Last Don Standing

by Larry McShane

  Choose someone without ties to anyone else, Gambino declared, without a history that might cloud the vision that Bruno would impart about the Philadelphia family. “You must be his mentor in all things, so only you can show him us,” Gambino explained. “Only you can impart what you want him and your family to feel about La Cosa Nostra. This is most important.”

  Bruno headed back to Philadelphia with the advice already ingrained into his thoughts going forward.

  Bruno had Iezzi drive him directly to the Friendly Tavern, where he would share the news of his good fortune with Skinny Razor—his friend and fellow traveler through the Life since both were nineteen. Bruno’s decision only reinforced to Iezzi that New York had made the right choice.

  “The smart move, according to Sicilian philosophy, is when forming a family of your own you must first align yourself with the strongest capos as your foundation,” Natale explained. “Ang’s decision told everybody in the family that there would be no dissent over New York’s decision. And it would also make anyone think twice about opposing the decision, given Skinny’s expertise in making people disappear.”

  Iezzi, a DiTullio pal since the old mob war, didn’t need directions. The driver parked on Washington Street, near the front entrance to the bar. Skinny’s personal bodyguard, Lefty Gatti, heard the sound of an engine and bolted immediately toward the front door as Iezzi exited the Lincoln Town Car.

  “You know what to do,” said Bruno—and after a lifetime of knowing what to do, Iezzi headed toward the front door. “I’ll wait by the side door,” Bruno added before slipping away.

  What happened next was instructive: While many bosses like to make an ostentatious entrance, basking in the love and fear of their minions, Bruno had an aversion to such grandstanding. So on the night of his ascension, the humble Bruno opted for a back entrance to the bar.

  “He held himself with dignity and humility as he should, coming to tell a man who could easily have been as honored as he was,” Natale recalled. Iezzi went in through the front, looking for DiTullio. Gatti greeted him warmly, with a smile and a handshake. DiTullio saw the pair and waved to Iezzi to join him at the bar. Iezzi asked quietly if Gatti could open the side door, because Angelo Bruno was waiting outside. DiTullio took the keys and stood up: “I’ll let my friend in myself.” The two men embraced wordlessly, and with one look, each knew exactly how their upcoming conversation would play out. No rancor or jealousy or treachery was in either one’s mind. It was a moment of triumph and joy for the family and the two old friends.

  A bar patron pumping money into the jukebox first noticed Bruno’s arrival. By the time the new don and Skinny Razor walked toward the table in the farthest end of the bar, everyone inside was staring at the two revered mobsters. Then they stood in a show of respect as Bruno offered a wave with his left arm.

  Bruno rarely drank in public, occasionally enjoying a cocktail while out with his wife, his capos, and their wives at a Thursday-night dinner that became a family tradition under the Docile Don. But on this night, he ordered a Canadian Club straight up, with Pellegrino water on the side. He then bought the bar a round before leaning over to speak with DiTullio in a low whisper.

  “John,” said the new boss, “you are the first to know in Philadelphia. We’ve just come back from New York, and the Commission named me as Marco’s successor and has combined us all together—South Jersey with us. We’re all under one flag.”

  DiTullio rose to his feet, raising his glass of Scotch high to pledge his allegiance. It was an oath that the old warrior took more seriously than anything else in his life.

  “I am yours, and my entire crew is yours to command,” he announced. “It will be so until I die. Salute!”

  Now Bruno stood, kissing his trusted capo on the cheek. “I’m honored to have your loyalty, your life, and the lives of all of your men.”

  Bruno became the kind of boss who made regular visits to long-retired “Don Turridu” Sabella with free cartons of cigarettes and other gifts. A decade earlier, Bruno did the old boss another service, according to the FBI: he was involved in the South Philly execution of man spreading rumors that Sabella was cheating on his wife with a neighborhood woman.

  The dead man was found facedown in the gutter, three bullets in his skull. The killers were never found, although Natale knows who pulled the trigger: his old pal DiTullio. Bruno gained a reputation as a man who treated his men fairly, affording them respect both personally and financially.

  As a boy, young Ralph already knew who Bruno was: “Skinny told me, ‘Ang will never do anything wrong. Never. He’s that kind of a man.’ It’s a simple thing. When Ang would walk into a bar, everybody would stand up. Everybody.”

  DiTullio was just as quick to vouch for Natale with the new boss. “Skinny told him, ‘Whenever I’m on vacation, in the hospital, or sick or whatever, there’s only one guy who will do what you ask—fast, without talking, without anything. All you gotta do is tell him, and that’s Ralph,’” Natale said.

  When DiTullio filled Natale in on the Commission’s endorsement of Bruno, the protégé had just one question for his mentor: “Is that what you want?”

  The older man leaned over and kissed Natale, and the two raised their glasses of Scotch in a toast to Bruno—and the future.

  Natale, like most in South Philly, grew up hearing about the legendary Bruno. As a kid, Ralph hung out at the corner of South Sixth Street and Manton Street. The neighborhood would buzz when the Philadelphia capo came cruising through the neighborhood with his driver at the wheel.

  “Always in an old, beat-up Chevy, an old car,” Natale recalled of the drive-bys. “He was affable for a mob boss. He was one of those guys, when we were thirteen, fourteen years old, he’d pass by and make the guy stop and beep the horn. Kids would yell, ‘Hey, Mr. Bruno!’”

  When Bruno chose an underboss, he followed the sage counsel of Gambino to the letter. Within a week, Iezzi was driving the new padrone to the Italian Market for a meeting with Phil Testa.

  Testa came to Bruno’s attention through one of Natale’s pinpoints in time, where what a man is and what he will become are forever altered in a few unexpected minutes—often without warning. The Chicken Man, as he was known, was butchering a pair of hens for a customer when the sound of loud voices came from an adjoining shop.

  Testa, the bloody butcher’s knife still in hand, came to his neighbor’s aid. Once inside the fish store, Testa spied local extortionist Pauly Tropea with a revolver pointed at its owner—a pal of the Sicilian-born Testa’s. The Chicken Man plunged the blade into Tropea’s side and simultaneously kicked the gunman’s right leg out from under him.

  Blood spewed like a geyser. Testa and his pal dragged Tropea’s corpse outside and left him on the sidewalk. The other Sicilian business owners turned their heads in a silent message: we didn’t see anything. Testa told the businessman to call the cops and report that Tropea was stabbed outside the store by a black man who fled.

  Natale recalls blaming such violence on an unidentified “black guy” was almost a neighborhood tradition among the insular Italians. The local homicide cops “knew the answer before they asked the question,” said Natale. “But as a matter of policy, they asked anyway.”

  The Black Mafia, an African-American group operating in a minority neighborhood, eventually turned the oft-repeated line on its head. When asked about murders in their sphere of influence, they developed a stock answer: “It looked like a couple of Italians did it.”

  Either way, the cops found collars were hard to come by.

  Word soon spread along Ninth Street of Testa’s bold move. Eventually, the talk made its way to Angelo Bruno. One year earlier, family capo Freddie Iezzi had touted Testa as a candidate for La Cosa Nostra. He was inducted in the usual ritual, sharing his blood finger to finger in a dark cellar on Mercy Street in South Philly.

  Testa was assigned to the Bruno crew. “And so, the second life of Phil Testa began,” Natale observed.

  When Br
uno arrived at the Italian Market seeking Testa as his number two man, it was a major event: the new don of the Philadelphia Mafia walking among his fellow Sicilians. This was their new godfather, the man they would seek out in times of need or in want of a favor. Bruno walked purposefully past the small businesses, headed for the butcher’s shop, and looked his new underboss in the eyes.

  The selection didn’t sit well with at least one made man, Anthony “Tony Bananas” Caponigro, who considered the decision a snub. Based in Newark, the mob killer showed a loyal face to the new boss and his number two man. But an undercurrent of anger would fester for two decades before finally exploding.

  6

  MOB HEAVYWEIGHTS

  One night in late February 1964, Skinny Razor sat with Natale at the bar of the Friendly Tavern and told him the eye-opening tale of the Cassius Clay–Sonny Liston fight, its rematch, and the reach of organized crime into the highest level of professional sports.

  By 1964, Sonny Liston was not only the heavyweight boxing champion of the world—he was the undisputed biggest and baddest motherfucker on planet Earth, both terrifying and devastating. He never learned to read or write as a child and once recalled that “the only thing my father ever gave me was a beating.” After turning pro in 1953, it was Sonny handing out the beatings as he won thirty-three of his first thirty-four bouts.

  The ex-con learned to box while behind bars, coming from nothing to seize the championship belt in stunning style. He battered the preceding champion—nice guy Floyd Patterson—into submission in two one-sided bouts, much to the horror of Middle America and many ring aficionados. The first fight, on September 25, 1962, lasted all off 126 seconds before Liston knocked the champ out.

  The rematch ten months later took just seventeen seconds longer, with the same brutal result: Liston by knockout.

  “The world of sport now realizes it has gotten Charles ‘Sonny’ Liston to keep,” wrote Los Angeles Times sports columnist Jim Murray. “It is like finding a live bat on a string under your Christmas tree.”

  Liston’s rise through the ranks was aided by one of Philadelphia’s own: Frank “Blinky” Palermo, the notorious mob fixer of the fight game. The fighter signed on with manager Joe “Pep” Barone, who was linked with Palermo and his equally disreputable partner, New York mobster Frankie Carbo—known in mob circles as the Man in Gray, reflecting the color of his suits. His mob palette included various other shades, including work as a hit man.

  “He killed Benjamin ‘Bugsy’ Siegel,” Ralph said. “Not [his girlfriend] Virginia Hill’s brother or anybody else. The mob sent Frankie Carbo. Killed him. The guy who gave him up was that little weasel Jew, Meyer Lansky—said, ‘You can do what you want, he’s crazy!’ He gave Siegel up.”

  Palermo and Carbo controlled some fighters directly, and others more surreptitiously. Fights were famously fixed, as Jake LaMotta wrote in his biography, and the mob money routinely rolled in. “The Gambinos and Philadelphia owned professional boxing together,” said Natale.

  Carbo once boasted of exercising absolute control of the welterweight division for a full quarter century. Everyone and everything in the world of boxing operated within their orbit, as lightweight Ike Williams attested.

  “See these eyes?” he once asked. “These aren’t even my real eyes. Blinky robbed me blind!”

  The City of Brotherly Love became the surly Liston’s adopted hometown as he pounded his way to the top of the fight game. His sparring partners occasionally included Natale’s driver, Frankie Vadino, Ralphy’s “suit of armor”—his army of one.

  “He stayed with us in Philadelphia,” Natale recalled. “Blinky got him a nice apartment, this, that, got him everything. You know, he was a big heroin user. But when he was training, he’d stop and try to get ready. He was on it since he was young. A shame. Nice guy. He looked like a bear. He could fight ten guys. I mean, tremendous puncher—and he could take a punch.”

  Liston’s next opponent was a brash young Olympic gold medalist by the name of Cassius Clay, soon to be Muhammad Ali, renowned under either name as much for his trash talk as his estimable skills inside the ring. A Liston victory over the young loudmouth was generally considered a fait accompli. “He could beat three Muhammad Alis at once in the ring—that’s Sonny Liston!” was Natale’s assessment.

  By the time of the fight, Palermo and Carbo were behind bars after a conviction for trying to muscle in on welterweight champion Don Jordan. The duo were found guilty in 1961 of ordering a beat-down on a California promoter in their bid to seize control of Jordan’s career, with Carbo warning the victim that the mob would tear out his eyeballs.

  But their reach was hardly limited by their jail time, as the world was about to learn.

  “There came a time when Liston was getting heavy with the heroin in between fights,” recalled Natale. “Instead of withdrawing, he’s using all the time now. We knew the guys who were selling the heroin, but you couldn’t stop them. You bury two of them, and ten take their place—they’re like cockroaches.

  “So they’re getting ready for this Liston fight with Ali, and they sent word from New York: ‘We’re gonna make the score of a lifetime.’ Because you never know when he’s going to OD, this guy. He’s a commodity they don’t want to lose. Sonny Liston, heavyweight champion! If he dies, they don’t get nothing. Everything is business, so he’s gotta take a dive. He’s gotta dump. Whatever he does, he can’t beat Ali.”

  On February 25, 1964, the glowering Liston stood in his corner to face the motormouth from Louisville, Kentucky. The fight was held in Miami Beach, Florida, with Clay expected to land in roughly the same spot on the canvas as Patterson—and in about the same, short amount of ring time. The betting odds reflected that sentiment.

  “The opening price in Vegas was ten to one,” recalled Natale. “Then it dropped to eight to one. Only the bosses knew what was going down.”

  Disaster nearly struck when Clay—his eyes blinded by some unidentified substance—nearly refused to come out for the fifth round. Trainer Angelo Dundee shoved his fighter back in the ring, and the bout continued as mob bosses from coast to coast exhaled deeply. Clay triumphed when Liston conceded from his corner, sitting on a stool and spitting out his mouthguard before the seventh round.

  Rumors of a fix began floating immediately. The FBI investigated. Nothing was ever proven. But John DiTullio knew the truth, as told to him by Angelo Bruno.

  On the night after the stunning TKO, Skinny Razor asked Natale to stick around for one of their late-night talks in the quiet confines of his bar. There, with the jukebox jazz as their sound track, he laid out the whole scenario for his protégé.

  DiTullio, after telling the entire incredible tale, explained his motivation for sharing the story.

  “Skinny says, ‘I’m telling you this ’cause I want you to know—things can be done like this. We made the biggest score of a lifetime, legitimately, on this fight. We all took Cassius Clay,’” Natale recalled. “And throughout the country it was done. They all bet big. Not my business how much, but they made a fortune on it. All the top people, from Chicago to Milwaukee, New York, Cleveland.

  “They took care of Sonny. They mighta gave him six hundred thousand dollars, seven hundred thousand dollars. He’s gonna blow it all on heroin anyway, the bum.”

  Incredibly, the once-in-a-lifetime mob windfall repeated itself—there would be a rematch. “They started salivating again,” said Natale. The immediate problem was that Liston declared that he intended to exact revenge on Clay, much to the consternation of his mob handlers.

  “They told him, ‘You can’t win,’” Natale related. “He said, ‘I’ll knock him deep.’ Frankie [Carbo] sent word: ‘I ain’t killed a man in a long time, but I’ll kill you.’ That was the end of that. He threw the other fight, too.”

  The second fight was moved to remote Lewiston, Maine, with a mere 2,434 people in attendance—the smallest crowd ever for a heavyweight title fight. The obscure rematch location was no accident
.

  “Who’s gonna bother them there, in Lewiston, Maine?” Natale asked archly. “And he threw it twice.”

  Less than two minutes into round one, the once-invincible Liston collapsed to the canvas from a blow that nobody saw—Ali’s infamous “phantom punch.” The new champ, in an iconic photo, stood victorious over his vanquished foe, unaware of the Mafia-orchestrated backstory that came with his title belt. He was blissfully unaware of the circumstances surrounding his two not-so-stunning upsets.

  “They paid him again, Liston,” said Natale. “And they loaded up. They made a fortune, they really did. And Frank ‘Blinky’ Palermo was instrumental in the whole thing because he had the reins. It happened that way.”

  There was no happy ending for Liston, who was found dead in his Las Vegas home on January 5, 1971. Despite the mysterious circumstances surrounding Sonny’s demise, Natale remains certain of the cause of death: “He OD’d. If the mob had killed him, I would have heard about it. He loved heroin.”

  7

  DOING THE WORK

  The tale of Sonny Liston and the multimillion-dollar haul was not the stuff of the mob’s day-to-day operations. Natale moved comfortably through that world, working as Bruno’s mob Mr. Fix-It in the 1960s. One day, a problem arose with a couple of porno shops/peep shows operating on Market Street. The two businesses belonged to a man from New York, the well-dressed and well-respected Robert DiBernardo.

  DiB, as he was known to his friends, was a huge moneymaker for the Gambino family, becoming the king of mob porn and peep shows—including part ownership of the notorious Show World Center just off Times Square. Bruno, after a call from his friend Carlo Gambino, gave DiB the go-ahead to open a peep show in Philadelphia. Both mob dons received a taste of the profits, and business was good.

  Then, as Natale recalled it, a local biker gang showed up.