Last Don Standing

by Larry McShane

  The couple said good-bye and Natale headed to see the warden, with no idea of the group assembled waiting for his presence.

  “Six, seven, eight suits are there!” he remembered. “From Washington—they told me about a Senate investigating committee. They told me, ‘If your answers are correct, and we know you’re not a liar’—all that bullshit—‘we will recommend a reduction, and you could be home in maybe three or four months.’”

  The response, as it had in Florida, came instantly to Natale’s lips: “I’m afraid you got the wrong guy. Can I go back to my cell?” The parole folks had already offered him what was now on the table from the feds.

  Natale was in the prison’s Red Top, the red-tiled center area of Lewisburg, when his counselor summoned him for another meeting. He couldn’t imagine what the problem was—an argument with another inmate? His mind began racing—with a sentence reduction awaiting, Natale was keenly aware of keeping his nose clean.

  An envelope was waiting from the Senate committee. The counselor said he had no idea what was inside. Natale, on the other hand, knew what was waiting.

  “They put the carrot in front of me with the parole, and then I go up there to the warden’s office,” he said ruefully. “And when I don’t speak, a week after that, I heard that I’ve been denied by the parole board for my reduction. It’s unheard of. But it happened.”

  So did the trip to testify before the Senate committee. On June 22, 1982, Mr. Natale went to Washington, arriving with a grant of immunity from the panel waiting to question him. It would become a life-defining moment, when all of the lessons learned across the decades from Skinny Razor and Angelo Bruno were put to the ultimate test.

  He was brought directly from solitary confinement at Lewisburg to the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington. Lucia took the Amtrak train south from Jersey with their daughters Rebecca and Carmen for their first opportunity to see Ralph outside a federal prison in three years. The trio jumped in a cab for the last leg of their journey.

  The public hearing on organized crime was a big deal, with the Senate committee looking to hang some prize heads on the office wall before a media horde. Their targets: Chicago boss Anthony Accardo, Natale’s old Philadelphia nemesis Nicky Scarfo, and longtime union pal Ed Hanley. The panel wanted Natale’s long-held secrets about Atlantic City and the deal hatched in Ferraro’s over coffee and dessert.

  Ralph knew his words held the keys to any hopes of imminent freedom. He also knew they would be chosen carefully and reveal little, no matter the cost to himself—or his wife or his kids. He felt a tinge of pride, too, since the federal invitation certified that Senate investigators were aware of his pivotal role in the nexus of organized crime and organized labor.

  “You gotta remember, I’m jammed up,” he says now. “Imagine that—that Atlantic City money is there. I put that together with Angelo, Carlo Gambino, and Tony Accardo. And not a dime of it was going to my family.”

  A look of pure disgust covers his face as he spits out two names: “Nicky Scarfo. Phil Testa.”

  The captain assigned to guard the summoned witness showed some sympathy for Natale’s plight, directing him to a bathroom with a shower inside the office. “I don’t need a shower,” Natale told his benefactor. “I just want to wash my face and shave.”

  Once Natale had cleaned up, the captain allowed Lucia inside as the two girls—outside in the hallway—peered through a crack in the office door at their dad. Once they left, Natale donned his attire for the hearing: dark sports coat, plain dark tie, white shirt, and slacks, with hair cropped short. He was freshly shaved and sported an unlikely tan from his time in the yard. He was accompanied by an attorney, Glenn Zeitz. Rebecca watched from the hallway, looking at her dad through a door left ajar.

  Natale looked more like the head of a Fortune 500 company than a Mafia cohort jailed for arson and drug dealing as Senator William Roth of Delaware commenced with the questioning. Natale’s reply, never in doubt as he waited to take his seat before the panel, was delivered implacably.

  “Senator, on the advice of my counsel, I can’t answer,” he said evenly.

  Another question.

  “I will not answer at this time.”

  Senator Warren Rudman exploded angrily when Natale declined to answer a question about providing guns for Angelo Bruno—and Zeitz intervened.

  “You’re not here to make speeches to this committee!” Rudman snapped. “You’re here to advise your client. You talk to Mr. Natale. I’d like him to answer it. He’s been instructed to answer it.”

  Natale’s reply was succinct: “I refuse to answer, Senator.”

  “Do you understand that you have been instructed to answer this question?” shot back Roth.

  “Yes, I do Senator.” Natale had his hands crossed on the table in front of him.

  Roth raised the ante: “Do you understand that in view of your refusal to testify … in response to this subcommittee’s grant of immunity, that I believe the record would support a finding of either civil or criminal contempt on your part? Such a finding could subject you to additional incarceration. I must advise you that such action on your part will not be taken lightly.”

  The Ralphy of South Philadelphia was suddenly present at the table with his attorney as a bristling Natale responded, “I don’t take it lightly either, Senator. I think this panel has went beyond the scope of this investigation, to answer Senator Rudman. You’ve heard Charlie Allen—he is a complete liar. He tells twenty percent truth and eighty percent lies. I’ve got twenty-seven years already. They’re trying to give me more time on the same case.

  “I didn’t come in here looking for any extra time. But on something like that, I think it is a trap for me. I wanted to answer the best I could. Right now, I can’t beyond that there.”

  Roth pressed on: Didn’t he meet with Bruno on regularly, usually for lunch?

  “Yes, I did. He’s my friend,” Natale replied, referring to his slain boss in the present tense. “He’s my friend. Maybe twice a week.”

  “Did Mr. Bruno give you orders on union matters during these luncheons?” Roth continued.

  “Never. Never. I’ll take a polygraph for that. See if Charlie Allen will take the same polygraph with me on these questions. Senator, none whatsoever.”

  Was Angelo Bruno a crime figure?

  “He was a fond, adorable man,” Natale said evenly. “No, I never heard of those things.”

  The questions shifted to Ed Hanley. Did they ever meet?

  “Many times,” said Natale. “He was my boss. He signed my paychecks.”

  And loans made from union pension funds?

  “I’ll take a polygraph on all of that also,” Natale said combatively.

  He was then asked about one of the witnesses to follow, the current boss of the Philadelphia mob—Little Nicky Scarfo. Natale despised Scarfo with every bone in his body. Butter would not melt in his mouth as he answered the questions. But the bitter taste of his responses would never disappear.

  “I think Nicky was a bartender at one time,” said Natale. “A few years ago in Atlantic City, he was tending bar—I think at the 500 Club. I’ve known Nicky casually during the last ten, twelve years. That’s what I know of him.… Nicky’s a fine little guy.”

  And was Scarfo mobbed up?

  “No. We were all born and raised there. We don’t talk that way about each other.”

  The grand finale followed, with Rudman and Natale going toe-to-toe like a pair of fighters battling for the championship belt.

  “I just want to nail this down, Mr. Natale,” the senator jabbed. “In all the years that you were involved in this business, which by anybody’s rules is a kind of tough business—you wouldn’t deny that, would you?”

  “It certainly is,” parried the mobster.

  “I’m glad we can agreed on that.”

  Then Natale unloaded a roundhouse: “I’m fighting for my life here. That’s why I have to watch what I agree with you on. You have to ta
ke that into consideration. I’m not trying to give you a hard time here.”

  Rudman fired back, “In all those years, you want your testimony before this committee to be that you didn’t even know anything about the fact that people like Nicky and Angelo were involved in organized crime?”

  “Only what I read in the great, free press.”

  “Which you didn’t believe?”

  “Of course not,” said the unflappable Natale. “I don’t think you believe everything you read in the paper, too, Senator.”

  Natale did address the claims by witness Charlie Allen that he spent ten years as Ralphy’s bodyguard: “What did he do for me? He put me in jail. He never worked for me.”

  Natale never ceded an inch before security finally shuffled him out of the hearing room and back to the captain’s office. The officer knew what the senators wanted from Natale, and he knew the Philadelphia mobster had refused to give it to them.

  In grudging admiration, he offered Natale a firm handshake. “Jesus Christ, they don’t make ’em like you anymore.”

  “Thanks. I’m just starting a long bid.”

  “Yeah. I’m sure you’re gonna be fine.”

  Which wasn’t remotely true at this point. Natale’s shot at early release was torpedoed. His family would return to their home without him, or much hope of seeing him free anytime soon. His cell at Lewisburg awaited. Yet Natale returned to prison with no regrets.

  “I coulda gave them New York, Chicago, Philadelphia.” He shrugs. “I did my time—sixteen straight bananas on that one. It just shows you, if I wanted to—but I didn’t. It wasn’t gonna work for me.”

  Natale wasn’t the only witness called to Washington. Scarfo was subpoenaed and arrived with a small entourage that included a nascent Philadelphia mobster named Joey Merlino. The latter’s path would cross with Natale’s again, to interesting results, seventeen years down the road in a far different federal venue.

  Another summons to our nation’s capital came a year later. If the first visit was part of a dog and pony show, the encore was done with far less fanfare. The feds still held out hope of leveraging Natale into a cooperation deal, dangling early release yet again.

  Nothing changed.

  “They gave me immunity for everything I ever done,” Natale recalled of his next go-round. “And they did it in a closed room, not for the public. Nobody. It was still the same answer.”

  22

  A MAFIA PRINCE

  The brutal murder of his father unleashed something savage in Salvie Testa, the mob prince with an unlikely past and an uncertain future. The boss’s son had shown signs of a bright future in La Cosa Nostra while growing up, and his fearsome reputation would land him on the front of The Wall Street Journal—where he was described as “the mob’s most celebrated figure these days.”

  Natale was not surprised by his ascension. “I loved Salvie. I seen him grow up,” he said years later with respect. “He kind of admired me from afar. Madonn’, he was a killer’s killer. No life was killed without reason or sanity.”

  But his short and criminal life’s work was hardly preordained. His father initially steered his son away from the Life, and Salvie attended private Catholic schools—graduating from Saint John Neumann High School. The young Testa attended Philly’s Temple University for a year before taking a job as a real estate salesman, working for Bruno’s son-in-law. His boss recalled the handsome, athletic six-footer as hardworking, conscientious, gentle, and kind. But like the fictional Michael Corleone, the young man found himself inexorably drawn into his father’s orbit.

  Natale was walking with Lucia and one of their daughters to visit a South Philly pediatrician when they ran into young Testa shortly before Natale’s 1979 arson arrest and incarceration,

  “He was walking across the street and he saw us,” Natale recounted of his final meeting with Salvie. “He shouts over—‘Ralphy!’—and he came over to shake my hand. We talked, and he told me, ‘My family wants me to go to college and all that. I don’t wanna do that. I wanna do what you do.’

  “The mother and father were behind that, going to a good school. But when Phil saw what his son was—Phil wasn’t stupid in that regard. Salvie was a real man, and a real gangster.”

  The first evidence of Salvie’s lethal acumen had occurred earlier that year, shortly after Philadelphia rang in the New Year. The second-generation mafioso made his bones on January 4, 1979, whacking a drug dealer named Michael “Mikey Coco” Cifelli inside a South Philly bar. The murder was sanctioned by Bruno and assigned to Scarfo, who selected young Testa and Chuckie Merlino to handle the hit at Priori’s on the corner of Tenth and Wolf.

  Cifelli’s open dealing of methamphetamine was a slap in the faces of Bruno’s neighborhood constituents, and the boss acted quickly to remove this scourge from their streets. When Cifelli ignored a friendly suggestion to take his business elsewhere, a lethal Plan B was unleashed.

  “Legends, like rivers, must begin at their source,” Natale said of the killing. “And Priori’s was the beginning of Salvie Testa. His true nature surfaced, from the core of his being. Even Merlino, who knew him since Salvie was a little boy, couldn’t recognize the man now standing in front of him.”

  The two killers donned ski masks and walked toward Cifelli, who was jabbering on the bar’s pay phone. The shooters knew when the call would come; Chuckie had suggested to a mutual friend that he should call Mikey Coco at this exact time to warn him about the contract on his life. Instead of deliverance, the call brought only death.

  “This is for you,” announced Testa before firing point-blank into his target’s skull. Cifelli fell silently to the floor, killed so quickly that he had no time to utter a word of protest or a scream of horror.

  Scarfo drove the getaway car. As Natale heard the tale, Testa walked out of the bar and away from his first killing with the gait of a man casually headed to meet an old friend. The howls of terrified patrons echoed in the winter air behind him. Testa climbed into the shotgun seat alongside Little Nicky.

  “Did you put two in his head?” asked Scarfo.

  “Without a doubt,” replied the younger, taller, and better-looking shooter, with panache in his answer. Word of his cavalier approach to killing became the talk of the neighborhood, where Salvie Testa received instant respect as the local mob’s Rookie of the Year.

  Things changed after the assassination of Bruno and the rise of Philip Testa to boss. Shortly before his own brutal death, the Chicken Man arranged for Salvie’s induction as a made man. Around the same time, Testa’s wife passed away. With the hit on his father, the young Testa was an orphan at age twenty-five.

  “His mother died of cancer,” Natale said of the unparalleled mob scion. “That hurt him. And then to see his father get killed like that? He loved his father. And that’s what made him what he was. A pure killer.”

  The mob execution of Phil Testa “took away any chance of Salvie leading a life of any kind of normalcy,” Natale said. “His destiny now was to be ‘Salvie Testa, the coldest of all the killers’ who would rise under Nicky Scarfo.”

  Natale recalled the tale of Salvie’s actions on the day of his father’s burial, a cold and windy March morning that felt more winter than spring. As the mourners slowly dispersed, young Testa stood in the cemetery among a small group of boyhood friends offering their support to their precocious leader. He stood among them, not a single tear visible. His stony public face was in contrast to the anguish that Testa felt leaving the hospital emergency room on the night of his father’s murder.

  Testa asked for a few minutes of solitude as he stood by the graves of his parents, ordering the lingering mourners to wait for him by the cemetery entrance. His mother and father were now together forever, and he stood all alone amid the tombstones.

  Phil Testa’s casket had not yet gone into the ground, and his son stood for an hour with one arm extended, touching the coffin. His facial expression was now hard, a metamorphosis “into what he was destined
to be,” said Natale. “The most prolific killer that South Philly had seen since the death of Skinny Razor.”

  Salvie finally knelt alongside the casket to deliver a solemn vow: “Daddy, I will kill and punish everyone involved with putting you here.” He touched the dirt beneath his knees. “I promised I will put such fear into their hearts that even their dogs will forget how to bark.”

  His initial instinct was to whack everyone outside his father’s inner circle. But his upbringing left Salvie acutely aware of the mob’s protocols in such matters, and he was persuaded by new boss Scarfo to wait until the Commission gave their approval. The New York families first installed Scarfo as the city’s third boss in thirteen months before getting down to the Testa killing. Old pal Manna vouched for Scarfo before the other families as the choice of the Genovese borgata, with Little Nicky installed without opposition. Then Manna laid out the case for Casella as the main force behind this latest bit of mob treachery.

  The verdict from New York and the family headed by Gigante was again brutal and brief: kill them all—except Casella, who was given a pass by the Chin, banished to Florida under a threat of immediate execution if he ever reappeared. The worst bloodletting in the often-gory history of the Philadelphia mob was about to commence with the approval of New York, under the shaky hand of Scarfo.

  “Nicky Scarfo,” Natale said with derision. “Boss by attrition. The darkness of treachery was about to descend over the Philly La Cosa Nostra. There was no one for Nicky to answer to except the face in the mirror when Scarfo shaved.”

  Then, and only then, did the Testa kid go about avenging the death of his father in spectacular fashion.

  On January 7, 1982, Narducci parked his Cadillac about a half block from his home in South Philly. A familiar voice called through the darkness: “Hey, Frank.” He turned to see Salvie Testa standing a few feet away, a gun in his hand and malice on his face. The mob prince made sure Narducci had a good look at his executioner before pulling the trigger—again and again and again.