Last Don Standing

by Larry McShane

  “Chickie, when we enter Philly, we go into town as when we left, knowing nothing about Atlantic City and what we were told. Then we call Rocco and tell him to bring the kid who’s the expert with the guns and bombs.”

  Narducci turned to look at his friend: “Can I say something now? I’ve never been happier than at this moment.” The exchange marked the beginning of the end for Testa, barely ten months into his reign as boss. To the men driving south, Phil Testa was already a dead man walking.

  Narducci wasn’t done. He wanted to take out Scarfo as well and proposed that he personally pump two bullets into Little Nicky’s head. Casella remained focused on Testa, knowing that the New York bosses would be outraged by a second unsanctioned Philly killing so close to the murder of Bruno.

  A plot soon evolved: They would make the mob hit appear as payback for the murder of union boss McCullough, which was backed by Testa. Casella and Narducci were actually sharing dinner on the night of the McCullough murder, with news of the assassination personally delivered to their table by the restaurant’s owner.

  McCullough’s friends in the union and his allies in the Irish Republican Army would shoulder the blame. Because the IRA was famously proficient with bombs, they would detonate an explosive device and blow Testa to kingdom come.

  DiPretoro and Marinucci met with the underboss and Narducci in the Villa di Roma, a restaurant in the heart of the Italian Market. The traitorous quartet made their plans and pledged their mutual allegiance. The sands were now running quickly from the hourglass of Testa’s life.

  The murder weapon would be a keg filled with roofers’ nails placed atop sticks of dynamite. DiPretoro would design the simple bomb using twenty sticks of dynamite, and Marinucci would hit the detonator. On March 15, 1981—six days short of the first anniversary of Bruno’s demise—the two men sat inside a van parked near Testa’s upscale home.

  At 2:55 a.m., the Chicken Man walked toward the front door after double-parking his 1980 Chevrolet Caprice Classic on the street. A massive explosion tore suddenly through the night, a blast so powerful that the porch was torn to pieces and debris scattered for fifty feet across the property. The front door was blown thirty feet into the kitchen, with an eight-foot-wide hole torn in the front façade of the house.

  Testa was pronounced dead a short time later at St. Agnes Hospital. The cops found $10,000 cash in his pockets. “He looked like he went through a giant paper shredder,” said one eyewitness. The bomb plot had worked, too; media reports soon suggested the killers were friends of McCullough’s exacting their revenge.

  Natale was less surprised by the second murder of a Philadelphia boss in just under a year. “Pure La Cosa Nostra, finding a reason to justify killing a onetime friend,” he reflected. “Although in this case it was not hard, considering the treachery involved with Atlantic City.”

  When law enforcement searched Testa’s home, they found a VCR and just two tapes: The Godfather, parts one and two.

  As he had one year earlier after the Bruno murder, Scarfo called his old prison pal Manna from the Genovese family. This time, he was plotting to fill the suddenly vacant seat as head of the volatile Philly family, where decades of peace were forgotten after this second brutal execution. This time, the killers were Pete Casella and Chickie Narducci, Scarfo told his friend.

  Only days later, Scarfo’s nephew Phil Leonetti was standing alongside an Atlantic City pay phone inside an Italian restaurant at 6:00 p.m.—the designated number for the Genovese family to hear from Little Nicky. Leonetti had driven a few short blocks to the location, insuring no one could lob a shot at him on the streets. The call was short and the message terse: Leonetti was wanted at 10:00 a.m. the next day in Manhattan. Make sure nobody is following you.

  Click.

  Leonetti arrived thirty minutes early, with a burly doorman leading him inside a luxurious condo on the Upper East Side. His uncle had briefed Leonetti the night before, and the young gangster took the elevator to the fourth floor, where he was greeted by Manna’s muscle—two men the size of Mack trucks. A third man greeted him by name and led Leonetti inside, where Manna awaited.

  The apartment was redolent of Italian coffee and Cuban cigars. Leonetti entered and kissed his host on both cheeks. Casella might somehow have reached the Genovese family before Scarfo, but the die was already cast. All the fears were dispersed as Manna began to speak, his message as clear as the church bells ringing on a Sunday morning back in South Philly.

  Manna offered his condolences for the killing of Testa. The Genovese family was on board with Scarfo’s version of what happened, and so was the entire Commission—now fully under the sway of the Chin’s powerhouse family.

  The Philadelphia branch was placeo in the hands of a murderous psychopath: Little Nicky Scarfo. Blood would flow and the family soon flailed.

  “Bobby Manna set loose what Scarfo had kept dormant in the darkest part of his soul,” Natale mused years later. “The bitterness of those years when he was regarded by Angelo Bruno and his fellow made men as unstable in his dealings with other men. Manna based his opinions on the years when they walked the yard in New Jersey, where Scarfo hid his devious nature behind a verbiage of flattery that distracted Bobby from digging any deeper.”

  Natale recalled a time when Scarfo’s stock was so low that the city’s top drug dealers spurned his company and turned up their noses when he called to distribute their product and line his pockets. Now, Scarfo decreed, they would pay his family tribute—or face the lethal consequences. Any drug dealers who balked would face a death sentence, with no appeal.

  “He unleashed a bloodbath without reason or direction,” said Natale. “He did this for only one purpose, to instill fear in the hearts of enemies created only by his own paranoia. And also in the minds of his own newly baptized soldiers.”

  Scarfo made one other move: he brought Bruno’s old partner Martorano into the family as a made man. The Docile Don had refused his friend’s requests for two decades. But in April 1981, Martorano received his button along with Salvatore “Shotsie” Sparacio. Martorano, as a meth maker himself, knew all the other major players in the drug game and shared his wealth of industry knowledge with the new boss.

  Martorano also agreed, within a month, to serve up two of his best friends from their mutual business, Harry Peetros and Stevie Bouras, members of the city’s so-called Greek Mob—an affiliation of about a dozen that also dealt in gambling and loan-sharking.

  “Long John became a made man on the bodies of his friends,” recounted Natale with disdain. “And he never even pulled the trigger.”

  Peetros and Long John were business partners and friends, often dining together—Martorano with his wife, and the Greek with his girlfriend du jour.

  Martorano had broached the idea of partnering with Scarfo to Peetros, who brushed aside the suggestion as the two shared what became their final meal, with an appetizer of beluga caviar and champagne, at a five-star restaurant.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” said Peetros. “I’ll gladly send him an envelope every month out of respect, but I’ve put my balls on the line all of my life. And now he wants to emasculate me.”

  Martorano appeared confused until Peetros gave him the definition of emasculate—“He wants to take my manhood away from me.” The two men excused themselves from the table to continue their conversation, with Martorano lending a sympathetic ear to his old pal.

  “Harry, I’ll fix this,” he said confidently. “The monthly thing will be enough. Let’s go over and join our ladies.” Once seated, Long John reached into an ice bucket to remove a chilled bottle of vodka. He poured the booze into a pair of snifters and raised his glass in a toast: “To tonight, and forever our friendship.”

  Peetros, who usually picked up the tab for their nights on the town, was only the first to die. Two nights after their dinner, his body was found inside the trunk of his gold Cadillac on May 25, 1981. His last ride ended when the luxury car was parked on a quiet street about a
mile outside the city limits. He died secure with Martorano’s assurance that his decision to stiff Scarfo would come without consequence.

  Natale said Peetros’s mistake was a failure to gauge the sudden change in Scarfo’s mob stature, along with the everlasting enmity of Little Nicky toward those who had once looked down their noses at him. And Peetros completely misjudged Martorano’s relationship with the new boss.

  “He made a brave mistake because Long John was in deadly fear of this miniature gangster,” said Natale.

  The Peetros killing came with a maniacal twist: Martorano arranged for Bouras, his next target, to pull the trigger. Bouras, kingpin of a multimillion-dollar methamphetamine ring, was recruited by a promise from Long John that the execution would insure his independence from the Scarfo regime, along with control of Peetros’s drug business.

  Martorano played his business partner like a Stradivarius in what Natale called “The Mafia Triangle.” He explained the double-dealing this way: “When there are two men who have the same friend, and they both trust him, it was simple—use one to kill the other. The reason? Survival.”

  Bouras received a call for a dinner date two days later from Martorano. Long John was bringing his wife, and he arranged a dinner companion for Bouras. Knowing of Bouras’s interest in an attractive South Philly woman named Jeanette Curro, an invite was extended to her as well. On its face, the dinner appeared a nod of congratulations on a job well done in the Peetros hit.

  Like so many other things in the world of La Cosa Nostra, the truth proved far more sinister.

  The couples, joined by some other guests, assembled at the Meletis restaurant on May 27—a beautiful spring day, with temperatures in the low seventies. Martorano found his killer for this hit much closer to home: his troubled son, George.

  Natale recalled that George, known as Cowboy, struggled as a kid with an attention deficit disorder and relied on medication to control his condition. The son had never killed a man in his life. But his greedy father was more focused on his future in the crime family than worried about his own kin.

  As Natale heard the tale, Bouras—a seasoned killer possessed of the sixth sense needed to survive in his treacherous business—was oblivious of the warning signs of impending doom as he turned all his attention toward Curro. He never noticed when Martorano arranged the seating so that Bouras was closest to the restaurant’s entrance. Bouras never saw the two men enter the restaurant through that front door until it was too late. Both shooters wore their winter clothes despite the warm weather: one in a ski mask and a long coat, the other with a wool scarf wrapped around his face.

  “Ah, c’mon now, fellas,” said Bouras when he saw the pair marching toward the table. Those were his final words. The younger Martorano and his dad’s bodyguard started firing indiscriminately from ten feet away, with the inexperienced Georgie emptying his weapon. The pair didn’t stop shooting until Bouras was dead. Killed alongside the meth dealer was his innocent date, Jeanette Curro.

  Natale, though no stranger to the murderous ways of the mob, was repulsed when he heard the story: “A scene from hell. The father has his son kill a man in front of his mother? As simple as asking him to run an errand, asking him to lose his immortal soul for the aspirations of the father to find a top position in the Philly family.”

  20

  LIFE IN LEWISBURG

  When Ralph arrived at Lewisburg, facing another quarter century away from his hometown and the Philly mob, the dire circumstances of his life finally hit the gangster. Angelo Bruno was dead and gone, and so was the money once sent to Natale’s family. His future appeared as dreary as the nondescript surroundings.

  “You see them gray walls, you see them gun towers,” he recalled. “And you got a long sentence, and you say, ‘Look where I gotta do this time—in the middle of Pennsylvania!’”

  Oddly enough, he was struck by perhaps the lone bit of fatherly advice that Spike Natale had ever offered him. The old man, after sizing up his young son, saw a long prison stretch somewhere in the boy’s adult future.

  “My father didn’t tell me too many things, but he told me this,” Natale said before repeating the words verbatim.

  “I know you’re going away for a long time at some point,” Spike lectured him. “Remember one thing when it happens. It may sound harsh now, but remember this. You have to forget everything and everybody—your wife, your kids, your girl. Everything! Because if you don’t, you’ll think about that every day, and when you come home, you’ll be half a man. And they can’t do that to you.”

  Another bit of prison counsel came from the facility’s African-American inmates. “As my black brothers use to tell their black brothers when they came in, ‘It’s too late to get scared now,’” Natale said.

  One visitors’ day early on, his brother Michael arrived at the correctional facility with their mom. The two came through the front gate, enduring a weapons check on the way inside. This was a strange, alternate reality for solid-citizen Michael—a successful musician, the lead trumpet player for Philly talk show host Mike Douglas’s band, and a professor at Temple University. Ralph used to tease his straight-arrow sibling that they came from different parents.

  “Mom, are you sure?” he asked with Michael in listening range. “Me and him?”

  This time, a stunned Michael did the talking after sitting down with Ralph inside the drab Lewisburg visiting room: “How can you do it? How can you stay here?”

  Ralph’s answer came back terse and true: “Michael, I have no choice. I gotta stay here.”

  Before Michael could answer, their mother spoke to her imprisoned son in a voice heavy with disdain. “Ralph, look at you.”

  But Natale cut her off before she could utter another syllable. “Mom, I gotta tell you something before we get into this. I’m glad you made me what I am. You made me tough. I don’t care what they do to me. I gotta tell you that right to your face.”

  When Michael left with their mother, he threw up outside the prison walls and never returned. “And I can understand that,” Natale said. “I don’t know if I ever got used to it, but it didn’t bother me after a while. That’s frightening.”

  The high school dropout became a reader behind bars, everything from reference books to Ernest Hemingway’s classic novels. “When I had nothing to do, I would read the dictionary—from the front to the back, from the back to the front. In jail, you got nothing to do. And if you’re doing real time, you don’t have a TV in your room—all you got is a cell. So I read incessantly. And I thought about things.”

  He also became a regular at the weekly Sunday masses behind the prison walls. “Billy DiPasquale, the brother of ‘Mad Dog’ DiPasquale, he was the altar boy. But everyone was serious about it. We went to church. Nobody would dare sneer at you, because a lot of good men went every Sunday. It was terrible to see such a nice man like the priest, a great guy, inside that prison.”

  On one memorable occasion, the stone killer became a man of peace, brokering a deal between the prison’s Black Mafia and the prison administration. Complaints over living conditions led to a hunger strike by the African-Americans, including a few doing life for the murders of seven people inside a Washington, DC, home owned by future NBA Hall of Famer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar.

  Natale sat down with the inmates, then approached the prison guards.

  “I just said, ‘If you’ll do this and that, the strike will be over,’” Natale recalled nonchalantly. “And they did, and the strike ended. Whenever the Black Mafia had a beef after that, they came to me. And they remembered that.”

  No matter his other prison pursuits, Natale remained obsessed with avenging Bruno and taking control of the Philadelphia family. “That was my quest. To take back Philadelphia from whoever was in charge. And to take back what once belonged to me and Angelo Bruno.” The scenario was never far from his thoughts.

  By 1982, the cash crunch created in the Natale household by Ralph’s imprisonment was real and getting worse. Natale kept
waiting for his old mob cohorts to do right by his family, but not a penny found its way to Lucia or the kids. When she came to visit Ralph, the two shared a fiscal summit to face the new realities.

  “I told her, ‘We’ll be okay. Sell the house. Sell the one in Palm Springs, too. And make sure the kids have enough to go to school,’” Natale remembered. “You know what my wife did? She’s a queen. She started cleaning other people’s apartments, certain people that she liked. She cooked for them a little bit. She cleaned other people’s toilets, and still I wouldn’t become a rat. She took care of herself and sent me commissary money.

  “Imagine that! I could cry when I think of it. But she did it.”

  His daughters, their father in prison, worked their way through school as waitresses. Natale, alone in his cell at night, asked for divine intervention to help him make it through: “I prayed to the Blessed Mother. I figured she’s gonna help me out. Help my family out. Look, the things I did in my life and I was still alive—there musta been somebody really cared for me.”

  21

  MR. NATALE GOES TO WASHINGTON

  In early 1982, Natale found himself in front of a federal parole board for a review of his sentence. The three-member group seemed perplexed: Why was he doing twenty-seven years when the federal sentencing guidelines called for fifty-two to eighty months—just under seven years?

  “They talked it over, and they said, ‘We’re gonna recommend a reduction. We’re not gonna set you free, but you can’t do twenty-seven years,’” recalled Natale. “Maybe I woulda done eight, nine, I woulda been home.”

  The elated Natale thanked them profusely, shook everyone’s hand, and was told to expect word in a month. He called Lucia with the good news, and she came up to visit with the wives of fellow Mafia members Ronnie Turchi and George Flynn. They arrived in the visitors’ area, with three guards watching every move on the floor below—and then Mrs. Natale’s visit was interrupted by one of the corrections officers. Her husband was needed in the warden’s office when they were finished.