Last Don Standing

by Larry McShane

  Philly’s Black Mafia also arrived at Ralphy’s Pennsauken, New Jersey, penthouse, bearing a multicolored robe as a welcome-home gift. Their cohorts doing time in Lewisburg had vouched for the new Philly boss as a stand-up guy.

  “I don’t know how much they paid for it,” he still marvels. “And they told me, ‘If you need us, we are here for you.’ They asked for permission to visit with some friends of mine, and I said, ‘Come right up.’ They loved that, and why not? They knew my reputation, and I knew theirs. They were all gentlemen, straight up. My wife was there!”

  The new boss remembers their assurance that he would have their support in all endeavors. “They said, ‘We got your back, let us know,’” he recalled. “And I said, ‘Hey, I ain’t that old, you know?’”

  One and all shared a good laugh before the guests headed out. But Natale was now the head of the most dysfunctional crime family in the United States, and perhaps in the long history of American organized crime—not that it felt that way to him.

  “There’s only one boss in Philadelphia,” he declared after leaving prison. “That’s Ralph Natale, and that’s where the fuck it’s at.”

  Natale once again set up shop at the racetrack in Cherry Hill, operating with impunity out of the Currier & Ives restaurant. He was astounded and delighted after all his time away by the discovery of simulcasting: “Even when the track was closed, you could bet on all the races from every track. That was something new to me—wow, you can bet everything!”

  He was at the track as usual one afternoon when an old friend appeared to offer his assistance to the new boss.

  “Blinky Palermo came up to see me, with his driver Red—I never knew his real name!” Natale recalled with delight about the reunion. “Blinky looked pretty good, but he’s old—ninety-one, ninety-two years old. They come up wearing the old double-breasted suits—clean, with the white shirts, immaculate. We hugged, we kissed, we had lunch. We laughed.

  “And then he leaned over to me—he was a shooter, he buried a few people, you know? Out in the street, whatever. And he said, ‘You know, I’m still capable.’

  “Oh, I loved him. He meant it! I said, ‘I know. Don’t you dare think I don’t. Let these young punks do what they gotta do. We’ll see what they got.’ And in the end, they didn’t have too much in them, as men.”

  Palermo was an anomaly among the men who made up the Philadelphia mob of the 1990s. The high-rolling Natale was stunned by the way his new associates carried themselves—living at home with their mothers, driving other people’s cars, working nickel-and-dime scams.

  “They were all dead out,” Natale recounted. “But what am I gonna do—use mannequins? I needed somebody.”

  One of his first decisions in the top seat came back to bite him. A soldier named Ronnie Previte—a rotund ex–Philadelphia police officer—was with the Stanfa faction, and Merlino agitated for his murder. Natale was unconvinced by his young partner’s arguments.

  “When I came home, I hooked up with Ronnie,” Natale recalled. “We used to hang out. Joey Merlino wanted to kill everybody—including Previte. I said, ‘Did this guy ever do anything with a gun?… No? Then it’s over. That’s enough killing. You can’t kill everybody.’ Previte wasn’t a shooter. Well, I let him live. And he came up wired at the racetrack, recorded everything.”

  A busy Natale set quickly to reestablishing the family’s preeminent role in the Philadelphia underworld, ignoring the conditions of his parole—strict guidelines about where he could go and whom he could see. He reached out to the owner of a banquet hall on Front Street, typically used for weddings and other family parties. Natale had a different kind of party in mind.

  “First we had a big meeting in the family,” he recalled. “I said, ‘Who took all the action? The numbers, the bookmaking, the loan-sharking?’ And they told me: ‘This guy has this, this guy has that.’ I said, ‘Hold on one second.’”

  He arranged for a weekday event at the hall, catered with plenty of food and booze. Then he dispatched his mob minions to contact every bookie, loan shark, and numbers hustler in the city and issue an invitation that none dared decline—directly from Natale. “I said, ‘Tell them I’m asking.’ See, they didn’t trust Joey Merlino. When he used to bet, he’d lose the whole bank. Everybody knew him—he was like John Gotti, he didn’t pay. Now I’m saying, ‘Tell ’em Ralphy wants to see ’em. Tell them I want to see them all, and if I have to call again, there’s gonna be a problem.’ Because they knew my reputation before I went to Lewisburg. They knew what I meant, and they all show up.”

  The buffet and an open bar awaited, as did Natale, with his underboss Merlino and consigliere Turchi. The new ruling triumvirate put their guests at ease before bringing them into a room, one at a time, where the mood was far less welcoming.

  Natale did the talking. He wasted no words in laying out the new rules. None of the visitors saw the weapon he carried in case additional persuasion was needed.

  “I’m gonna talk,” he said by way of opening. “It’s not for you to talk. When I ask you a question, you have to answer. I know what you’re doing. I’m not here to put you out of business.”

  Natale would summon one of his underlings to join the party—and resume the monologue. “You know him? He’s your new partner. Now, if you need money, ask him. We’ll make sure you get that money—for a certain fee. But he’s your partner for all your action, and nobody can fuck with you for the rest of your life.”

  Natale, once finished, flashed a Cheshire cat grin. Each and every attendee responded the same way to his proposal. “Every one of them said it sounds fair. And I said, ‘It is fair!’ Because I always began and ended with this: ‘Everything illegal in the city of Philadelphia belongs to La Cosa Nostra. That’s us. Our friends die, our relatives die, because of this. Get that through your head. Never think different. If not, you have a problem.’

  “They knew I woulda killed them. If I had to, I woulda banged one of them right in the head, just to make sure.”

  His ragtag mob army was soon reaping the financial benefits: BMWs, big-screen TVs. Life was good until it wasn’t.

  Natale’s inclusion of Turchi in his mob administration provided a perfect illustration of his mob acumen: His old pal had plotted to kill Ralphy once he came back to the city. Word of the planned hit reached Natale two days after he came home, when the kid hired by Turchi as the shooter was overheard discussing the murder plot in a Philadelphia pizzeria.

  The wise old head remembered the adage to keep your friends close and your enemies closer. There was a personal aspect, too: he had known Turchi since the days when the young mobster played shortstop at Southern High, getting drafted by the Phillies. His career ended two weeks later when Turchi stabbed a man in a bar fight. And the two were convicted together in the Mr. Living Room arson. Turchi took the hit and did his time and never opened his mouth.

  “I made him the consigliere because I felt sorry for him,” Natale said. “He thought he was more than everybody. He was a killer—stone-cold. But how can I kill him? I knew him since I was a kid. He might want to kill me, but he’d never be a rat. Turchi? Never.”

  Ralphy was right: Turchi went to his grisly death in October 1999 without ever speaking to the feds. His naked body was found facedown in the trunk of a car, his hands and feet bound, with two bullets to his head—which was wrapped in a plastic bag to prevent any blood spatter.

  “They told him they were gonna make him, and they killed him,” recalled Natale—a scene right out of Goodfellas, where Joe Pesci’s character was dispatched in similar fashion.

  Natale, decades after his initiation ceremony with Gambino and Bruno, agreed to be remade when Merlino approached him with an invite to become a made man. Though unnecessary, Natale accepted the offer in the interest of keeping the peace among his factions. The ceremony was held in a suite at the Hilton Hotel near Veterans Stadium, with a gun and a knife in the room.

  Both men swore an oath of omertà to the family. And e
ach acknowledged their souls “would burn in hell” if they broke their word.

  “I never told him, that punk, that I was already made by the two biggest guys,” Natale said. “But he wanted to show everybody what he had—Ralph Natale. None of them would have gone near Joey Merlino if he didn’t have Ralphy.”

  Given the option, Natale said, “I wouldn’t have made him.” The boss nevertheless embraced Merlino as second-in-command of the family, even making a public proclamation that Skinny Joey was under his personal umbrella of protection.

  “What was I gonna do by myself?” he offered in self-defense. “Go out on the streets and take numbers personally? I told everybody, ‘If you think you’re gonna get near that kid, you’re gonna have to kill me first.’ And then he forgot that I put my life on the line for him.”

  Once Natale was embraced as the new boss, a summons came from the Gambino family for a sit-down. The New Yorkers had backed Stanfa from the start, and they were now waving a white flag.

  “Me, Joey, and Ronnie Turchi took a ride up to New York,” said Natale. “Gotti was in jail, and they had three top captains running the family. They asked me to do them a favor: please don’t kill Mikey Chang’s brother or Stanfa’s son. I said, ‘Why kill them? Okay.’ Then they brought me in the back—‘Ralphy, you gave your word.…’ I said, ‘Don’t say any more. My word is good.’”

  Natale wasn’t surprised by the call for compassion for the two survivors of the war: “Lots of times it happens that if a guy survives a hit, they’ll give you a pass.”

  The first target once Natale landed in Philadelphia was William Veasey, killed just before his brother—mob capo John Veasey—was scheduled to testify in a mob trial about the murder of Ciancaglini and a failed hit on Merlino. The man known as Billy was gunned down on October 5, 1995, after picking up doughnuts on his way to work.

  Ralph later testified that one of the killers was a third Ciancaglini brother, John. The killing of William Veasey was direct payback for the Mikey Chang murder—“It was brother for a brother,” Natale told the FBI.

  The next bump in the road for the Natale regime came from Northern New Jersey, where capo Joseph Sodano operated as a major earner for the Philly group: illegal video poker machines, loan-sharking, and fencing stolen goods. Natale heard from his friends in New York that Sodano was also working with some of the families in the city, rather than exclusively for him. This did not sit well with Natale.

  The new boss summoned all the Philadelphia-connected guys in Newark to come south and sit face-to-face. Sodano, to his detriment, declined the invitation—instead sending a cash-stuffed envelope back to Natale with mobster Philip “Philly Fay” Casale.

  “Full of Franklins,” Natale recalled. “I said, ‘Bring it back to him. Tell him I want to see him man to man.’ Philly said, ‘Ralph, this guy thinks you want to kill him.’ I said that his underwear must be dirty. That’s the old saying: ‘You never show up if your underwear’s dirty.’ I said, ‘Tell him nobody wants to kill him.’

  “And he never came.”

  Now somebody wanted to kill him. Natale instructed family associate Peter “Pete the Crumb” Caprio that the clock was running: Sodano must be killed within a week.

  “I sent word: ‘Pete, if he’s not dead within a week, I’m gonna come out of retirement and I’m gonna show you how to do it. I’m gonna embarrass all of you—and who knows what else I’m gonna do while I’m up there,’” Natale recalled. “He knew what I meant. Sodano was dead within a week.”

  Sodano, with two bullets to the head, was found behind the wheel of his SUV, left in the parking lot of a Newark senior citizens complex on December 7, 1996. The contract went to Casale, who wasted little time in tracking his target down.

  When the Crumb flipped and joined the feds, he recalled Natale’s exact order: “We got to bang this guy out.”

  Only a few months earlier, Natale endured one of his darker days with the death of an old mob friend. He was at the track in May 1996 when Palermo’s driver appeared late one afternoon. The boss was holding court in the clubhouse—“nice room, hundred-dollar window, fifty-dollar window, free food,” he recalled. “At about four thirty, I’m buying everyone drinks. And as soon as I saw Red, I knew Blinky died. I had that feeling.

  “He comes over: ‘I’ve got bad news. He died the night before last, we cremated him yesterday. He wanted to be cremated. But he left me something to give to you.’”

  Red reached into his suit and produced Blinky Palermo’s glasses. He solemnly presented the eyewear to the boss.

  “That comes from when Julius Caesar was with the Mafia,” a misty Natale said of the long-standing tradition. “That’s from one man to another man, showing the respect for the man who’s still alive: let him look through these glasses and see things the way I saw them.”

  Natale treasured the posthumous gift—until his wife lost the glasses in a mix-up with their cars. “I almost divorced her because of that. I’m not kidding. But let bygones be bygones, because I’m not Little Boy Blue over here, either.”

  He speaks the truth. Shortly after returning home, Natale—living large after his time in lockup—took up with a much younger blond mistress, a friend of his youngest daughter’s named Ruthann Seccio. Natale spotted his future goomah sunbathing poolside in a bikini. Six months later, the two were a scandalous item, tooling around in Natale’s white Eldorado with its blue leather seats.

  Many in the mob were distressed by their boss’s chasing a twentysomething Philly girl while his wife sat at home. It was unseemly.

  Natale, looking back, doesn’t disagree. “The life I led, especially when it came to marriage, wasn’t right. I regret that—the only regret I have, you know? Ever hear that Sinatra song? ‘Regrets, I’ve had a few. But too few to mention.’”

  After the death of his friend Blinky, Natale returned to plotting the deaths of others. On May 29, 1996, video poker power broker Anthony “Tony Machines” Milicia was sitting behind the wheel of his Ford Explorer just a short block from one of his clients, Bonnie’s Capistrano Bar. Milicia survived after taking a bullet to the back, and his face was cut by flying glass.

  Milicia was shot after balking at Natale’s demand for a cut of his weekly poker machine intake, which generated profits of close to $1 million a year. Once Milicia saw the light through the shattered glass of his car windows, all was forgiven. He and Natale subsequently met for drinks at a South Philadelphia bar.

  “He wasn’t a bad fella,” said Natale. “I was glad he did survive.”

  Natale, in short and violent order, had restored some of the mob’s old moneymaking cachet. Previte recalled that “every day was a different felony. I thought about nothing but making money from the minute I got up until the minute I went to bed.”

  That same year Natale spoke about his preferred method of handling mob problems. He advocated the beating of one mob associate “’cause he answered me in a tone that he wasn’t supposed to be doing.”

  Unfortunately, the conversation was captured by an FBI bug—and so were many more. On one, Natale ranted about the cowardly “rats” now so prevalent in his chosen field. “In life,” he declared, “you have to do the right thing and be a man.” His take on Atlantic City, long the family’s crown jewel: “If we don’t become successful in Atlantic City … we ought to put weights around our necks and jump in the river.”

  Even though Natale was paranoid about FBI ears, he couldn’t stop himself from talking. Soon everyone would know everything there was to know about boss Ralph Natale.

  26

  WHERE DID IT ALL GO WRONG?

  By 1998, the Philly mob was lousy with rats and wiretaps as the FBI prepared to take down Natale and his crew. The feds were soon listening to Natale’s every word about every aspect of the Philadelphia mob, tapping the racetrack restaurant along with his home telephone, his kitchen, his TV room, and the balcony of his Pennsauken, New Jersey, penthouse. A video camera was even installed at the track to collect images
of the mobsters at work and play. Even worse, Previte used his new lease on life to wear a wire and record hundreds of conversations.

  “Well, I was and I wasn’t surprised by all the bugs,” Natale reflected. “How much money they spent—they wired the whole racetrack, my phones, everything. How many millions of dollars they spent! And we talked about things. Assholes.”

  The word was soon out: indictments were on the way, and soon. Natale reached out to Merlino about the very uncertain future. “I told Joey, ‘You do what you gotta do. Don’t forget my wife.’ And he said, ‘Nah. Don’t worry, Ralph.’”

  Ralphy next sat down for a conversation with Lucia and shared the bad news. His message to her was simple: “Listen, I don’t know what the hell’s coming down, they say a big indictment. Whatever. Don’t worry about nothing. Joey and the crew made a commitment to me. They will bring over an envelope every month. So don’t worry about it.”

  Natale never stopped fighting to protect what he had reclaimed. On March 18, 1998, Anthony Turra was shot in the right eye and the back by a killer in a ski mask and a black jacket. The sixty-one-year-old accused drug dealer was plotting to murder Merlino and seize Skinny Joey’s gambling business—and even worse was caught doing so during a secretly recorded conversation with an FBI informant. One of his proposed methods of murder for Merlino: throwing hand grenades in Joey’s house to “blow him from here to kingdom come.”

  The tape was played in open court. Turra—already fighting terminal cancer—went to the grave before a jury could render its verdict on his conspiracy and racketeering charges.

  “There’s a lot of people I saved from killing,” said Natale. “Now, a guy wants to throw a grenade in your house—you can’t let a guy talk that way. Joey came to me, and I said, ‘Get it done.’ There were certain things you can do, and certain things you can’t. At least that’s how I felt.”