Gravano told the same FBI agents and US attorneys who had debriefed Philip Leonetti that once Leonetti flipped, he knew that it was over. The Bull told them, “I knew what Philip knew, what me and John had told him, especially about the hit on Paul. I knew that with him testifying, we didn’t have a chance.”
Gravano was whisked out of the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Manhattan and taken to the United States Marine base in Quantico, Virginia, where he was debriefed at length regarding the inner workings of the Gambino crime family and La Cosa Nostra in and around New York City.
By the end of 1991, after Gravano had spent several months at Quantico, the feds needed a new place to stash Sammy the Bull—someplace he could relax before being brought back to New York to testify against Gotti.
When I was in FCI Phoenix, you gotta remember, there are only 70 to 75 inmates in our unit. So anytime someone new came, it was a big deal. So one day one of the guards comes up to me and says, “You’re never gonna guess who’s here,” and I said, “Who?” And he said, “Sammy the Bull.”
Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano, who at 46 had followed Philip Leonetti’s lead and defected from La Cosa Nostra, was now being held in a segregated area less than 50 yards from where Leonetti’s cell was located.
For a week, they keep you in isolation to make sure you’re not sick or carrying a disease. Once you’re medically cleared, they release you into the unit.
A week after arriving at FCI Phoenix, Sammy the Bull was reunited with Crazy Phil, and while Leonetti was helping Gravano get acclimated to life inside the Wit Sec unit at FCI Phoenix, Gravano was updating Leonetti on everything that had been going on in the world of La Cosa Nostra.
You have to remember, by this time I had been in jail for almost five years; Sammy had only been locked up for a year. He told me they had made John Stanfa the boss because the siggys in the Gambino family were pushing for him. He told me that the Chin was definitely behind the car bombing that killed Frankie DeCicco, and that there was bad blood between Gotti and the Chin.
Sammy told me that he was there when Frankie DeCicco got blown up, and that when he went to grab Frankie’s body, there was nothing there. Sammy said his hand went through him. Sammy used to talk about Frankie DeCicco all the time. He said he was a man’s man, a real gangster.
Sammy told me that when John Gotti came to him and Frankie about killing Paul Castellano, Frankie DeCicco said to Sammy, “I got no love lost for Paul, so if this guy,” meaning Gotti, “wants to whack, let him whack him. And then if this guy don’t work out, me and you will kill him. Fuck John Gotti.”
He told me that him and Gotti had had a falling out in the Metropolitan Detention Center in New York over some things Gotti had said about Sammy that the feds had picked up with a listening device, and that Gotti was worried about me being a witness against him. And I said, “I bet he’s more worried now about you and not me.”
He told me that the feds wanted to use both me and him to help build a case against the Chin.
We caught up on old times and had some laughs and we always worked out together. We walked that track every day. But Sammy still wanted to be Sammy the Bull, and I didn’t want to be Crazy Phil anymore—to be honest I never did. It’s what my uncle wanted, not me.
On the one hand, it’s great to see someone you know, like it was for me with Gino Milano. But on the other hand, mentally I am done with La Cosa Nostra, so seeing Sammy, while it was nice to see someone I had been close with, that part of my life was over and I was really ready to just move on.
As 1992 got underway, Philip Leonetti continued to be debriefed by FBI agents and federal prosecutors, who were now focusing their attention on Vincent “The Chin” Gigante, the boss of the Genovese crime family.
They told me they were going to use me to testify against John Gotti and they wanted to use me against the Chin. They flew me and Sammy from Phoenix to New York in late February/early March for the Gotti trial, and they had us staying in what looked like hotel rooms that were in the basement of the courthouse. This is where the US Marshals would stay when they were traveling. Once Sammy flipped, they really didn’t need me in the Gotti case, but I think they brought me as an insurance policy.
On April 2, 1992, the jury convicted the onetime Teflon Don on all charges in the indictment, and Gotti was sentenced to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
The 51-year-old chief of the Gambino crime family was immediately shipped out to the maximum-security federal penitentiary in Marion, Illinois, which had been Nicodemo “Little Nicky” Scarfo’s home for the past two and a half years.
When I got back to Phoenix, it was early April 1992 and I had been locked up for the last five years. When we got sentenced, we were under the old federal sentencing guidelines, which meant we had to serve two-thirds of our sentence. I got 45 years, so unless I got a reduction, I would have had to do 30, which means I had 25 years to go. Today, the feds make everybody do 85 percent of their sentence.
Around this time, I get a phone call from Jim Maher and Gary Langan, and they say, “Philip, we have to bring you back to Philadelphia to see the judge. He’s going to hear your motion for a new sentence.”
Philip Leonetti was now 39 years old and everything was riding on his motion for a new sentence. Without it, he would spend at least the next 25 years behind bars and wouldn’t be eligible for release until he was 64 years old.
When I started cooperating, there are no promises, no guarantees. You go into it knowing that you could testify against a thousand guys, and no one can make the judge do anything to help you. In other words, everything I had done or everything I would do, it was all meaningless, at least in the sense of helping me personally, unless the judge reduced my sentence.
In early May 1992, just three years after he was sentenced to 45 years in federal prison, Philip Leonetti was back inside the same federal courtroom before the same federal judge asking for a reduction of his sentence.
The room was packed with FBI agents and prosecutors that at one time hated my guts when I was with my uncle and La Cosa Nostra, and were now coming to court to speak on my behalf and tell the judge everything that I had done since I began cooperating.
Before the hearing started I got a chance to catch up with most of them and they treated me with respect, like a human being, not like the monster they had made me out to be three years before in the same courtroom. The government appointed a lawyer to represent me named Frank DeSimone, who I got along with and who was a good guy.
I remember feeling jittery when they said “All rise!” and the judge, whose name was Franklin Van Antwerpen, came out. This was just like waiting for the jury to say guilty or not guilty in every case I had been in. Even though I was nervous, I always felt lucky in court or when I got charged with something. Remember, I had beaten the Pepe Leva murder case, the Falcone murder case, the extortion case with Mike Matthews, who was the mayor of Atlantic City, the P2P case, and the Salvie Testa murder case. My only loss had been the RICO case.
So the US attorneys are talking, the agents were talking, my lawyer talked, and then the judge asked me if I had anything to say. I told him that I decided that I no longer wanted to be associated with my uncle or with La Cosa Nostra, and that since that day I have done everything in my power to prove to the federal government that I am 100 percent done with that life. I told the judge that I wanted to join my family and raise my son and live a peaceful, law-abiding life. I told him I wanted a shot at going straight and doing the right thing, doing it all over.
Judge Van Antwerpen called Philip Leonetti “the most significant crime figure who had ever chosen to cooperate” and hailed his cooperation and his transformation as a human being both “extraordinary” and “outstanding.”
The judge then reduced Leonetti’s sentence from 45 years to a mere six and a half years. With the time he had already done, Philip Leonetti would be a free man in less than four months.
I will never forget t
hat feeling. I felt like I had a shot at a whole new life where I could just be a regular guy and be around regular people. I spent my whole life around vicious and treacherous murderers, and I was just like them. But now I had a chance to start over, to do things right.
Leonetti would return to the Wit Sec unit at FCI Phoenix, but the news of his courtroom victory was not made public.
I never involved myself in other people’s business, and I didn’t like it when people got involved in mine. When I got back to Arizona, no one knew that I was getting out in a few months, and that’s the way I wanted it. I spent that summer doing what I had done the whole time I was there—playing basketball, exercising, hanging with Sammy, and reading books.
But I gotta tell you: that last stretch, the summer of 1992, it was the longest four months of my entire life. The anticipation of getting out of jail and being reunited with my family made it difficult to sleep. I was very antsy.
Starting Over
ON SEPTEMBER 9, 1992, AT THE AGE OF 39, PHILIP MICHAEL LEONETTI, THE FORMER UNDERBOSS OF THE PHILADELPHIA-ATLANTIC CITY MOB, WALKED OUT OF THE FCI PHOENIX FEDERAL PRISON NEAR MESA, ARIZONA, A FREE MAN, AND WAS IMMEDIATELY GREETED BY HIS ONETIME NEMESIS TURNED FRIEND, FBI AGENT JIM MAHER.
Jim Maher flew all the way from Philadelphia to Arizona to make sure that everything went smooth when I got out. A guy who was the special agent in charge of the Philadelphia FBI office, who didn’t like me, told Jim Maher not to come and he came anyway, because that’s what type of stand-up guy he was.
Jim and I drove from the prison to the airport in Phoenix and we got on a plane and headed for the Tampa area, where my mother, Maria, and Little Philip were living. Both of us flew under assumed names and we had a detour, stopping in Houston, and then boarding another plane. I remember it was late, maybe nine or ten o’clock, when we landed, and it took us maybe another hour or so to get to the house.
Shortly before midnight, a small rental car being driven by FBI agent Jim Maher, with Philip Leonetti in the passenger seat, pulled into the driveway of a nondescript two-story house in a quiet residential neighborhood about 30 miles outside of Tampa.
Inside the house were Leonetti’s mother, Nancy, his longtime girlfriend, Maria, his now 18-year-old son, Philip, and FBI agent Gary Langan.
It was very, very emotional. There was a lot of hugging and kissing and crying. It was one of the best feelings in my life. It was like being born again and getting to start my life all over, away from my uncle and La Cosa Nostra.
As Leonetti spent his first night as a free man, sleeping in what had now become his family’s home, the two FBI agents who had befriended him and assisted him in leaving La Cosa Nostra stayed in a nearby hotel.
The very next morning, I was up early, before anyone in the house. I remember going to the kitchen and making a cup of coffee, and then walking out onto the back porch and just sitting there, looking at the grass and the trees and thinking: there’s no walls here; there’s no barbed wire; no guards. I’m free.
The thought of being free was very surreal to me. I went upstairs and told Maria, “I’m going for a run,” and she said, “You have no idea where you are. How are you gonna find your way home?” And I said, “I made it here, didn’t I? I’m sure I can find my way back.”
That morning, at approximately 7:30 a.m., Philip Leonetti started out on what had become his daily ritual of running five miles. Only now, instead of running around a track in the recreation yard of a federal prison, surrounded by men like “Sammy the Bull” Gravano, he was running through the streets of the small suburban town where his family had chosen to relocate.
When I’m out running, I’m seeing people leaving for work, kids going to school, dogs running around barking, people’s sprinklers going on—all basic stuff that most people see every day and take for granted, but not me, not on this day. I must have had the biggest smile on my face, and it was the best run I had ever taken. I was waving at the people in the neighborhood, and no one had any clue who I was or where I had just come from. I could have run 100 miles that day. And the best part was that I did find my way home.
Back at the Leonetti home, Jim Maher and Gary Langan were treated to a continental breakfast, courtesy of Maria, and the two agents spent several hours sitting on the back porch, talking with Philip.
They told me that they knew my mother had been communicating with my grandmother back in Atlantic City, and that if my grandmother, even by accident, knew anything about where we were and it got back to my uncle, that he was going to send somebody down to kill us.
Jim Maher said, “You guys have to be extremely careful; you are all in very serious danger if anyone finds out who you are and where you are,” and Gary Langan said, “And it’s not just your uncle. It’s the Gambinos, the Genovese, the Luccheses—it’s everyone you testified against. If given the chance, all of them would kill you and your family, and it’s going to be like that for the rest of your lives.”
I told them I knew that going in and I know the situation I have put myself and my family in. It is what it is, but I am going to be careful and do the best I can—that’s all I can do.
For the next several hours, the agents went through the proper protocol of how Philip Leonetti was going to transform into a John Doe, with a new name and a new background.
That night the Leonetti family and the two FBI agents went out for a huge celebratory dinner at one of the Tampa area’s top restaurants and they reminisced over the past and waxed philosophical over something that was undoubtedly uncertain for Philip Leonetti: the future.
Leonetti had mastered the rules of La Cosa Nostra and life as a federally protected witness in La Tuna and FCI Phoenix. That was easy to him; those skills were innate. He was a survivor. But mastering the rules of living life as someone else, a civilian, would be Philip Leonetti’s toughest challenge yet.
Those first couple of weeks I was just driving around, learning the area and seeing what was going on down there. Every day was like a new adventure for me. I laid low for the first two months. I was just getting acclimated to the area, my new identity, and life away from La Cosa Nostra. And then they called me back to Philadelphia to testify in the Bobby Simone trial.
While Leonetti may have been released from jail, he was still required to appear as a witness if called to do so by the federal government.
Testifying against Bobby Simone was the hardest thing I ever had to do. It was easier killing Vincent Falcone and getting sentenced to 45 years, then it was to testify against Bobby. Bobby was always good to me and I considered him a dear friend, but I had to tell the truth and the feds knew what the truth was. The evidence was so overwhelming I couldn’t have lied even if I wanted to. There were a lot of times when I was testifying in that case that I had tears in my eyes—that’s how difficult that was for me. Any chance I got to try and help Bobby, I did. I wasn’t trying to hurt him, and he knew it. There were a lot of questions that were asked of me where my answer was “I don’t recall” or “I don’t remember”—and trust me, if I had remembered, it wouldn’t have been good for Bobby.
When it was over, Bobby Simone was convicted of racketeering and sentenced to four years in federal prison, with a concurrent 15-month sentence in a separate tax case.
Around this time—I think it was the Spring of 1993—we moved from where we were staying and bought a four-bedroom house right outside of Naples, Florida, which was a few hours south of where we had been living. The place was gorgeous and was right on the water. I started a small landscaping company and things were going good for us.
Even though he was done with La Cosa Nostra, in the early part of 1993, Philip Leonetti decided it was time to take another oath.
Maria and I got married. She had stuck by me through everything. I remember her telling me, “I’m not going anywhere,” and that was after I got the 45 years. I don’t know if I would have been able to do what I did without her.
By this point, Little Philip wasn’t so little. He was
now 19, and was going to a big university in Arizona. He had come out to see me a few times while I was in FCI Phoenix and he told me that he wanted to go to school there. I couldn’t have been prouder that he turned out the way he did, considering everything he had to deal with when he was a kid. He had just turned 13 when we got locked up in 1987.
Looking back, I remember his 10th birthday. We had a party for him on Georgia Avenue. We had it inside the Scarf, Inc. office and in the courtyard that separated our two buildings. They didn’t have Chuck E. Cheese back then. All of his friends came to the party and I remember being in the Scarf, Inc. office with Lawrence. My uncle, who was home at the time, never came down to the party. That’s the kind of guy he was. Always the big shot, always a jerk off. So me and Lawrence are in the office and I look out the window and I see this shadow move back and forth very quickly—you could see it was a person, but it looked like they were wearing a mask and you could tell they were right on the other side of the door. I say to Lawrence, “What the fuck is that?” And he says, “I don’t know.”
I told him, “Go out the back door and sneak through the alley, and when I open the door, I want you to grab the guy from behind.” So Lawrence does what I tell him, and when I know that he is in position, I open the door and Lawrence grabs the guy and the guy is wearing a dinosaur costume. We drag the guy into the Scarf, Inc. office and we are punching and kicking him and trying to get his mask off. I think this is a hit—that someone sent this guy to kill either me or my uncle. So Lawrence gets the mask off and we see that it’s a teenager, and the kid is crying and he’s scared to death.
I’m trying to help him up, but he’s shaking like a leaf and Lawrence is trying to give him cake and soda to calm him down. I tell him, “I’m sorry that this happened, we just didn’t know who you were. Please let us give you some money in case we damaged your costume.” That kid said, “I don’t want your money. I just want to go home,” and he runs out the door crying right in front of Little Philip and all of his friends. This is my son’s 10th birthday party. Me and Lawrence beat up the dinosaur who someone got to come to the party and entertain the kids because we thought the dinosaur was there to kill us. This is how fucked up our life was. This is what my kid saw on his 10th birthday.
Mafia Prince: Inside America's Most Violent Crime Family Page 28