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 (32 page)
A few days after Christmas, Scarfo, Leonetti, and the entire Philadelphia–Atlantic City mob, including the Merlino brothers, headed down to Casablanca South for another winter retreat in Florida.
As the Scarfo mob enjoyed their two-week holiday of fun in the sun, Little Nicky was growing increasingly frustrated with his underboss and his out-of-control binge drinking.
When we were down there, Chuckie’s drinking got even worse. He was drunk the whole time we were there. I could tell my uncle had had it with both him and Lawrence and was now starting to get angry with me because of the position I had taken. Everything was fucked up at this point, nothing was right. Everything seemed off.
Philip Leonetti knew that changes were coming, he just didn’t know what they would be or who may be dying as a result.
A few days after we got back to Atlantic City, my uncle set up a meeting with Bobby Manna in North Jersey and I drove him up. Every time we met with Bobby Manna, it was something serious. So we are sitting there and I have no idea what this was about. It was just me, my uncle, and Bobby, and my uncle says, “Bobby, I’m thinking of taking Chuckie down and putting my nephew up. What are your thoughts? Do you think he’s old enough?”
What my uncle was saying is that he wanted to demote Chuckie, from underboss back down to solider, and he wanted to elevate me from captain to underboss. I think he wanted Bobby’s opinion because I was so young. I was only 32 years old. Bobby said, “Nick, if you feel he knows the rules and he knows how this thing
works, then I don’t think how old he is really matters much. Plus, don’t forget, Luciano, Lansky, and Capone were all in their twenties when they started this thing, so I don’t think age really matters.” And my uncle just nodded and looked at me and patted me on the back of the head.
A week later, Nicodemo Scarfo called a meeting and announced to the members of his crime family that Salvatore “Chuckie” Merlino and his brother Lawrence Merlino were being “taken down,” and that his nephew, Philip Leonetti, was now the new underboss of the Philadelphia–Atlantic City mob.
Neither of the Merlinos was invited to the meeting.
My uncle addressed the family and said, “I am going to give Chuckie a break here. I’ve known him a long time. I know that he is going to jail in a few weeks. I’m going to let him go to jail and clean his act up, sober up. If he does that, we will welcome him back into this family when he comes home. If he does not, it’s this,” and he did the sign of the gun. “For him, his brother, and maybe his son.”
At 32 years old, Philip Leonetti became the youngest underboss in the modern-day history of
La Cosa Nostra.
He was the No. 2 man behind his uncle, Nicodemo “Little Nicky” Scarfo, one of the most powerful Mafia dons in the United States, and he couldn’t have been less happy about it.
I was numb; I didn’t have a feeling one way or the other. By this time I was so sick of my uncle and all of his treachery that I didn’t even want to be around him anymore, let alone be involved in
La Cosa Nostra.
That’s how bad it had become.
Following the murder of Salvie Testa and his uncle’s betrayal of Nick “the Blade” Virgilio and the Merlino brothers, Philip Leonetti had seen enough to believe that eventually his uncle would turn on him.
If we had made it a few more years, he would have turned on me and tried to have me killed, I have no doubt in my mind about it.
One time, my uncle and Nicky Jr. got into an argument and Nicky Jr. was talking fresh to my uncle. I was right there, but I
didn’t say a word. When Nicky Jr. left, my uncle turned to me and started hollering, “You need to teach him that he can’t talk to me like that,” and I still didn’t say anything. Very quickly my uncle’s colors change and he says to me, like he just figured out the answer to his own question, “I see what it is—you want him to get in trouble. You want me and him to be at odds. I see what it is with you.” This is how sick he was. In his mind, he thought I wanted him and Nicky Jr. to argue and to fight because it would be better for me, which was the last thing on my mind.
As Leonetti began to settle into his new position as underboss, Scarfo placed the relatively inexperienced duo of Francis “Faffy” Iannarella and Tommy DelGiorno in charge of the family’s street operation in Philadelphia and entrusted them with delivering the news to the Merlino brothers that they had been taken down.
My uncle said to me, in a very aggressive tone, “If I have to see either one of them guys,” meaning Chuckie or Lawrence, “if either one of them try and come down here and see me, I am ordering you to kill them on the spot. And that is a direct order from me to you. I’m not your uncle saying this, I am your boss in
La Cosa Nostra.
If you don’t want to see them dead, tell them to stay the fuck in Philadelphia and clean their acts up.”
It was as if my uncle was saying that he spared their lives because I had spoken against it, but he was warning me that they were on very thin ice.
The very next day I get a call in the office from Chuckie. He says, “Philip, what’s going on? He took us down and now he won’t see me.” I told him, I said, “Chuck, just stay in Philadelphia, be with your family, go do your sentence, and everything will be okay.” And he said, “What did I do? I didn’t do anything. I just want to come down and talk to him and straighten things out before I go to jail.” And I said, “Chuck, please don’t come here, please don’t. Be with your family, go to jail, and everything is going to be okay, but please, do not come here, Chuck. I’m begging you.”
Salvatore “Chuckie” Merlino had been around Nicky Scarfo for over 30 years and he knew by the tone of Philip Leonetti’s voice in imploring
him not to come to Atlantic City that Leonetti was warning him of Scarfo’s desire to kill him if he did.
Merlino spent the next few weeks in South Philadelphia, and then turned himself in a few weeks later on February 21, 1986, to begin serving his four-year prison sentence.
His brother Lawrence apparently got the memo, too, and avoided Scarfo, Leonetti, and Georgia Avenue at all costs.
I didn’t save Chuckie and Lawrence’s life with that call, I saved my uncle’s. Because there was no way I was killing either one of them, and if push came to shove, I was going to kill my uncle. I was absolutely disgusted with him. Because at that point, if I had disobeyed his direct order to me to kill either one of them, he would have had me killed, and then he would have killed them. That’s how bad things were at this time. We weren’t a family anymore.
The Scarfo mob, which had thrived with Chuckie Merlino as underboss and Salvie Testa as street boss, was no longer.
Testa had been murdered on Scarfo’s orders, and Chuckie Merlino was behind bars and stripped of his rank.
Nicholas “Nick the Crow” Caramandi was a solider in the Scarfo mob, a made man following his participation in the 1983 murder of Pat Spirito.
The Crow was a con artist, a flimflammer. He wasn’t a gangster, but he always had some scheme goin’—and once in a while, whatever he was doing would hit pretty big and we would make a lot of money, so my uncle kind of tolerated him.
He started to get involved in Philadelphia, shaking down construction companies so they could get their projects done without any interference. You have to understand that all the unions were under our control and we could shut projects down with a phone call, so these guys would pay us so that we wouldn’t bother them.
Around this time Caramandi became acquainted with a Philadelphia city councilman from South Philadelphia named Leland Beloff and Beloff’s aide Robert Rego.
We knew Leland Beloff He came every year to our Christmas party and always paid his respects to my uncle if we saw him out somewhere. In turn, we would have the unions support him during his elections and he would do little favors for us from time to time.
So as the Crow starts getting more involved with the construction stuff, he comes into contact with Beloff, who as councilman had a lot of influence over what projects would go forward and what projects would not. So one day, the Crow comes down to see my uncle and he asks for permission to start doing business deals with Beloff, and my uncle gives him the okay, but says, “Be careful. Use your head.”
In April 1986, Nicodemo Scarfo and Philip Leonetti were the boss and underboss of the Philadelphia–Atlantic City mob. Scarfo was 57 years old and Leonetti was just 33.
As they tried to reshuffle their own family hierarchy following numerous deaths, demotions, and incarcerations, the New York Families were going through the same type of bloodletting that Philadelphia had gone through in the early 1980s following the deaths of Angelo Bruno and Philip Testa.
After Paul Castellano got killed in New York, John Gotti became the boss of the Gambino family, and he made Frankie DeCicco his underboss and he named Sammy the Bull his No. 3, his consigliere. This was their new administration. Even though our family was aligned with the Genovese, with the Chin, and Bobby Manna, we always had a working relationship with the Gambinos, the Luccheses, the Colombos, and the Bonnanos, who were the other Families in New York.
But what happened was, the Chin had a strong relationship with Paul Castellano, in the sense that, while they weren’t the best of friends, they didn’t get in each other’s way and they would help one another from time to time. When Gotti killed Castellano, the Chin decided to kill Gotti in retaliation and made a pact with the Luccheses and their boss, Vic Amuso, that they were going to kill Gotti and put another guy in there to run the Gambinos so that they would be able to control the family, using the new boss as their puppet. This would avenge Paul Castellano’s death and
make the Chin even stronger, because he would essentially control both the Genovese and Gambino Families and have absolute control over the Commission, and it would have made Vic Amuso and the Luccheses the second most powerful family in New York behind Chin’s. The Chin hated John Gotti and wanted to eliminate him at all costs.
On April 13, 1986, a low-level Genovese associate walked toward a parked car outside of the Veteran & Friends Social Club in the Dyker Heights section of Brooklyn. Very casually, he placed a bag containing a powerful homemade bomb underneath the car.
Inside the club, new Gambino boss John Gotti, his underboss, Frankie DeCicco, and his consigliere, Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano, were scheduled to attend a meeting, and when the meeting was done, the men were supposed to drive back to Gotti’s headquarters, the Ravenite Social Club in the Little Italy section of Lower Manhattan.
Gotti’s would-be bomber sat in a parked car just up the street with a full view of the Veteran & Friends Social Club and the car with the bag of explosives under it that belonged to Frankie DeCicco.
The hit planned for Gotti and DeCicco was eerily similar to the bombing death of Philip Testa in March 1981.
As DeCicco and another man believed to be Gotti approached the car, the bomb was detonated, killing DeCicco instantly and wounding the other man, who turned out not to be John Gotti.
The Chin’s plan had failed and now Gotti and the Gambinos were on high alert.
My uncle and I had been told by Bobby Manna that John Gotti did in fact get the Commission’s permission to kill Paul Castellano, but I didn’t believe it and it never made any sense to me. I think Bobby told us that because the Chin never wanted to be connected to the killing of Frankie DeCicco and the attempted killing of John Gotti. By telling us that Gotti had gotten the okay, it took suspicion away from the Chin being involved in the bombing. They used the bomb to make it look like the siggys did it because they were close to Castellano. The use of explosive devices was against the rules of
La Cosa Nostra.
I remember thinking to myself: this fuckin’ Chin ain’t so crazy; he’s the shrewdest of them all, and the most deadly.
Another person who told both Scarfo and Leonetti that John Gotti had gotten permission from the Commission to murder Paul Castellano was Gotti himself.
A month or so after Frankie DeCicco got killed, my uncle and I went up to a house on Staten Island belonging to Sammy the Bull’s brother-in-law, and Sammy the Bull formally introduced us to John Gotti as the boss of the Gambino family. After DeCicco got killed, Sammy became the underboss. Gotti said to my uncle, “Nick, I wanted you to know that I got the okay and I did this thing right,” and my uncle said, “I’m sure you did, John.”
For the next several hours, the bosses and underbosses of the Gambino crime family and the Bruno–Scarfo crime family got acquainted with one another over drinks and a homemade Italian feast.
It was just the four of us. Gotti and my uncle talked about how similar Ange and Castellano were, in the sense that were racketeers and not gangsters, which is exactly what me and Sammy had said all along.
After a while, Gotti said to me, “My friend Sammy here has told me a lot about you,” and then he said to my uncle, “Your nephew here has quite a reputation for such a young man.” My uncle said, “He’s been with me since he was a boy and he knows
this thing
as well as I do.” Gotti said, “You did good with him. You should be proud to call him your nephew and underboss. We need more young men like him in
La Cosa Nostra.
But these young kids today, this generation, they’re not like us, Nick. There’s no one left to teach them the rules and show them the parameters of what
this thing
is all about.”
Gotti spoke very fondly of his mentor, Aniello Dellacroce, and my uncle talked the same way about Skinny Razor, and you could tell that Gotti felt the same way about
La Cosa Nostra
that my uncle did. All in all, it was a great meeting.
When we got back to Atlantic City, my uncle said of Gotti, “He’s sharp. I now know why our friend,” and he stroked his chin, meaning Gigante, “doesn’t like him.”