Read Mafia Prince: Inside America's Most Violent Crime Family Online
Authors: Phil Leonetti,Scott Burnstein,Christopher Graziano
Tags: #Mafia, #Nonfiction, #Retail, #True Crime
Mafia Prince: Inside America's Most Violent Crime Family (10 page)
When my uncle was younger, he and Mark Marconi were the best of friends but they had a falling. It was a big mess and it put a strain on their relationship. My uncle told me, “If Tommy Butch starts coming back down to Atlantic City, I want you to tell the Blade to kill him on the spot. If he stays in Philadelphia, I will leave him alone for now.” This was before the Blade went to jail, probably 1971.
While Tommy Butch got a pass, the King of the Jews wasn’t as lucky.
Joseph Scalleat was a member of our organization who was based in Northeastern Pennsylvania. He was part of Santo Idone’s regime. Joseph Scalleat reaches out to Alvin Feldman and tells him that he wants his help in torching a warehouse in Pennsylvania, and Alvin Feldman goes for it, thinking it’s a score. This guy never turned down an opportunity to make money. My uncle used to say, “This cocksucker is so greedy, he’d kill his own mother for 200 dollars.” So once Scalleat gets Alvin to the warehouse, Santo Idone, Chickie Narducci, and Chickie Ciancaglini run up on him and start roughing him up. Santo Idone grabs him from behind and Chickie Narducci goes to stab him with an ice pick, but Alvin gets away and Chickie ends up stabbing Santo. As Alvin is running away, Ciancaglini grabs him and Ciancaglini is big and is strong as an ox.
The King of the Jews didn’t have a chance.
Chickie ended up killing him with the ice pick while Ciancaglini held him, and they dumped his body down some sort of sewer out in the woods. When my uncle heard the details, he loved it.
He said, “I hope the rats in that sewer ate the eyeballs out of his fuckin’ head.”
Eddie Helfant, the third person Scarfo had gotten permission to whack was living on borrowed time, only he didn’t know it.
My uncle decided to wait for the Blade to get out of jail before they would kill him. He wanted to give the Blade the opportunity to kill him himself. When my uncle got out of jail, Judge Helfant came to see him and had concocted some story about the judge in the Blade’s case taking the money and not doing the right thing. My uncle pretended like he bought it, but we knew he was lying. He was no good and my uncle had had enough of him.
But Scarfo decided to lull the unsuspecting Helfant into thinking everyone was okay, that all had been forgotten.
Judge Helfant was having problems with his own indictment for fixing cases and he came to see my uncle for help. He wanted my uncle and Harold Garber to fly down to Atlanta and talk to one of the witnesses about not testifying. So my uncle flies down to Atlanta with Harold and meets with the witness and low and behold, the guy doesn’t want to testify and now Judge Helfant might actually beat his case. So one day I’m having lunch with my uncle at the Madrid, Chuckie and Lawrence were with us, and Lawrence says, “Nick, why would you go all the way to Atlanta to help this guy, after everything he has done.” So my uncle says, “I don’t want him to go to jail, I want to kill him.” That’s the extent that he went to to set the trap for this guy. Like Louis DeMarco and Pepe Leva, Judge Helfant never saw it coming.
Loud and boisterous and somewhat tipsy, Helfant was in good spirits as his legal team expected to win a motion to dismiss his indictment in two days, thanks to Nicky Scarfo’s recent trip to Atlanta, ending what had been a decade-long fight by prosecutors to put the crooked judge in jail.
Eddie Helfant was sitting on top of the world.
He had less than 30 seconds to enjoy the view.
Judge Helfant, his wife, and another couple were sitting at a table.
The Muhammad Ali–Leon Spinks fight was showing on a closed-circuit television behind them. As the snow fell on this cold February night, no one thought anything of the tall and somewhat lanky man who walked into the Flamingo with a snow shovel in his right hand and wearing a black ski mask. The man placed the snow shovel near the door and moved swiftly toward the judge’s table, which had been pinpointed moments earlier by a spotter, who relayed the information to the man with the shovel.
The lounge was packed and dimly lit and no one seemed to pay attention to the man in the ski mask swiftly approaching the judge’s table.
That was about to change.
Placing his left hand on the back of the man seated at Judge Helfant’s table, the man in the black ski mask raised his right hand carrying a .38 caliber handgun and a six-year-old grudge and fired four shots at his target, one in the head and three in the chest, as his wife shrieked in horror.
The judge was dead before his body crumbled to the floor.
The man in the black mask calmly walked through the lounge toward the door and back out into the Flamingo’s parking lot, the same lot where Judge Helfant had broken up the fight between Philip Leonetti and Pepe Leva. Now, less than a year later, both Pepe Leva and Judge Helfant were dead. And the man in the black mask, Nicholas “Nick the Blade” Virgilio, fresh out of jail after serving six years, had gotten his revenge.
As the Blade walked the escape route from the murder scene at the Flamingo, his old friend Nicky Scarfo was parked in a predetermined spot to drive him away just as he had done when Philip Leonetti and Vincent Falcone killed Louis DeMarco less than five blocks away three years earlier.
This was big, big news in Atlantic City and Philadelphia. The fact that a judge got killed—it made all the papers. Everyone was talking about it. The mob guys in South Philly and up in North Jersey knew it was us and a lot of the guys in New York took notice. My uncle loved the attention, especially the fact that other mob guys were talking about how ruthless we were. He would say to me, “We can hold our head high when we are around our friends,” meaning other mob guys and other Families, “because everyone knows who we are and what we are, and there ain’t too many guys out there like us.”
My uncle saw himself as an old-school gangster, even though by this time he wasn’t even 50 years old. He looked up to the old-time
guys, the Capones and Lucianos and especially the killers, like Skinny Razor. And he was right; there wasn’t too many guys like him in
La Cosa Nostra.
In fact, I don’t think there was anyone who enjoyed killing as much as he did except maybe the Blade.
But the Blade wasn’t all bad. He had a good side when he wasn’t drinking or killing people. There was this kid who was around at that time who we called Bidda-Beep. He was a bookmaker and he was a good kid, he didn’t bother anybody. He used to go to Harry the Hat’s coffee shop and play cards and some of the older guys in there used to cheat him and take his money because he didn’t know how to play all the games. They were hustling him. I guess the Blade had heard about it and one day when Bidda-Beep was playing cards in the coffee shop, who comes walking in but the Blade. Everyone in that shop knew who he was and that he was a serious, no-nonsense guy who was a killer and was around me and my uncle.
The Blade goes over to Bidda-Beep and taps him on the shoulder and says, “Let me play your hand.” Bidda-Beep has no idea what’s going on, but what’s he gonna do, say no to the Blade? So he jumps up and the Blade sits down and tells the guy dealing to deal the cards. The guy deals and the Blade never turns his cards over and looks around the table at every one of the guys who had been robbin’ Bidda-Beep and says, “I won; deal another hand.” The dealer deals the next hand and the Blade does the same thing, he never looks at his cards and he says, “How ’bout that, I won again, deal another hand.” This went on for almost an hour. He took every penny off of those guys, several thousand dollars, and handed it all to Bidda-Beep. No one ever cheated him again.
The Scarfo gang was now thriving in Atlantic City, but things in South Philadelphia were going from bad to worse for Scarfo’s boss, Angelo Bruno.
I
N 1979, CASINO GAMBLING WAS IN FULL SWING AND ATLANTIC CITY WAS IN THE MIDST OF A COMEBACK. REAL ESTATE DEVELOPMENT WAS THRIVING AND CONSTRUCTION WAS BOOMING.
So were traditional mob rackets like bookmaking, loan sharking, and extortion. Nicky Scarfo and his crew had positioned themselves to cash in on all of it.
While things were looking up for the Scarfo crew in Atlantic City, longtime Philadelphia mob boss Angelo Bruno was slowly starting to lose control of the crime family he had overseen since 1959.
When Ange became boss, he aligned himself and the Philly mob with the Gambino family in New York. Ange and Carlo Gambino, the boss of the Gambinos, were very close and had worked together as bootleggers when they were younger. Carlo Gambino had used his influence on the Commission to help Ange win the dispute with Mr. Miggs, and that’s how Ange became the boss and he remained loyal and indebted to Carlo Gambino. At the time, the Gambinos were the most powerful family in
La Cosa Nostra
and Carlo Gambino, who was known as Don Carlo, was the
il capo di tutti capi,
the boss of all bosses, who sat at the head of the Commission.
But in 1976, the 74-year-old Gambino would die from a heart attack and almost overnight it seemed that Angelo Bruno’s power began to wane.
Around this time Angelo Bruno and Phil Testa started having problems with each other. Ange was the boss and Phil Testa was the underboss, but they were at odds about money and how to run the family. Ange was more of a white-collar guy and Phil Testa was a blue-collar guy, a street guy, so they both had different philosophies. There’s an old saying that Sicilians love their money more than they love their children, and that they really love their children. With the Sicilians, it always came down to money and both
Ange and Phil Testa were hardheaded Sicilians. We called them siggys, which is slang for Sicilian.
So one day, we’re at the office on Georgia Avenue and Ange comes down to see my uncle. It was in the summer and Ange used to have a home in Ventnor. Sometimes when he was down, I would be his driver. Ange knew that my uncle was 100-percent
La Cosa Nostra,
that he knew all the rules, all the moves, and knew all the angles better than some guys who had been around this thing for 50 years. He knows that there was no bullshitting my uncle. You had to always give it to him straight. He got to know my uncle real well when they were in Yardville together and me as well. We had already done the DeMarco hit for Chickie Narducci and Chickie was one of Ange’s top guys, one of his top earners. He, too, was a hardheaded siggy.
At the time Chickie Narducci was also having problems with Phil Testa.
So Ange comes in and says, “Nick, you know that me and Phil Testa are having problems and I just wanted to see what side you were on.”
Now here’s the boss of the family and coming to see us about a problem he was having with the underboss. That’s how far we had come. Angelo Bruno was the guy at my great-grandmother’s wake, the guy I thought was the president when I was seven years old, and now he’s coming to see us because he needs our help. He told my uncle that if you come with me and be on my side, it will be $1,000 per week for you, and the kids—meaning me, Lawrence, and Vince Falcone—would make $500 per week. Ange was trying to get us lined up against Phil Testa so that they could take him out and make Chickie Narducci the underboss. My uncle listens to all of this and says to Bruno, “What do you mean what side am I on? This is
una familia,
one family. Let me think it over.”
My uncle always told me, “It don’t matter what the guys in South Philly say, it matters what the guys in New York say, because only they can make or break a boss.” That’s something that Skinny Razor had taught him way back in the ’50s, and he never forgot it. Now around this time my uncle and I were going to North Jersey quite a bit and spending time around guys like Caponigro and Bobby Manna, and getting their take on things. My uncle was a great listener and had an ability to get people to say more than they should. When we’d come
back, my uncle would say, “If you wanna know what you’re lookin’ at, you gotta look at the whole picture, otherwise what’s the fuckin’ point?” What he was saying was that there was more goin’ on then we were aware of with this beef between Ange and Phil Testa, and with my uncle. He always got to the bottom of things before he made his move.
Nicky Scarfo, the boss of the family’s Atlantic City operation knew from his one-on-one meetings with Antonio “Tony Bananas” Caponigro, the boss of the family’s North Jersey operation, that Bruno was quickly losing his grip over the North Jersey faction of the family.
Scarfo also confirmed this in his private meetings with Bobby Manna, his old pal from Yardville, who told him that Bruno’s days as boss might be numbered.
My uncle would always check things out, and if there was a way to double-check, he’d double-check. He always knew what everyone else’s moves were gonna be before he made his move. He’d say, “In
this thing,
in
La Cosa Nostra,
if you go off half cocked, you end up with this,” and he made the sign of the gun.
Scarfo’s separate meetings with Caponigro and Manna, and his belief that Bruno was a sinking ship—more so than his loyalty to Phil Testa—were the reasons for Little Nicky to turn down Bruno’s request.
So about a week or so later Ange comes around and him and my uncle go outside for a walk and talk up Georgia Avenue towards the Madrid. I’m walking a few feet behind them. I had a pistol on me. I’m keepin’ an eye out for the law and anyone who may have tried to hit either one of them. I remember things were tense in the family at this time and everyone was on edge. I hear my uncle say, “Listen, Ange, this is
una familia,
I’m not on anyone’s side. I know Phil a long time and I’m friends with him and I know you a long time and I’m friends with you. I know you guys will eventually work things out.” So basically my uncle told him, no. He turned Ange down and Ange wasn’t happy.