He’d have me send money to put on their books or do things for their families. These guys were dirt poor but they were loyal, and like my uncle, they were stone killers. My uncle told me when he got out, he said, “I wish I had ten more guys just like them.”
So I’m back at the hotel and I’m in the lobby having a drink, and in comes Bobby back from the prison and seeing my uncle. I say, “Hey, Bob, how did it go?” And he says, “You know how he is,” and we both smiled. He said, “Let me go upstairs and freshen up a bit and I’ll be right down.”
Bobby and I were staying in the best suite in the hotel, but, remember, we were in El Paso, not Beverly Hills.
Five minutes later Bobby pages me and he’s out of breath and I can barely make out what he’s saying. He tells me that when he put the key in the room he sees two guys in the room dressed like maintenance workers, and that they seemed startled to see him and hurried out of the room once he arrived.
Now my mind is racing, I’m thinking, “Is this a hit? Was someone there to kill me?” There was no reason to kill Bobby—he was our lawyer. No one wanted to kill him, except maybe the prosecutors and judges he dealt with.
But I was a captain in La Cosa Nostra and my uncle was the boss, and here I am, 2,000 miles away from Atlantic City. Like Harry Riccobene in that phone booth, I realized I was essentially a sitting duck.
Two minutes later Bobby’s down in the lobby and I tell him, “We’re out of here, we need to pack our bags and go back home,” and Bobby agrees. We were supposed to be there all weekend and Bobby was supposed to go see my uncle the next morning.
We went to the room and packed our stuff and drove right to the airport and got on the first plane back to Philadelphia.
On the plane I tell Bobby, “That was either a hit or the FBI trying to bug our room; either way I don’t like it,” and Bobby agreed.
When he arrived in Philadelphia, Leonetti rounded up Chuckie Merlino and Salvie Testa and told them what had happened in El Paso.
We all agreed that we needed to be on guard and make sure everybody in the family was on point. The next day, my uncle called and wanted to know what happened with the second visit and he was stunned when I told him what had happened in the room. I could hear it in his voice. He said, “Jesus Christ, did you get a look at them?” and I told him, “No, only Bobby saw them.”He said, “You made the right move leaving. Make sure everyone back home tightens their belts. I don’t like what I’m hearing here.”
It was never determined if this was a botched hit attempt on Philip Leonetti or the FBI attempting to plant a bug in his hotel suite, but it was determined that the two men inside the hotel room were not maintenance workers.
We checked it out at the hotel and they told us there was no work being done in any of the rooms, and Bobby contacted a lawyer down there to look into it and the lawyer told him the same thing.
Life in the mob was certainly unpredictable.
Cleaning the Boat
FROM BEHIND BARS NICKY SCARFO WAS SENDING MESSAGES TO HIS NEPHEW PHILIP LEONETTI AND TO HIS STREET BOSS, SALVIE TESTA, TO “CLEAN THE BOAT,” AND TO MAKE SURE THEY CLEANED “THE WHOLE BOAT, TOP TO BOTTOM.”
Scarfo wasn’t referring to the boat that Testa kept in a Ventnor marina, nor was he talking about the cabin cruiser he and Leonetti had docked out by Harrah’s Casino in Atlantic City. He was cryptically instructing Testa and his Young Executioners crew to finish the Riccobene War by killing anyone and everyone connected to rival Harry “the Hunchback” Riccobene, who, like Scarfo, was behind bars.
As 1983 got under way, the Scarfo mob was back to doing what it did best: killing people.
On January 27, the body of Robert Hornickel, a low-level South Philadelphia drug dealer who had run afoul of Scarfo’s street tax, was found in the trunk of his car.
With Harry “the Hunchback” Riccobene locked up, his brother Mario “Sonny” Riccobene was running the gang. This made him Salvie Testa’s No. 1 target, as the Scarfo mob hit men escalated their murderous efforts to appease their jailed boss.
Pat Spirito was one of the guys in Ciancaglini’s crew. I never liked him; I thought he was a crybaby and didn’t think he was much of a gangster. But he was a decent earner and he led one of the crews that was out collecting the street tax.
Salvie gave Pat and his crew the Sonny Riccobene contract. At the time Pat had Nicky Crow, Charlie White, and Junior Staino in his crew, and they all reported to Ciancaglini.
That was about to change.
We were getting reports that Pat and his guys were dogging it, not doing what they were ordered to do. None of them guys in that crew were killers, except for Charlie White. Pat, the Crow, Junior—they were all neighborhood guys, knock-around guys. They weren’t gangsters.
So one day I’m with Chuckie, Salvie, and Ciancaglini, and we decide that Pat Spirito needs to go, that we need to kill him to send a message to everyone in our family that we mean business, and that an order is an order.
I knew my uncle wanted to kill Pat since the day he made him. After he got made, Pat came up to my uncle and said, “You know, Nick, you should think about making Patty Specs a captain,” and my uncle just stared at him, like he couldn’t believe this guy who just got made was telling him how to run the family. When he walked away, my uncle said, “Do you believe the balls on this fuckin’ guy?” And Chuckie said, “Nick, maybe we should get one of them suggestion boxes and let the guys gives us ideas on how to run things, like they do at restaurants.” Me and Chuckie were laughing and my uncle said, “Where do these fuckin’ guys come from?”
So Chuckie ordered the Crow and Charlie White to kill Pat.
A few weeks later, on April 29, Charles “Charlie White” Iannece, who was armed with a .38, shot Pasquale “Pat the Cat” Spirito in the back of the head as he sat in a parked car in South Philadelphia with Nicholas “Nick the Crow” Caramandi.
As the war with the Riccobenes continued, it became obvious that the Riccobenes were losing their momentum. Harry the Hunchback was in jail, as were his top two soldiers, Joseph Pedulla and Victor DeLuca, both of whom were locked up for the attempted murder of Salvie Testa.
Botched or aborted hits from both sides ensued for the next several months, until a Scarfo hit team supervised by Testa pumped multiple gun shots into Riccobene solider Frank Martines as he got behind the wheel of his truck to drive to work on a foggy October morning in 1983.
Two of the shooters on the hit team that got Martines were the Narducci brothers, Chickie’s sons Frank Jr. and Philip.
Frank Jr. had helped Salvie Testa set up and kill Rocco Marinucci in retaliation for Marinucci’s involvement in the bombing that killed his father, Philip “Chicken Man” Testa.
Frank Narducci Jr. gladly assisted Testa, despite knowing that Testa had personally murdered his father, Frank Sr., for the exact same reason that Marinucci had been killed—because the elder Narducci had also been involved in the murder of Philip Testa.
Philip Narducci was the gunman who shot Joe Salerno Sr. in Wildwood Crest on direct orders from Nicky Scarfo himself, despite the fact it was Scarfo who had ordered his father killed only six months earlier.
In a piece of twisted, blood-soaked underworld irony, Joe Salerno Sr. had been one of the first neighbors to find Chickie Narducci as he lay dying in the gutter, and the elder Salerno even went and got a neighborhood priest to come and read Narducci’s last rites.
Now, the Narducci brothers were two of Scarfo’s go-to soldiers, members of Salvie Testa’s Young Executioners crew.
They were two of Salvie’s top guys and my uncle had told them both before he went to jail that he wasn’t going to hold them responsible for what their father had done. So despite the fact that we killed their father, they were with us.
The reality is, they didn’t have a choice.
Years later, a witness who would testify against Scarfo, Leonetti, and the Narducci brothers would tell FBI agents that he was baffled as to how the Narduccis could swear b
lood allegiance to the man who had killed their father. “Never in a million fuckin’ years will I understand that one,” the witness would say in one of his debriefing sessions.
Frank Martines would survive the October 1983 ambush, but the incident served to break the street war wide open in favor of Scarfo and would foreshadow similar events with different outcomes over the next two months.
On November 3, Philip Narducci and another member of Salvie Testa’s Young Executioners crew, Nicholas “Nicky Whip” Milano, the younger brother of Testa’s close friend Eugene “Gino” Milano, shot and killed Sammy Tamburrino, a Riccobene loyalist, who had previously been aligned with Scarfo.
Tamburrino was killed in a Southwest Philadelphia arcade that served as his headquarters, and the killing took place in front of his mother, who stood and watched in horror.
When Tamburrino decided to shift his allegiance from Scarfo to Riccobene, he did so in an effort to make more money, by filling the void that was left when the Hunchback, Joseph Pedulla, and Victor DeLuca went to jail.
Tamburrino had become close with Sonny Riccobene, and he and Frank Martines stood to inherit what remained of the lucrative Riccobene crew if Sonny Riccobene were to join his brother Harry behind bars.
Mario “Sonny” Riccobene had been arrested and charged in a massive 1980 federal racketeering case. Riccobene’s codefendants included Angelo Bruno, Philip Testa, Chickie Narducci, and Pat Spirito, all of whom were killed either before the trial or prior to sentencing.
Sonny Riccobene’s brother, Harry the Hunchback, was also convicted. The bail he put up while his appeal was pending got revoked when Philadelphia police discovered a gun in his car during a routine traffic stop.
Only Sonny Riccobene and Scarfo capo Joseph “Chickie” Ciancaglini remained free on bail, pending appeal, but both knew their days as free men were numbered.
A month later, Scarfo’s men would finally hit the jackpot, finding and killing one of the Hunchback’s own flesh and blood—his brother Robert “Bobby” Riccobene.
After stalking him the entire day of December 6, a Scarfo death squad—made up of Charles “Charlie White” Iannece, Joseph “Joey Punge” Pungitore, and Francis “Faffy” Iannarella—caught Bobby exiting his car in the presence of his elderly mother.
Similar to the Tamburrino hit, Little Nicky’s men disregarded the callousness of rubbing out someone in front of his mother and attacked their prey on site.
Armed with a shotgun, Iannarella, a young, street-savvy, second-generation South Philadelphia gangster, approached Riccobene and his mother. When Riccobene spotted Iannarella, he took off, jumping a nearby fence in an attempt to escape the onslaught.
His efforts would prove futile.
Taking aim at his fleeing target, the former US soldier, who had been decorated for his service in Vietnam before enlisting in Nicky Scarfo’s La Cosa Nostra army, Faffy Iannarella blasted Riccobene to oblivion with a shot to the back of the head, dropping Bobby Riccobene as he was trying to climb the fence.
As Iannarella retreated to the waiting getaway car, he was confronted by Riccobene’s mother, who tried to wrestle the shotgun from him.
The scene was eerily reminiscent of the time her son Harry had wrestled a handgun from his assailant in a phone booth following an attempt on his life.
Iannarella would take the butt of his shotgun and strike Riccobene’s elderly mother in the face, sending the hysterically crying woman crashing to the ground.
In a sick and perverted way, the murders of Bobby Riccobene and Sammy Tamburrino in front of their mothers, like the shooting of Joe Salerno Sr., highlighted what had become the Scarfo family’s specialty: raw, vicious, visceral, in-your-face, wanton violence.
Honor and respect seemed to be a thing of the past.
I wasn’t happy when I found that these two guys had been killed in front of their mothers. And I didn’t agree with the shooting of Joe Salerno’s father. But you have to understand, the Riccobene guys were trying to kill us, so it was kill or be killed. This was a war in every sense of the word. Just like my uncle was ordering us to kill them from his jail cell, the Hunchback was doing the same from his.
Everyone knew the stakes were life or death.
Scarfo, on the other hand, was ecstatic following the two high-profile mob murders.
He would get the Philadelphia Inquirer in the mail, but it was always a few days behind. We couldn’t talk on the phone and say, hey, we killed Bobby Riccobene today. So he’d make a comment and say, “How about the Eagles, they are playing terrific aren’t they?” That’s what he would say if he was happy with what we were doing. If he wasn’t happy it would be, “How about these fuckin’ Eagles, the whole team is lousy, from top to bottom. They need to get rid of everybody and start over.” That meant he was disgusted that we weren’t doing our jobs.
Following the shooting of Frank Martines and the murders of Bobby Riccobene and Sammy Tamburrino, the Riccobene faction seemed to be on its last leg.
But a wounded animal is a dangerous animal, and Harry’s gang wasn’t done yet.
A few days after Bobby Riccobene’s murder, Salvie Testa was driving through South Philadelphia with members of his Young Executioners crew, Joseph “Joey Punge” Pungitore and the Milano brothers, Gino and Nicky Whip.
Their car became boxed in by another car that was loaded with four Riccobene soldiers, who jumped out of their car and opened fire in broad daylight.
Luckily for Testa and his men, nobody was hit in the fusillade of bullets, and it proved to be one of the last assaults in the carnage-filled conflict that had rocked the underworld in South Philadelphia.
There would be, however, one more casualty in the Riccobene war.
A few days after Harry’s guys tried to kill Salvie and Joe Punge, I drove up to Philly with Lawrence to go see a jeweler I did business with on Jewelers Row. It was a few weeks before Christmas, and I was going to pick up a watch for Maria.
Me and Lawrence met Salvie at Virgilio’s and we went and saw the jeweler. I think we may have had Faffy with us.
As we were leaving we passed by a jewelry shop that was owned by Sonny Riccobene’s son Enrico. Salvie said, “Let’s go in there and see what’s on this kid’s brain,” meaning to see what he was thinking.
I knocked on the window and I saw Sonny’s son coming towards the door, and then he froze when he saw who it was. I said, “Come on, we just want to talk to you,” and I saw him retreat to the back of the store.
With these jewelry stores, you had to be buzzed in; you couldn’t just walk in the store.
A few seconds later a guy who worked there came to the window and said, “If you don’t leave, we’re calling the police.” So we left.
Moments later, Enrico Riccobene walked into his office at the rear of the store and put a pistol to the side of his head and pulled the trigger. He was so frightened by the site of Philip Leonetti and Salvie Testa that he killed himself.
He was 27 years old.
Salvie Testa was now bragging, “We don’t have to kill these guys anymore; they do it themselves.”
When the news of his nephew’s suicide reached him in prison, Harry the Hunchback’s heart and will were shattered.
Things had gone too far.
Both his brother and now his young nephew were dead.
He was ready to give in and wave the white flag.
During the first week of 1984, the Hunchback sent word to what remained of his crew that the war was over.
Nicodemo “Little Nicky” Scarfo had won the war.
The victory entitled Scarfo to everything that belonged to the Riccobenes, a treasure trove of illegal operations that he and his men would devour and add to their already overflowing stable of cash-cow rackets.
But all was not well in the ranks of the tumultuous Scarfo mob, despite the fact that it had won the Riccobene war and that Little Nicky was set to be released from prison in a matter of weeks.
Those in Scarfo’s inner circle didn�
��t know it yet, but the plot would soon thicken and was about to get even more treacherous than it already was.
Falling Apart
BY JANUARY 1984, NICKY SCARFO HAD BEEN THE BOSS OF THE PHILADELPHIA-ATLANTIC CITY MOB FOR APPROXIMATELY 34 MONTHS, AND SPENT 17 OF THOSE MONTHS–OR HALF OF HIS TENURE TO THAT POINT—BEHIND BARS IN A FEDERAL PRISON IN EL PASO, TEXAS.
The crime family he had left was not necessarily the crime family he was returning to at the end of his prison sentence.
Simply put, the Scarfo mob was in tatters, with many of Scarfo’s top guys facing legal problems of their own, some of the charges stemming from incidents that occurred while Scarfo’s men were drunk.
For starters, Scarfo’s longtime friend and underboss, Salvatore “Chuckie” Merlino, had been arrested on suspicion of drunk driving in Margate, and during the course of his arrest, the drunken mob under-boss had offered the arresting officer a bribe in the form of his expensive gold watch as the entire episode was captured on videotape. Merlino was booked on attempted bribery and DWI charges, and faced as many as 10 years in state prison.
Merlino’s brother Lawrence had been arrested and charged with disorderly conduct after he got drunk at a wedding and then made terroristic threats to a Philadelphia police officer. Like his brother Chuckie, Lawrence was also facing state prison time.
Despite promising to clean up his act, Nicholas “Nick the Blade” Virgilio was back in trouble after a drunken incident at an Atlantic City casino, where during a fight, he threatened to kill a man. The twice-convicted murderer was sent to state prison for three years as a result.
Scarfo’s own son, Nicky Jr., was facing an underage-drinking rap following an arrest in Atlantic City.
Scarfo capo Joseph “Chickie” Ciancaglini had lost his appeal on federal racketeering charges and was hauled off to federal prison, as was his codefendant, Mario “Sonny” Riccobene, who headed what was left of the Riccobene gang.
Mafia Prince: Inside America's Most Violent Crime Family Page 19