motherfuckers, but they tried to pin it on me anyway. They got a guy who worked at the trash dump where we did the killing to give a statement and identify me as the shooter. A couple weeks later the owner of the trash dump’s wife called Harold Garber, who was one of our lawyers and told him what had happened and that the cops had made the guy say that it was me and that he wanted to set the record straight and tell the truth that it wasn’t me. My uncle always hated the police, he called them all “no good dirty cocksuckers.”

  Now this woman used to hang out at the old Penguin Club that my uncle owned with Tommy Butch. So Harold has her bring the guy to Vince Sausto’s insurance office and he takes a statement from him where he says is wasn’t me who did the killing, which it wasn’t. Now at the time the witness was being watched by two detectives from the prosecutors office who were protecting him from us. They were convinced that me and my uncle were going to kill this guy so he wouldn’t be able to testify against me. The cops thought he was going to do some insurance business with Vince, so they waited outside. They had no idea that Harold was inside the office and that the guy was coming to give a statement that would ultimately kill their case against me. The guy turned out to be a stand-up guy and just wanted to tell the truth.

  Based on the witness recantation, the murder charges against Philip Leonetti were dropped.

  Scarfo and Leonetti’s reputation
s were not only known in Atlantic City and Philadelphia, but in mob circles in North Jersey and New York, where guys like “Tony Bananas” Caponigro and Bobby Manna were updating their crews on what the gangsters in Atlantic City were up to.

  What was about to happen next would put them in a whole different stratosphere.

  The Payback

  ONE OF NICKY SCARFO’S OLDEST FRIENDS AND TOP ASSOCIATES, NICHOLAS “NICK THE BLADE” VIRGILIO, HAD RECEIVED A 12-TO 15-YEAR SENTENCE FOR A 1972 KILLING THAT OCCURRED WHILE NICKY SCARFO WAS LOCKED UP IN YARDVILLE.

  From behind bars, Scarfo, through his nephew Philip Leonetti and attorney Harold Garber, had arranged for a $6,000 bribe to be paid to the judge on the Blade’s case in exchange for a lenient sentence.

  The deal had been brokered using a wheeler-dealer Atlantic City lawyer and shyster named Edwin “Eddie” Helfant, himself a part-time municipal court judge who was facing an indictment for fixing cases in the Somers Point Municipal Court. Helfant owned the Flamingo Hotel in Atlantic City where Philip Leonetti and Pepe Leva had gotten into a fight eight days before he was killed.

  Instead of paying off the judge in the Blade’s case, Helfant kept the money for himself and split it with a friend—an associate of Nicky Scarfo’s named Alvin Feldman. The Blade received a substantial prison sentence.

  The double-cross would eventually cost both Eddie Helfant and Alvin Feldman their lives.

  Back in 1972, when my uncle was in Yardville and he found out what Judge Helfant and Alvin Feldman did to the Blade, he went nuts. He was furious. I’d never seen him this angry. Adding to that, my uncle believed that Judge Helfant gave testimony to the SCI—the same commission my uncle, Angelo Bruno, Jerry Catena, Bobby Manna, and those guys refused to testify in front of—and that he had talked about my uncle and Ange to the SCI. My uncle also believed that Judge Helfant was talking to the FBI. He would say, “This guy is a double agent. He’s no fuckin good.”