Mafia Prince: Inside America's Most Violent Crime Family

by Phil Leonetti

  Both Raymond “Long John” Martorano and his son Cowboy were facing federal drug charges, and rumors were abound that Long John would soon face charges for his role in the murder of union boss John McCullough after it was reported that the triggerman Willard “Junior” Moran was cooperating with the Philadelphia District Attorney’s office.

  Saul Kane was also under investigation on federal drug charges.

  Frank Gerace was facing charges that he had embezzled union funds when he was the head of Local 54 and allegedly funneled those funds to Scarfo and Leonetti.

  Even Scarfo’s attorney, Bobby Simone, was facing a federal prison sentence after getting indicted for income tax evasion.

  But the worst news Scarfo was to hear dealt with his own nephew, Philip Leonetti, who had been indicted on extortion charges stemming from his involvement in a corrupt land deal with the mayor of Atlantic City.

  Now while all of the stuff with the Riccobene’s was going on in Philadelphia, I started getting involved with some new things for our family in Atlantic City.

  A few years earlier I had been approached by a guy named Frank Lentino—who had been a Teamster, and then was with us in Local 54—about getting involved with a local politician named Mike Matthews, who wanted to become the mayor of Atlantic City.

  Mike Matthews sent word through Frank Lentino that he wanted our help in getting him elected. We had given him almost $200,000 for his campaign and had helped him win by getting all of the unions to support him.

  One of the first things he did for me was to make a guy who we were close with the chief of police. His name was Joe Pasquale, and me and my uncle both knew him and liked him. We trusted him and he always looked out for us.

  Now when I was meeting with Mike Matthews, one of the trade-offs for our support was that we would get a piece of what they called the H tract, which was a 78-acre parcel of land that the city was going to sell to a casino developer for millions of dollars.

  It had been a landfill, the site of the city dump. But this was going to be a major score for all of us—me and my uncle, as well as Matthews and Frank Lentino, who had set the whole thing up.

  Everything seemed great.

  But it wasn’t.

  The casino developer who had promised to pay Matthews and Lentino the kickback money that would be used to pay Scarfo and Leonetti turned out to be an undercover FBI agent.

  Before long, Leonetti, Lentino, and Matthews were all indicted and looking at lengthy federal prison sentences.

  Nicodemo Scarfo would be named as an unindicted coconspirator.

  It seemed that the only high-ranking member of the Scarfo mob that didn’t have legal problems was Salvie Testa, Scarfo’s street boss and the leader of the Young Executioners crew.

  But Salvie Testa had other problems.

  Following the shooting incident in the Italian Market, the handsome young mob captain started dating the beautiful, dark-haired daughter of family underboss Salvatore “Chuckie” Merlino.

  Pretty soon the two lovebirds were engaged and a wedding date was set.

  The underworld was abuzz at the thought of the Merlino and Testa families, both mob royalty, being aligned through marriage.

  Everyone seemed to be happy for them; well, almost everybody.

  One day my uncle called the office from jail, and I told him that Salvie had gotten engaged to Chuckie’s daughter. When I said it, there was dead silence on his end of the receiver.

  I knew that he wasn’t happy about it. I knew that his paranoia would start, and he would go through every possible scenario of what could happen if Salvie married Chuckie’s daughter. Would they form an alliance and try to overthrow him? Would they try to kill him? Could he ever fully trust that they weren’t plotting against him?

  These are all of the thoughts that went through his head in the 15 seconds of silence on the phone. That is how his sick mind worked.

  But Scarfo’s worries were for naught, as Salvie Testa would soon break off the engagement, leaving both Chuckie Merlino and his daughter embarrassed and furious.

  The once-solid relationship between Nicky Scarfo’s underboss and his street boss was now irrevocably shattered.

  And Little Nicky couldn’t have been happier.

  Back in Business

  My uncle was set to be released from prison right around New Year’s Day in 1984, but the feds didn’t let him out. Bobby Simone and Nicky Jr. flew down to Texas to see what the issue was. After a few days Bobby sorted everything out, and my uncle’s release was back on and scheduled for January 20.

  A bunch of us flew down to El Paso to be there when he got out. It was me, Chuckie, Lawrence, Salvie, Bobby Simone, Nicky Jr., Harold Garber, Chuckie’s son Joey, Tory Scafidi, and a few others. We took several suites at the Marriott and we had one giant party in that hotel. We must have spent 20 grand on food and liquor that weekend.

  I remember having mixed feelings about my uncle coming home. I knew it meant that my life was going back to the way it was before he went to jail, running around all day, all of the chaos. But that was the life I had chosen, or I guess had been chosen for me. I didn’t have the option of saying, hey, I want to go to college or I want to be a doctor. This was the path that I was put on as a young boy. There was no way to change that. I was born and raised in this thing, in La Cosa Nostra.

  So the day he gets out of jail, we take a limousine to the prison. It was me, Lawrence, Nicky Jr., and Bobby Simone.

  My uncle comes out and he’s wearing a red Windbreaker and a pair of sunglasses and he has a box containing his belongings. The first thing he says is, “Let’s get the fuck out of here,” and we start heading towards the car. The news media, the FBI, and even the Texas Rangers were there, and everyone was taking pictures. Not the baseball team, the cops. They were wearing the ten-gallon hats and had the stars on their chest, the whole nine yards.

  As we’re walking, my uncle nods in their direction and says, “Get a load of these jerk offs in the cowboy hats.”

  I knew from my uncle’s demeanor that he had not changed one bit during his 17 months in El Paso. He looked very fit and had a deep tan.

  Back at the hotel everyone made a big deal when he got there and we had a good time. He seemed like he was in a good mood. He pulled me aside at one point and asked me about the money I had collected while he was away. I told him it was just under three million and he was happy. He then pulled me away even further and said, “What’s going on with Salvie and Chuckie?”

  I told him Chuckie wasn’t happy that Salvie broke off the engagement but that Chuckie hadn’t said too much about it. He said, “We gotta keep our antennas up on this one; I don’t like this situation.”

  I knew right there that my uncle was spooked about the possibility of Salvie marrying Chuckie’s daughter, and then with the engagement being broken off, it seemed like he was even more spooked.

  I can’t explain it, but he was always thinking like that. Nothing was simple. Everything had a subplot, and the subplots had subplots. It would make you dizzy listening to him.

  Meanwhile, 10 feet away, Chuckie Merlino, Salvie Testa, and the rest of those gathered to celebrate Nicky Scarfo’s release from prison were having a great time and oblivious to what was going on in Scarfo’s head.

  To the others, this was just a party. But with Nicky Scarfo, nothing was ever what it seemed.

  It was a scene fit for a king. News cameras were everywhere. Photographers snapped shots of his every move. Nicodemo Scarfo’s long-awaited homecoming at the Philadelphia International Airport caused the level of commotion usually reserved for the arrival of a head of state or an A-list celebrity.

  And in a lot of ways, it was appropriate. Scarfo had become both.

  He was the undisputed head of the Philadelphia–Atlantic City La Cosa Nostra, and his notoriety had made him one of the nation’s foremost celebrity gangsters.

  Always impeccably dressed and groomed, the 55-year-old Scarfo had become a media sensation, a precur
sor to the flamboyant John Gotti, who was then still a lowly solider in New York’s Gambino family.

  As the cameras flashed and reporters followed his entourage, Little Nicky was carrying himself with a swashbuckling swagger and regal flair not typical of someone who had just been released from prison.

  I think in many ways my uncle had become even more self-centered and more self-absorbed during the 17 months that he was away. His ego was a thousand times worse than it was before.

  Flanking Scarfo as he walked from the airport terminal to a waiting fleet of white limousines were his top two lieutenants, Philip Leonetti, who was 30 years old, and Salvatore Testa, who was 27.

  When Scarfo was away in El Paso, Leonetti and Testa worked together to look after his empire with ruthless efficiency, proving their merit as future leaders in La Cosa Nostra and as possible heirs to Scarfo’s throne.

  But therein was a problem.

  Beneath the surface and all of the smiles, backslaps and kisses on the cheek, Scarfo was an evil and vindictive despot who maintained an unquenchable thirst for blood as a means of both obtaining and keeping power.

  While Scarfo loved every minute of it, Leonetti was growing tired of it.

  There was a time in my life when all I wanted was to be with my uncle and to be with La Cosa Nostra and live that life 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, just like my uncle.

  It’s all that I knew.

  But when he went away and I started living my own life, waking up every day and making my own decisions, I started to resent both my uncle and what being involved in La Cosa Nostra was doing to my life. I felt like I had no life being in the mob, no identity.

  I realized that I was a lot happier doing things with Maria or doing things with Philip Jr. than I was doing things with my uncle, but I was trapped. Once you are in this life there’s only two ways out: jail or death. There was no retiring or quitting.

  I felt stuck.

  And then there was the pure sport of it.

  La Cosa Nostra was my uncle’s whole life. He lived for this thing. Every day was just like the day before it. Where are we getting money? How much are we getting? Whose making what moves? Who do we have to watch? Who do we have to kill? That was our routine, day after day after day.

  If you made a big score and made him a lot of money, the second he was done counting the money he would say to me, “This guy thinks he’s a big shot now; all the sudden he’s J. D. Rockefeller,” or “We gotta watch him so he doesn’t get too big for his britches.”

  The guy just hands you a bag with $200,000 in it and ten minutes later you’re burying the guy. It didn’t make sense, but that’s how he was.

  If he ordered you to kill someone and you did it perfectly and you got the guy just like he asked, he’d say to me, “Now this guy thinks he’s Al Capone because he killed a guy.”

  As quickly as he would build somebody up, he’d already be bringing them down.

  Nowhere would this be more evident than with the next mobster who found himself in Nicky Scarfo’s crosshairs.

  So when we get back to Atlantic City, my uncle stayed in for a day or two, just to get his bearings straight. On the third or fourth day he had me set up a full day of meetings at Scannicchio’s so he could talk to everyone and see what was going on.

  He told me to bring down Chuckie and Bobby Simone, and he wanted to see Blackie Napoli from North Jersey. He was going to meet with everyone separately and he wanted an hour or two blocked out for each meeting.

  I said, “Do you want me to bring Salvie down?” And he said, “I don’t think we need to.” Now this gets my antenna up, because the whole time my uncle is gone, it was mainly Salvie and his guys who were out there shooting it out with the Riccobenes, and Salvie was also heavily involved in the street-tax collections. I found it strange that my uncle wasn’t bringing him down to meet with him, too.

  He tells me, “I want you in on these meetings,” which means I gotta sit there all day.

  The first guy down was Blackie Napoli. When my uncle was away I was meeting with Blackie once or twice a month, and he was bringing my uncle’s tribute money down. Now Blackie was getting up there in age and he wasn’t as sharp as he used to be, but him and my uncle went way back, even before they were in Yardville together.

  My uncle wastes no time in telling him, “These envelopes you sent down while I was away, they were light. What are you guys doing up there? Did you forget how to make money or are you guys just giving it away?”

  When my uncle became boss, remember, it was him and Blackie who first went to see Bobby Manna the day after Phil Testa’s wake. My uncle always knew that Blackie was letting Bobby Manna and the Genovese take more than they should in North Jersey, but my uncle felt like Blackie had given away the store up there when he was in jail.

  Then my uncle told Blackie, “We’re gonna tighten our belts up there, no more free lunches for anyone. I don’t care who they are with,” and Blackie left. I could tell he was disappointed, because he thought he had done a good job while my uncle was gone.

  When he left my uncle said, “I’m taking him down. He’s getting too old. He’s losing his fastball. I’m gonna keep him up there, but I’m putting Patty Specs in charge up there. Bring him down tomorrow and tell him I want to see him.”

  Patty Specs was a guy named Pasquale Martirano who had been with the North Jersey branch of our family dating back to the days when Ange was boss.

  The next one in was Bobby Simone. My uncle seemed very concerned about Bobby’s tax case, and Bobby talked about it a little bit. My uncle then went through the litany of criminal charges that everyone in the family was facing—from Chuckie’s bribery case to my thing with the mayor—and asked Bobby to explain every possible scenario of everyone’s individual cases.

  This went on for like two hours. My uncle was just asking hypotheticals. Towards the end he said, “I can’t depend on anybody in this entire borgata. Everybody’s drunk, stupid, or incompetent. I should go get six black guys from North Philly and start a new gang. They’d be better than what I got right now.”

  Now I can’t say anything, but what I’m thinking is: you just came home from jail, you got $3 million sitting in a safe, everybody you wanted us to kill is dead, and you’re still complaining?

  So after Bobby leaves, Chuckie comes in. Chuckie’s telling him everything that had been going on in Philly while he was away. He says to my uncle, “We never filled Frank’s spot after he got killed,” meaning the consigliere position. “And with Ciancaglini in jail, we are down a capo.”

  My uncle says, “I’m gonna put my uncle Nick in as consigliere,” meaning his mother’s brother “Nicky Buck” Piccolo. Now, me and Chuckie both know how bad my uncle hates his Uncle Nick. He hated him and his brothers his whole life. He used to say they were no good, that they mistreated him and always tried to hold him back. Now he’s gonna make him the consigliere. The position of consigliere is very important in La Cosa Nostra. The consigliere is the counselor, someone to settle disputes in the family and someone who can advise the boss. The consig is the third most powerful position in the family, behind the boss and underboss. Bobby Manna was the Chin’s consigliere and Bobby was the Chin’s eyes and ears. My uncle is gonna make his uncle the consigliere, a guy he hated his whole life—it didn’t make any sense. It’s almost like he was saying, “I don’t need a consigliere, ’cause I ain’t askin’ nobody their opinion or how to settle disputes.” My uncle settled almost every dispute with a gun, but that wasn’t what La Cosa Nostra was about. When my uncle got out of La Tuna, this thing started to become my thing with him.

  Then he says, “And as for Chickie’s crew, let’s leave things the way they are for now. Too many chiefs and not enough Indians,” which was his way of saying he wanted more soldiers and less captains. He wanted to keep all the power for himself.

  Then he says to Chuckie, “What . . . about . . . Salvie?”

  It was like he said it in slow motion, like a movie
. I couldn’t believe it. I immediately felt sick. I knew at that very second that my uncle had decided that he was going to turn on Salvie and was now going to make a case for killing him.

  Leonetti’s intuitions would prove to be spot-on.

  Dead Man Walking

  ONLY DAYS OUT OF JAIL, NICKY SCARFO WAS ALREADY PLOTTING HIS NEXT KILL, AND THIS TIME, INSTEAD OF SALVIE TESTA DOING THE KILLING, HE WOULD BE THE ONE GETTING KILLED.

  Prior to this, Philip Leonetti had been Nicky Scarfo’s prized pupil and had never seriously questioned his uncle’s leadership. He was in many respects the perfect soldier, the perfect protégé.

  But by putting a hit out on Salvie Testa, Little Nicky had gone too far, even for Crazy Phil.

  Nicky Scarfo’s increasingly erratic behavior had shaken Philip’s faith in his uncle, and his blind allegiance to La Cosa Nostra, to the core, turning his world upside down.

  For the first time in his life, Philip was seriously reconsidering his path in life. Being his uncle’s protégé had worn him down, both physically and emotionally, and he didn’t know how much more he could take.

  My uncle went crazy with the power when he became the boss. It was like he got drunk off of it. He became so full of jealousy and hatred that he had turned into something out of a horror movie. This wasn’t a thing of honor or respect anymore. It wasn’t even about the money.

  It was all about the power.

  Bodies were falling everywhere. He wanted to murder everyone and everything around him. It wasn’t enough for us to kill our enemies. We were now going to start killing our friends.

  He used to say, “The only way to hold on to the power is to kill anyone who stands in your way.” That’s the kind of mentality he had on everything. He was just looking for excuses to kill guys. And the more power he got, the crazier and more paranoid he became.