Mafia Prince: Inside America's Most Violent Crime Family

by Phil Leonetti

  The Blade always reminded me of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. One second he was the nicest guy in the world, and the next second he’d be drunk and he would turn into a stone-cold, heartless killer. I always liked the Blade, and he was always good to me, even when he was drunk. When I think of the Blade, I think back to what he did when those guys were robbing Bidda-Beep at the card game, how he protected him from those guys—which is what this thing is supposed to be about: honor and respect—or how superstitious he was when we saw that black cat on the night Ange died and how happy he was after he killed Judge Helfant. He said to me, “Philip, this guy was a crook and I’m not a crook,” and he mimicked Richard Nixon’s voice. This was a few hours after he killed him. He thought it was funny, and so did I. But that was the Blade.

  Lawrence died of cancer in 2001. He was 55. The last I heard he was living out west somewhere and he got sick, and then he died. He had only been out of prison for a couple of years before he got sick. He died of cancer. I always liked Lawrence. We were always very close. We would go out drinking together or go out to dinner. Lawrence loved to have a good time. When I think of Lawrence, I think of his eyebrow catching on fire when I shot Vince Falcone and of Lawrence tackling that kid in the dinosaur suit at Little Philip’s 10th birthday party. I got a chance to talk to him one time on the telephone when I was in FCI Phoenix and he was in FCI Sandstone in Minnesota, and I knew that he was bitter with the way things turned out, with the way my uncle treated him and his brother towards the end, and I don’t blame him. Chuckie and Lawrence were always loyal to my uncle, but the way my uncle was towards the end, loyalty meant absolutely nothing. Look at the thing with Salvie.

  Salvie was one of the most loyal guys and one of the sharpest guys that my uncle had in our family. He and I were very close and very much alike—both being raised in La Cosa Nostra—me with my uncle and him with his father. My best memories with Salvie were playing racquetball with him, or when he and his girlfriend took me and Maria out to a Broadway show when my uncle was in La Tuna. To this day, every time I go to see a show with Maria, I think of Salvie and I smile.

  When Phil Testa got killed, Salvie went out and avenged his father’s death, like a man, killing Chickie Narducci and Rocco Marinucci to honor his father’s memory. Salvie knew all the rules and all the moves and eventually my uncle became jealous of him, paranoid that one day he would turn on him, which would have never happened. Salvie looked at my uncle like he was his own father and Salvie was 100 percent loyal to my uncle and 100 percent committed to La Cosa Nostra. He would have never gone against my uncle, not in a million years. Neither would Chuckie.

  Chuckie’s been in jail since 1986. He was 46 years old when he got locked up and today he is almost 73. If he lives long enough, he is supposed to get out in 2016 when he is 77 years old. He’s rotting in a federal prison down in Texas. Chuckie was always a great guy and a lot of fun to be around. Other than me, there was no one who knew my uncle as well as Chuckie did. Chuckie could read my uncle like a book. I know that he was very disappointed when Lawrence went bad, but, in a way, I think he always knew that Lawrence wasn’t as committed to La Cosa Nostra as he was. When I think of Chuckie, I think back to all of the fun we had when I would go see him in Philadelphia when my uncle was in Yardville. He and I would go to the Saloon. When I went in there for a drink after I saw the attorney James Leonard in Atlantic City in 2010, I had a drink for Chuckie. I hope when he gets out of jail, he has his health and enjoys his grandchildren.

  Bobby Simone died in 2007; he was 73 years old. Bobby lived hard, played hard, and worked hard. He was the best attorney I ever saw, and I saw them all. Testifying against him in 1992 was the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. Me and my uncle loved Bobby and I know he felt the same way about us. I know Bobby wrote a book towards the end of his life and—from what I can tell in reading those letters my uncle wrote to my grandmother—I know my uncle wasn’t happy that he wrote the book. But you know what, my uncle wasn’t happy about anything. Bobby should be remembered as the best criminal defense attorney to ever step foot inside a Philadelphia courtroom.

  Faffy’s still in jail and so is Ciancaglini. Faffy’s 64 years old and will be 68 when he gets out, and Chickie is 77 and will be 80 when he gets out. Faffy was a good guy, a good solider. Towards the end, Faffy was the street boss in South Philadelphia. My uncle always liked him and so did I. He and I were cellmates together for a little while in Holmesburg, and he used to tell me stories about when he was in Vietnam. Faffy had a lot of balls.

  Ciancaglini was a gentleman, but also a real gangster. I remember after Tommy Del flipped, Ciancaglini told me and my uncle in jail that he felt responsible for bringing him around because Tommy was part of Ciancaglini’s crew. My uncle said, “Chick, it’s not your fault,” and Ciancaglini said, “Nick, I could go to the government and tell them I want to cooperate, but that I want to see Tommy first, and when they bring him in I will give him a hug and hold him tight, and then I will jump out the window with him and he’ll be dead.”My uncle looked at him and said, “But you’d die, too,” and Ciancaglini said, “Nick, after what this guy did to us, so be it.” I know that Chickie had to be devastated after what happened with his sons in the early ’90s—them on opposite sides trying to kill each other when Stanfa was the boss, with one of them dying and the other one becoming disabled.

  All the other guys we went to jail with are out. Joe Punge is living down in South Florida, and so is Tory Scafidi.

  I know that the Pungitores are doing well and that their father, the Blonde Babe, set them up in businesses and in real estate. The Babe was always a moneymaker, and all three of his sons were gentlemen, just like he was. I read in one of the Philly papers that the Babe just died. Joe Punge and I were close because we both had a strong relationship with Salvie, and I know that after Salvie died, Joe Punge seemed less interested in La Cosa Nostra. I mean, Christ, I was 31 when Salvie got killed and him and Salvie were both 27 and 28. We were all just kids. I think Joe Punge will be successful in whatever he does, and it won’t have anything to do with the mob.

  Tory Scafidi was always a good kid and he was with me when I got arrested in April of ’87 outside Rittenhouse Square, and he had my back in Holmesburg when I got into that fight with the drug kingpin. Tory was a tough kid. I hope he stays down in Florida and leaves Philadelphia and La Cosa Nostra behind. He’s gotta be 51 or 52 years old by now and he got locked up when he was 26. His younger brother, Tommy Horsehead, ended up cooperating with the government in the ’90s and testified against Joey Merlino.

  Everybody else is out and back in South Philadelphia. Junior Staino is 80, and Charlie White is 77. Junior is a character, always breaking balls and starting some kind of trouble. I remember at least two fights he started in jail, one with Wayne Grande and another with Joe Punge, and he had almost 30 years on each one of those guys, but Junior always had something fresh to say. Charlie White and I were cellmates for a while in Otisville, and Charlie was always a good guy and I liked him. I remember one time he was telling me that his family was having money problems and I had Nicky Jr. give his son $10,000. My uncle went nuts when he found I had told Nicky to give him the money; he said, “What’s the matter with you, are you nuts giving this guy $10,000?” and I said, “The guy just stood up for our family and got 40 years,” and my uncle said, “I don’t give a fuck what he did.” That’s an example of how loyal my uncle was to the guys in our family. He didn’t give a fuck about nobody but himself.

  Frankie Narducci is only a couple of months younger than me, so he is 59 and his brother Philip is 50. I think Frankie Narducci was pretty much along for the ride, but his brother Philip was a gangster, and just as shrewd as his father was.

  One time after my uncle become the boss, the Chin sent word through Bobby Manna that he wanted my uncle to send two shooters to New York to whack some guy out. My uncle said to me, “I want you to be one of them,” and he asked me who I wanted to use as the second shooter, and I t
old him, “Philip Narducci.” This was after Salvie had died, and both me and my uncle thought Philip Narducci was very capable. The hit got called off. My advice to whoever is running what’s left of that organization in Philadelphia is to stay out of Philip’s way.

  Joey Grande is 52 now. His father was a made guy under Ange and, like the Narduccis, he knows the rules of La Cosa Nostra and all of the moves, but he’s a troublemaker. I remember him coming to me one time and whispering stuff to me in front of Joe Punge, to make it look like we were talking about him, which we weren’t. Joe Punge picked right up on it and said to me afterwards, “I got a hard-on for this kid. You have no idea all the bullshit him and his brother are doing.” I heard that his brother Wayne went bad in the ’90s and ended up getting involved in a drug deal while he was in prison, and then cooperated against one of my cousins. Wayne was married to my cousin Rita.

  After we beat the Salvie Testa murder and it looked like we were going to make bail, my uncle told me that if I got out, he wanted me to kill three people: his wife Mimi, and then the two Grande brothers, Joey and Wayne. We never made bail, but even if we did I wasn’t going to kill any of them. First of all, as much as I couldn’t stand my uncle’s wife, there was no fuckin’ chance I would ever kill a woman ever, and I wasn’t going to kill the Grandes because, by this point, I was done taking orders from my uncle. I know from reading those letters he was sending to my grandmother that him and Joey Grande stayed in touch during the ’90s, and my grandmother used to tell me that Joey Grande would call her and write her letters from time to time.

  I recently read in one of the papers that Gino Milano is going to be a witness in an upcoming mob trial in Philadelphia. Gino is now 53 and, the last I heard, he was living somewhere in the Midwest and working as a car salesman and was living in the Witness Protection Program. His brother Nicky Whip is 51 and may be living at the Jersey Shore. From what I heard, he has nothing to do with La Cosa Nostra and may be working in construction.

  My old friend Sammy the Bull is back in jail, rotting away in the same Florence ADX that my uncle once called “a dog kennel” in those letters to my grandmother. Sammy got involved in drugs when he got of jail and got locked up out in Arizona back in 2000. He eventually got sentenced to 19 years and could be out a few years from now when he is in his early 70s, if he stays healthy. I recently read that he is sick and I wish nothing but the best for him with his health, but I am disappointed to hear that Sammy got involved with drugs and wound up back in jail. Sammy was very loyal to La Cosa Nostra, like I was, but just like me, he lost faith in his boss. He told me that one of his biggest regrets was not killing John Gotti so that Frankie DeCicco could be the boss instead. “We fucked up on that one, Bo,” is what he would say. Sammy used to call everyone “Bo.” I get a kick out of seeing his daughter Karen on the TV show Mob Wives.

  My father died in 1983, and my mother and my grandmother are both dead and they are buried in the family plot with my grandfather at a cemetery just outside of Atlantic City. Ironically, two plots down stands the mausoleum of Felix “Skinny Razor” DiTullio, my uncle’s first mob mentor. I don’t know if he and my uncle bought the plots together when Skinny Razor was alive, so they could be buried next to one another, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Those two were very close.

  My cousin Chris is still in Atlantic City, running a successful business and doing well for himself, having the smarts to change his last name and distance himself from his father.

  Tommy Del and Nicky Crow are out there somewhere, most likely in the Witness Protection Program. I never liked either one of them and one of my uncle’s biggest mistakes was making those guys and keeping them around. Tommy Del wasn’t even 100-percent Italian, for Christ’s sake. He and the Crow were always no good.

  I stay in touch with the FBI agents who helped me and became my friends, guys like Gary Langan, Jim Maher, Jim Darcy, and Klaus Rohr. These guys are the real men of honor.

  And how about all the guys that got whacked? And for what? Ange, Johnny Keys, Phil Testa, Sindone, Frank Monte—those types of individuals aren’t around anymore. They are like dinosaurs; they don’t exist. The Chickie Narduccis, the Caponigros. Nowadays, you got a bunch of kids who grew up on the street corner watching guys like Chuckie making moves, guys like Salvie, guys like Ciancaglini, but they didn’t grow up in this thing, they don’t know La Cosa Nostra. To them those words don’t mean nothing. They didn’t grow up like I grew up, or how Joe Punge grew up, or how Salvie grew up, or how the Narducci brothers grew up. To them this life is like the characters they see in Goodfellas or The Sopranos. But it’s not.

  THE LAST WORD

  June 2012, Somewhere Near Las Vegas

  AS THE HOT SUN SCORCHES THE NEVADA DESERT, 59-YEAR-OLD PHILIP “CRAZY PHIL” LEONETTI IS SIPPING A HALF-ICED TEA, HALF-LEMONADE CONCOCTION KNOWN AS AN ARNOLD PALMER, OR AN ARNIE, AS LEONETTI CALLS IT. WE ARE SEATED WITH LEONETTI AT A CAFÉ 30 MINUTES AWAY FROM THE LAS VEGAS STRIP WHERE THE FORMER MOB UNDERBOSS AND ONETIME MAFIA PRINCE APPEARS TOTALLY AT EASE WEARING A BLACK BASEBALL HAT AND A FORM-FITTING BLACK DRESS SHIRT.

  While Leonetti decided that living in Vegas wasn’t necessarily a good idea, it doesn’t stop him from frequenting Sin City whenever he gets the chance.

  I love it here. I come for a couple of days here and there, maybe six different times a year. It’s very easy to blend in out here.

  Making sure no one is listening, Leonetti leans in to discuss new developments in the Philadelphia–Atlantic City La Cosa Nostra that have recently made the papers.

  I hate to say it, because I happen to like the guy, but I think Joe Ligambi is gonna get convicted. How the fuck is he gonna beat those tapes, the ones the guy made who killed himself? But if anybody can do something with those tapes, it’s Joe’s lawyer Ed Jacobs. He took over where Bobby Simone left off.

  Leonetti is making reference to the secretly recorded tapes that a wire-wearing North Jersey mob informant named Nicholas “Nicky Skins” Stefanelli made following a 2010 drug arrest that also reportedly ensnared his son. Stefanelli, a made member of the Gambino crime family, agreed to wear a wire and record conversations with other mafiosi, so that his son could avoid being charged in the drug case.

  Stefanelli was one of the Gambino family’s top operatives in North Jersey, and, as such, had a strong relationship with Joseph “Scoops” Licata, the caporegime in charge of the Bruno–Scarfo crime family’s North Jersey operation. This relationship allowed Stefanelli to move freely in the Philadelphia–Atlantic City underworld and get close to reputed acting mob boss Joe Ligambi—close enough that Stefanelli would record both Ligambi and Licata talking about mob initiation ceremonies, mob history, current mob feuds, and at least one unsolved mob murder.

  Ligambi and Licata are now in the Philadelphia Federal Detention Center together, awaiting trial on racketeering charges based, in part, on the tapes that Stefanelli made. Both men, now in their 70s, were initiated into La Cosa Nostra by then-boss Nicodemo “Little Nicky” Scarfo during the Philly mob’s heyday in the mid-1980s and are considered old school by the younger mobsters in the family.

  Joe Ligambi got out of jail after my uncle and the rest of those guys won the Frankie Flowers retrial in 1997, and the word on the street was that he became the acting boss after Joey Merlino went to jail in 1999. Joe is 72 years old and is now back in jail facing a new RICO indictment. Joe was always a gentleman. He was part of Chuckie’s crew, and both me and my uncle liked him. Joe and my uncle were cellmates for a while when we were in Holmesburg. I hope Joe does okay with his trial, because I’d hate to see him spend the rest of his life in jail.

  Unfortunately, neither Ligambi nor Licata will have the opportunity to confront their betrayer, Nicholas “Nicky Skins” Stefanelli, at trial, as the 69-year-old, hapless mob rat killed himself in a North Jersey hotel room in February 2012, two days after he killed the man he blamed for his 2010 drug arrest.

  I believe Joey Merlino is gonna get pinched. A lot of people have a h
ard-on for this kid, including the FBI, the US attorneys office, and my uncle. Chuckie’s son is now living in South Florida after getting out of jail in 2011. He did 12 years on a racketeering case.

  I never liked this kid. If Chuckie wasn’t his father’s son he woulda been dead 25 years ago. I would have killed him myself, but my uncle wouldn’t allow it because of Chuckie. That summer of 1996, when I went back to Atlantic City to see my grandmother, there was a hairdresser who was friendly with Joey Merlino and he sent her to Georgia Avenue to see my grandmother. The woman was friendly with my grandmother as well. She told my mother and my grandmother that Joey sent her over there to find out if I was there. When I found out about it, I told the woman, “Tell him I’m here and that I’d love to see him; tell him to stop by and say hello anytime he wants.” She told me later that when she delivered the message to him, he laughed and called me a “rat motherfucker.” But guess what—he knew I was there and he didn’t come.

  My cousin Nicky Jr. is also back in jail again, in the same jail as Joe Ligambi, awaiting trial in two separate racketeering cases, one involving the Lucchese crime family in North Jersey, and the other involving a white-collar fraud case out of Camden. If he is convicted in either trial, he is likely going to spend the rest of his life behind bars. Nicky’s got a young wife, two young children, and both his mother and his brother Mark, who is still in a coma after almost 24 years, living in his house. From what I have been told, a group of nurses come by the house and help my uncle’s wife take care of Mark. I don’t know how that family will survive if Nicky gets convicted. They are barely surviving now.

  My cousin’s not a gangster and he never was. The only thing he is guilty of being is a loyal son to my uncle. My uncle got him involved with trying to keep control of La Cosa Nostra after we went to jail and almost got Nicky killed. After that, my uncle got him involved with some half-ass wise guys in North Jersey who turned out to be rats, and he got Nicky sent to prison. Then my uncle got Nicky involved with Vic Amuso and the Luccheses and got him sent to jail again, and now he’s got not one, but two indictments. My uncle was even an unindicted coconspirator in the fraud case. That’s the kind of father my uncle is. My cousin owes my uncle absolutely nothing. I would love to see him cooperate with the government and make a life for himself, not for his father, but for himself and his family, his wife and kids.