Natale bit off the end of his cigar before carefully lighting up, rolling the smoke to get the perfect ash—a trick learned in his youth. As he spoke, the other two leaned in so as not to miss a word.
“First things first. Michael, do you have the type of men who are ready to do what has to be done? Remember, the greater the fortune, the greater the risk. There are many people from the New York families who—if they become aware of what’s really at stake—will be willing to risk their lives or take lives if necessary for that amount of money.
“We must act now, before anyone else becomes aware of what can be done in Atlantic City. With your help, this will be ours again.”
Natale assured the two that Chicago would back their play in return for his years of silence while behind bars. And he explained, looking at Michael and ignoring Joey, that the process would require bloodshed and a big set of balls. It would also start immediately.
“We must take back the streets of South Philly with a bang and send that message to everyone who is sniffing what belongs to us,” Natale said. “Remember, Michael, I’m doing this sentence for some people in New York as well as Philadelphia. It’s important that I show real strength from here in prison, so when the time comes, the Commission will recognize us.”
Michael had a question: “Ralph, do you want us to let everybody know, no matter who they are, what we intend to do?”
“Without a doubt,” Ralph shot back. “Because that’s the only way to find out who the snakes are, and as sure as the day follows night, they will show themselves. And then, my young friend, if you’re the man Joey says you are, you won’t have to take a ride back here for me to tell you what must be done. After you do what you have to do, all the snakes will disappear.”
Ralph was almost done with his young acolytes, who sat mesmerized as he spoke. Natale asked a final question about the street situation in the city: Was anybody running his mouth about taking control of the family with Scarfo behind bars?
Ciancaglini immediately mentioned “Louie Irish” DeLuca, operator of an after-hours club and a downtown drug dealer. DeLuca was palling around with Natale’s old sidekick Ronnie Turchi and was bad-mouthing both Merlino and Ciancaglini—“chirping inside his club whenever he gets high, in front of anybody who will listen,” Michael reported.
Natale smiled and began to speak softly, almost as if reciting poetry. But his words sounded more like an obituary: “Louie Irish, with his own words like many egotistical men, composed his own epitaph. So, Michael, when you finally take all of his thoughts and dreams from him, everybody who mistakenly thought he was somebody will know it came from the people he talked about. And those people made him a nobody.”
The meeting was finished, and the two young mobsters were on board. Natale stood between Merlino and Ciancaglini, his hands on their arms, as they marched in unison toward the visiting room. Ciancaglini took Ralph’s advice to heart: strike fast, and strike hard.
At 1:00 a.m. on May 24, 1990, as DeLuca drove his burgundy 1986 Cadillac toward home, the Natale faction lashed out. Two shooters surprised Louie Irish, blasting through his car windshield at the helpless businessman. Three of the gunshots found their mark, and the fifty-four-year-old club owner was dead. He was unarmed, with $129 cash in his pockets. Mikey Chang, living up to his advance billing, was one of the gunmen.
Those were the first bullets fired in Natale’s quest to take everything back. They were far from the last. The killing of Louie Irish sent a message, but many others had a higher rank on Natale’s hit list of revenge. The top spot for a bullet unquestionably belonged to John Stanfa, one of the conspirators in the 1980 killing of Bruno. For Natale, getting rid of the man who killed his beloved and respected boss was nearly as exciting as the prospect of becoming the boss.
“That stuck in my craw,” Natale said of Stanfa’s role in the murder. “I thought for years, ‘When I get home, I’m gonna kill him and everybody around him.’ The young guys knew—their fathers and their uncles told them, ‘Ralphy’s crazy. He talks nice, but he’s crazy. He’ll kill him right then and there.’ And I would have, ’cause he was involved in it. I sent word back to the street, ‘I’m gonna kill them.’ That was on record. And history rolls on.”
Another prime target was off the streets: Scarfo, who’d run the family into the ground while lining his pockets and stiffing Lucia.
“I really wanted to kill Scarfo,” Natale continued. “I know that sounds terrible, but that’s how I felt. And it would have gotten done. I wasn’t Superman, but I was pretty good at my job. Or he woulda killed me. I know that. But I never thought it could happen.”
Natale arranged the murder of two other mobsters to ease his eventual return to the streets. Felix Bocchino, the man who delivered the shotgun that killed Angelo Bruno, was gunned down on January 29, 1992, by Mikey Chang after trying to shake down Merlino’s uncle “Sheiky” Baldino. Ciancaglini visited Natale in prison to deliver the news of his ultimate rebuke to Bocchino’s overtures on behalf of Stanfa.
Bocchino was shot four times in the head through his car window. It was a textbook hit: fast, economical, lethal.
Four months later to the day, James “Jimmy Brooms” DiAddorio was shot to death while speaking on the phone at the end of the bar inside the Vulpine Athletic Club in Philadelphia. Two men wearing black hats pumped a half dozen bullets into the helpless victim, who made the mistake of openly pledging his allegiance to the Stanfa faction—often loudly, after a few drinks in local bars.
The murder was done strictly as a message that the Natale faction was coming and anyone standing in their way faced the same fate.
One more vitally important detail had to be handled: Natale didn’t want to make a move without some sort of approval from the Commission in New York. The proposition was dicey at best, given that he had a few years left on his arson and drug convictions.
But fortune and the federal prison system smiled on Natale. He was transferred to Danbury, Connecticut, where his fellow inmates included onetime Lucchese family boss Vic Amuso and Raymond Patriarca Jr., son of the legendary New England crime boss.
Amuso reached out to Natale, and the two sat together in Amuso’s cell drinking coffee and eating Entenmann’s doughnuts—“That was a big deal,” Natale remembered.
The next night, the mobsters from New York, Philadelphia, and New England gathered for a chat. Natale, cards close to his prison jumpsuit, launched into his Stanfa gambit. Natale asked Amuso to send a message to jailed Gambino boss Gotti asking whether Stanfa’s regime was sanctioned by New York.
Amuso, convicted in the infamous New York “Windows” prosecution, interrupted Natale: “He can’t be the boss. We had a meeting, all the new bosses, when they sent the old Commission away. The first rule they made was no foreign-born Italian mafiosi of La Cosa Nostra could ever be a boss in the United States. So I know he’s not the boss.”
Natale asked if there was a way to find out how Stanfa was approved. It turned out approval came from John Gambino, his relative and the Italian-born Gambino capo. When an intermediary finally posed the question to Gotti, the Dapper Don dismissed the Philly pretender.
“John Stanfa?” Gotti sniffed. “Who knows him?”
That was good enough for Natale, who told his young underlings that the word had come down from on high—Stanfa could not serve as boss. Natale’s new cohorts—including Merlino, sprung from prison in April 1992—seemed unable to grasp the enormity of this decree directly from two members of the mob’s highest authority.
“When I told those idiots, when I sent word, they said, ‘It can’t be!’” Natale recalled with a tone of incredulity. “They didn’t believe me. Mikey Chang was allowed to visit me, and I said, ‘Listen—this is what Vic Amuso told me: He is not the boss. He never will be. He will not be the boss in a million years.’ Stanfa had no right to make anybody. He was never the boss.”
Natale then gave Ciancaglini specific and savage instructions on dealing with Stanfa in his absence. “I told Michael,
when this punk John Stanfa calls to meet you, you make sure you and Joey go in there loaded up.” I knew Stanfa would call them because that’s what the Sicilians do! And I said as soon as they open the doors to let you in, kill everybody. The city’s ours. They didn’t do that because Joey Merlino talked Michael out of it. Merlino was broke when he got home, so he told Michael, ‘Come on, we’ll go and shake guys down and use Stanfa’s name. And when Ralph comes home, I’ll tell him.’
“Michael says, ‘But Ralph told me…’ And Joey said, ‘Don’t worry about it. He ain’t coming home for a while.’”
So, when Merlino sat down with Stanfa on April 28, 1992, the pretender to the mob throne walked away unscathed. “And don’t Michael get killed by Stanfa?” Natale said.
He did, in a manner worthy of Shakespearean tragedy. The Stanfa-Natale war left the Ciancaglini family a house bitterly divided as Michael threw in with Ralphy while his brother Joey remained aligned with the ruling regime as its underboss. According to Natale, big brother Joey fired the first shot in the family feud in March 1992.
“Mikey claimed his brother had set him up,” Natale recounted. “Two North Jersey guys were in a car with his brother. He came home from the gym to his house, and he heard a car door slam, and he saw the two guys. They shot the windows out of the house, where Mikey’s wife and young kids lived. He claimed his brother was in the car. So you gotta do what you gotta do.”
Mikey Chang escaped by diving through the front door as the shotgun blasts tore up the brick façade of his home.
The reciprocal deed was done on March 2, 1993, as Joey Ciancaglini arrived to open his Warfield Breakfast & Lunch Express shortly before 6:00 a.m. An FBI surveillance camera captured the grisly sights and sounds—thirty seconds of gunfire and the screams of a waitress after several men were seen bursting in on their stunned target.
Joey Ciancaglini, shot five times in the ear, cheek, and eye, incredibly survived the hit attempt. He fought with the medics trying to save his life and was handcuffed before the EMTs could load him onto a stretcher and into the ambulance. The killers, to Natale’s continued incredulity, fled the scene with their target still breathing.
“They didn’t know how to kill him,” former hit man Natale said bluntly. “They shot him, but he lived. These things happen. And Michael didn’t shoot his brother—that’s bullshit. He wasn’t there.”
Ciancaglini was left permanently crippled—blind in one eye, deaf in one ear, both physically and mentally disabled, left to walk with a cane. His Stanfa colleagues were left to handle the payback, with the Sicilian-born boss caught on a wiretap in the spring that year ordering the murders of Mikey Chang, Merlino, Natale, and fellow mafioso Gaeton Lucibello.
Stanfa had specific directions: Merlino and Ciancaglini were to be buried in quick-drying cement, and Lucibello’s tongue was to be cut out. He called for a “welcome home” treat for Natale once the old-school mobster walked out of prison.
“He’s gotta go,” Stanfa announced. “I don’t even want to give him time to breathe the air.”
Ciancaglini never saw his concrete coffin—or the bullet that killed him. On August 5, 1993, as Mikey Chang and Joey Merlino walked along Catharine Street around 1:30 p.m., two shooters in baseball caps opened fire in a brazen daylight mob hit. Ciancaglini died from a single bullet that struck him in the arm—and wound up hitting his heart.
Merlino was shot in the legs and buttocks, a clear indication of the shooters’ ineptitude. The killers sped off in a waiting car that was dumped and torched about thirty-five blocks away. The missed opportunity to whack Skinny Joey was emblematic of Stanfa’s dopey crew: Another proposed hit by the family failed when the hit man loaded his shotgun with the wrong-size shells. And a previous murder plot against Merlino featured a onetime exotic dancer brought aboard to slip cyanide into his drink at a nightclub. That one failed as well.
Natale believes Merlino bears the blame for Ciancaglini’s murder: “Joey made the snowballs, and he had Michael throw them. Poor Michael got killed because he didn’t listen to me.”
Natale was in the prison weight room working out when he heard about Ciancaglini’s violent demise. The distraught don dropped a forty-pound weight on his finger, taking the tip right off.
“All I felt was the pain of missing him,” Natale recalled. “I felt sick to my stomach and I thought, ‘I’m gonna straighten this out.’”
But Natale didn’t feel any guilt about enlisting young Mikey Chang to the cause of his redemption: “I didn’t feel responsible for his death. This was my life, and that was his life. I did what I did, and I was responsible for my life. We’re all responsible for our own lives.”
Vengeance came quickly—if not successfully. On the morning of August 31, Stanfa was riding with his son Joe in a Cadillac Seville when a van with gun holes carved into its side pulled alongside on the Schuylkill Expressway and opened fire. The twenty-three-year-old Joe was hit in the face, with a bullet lodging behind his cheekbone. One of the Cadillac’s tires was blown out, with driver Fred Aldrich somehow steering the crippled car to safety. Aldrich predictably told the cops that he saw nothing.
Natale was stunned that his young charges had somehow missed their target. “I wanted to kill John Stanfa, not his son. The guy who was supposed to shoot Stanfa missed and hit the son. Dopey bastards. The kid got shot accidentally. All you have to do is block the car from the front, get another car right behind, and somebody gets out and shoots. End of story.”
The botched Stanfa hit turned the Philly war into national news, with The New York Times weighing in with a piece on the battle for the family leadership. “Philadelphia Braces for Increase in Mob Violence,” read their typically understated headline. It took barely two weeks for the Natale faction to lash out again, with Stanfa loyalist Leon “Yonnie” Lanzilotti shot in the face as he walked along Eighth Street in South Philly. Police said the diminutive bookmaker was ambushed by three ski-masked shooters who left him to die.
Thought his blood flowed like a red river along the sidewalk, Lanzilotti survived the murder try. The new generation of gangsters had twice lived up to their mocking reputation as “the gang that couldn’t shoot straight,” to quote the classic Jimmy Breslin mob book.
Before finally coming home, Natale had a strange encounter in Danbury. One of his fellow inmates was Benjamin “Lefty Guns” Ruggiero, the unfortunate mafioso who brought FBI undercover Joe Pistone into the Bonanno family to disastrous results (and a hit movie where Ruggiero was played by Al Pacino). When the two men met, Natale felt that the past was the past. They were still a couple of made men in the same prison. Respect was due, and given.
“I never mentioned the streets,” Natale recounted. “We shook hands, we hugged. The hug was a problem with some of the made guys, who still remembered how he brought a rat in. I stood up for him and told all those guys—I mean, I was me in those days—you oughta be ashamed of yourself.”
In 1993, as Natale prepared from his release from prison and ascension to boss, news reached Ralph about the turncoat Charlie Allen. Karma had come finally knocking for the treacherous onetime member of the Natale crew.
The informer went into the Witness Protection Program, living in a leafy Virginia suburb under the name William Terry. He was married to a woman with a stepdaughter—and she came forward that year with allegations that Allen had sexually abused her for thirteen years, starting when she was a four-year-old.
Allen told the girl that if she ever said one word, he would execute her mother and grandmother—and force her to watch the killings.
Charlie Allen was convicted of rape and sodomy. A judge sentenced him to forty-five years in prison, where he died of cancer.
“He had a nice little home, he was living with a woman,” said Natale. “This is where he shoulda ended. But this is where he ended: Full of cancer, in the joint. That’s what he was.”
25
DON’T CALL IT A COMEBACK
Natale returned home on September 23, 1
994, breathing the fresh air of a free man for the first time in sixteen years. Once his lungs were filled, his eyes grew wide with anticipation: The paroled Natale was determined to restore the family and retrieve what was taken from him. For some, the reality is never as sweet as the dream that preceded it. That was not the case for Ralph Natale. He assumed the mantle of family leadership as if slipping into a pair of old slippers, sliding comfortably into the seat without a second thought, his destiny fulfilled.
“I felt like I was born for it,” he said. “That simple. Because I did what I had to do, I got all the requirements, and here I am. And I didn’t give nobody up. That’s part of the record. There was no way I would come back and walk away from things. Why would I? I just did sixteen straight years, lost everything that I had. Atlantic City was thriving.”
He even reached out to his old union pal Ed Hanley with word that he intended to seize control of the local unions once more.
“Guess what he said? ‘With my blessing.’ Why wouldn’t he?” said Natale. “He didn’t have to do a day. They wanted him in the worst way in that Senate hearing.”
There was a bon voyage celebration at the prison, hosted by Genovese capo Federico “Fritzy” Giovanelli—accused of killing a New York detective. “What a send-off,” Natale remembered. “Fritzy and all the made guys. You never saw anything like it. Sandwiches, sodas. What a scene.”
A homecoming party was thrown by his family, with various generations of the Natale clan in attendance. Natale was barred from Philadelphia, so the fête was hosted elsewhere by his aunt Dolly—mother of the turncoat Raymond Bernard.
“She saw me, she said, ‘Ralphy, can I talk to you?’” he recalled. “We hugged and we kissed. And she said to me, ‘Ralphy, don’t kill Raymond.’ ’Cause she knew what he did, cost me all those years. I said, ‘Kill him?’ How could I kill my aunt Dolly’s son? I can’t do that. Figure that one out. I can’t do that.”
Absent from the party was nemesis Stanfa, already behind bars on a racketeering rap. He was arrested and jailed in March 1994, convicted the next year, and sentenced to die behind bars. Natale would never get a shot at his number one nemesis.
Last Don Standing Page 17