We met for dinner one night at Bookbinders, a famous (now shuttered) Philadelphia landmark restaurant in the historic part of town. I was joined by Bobby Simone, who was representing Scarfo in the case, and Beloff and his wife. Beloff was under a lot of pressure at the time, and was a little paranoid. Plus we had a few drinks before and during dinner. All the while he kept looking across the room at another table where two men in suits were having a meal. They were dressed in conservative suits with white shirts and rep ties. As the night wore on, Beloff became convinced they were FBI agents who were there to keep tabs on him.
Bookbinder’s was a great restaurant, and I was enjoying my meal and going over some preliminary details. All the while, Beloff kept looking at the two guys. Finally, as we were leaving, he flipped out, picked up a butter knife, and ran at them, screaming, “FBI motherfuckers!”
I don’t know what he intended to do. We grabbed him, and the two guys in the business suits were shaking. After they got over their shock, they said, “We’re not FBI. We’re IBM.”
That was my introduction to Leland Beloff and Philadelphia politics, circa 1987. We had a decent defense in the case and were able to beat up Caramandi pretty good on the witness stand. He looked like something out of central casting, wearing a leather jacket, a two-day beard, and had a gruff, heavily Philadelphia-accented voice. He also had a criminal record that went back decades. He was a scam artist with a conviction for passing counterfeit bills, and he was now admitting to being a hit man for the mob.
Another witness was a woman who was described as Beloff’s girlfriend. That’s always a ticklish situation, and as I said, I thought his wife Diane was a very nice lady. In another alleged extortion charge, the feds said Beloff had gotten his girlfriend a rent-free apartment in a building owned by a developer who needed city council approvals for another project.
The jury had only been out a couple of days when they sent a note saying they were deadlocked. The judge, John P. Fullam, a very dour man, immediately declared a mistrial. I think he knew the prosecution’s case had gone badly, and in effect, he gave them a second chance. It was as if he was on a mission. I thought he was totally out of line, and I think if he had let the jury deliberate longer, we might have gotten acquittals.
Fullam either had a bug in the jury room or was listening through the wall, because I’ve never seen a mistrial declared without an instruction—they call it an Allen charge—asking the jury to go back and try again.
We tried the case a second time, but retrials are always bad for the defense. I like the spontaneity of a trial, but you tend to lose that the second time around. The prosecution knows what your game is and can bolster its case accordingly.
For example, in the second trial, Caramandi came in cleanshaven and wearing a jacket and tie, which de-emphasized his wiseguy look. The government also changed prosecutors. Edward S. G. Dennis, Jr., who was the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, handled the prosecution. This was highly unusual because Dennis was the boss. He had about 150 deputy and assistant U.S. attorneys who normally tried cases. But this time, Dennis brought the prestige of his position into the courtroom. This was the top law enforcement official in the city, and it had to have an impact on the jury.
Dennis did a very extraordinary thing that I had never seen before or since. He read his closing argument to the jury, and while he was reading it, he had it flashed on a screen on the wall, like a PowerPoint. I thought this gave added weight to what he was saying, and obviously the jury thought so, too.
Scarfo, Beloff, and Rego were convicted. Beloff got ten years, Rego got eight, and Scarfo got fourteen.
And that was just the start of Nicky Scarfo’s problems.
We were constantly in court fighting pretrial battles and picking juries.
Jury selection is another interesting process. I know a lot of attorneys like to depend on “experts” who help analyze the questionnaires that potential jurors fill out and who try to develop insights into a juror’s character based on how he or she answers questions posed during the selection process, which is called the voir dire, Latin for “to see and to say.” I usually went with my own instincts.
It used to be that I would pick anyone who said they had a tattoo. That used to signify, at least in my mind, that the person was an individualist and a non-conformist. Today that’s no longer the case. Tattoos are like fashion statements, and they don’t tell us much about a person anymore.
I’m a Leo, born on July 26, and I would try to slip that fact into the question-and-answer sessions with possible jurors because I believe that you can sometimes make a connection that way; that a fellow Leo might be more sympathetic to the arguments of a lawyer who had the same birth sign. I would always try to keep naturalized citizens off the jury panel. I worried that they might be too gung-ho and rah-rah, and would accept anything the prosecution—the embodiment of the United States of America—might say. Another thing I tried to ask about was bumper stickers. You can sometimes get an idea of who a person is by the bumper sticker he or she has on the back of the car.
At the end of the day, jury selection is really a legal crapshoot. We had a lot of that when I was back in Philadelphia for those mob trials. Unfortunately, we didn’t roll many sevens.
The FBI and the New Jersey and Pennsylvania State Police had been building cases against the Philadelphia mob for a number of years, and it all came to a head in the mid-1980s. Two murder cases were pending in Philadelphia’s Common Pleas Court, and a drug case and a racketeering case were pending in federal court. Bobby Simone and I got along very well during the Rouse extortion trial, and he asked me to get involved in the other cases.
Scarfo’s nephew, a handsome young man named Philip Leonetti, was a co-defendant in three of those cases, and Bobby asked me to represent him. He was an easygoing man who was thirty-six at the time. I met his mother Nancy, who was Scarfo’s sister. She was very nice, and I felt sorry for Philip. I thought he had been targeted in part because of who the feds said his uncle was.
Scarfo was portrayed in government motions as a psychopath. The media, naturally, ate it all up. You would think this was the second coming of Al Capone or the Philadelphia version of Murder, Inc.
Several other alleged mob members were also charged, and it turned into a traveling circus. We just moved from courtroom to courtroom, defending these guys. Caramandi and DelGiorno were always the key witnesses. There were audio- and videotapes, wiretaps, and other informants and alleged victims. It was a real onslaught, but we held our own.
Scarfo, Leonetti, and the others were charged with being involved in the distribution of millions of dollars of methamphetamine. Meth was a big drug on the streets of Philadelphia in the 1980s. But as we looked at the case, it was clear that the government had brought the wrong charge, and we were able to convince a federal jury of that.
One of the prosecutors, in very dramatic fashion, told the jury during his closing argument that if they came back with convictions, they would “effectively put an end to the mob in Philadelphia.” It was typical government hyperbole, but the thing that struck me was that as he was saying this, these five hulking mobsters, guys with no necks, who had been attending the trial almost every day, stood up and walked out of the courtroom.
Clearly the mob still had a presence in Philadelphia, even with our clients in jail.
The evidence presented during the trial showed without much doubt that the Scarfo organization was shaking down drug dealers. The mob had what they called a “street tax,” and anyone who was bringing P-2-P (the illegal chemical that you needed to make meth) into the city had to pay a tax of something like $2,000 a barrel to the Scarfo organization.
The evidence clearly showed that the drug dealers were making those payments to Scarfo and his crew. But that wasn’t one of the charges in the case; there was no extortion count. The government really dropped the ball when they put this case together, and we made that point in our closing arguments. I tol
d the jury that even if you accept the evidence that the defendants were collecting a street tax from these drug dealers, you have to find them not guilty because that wasn’t what they were accused of.
Our clients were charged with running a drug organization, but there was no evidence to support that. They were clearly extorting drug dealers by forcing them to pay a street tax, but our clients were not part of a drug operation. There was no evidence linking them to the importation of the P-2-P, the manufacturing of the meth, or the sale and distribution of the product. In short, we argued, our clients were not drug dealers. They were shaking down drug dealers, but they were not dealing drugs themselves.
We won big-time; acquittals across the board. But no one went home. They were still being held without bail for the racketeering and murder cases.
The problem when a government launches a multi-pronged attack—and that’s what it did against the Scarfo organization—is that the odds are stacked against the defense. We had to win every time, but the prosecution only had to win once. Scarfo was already doing fourteen years for the Penns Landing extortion, but he was facing much more time.
We beat a murder case in Common Pleas Court where Caramandi and DelGiorno were again key witnesses. It was during that case that authorities had to acknowledge that DelGiorno was provided with the services of a prostitute while in the custody of the New Jersey State Police.
DelGiorno had testified at a preliminary hearing against Scarfo and was being driven back to the safe house where he was living. He and his escorts stopped at a bar-restaurant in New Jersey for dinner and drinks, and apparently DelGiorno caught the eye of a working girl at the bar. The State Police looked the other way while he and the hooker got together. I thought that was demeaning. Think about it: law enforcement authorities, State Police detectives, standing around outside a hotel room while a mobster has sex with a hooker. Is that how low the government would stoop to bring down the mob?
During cross-examination, DelGiorno had to admit to it all. And one of the defense attorneys asked him, “Is this what you call doing hard time?” Since this was a Common Pleas Court jury, it was comprised entirely of Philadelphia residents, unlike the federal cases that draw from a pool that stretches out into the wealthy and more conservative suburbs. Several of the jurors got a big kick out of that comment, and I think it helped us. We won that case as well: not guilty across the board. And that night we partied. I was staying at the Four Seasons Hotel, and the defense team and lots of supporters and family members headed over to the hotel lounge, which wasn’t far from the courthouse.
Scarfo, Leonetti, and the other defendants, of course, went back to jail since they were still being held without bail. The party got pretty raucous; in fact, they moved us to a special room. People were downing $50 shots of Louis XIV cognac, and $100-a-bottle Taittinger champagne was flowing freely. At the end of the night, the bar bill was something like $16,000.
Scarfo’s son, Nicky Jr., who was in his early twenties at the time, came up to me and said he couldn’t cover the bill. I liked Nicky Jr.; he was always polite and went out of his way to help my mother when she was with us at dinner after court. He’d hold the door open for her, take her arm and guide her up and down steps or through a doorway. He always called her “Mrs. Goodman,” and would help her order off the menu, suggesting what was good and what she might like. After dinner, he would drive her back to the condo where she lived and make sure she got in safely. He behaved like a true gentleman, and I always appreciated that. So when he asked if I would put the hotel bill for the party on one of my credit cards, I agreed. In exchange, he said he would give me his Dad’s Rolls Royce, a cream-colored, vintage 1973 model. Obviously the father wasn’t going to need the Rolls for the next fourteen years, so I agreed to the deal.
I had no idea what I was getting myself into. For the next eight years, I had to battle the federal government over the gift. They seized the car before I could take possession, arguing that it was forfeiture for Scarfo’s crimes. During the long legal battle, another federal judge ruled that I should have known that the car, which Scarfo purchased for $25,000 in Florida, was the fruit of his ill-gotten income. That was a dangerous precedent for any criminal defense attorney. If we are going to be required to assess and determine where our client’s fees originated, the entire system of justice could come undone. Those accused of serious crimes could be denied the right to the best defense available.
I fought legal battles up and down the federal judicial system over the Rolls Royce, and finally won. The car was mine. However, during all those years, the feds had parked it in some outdoor facility where it had been exposed to all kinds of weather. It was a rusted, worthless shell by the time I got legal possession, so I left it where it was.
Looking back on it now, it cost me the $16,000 bar bill and more than five times that in legal fees. But I’d do it all again. Well, maybe not all of it. I’d fight the same legal battle over the same legal issue. However, I might think twice about covering the cost of a Philadelphia victory party with my credit card.
Two more cases played out in Philadelphia with the same cast of characters, and this time the defense went down. It was the government onslaught that Tony Spilotro used to joke about. The United States versus Nicodemo Scarfo et al was a legal avalanche that eventually we couldn’t win.
The RICO case ended with all sixteen defendants, including Scarfo and Leonetti, being convicted. A second murder case in Common Pleas Court, in which Leonetti was not a defendant, resulted in more convictions (although that case was later overturned on appeal).
Here’s the way the law is stacked against defendants in RICO cases. You know that murder case that we won in Common Pleas Court? The federal government was permitted under the law to attach that same murder as a predicate act in the RICO trial. A racketeering case is built around a series of connected crimes. These are called predicate acts. In the Scarfo case there were nine murders, four attempted murders, and dozens of gambling, loansharking, and extortion allegations. Each was a predicate act in the indictment. To be convicted of racketeering, a jury has to find that the prosecution has proven at least two of the predicate acts. In some cases, there are dozens. That’s how the government stacks the deck.
In this instance, it was even more troubling. While Scarfo, Leonetti, and their co-defendants were acquitted in Common Pleas Court of one of those murders, they were convicted of the same murder as a racketeering act in the RICO trial. That sounds like double jeopardy to me, but the courts have ruled otherwise. That’s the kind of unlevel playing field defense attorneys have to deal with.
Scarfo got fifty-five years for the RICO conviction, and that sentence was to run consecutive to the fourteen he got in the extortion case. So he was looking at sixty-nine years in the federal can. It was tantamount to a life sentence, and he is still in jail. Leonetti got forty-five years, which shocked me because I thought the evidence against him was weak. Despite all the tapes and all the informant testimony, there wasn’t much hard evidence linking him to the crimes. He never said very much to anyone. They called him “Crazy Phil,” a nickname he hated, and the government alleged he was involved in ten murders, but I didn’t see him as a violent gangster, and I didn’t think the prosecution had proven its case. Even during the trials, he never said much, although I still can remember him whispering to me whenever one of those informants was testifying. I had never heard the expression before, but he called each one of them “lying motherless motherfuckers.”
I guess it was a Philadelphia thing.
But so was cooperating. The Philadelphia mob has spawned more cooperating witnesses than any other crime family in America. Some people jokingly refer to them as the South Philadelphia Boys Choir. To my amazement, Leonetti joined the choir shortly after he was sentenced. He turned into a rat and became a government witness in cases up and down the East Coast. Many in law enforcement circles say that he was the reason Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano turned. Leonetti was r
eady to testify about Gravano’s involvement in a mob murder in Philadelphia.
I couldn’t believe it when I heard that Leonetti had flipped. I really thought we had a chance on appeal to overturn his convictions. But I was informed that he was replacing me with another attorney, one who worked out his cooperating agreement. I couldn’t believe that a guy with his reputation, a guy I had thought was like Tony Spilotro, would become a rat. I couldn’t believe he was such a weakling. The first time he faced any kind of adversity, he turned on his family. And I don’t mean crime family; he turned on his own uncle, his mother’s brother, the man who had raised him after his father left. As far as I was concerned, the government made a deal with the devil.
They said Leonetti had committed ten murders. After testifying at a number of trials, he went in for a sentence reduction hearing. Instead of forty-five years, his sentence was reduced to five years, five months, and five days, which was the time he had served when the hearing was held. He walked out of the courtroom and into the Witness Protection Program. Five years for ten murders? Not a bad deal.
I love Philadelphia. It’s a great city. And going back there to try all those cases was a wonderful experience. I only wished my father had still been alive so that he could have come to court and watch me practice law. I think he would have been proud of me, and that makes me feel good.
The only sour taste I have from the whole experience was Leonetti. I don’t represent rats, and I think he’s a liar. I know he lied about me after he began cooperating, claiming that he had paid me thousands of dollars in cash and implying that I had taken the money under the table and had not declared it as income. Any payment I ever received for those Philadelphia trials came in the form of a check written by Bobby Simone, Scarfo’s lawyer.
Being Oscar: From Mob Lawyer to Mayor of Las Vegas Page 16