Read Mafia Prince: Inside America's Most Violent Crime Family Online
Authors: Phil Leonetti,Scott Burnstein,Christopher Graziano
Tags: #Mafia, #Nonfiction, #Retail, #True Crime
Joe Salerno would later testify that while he and Nicky Scarfo cleaned the apartment, Scarfo told him, “You’re one of us now,” and patted him on the back before doling out more instructions.
“Tie him up like a cowboy with his hands and feet tied up behind him.”
When Lawrence Merlino arrived back at the home about 30 minutes later, he discovered that Vince Falcone’s body had been wrapped up in a blanket and tied up exactly as Scarfo had instructed.
He also discovered something else.
Lawrence told me when he got there that my uncle was fall-down drunk and he couldn’t even stand up.
According to Salerno, while he followed Scarfo’s instructions on tying up the body and cleaning the kitchen, Little Nicky sat at the kitchen table and drank the entire bottle of scotch that had been used as a ruse to trap Falcone, and was belittling the dead man and waxing philosophical about what the future held, not only for the Scarfo gang, but for the entire Philadelphia mob.
“When Lefty goes, I’m gonna be right next to Phil Testa and you’re gonna be one of us,” said a slurring Little Nicky to a shell-shocked Joe Salerno.
Following Scarfo’s instructions, the men loaded Falcone’s corpse into the trunk of the car they had retrieved, and Scarfo continued to celebrate, saying “I love this” as Falcone’s body was lowered into the trunk.
Lawrence Merlino then got behind the wheel of Vince Falcone’s car with Falcone’s dead body in the trunk and abandoned it several blocks away on a desolate street, as another car being driven by Falcone, with Little Nicky in the backseat, pulled up beside him and the three men drove back to Atlantic City.
Margate was a resort town that was full of summer vacationers from Memorial Day to Labor Day, but nine days before Christmas, it was a ghost town—the perfect place to commit a murder and dump a body.
That night, following the killing, Scarfo, Lawrence Merlino, and Joe Salerno would return to the Scarfo compound on Georgia Avenue, where
they encountered Philip Leonetti, Salvatore “Chuckie” Merlino, and Nicholas “Nick the Blade” Virgilio.
Merlino greeted them by saying, “Lights out, huh?” and gave celebratory hugs and kisses on the cheek to everyone present.
The five men then settled into Scarfo’s dining room and feasted on a large, home-style Italian meal, while an extremely drunk and elated Little Nicky held court and talked in a hushed tone about who his next victims would be.
“I wanna cut this Alfredo’s guts out and fry ’em in a pan. He makes me sick. Him and that no good cocksucker Mad Dog DiPasquale; we’re gonna do him next.”
Philip had never seen his uncle in such a state of delirium.
You woulda thought he won the lottery; that’s how happy he was that we had killed Vince Falcone. I remember him kissing me on the cheek and telling me that he loved me. That was the first and only time that he did that, and he did it because he was drunk. My uncle never loved anyone or anything in his entire life, except for
La Cosa Nostra.
That’s all he lived for. He didn’t give a fuck about nothing else, that’s how sick he was.
Nicky Scarfo even planned a holiday of sorts for the men involved in the killing, telling them that they would travel to Philadelphia the next day for a relaxing steam bath in the shvitzing room of a decades-old, Russian-style bathhouse on Camac Street in South Philadelphia, to be followed by a celebratory dinner at one of Scarfo’s favorite restaurants, the Saloon.
Scarfo’s jubilation would be short-lived.
Within a matter of days the body of Vincent Falcone was found and detectives from the Atlantic County Major Crimes Squad were soon knocking on both Scarfo and Leonetti’s doors.
So I’m in the office and these guys come around, two detectives. They had pictures of the body tied up in the trunk of the car. They say, “Look, Phil, can you help us out? We’re not looking at you guys for this; we know that you and your uncle were friends with Vince. We want to show you what they did to him.” I looked at the pictures and pretended I was sad, and I said, “Guys, I don’t know nothing. I wish I did, Vince was my friend. I don’t know who would do this to him.” So after these guys leave, I drive down to Longport and grab
my uncle. We had bought a house for him down there, but no one except for he and I knew about it. Our code name for the house was “toothpaste,” because it was on Colgate Avenue.
He always had a girlfriend on the side, and whoever he was seeing, lived in that house. So I go down and I tell him what had just happened with the detectives. He was happy. He said, “Tell Lawrence and Joe Salerno to lay low for the next coupla weeks; let’s let this thing die down.” He tells me to pick him up in a couple of hours and that he wants to go to Scannicchio’s for dinner, Vince Sausto’s place.
When I get back to the office Lawrence was already there, waiting for me, and we went outside and I told him what had happened and what my uncle said about laying low. Lawrence said, “Got it,” and told me he was going to go to Philly for a couple of days.
Now me and my uncle are eating dinner at Scannichio’s and were both relaxed—we feel good that were not being booked for killing Vince.
All the sudden, who comes in but Joe Salerno, and he looks like he hasn’t slept in a week. He’s all worked up. He starts saying, “Nick, they’re gonna know that that was my gun that killed him because it was a .32.”My uncle says, “Calm down, Joe, there’s a lot of .32s out there. No one’s gonna know nothing. Just keep your mouth shut and everything’s gonna be fine.” Now a couple weeks before the killing, my uncle asked Joe Salerno, “Hey, Joe, do you have any guns?” Joe told him he had a .32 and my uncle said, “Bring it around, let me take a look at it.” So a few days later Joe Salerno brings the gun around and my uncle tells him, “Let me hold on to this for a while.” What’s Joe Salerno gonna do, say no to my uncle? So we kept the gun and we ended up using it when we killed Vince Falcone.
Now the next day, the same detectives go see Joe Salerno at his house in Brigantine because they knew he hung around Vince. It’s the same drill they did with me in the office: “We know he was your friend, we want to know who did it.” And Joe Salerno cracks right on the spot. He says, “Philip Leonetti killed him and I was right there.” Now these detectives can’t believe what they are hearing, because they really didn’t think that we were involved, but the more Joe Salerno talks, they realize he’s telling the truth and they are ecstatic because they hated me and my uncle with a passion.
I mean, these guys wanted us dead. One time after we had Pepe Leva killed, a couple detectives scooped me up and threw me in a van and drove me out towards NAFAC, which is like a military airport 20 miles away from Atlantic City. They thought that I had threatened one of them, which I didn’t, but as we were driving on this deserted road out by the airport, they slide open the door of the van and are hanging me outside like they are going to push me out. The van was going like 60 miles per hour at the time. They are telling me, “If anything happens to one of us, we will kill all of you. Do you understand?” They’ve got a gun to my head while I’m dangling out of the van. I stopped paying attention to them and started thinking about jumping and how I would land if I did. I remember thinking to myself, “These are the good guys?” But after a few minutes, they pulled me back in the van and took me back to Atlantic City. So I know that when Joe Salerno gives us up, to these guys it was like winning the Super Bowl.
Within a few hours, Joe Salerno was in protective custody giving law enforcement officials a play-by-play account of exactly what had happened to Vince Falcone.
It was clear that Joe Salerno had chosen not to accept Nicky Scarfo’s invitation to join the mob.
The next thing you know, me, my uncle, and Lawrence are sitting in the Atlantic County Jail, and guess who’s not there with us—Joe Salerno. We found out that the cops from Major Crimes went right to Joe Salerno’s house in Brigantine, and he gave us right up. Now my uncle is pacing, like a tiger in a cage. Me, him, and Lawrence are sitting in the holding cell. My uncle is talking out loud to himself, and me and Lawrence are just sitting there. “This isn’t good,” he said, “This is gonna be bad. We’re in trouble with this one.” Now I’m sitting there thinking to myself, Jesus Christ, I can’t believe how stupid I was to get arrested again for murder. First, the Pepe Leva thing, and now this. I was also angry with myself because I knew I should have shot Joe Salerno the way he was carrying on. I shoulda blasted him right there, and instead of ratting us out to the cops, he’d be in the trunk of the car with Vince. So while we were in the holding cell, my uncle says to me, “Call this
cocksucker, Joe Salerno, and see if you can get a read on him.”
So I call Joe’s house and his wife answers and she puts him on. So I said, “Hey, Joe, what’s going on?” And he said, “What’s going on with you guys? I saw on TV that you guys got locked up. I know your uncle has to be going nuts in there with his allergies and all the dust in there.” He was all worked up; just like he was the night we killed Vince. So I told him, “My uncle is fine, me and Lawrence are fine, we’re all doing good.” Then I asked him, “Did you go see that job in Brigantine? There was a contracting job that me and him were supposed to go look at it; we were going to work on it together.”So Joe says, “I can’t do nothing, the cops are everywhere.” So I said, “Hey, Joe, why don’t you come down and see us. I’d love to see you and I know my uncle and Lawrence would love to see you.” And Joe says, “I can’t, Philip, I got nine-thousand cops here, asking me questions.” So I said, “Joe, we didn’t do nothing wrong, did you do something wrong?” He said, “I didn’t do nothing wrong, Philip.” I said, “Don’t worry about this. This is a big misunderstanding.”He said, “I know, Philip.” I said, “Just tell the truth, Joe. We didn’t do anything to Vince. He was our friend.” And Joe says, “Okay, Philip.” So I hang up and I tell my uncle what he said and he just shakes his head. He sits down on the bench and he tells me and Lawrence, “Look, we got our hands full on this one with this Joe Salerno. But we’re gonna make bail and we’re gonna fight the case. We’re gonna do whatever we gotta do to beat this thing.”
Scarfo, Leonetti, and Merlino would spend the Christmas holiday in the Atlantic County Jail as detectives from the Atlantic County Major Crime Squad packed up Joe Salerno and his family, and moved them out of town and into the Witness Protection Program.
Our bails were $150,000 and we had the lawyers working on getting that together.
By New Year’s Eve, all three defendants were out of jail and back on Georgia Avenue, awaiting a trial that was several months away.
As the clock struck midnight and the ball dropped in Times Square, the 1970s were over.
It was 1980.
A
S NICKY SCARFO, PHILIP LEONETTI, AND LAWRENCE MERLINO SETTLED INTO LIFE OUTSIDE OF THE ATLANTIC COUNTY JAIL, THEY WERE NOT ENTIRELY FREE.
Our bail restricted us from traveling outside of Atlantic County. That meant we weren’t able to meet with guys like Caponigro or Bobby Manna to know what was going on in North Jersey or New York. Now remember, a few months before we killed Vince Falcone we had that dinner with Bobby Manna in North Jersey and that got my uncle’s antenna up that something was going on, that maybe there was gonna be a move against Ange. Also, we were still going back and forth with Ange over the union dispute.
With our bail, we couldn’t go to Philadelphia either. Chuckie and Salvie were coming down from Philly a few times a week to see us and let us know what was going on, but they didn’t know anything about Caponigro or Bobby Manna; all they knew was the stuff in South Philly. So at the time, we were basically stuck in Atlantic City and out of the loop of what was really going on. My uncle said, “We’re gonna let things play out and see what happens with Lefty,” meaning Ange, “And we’re gonna lay low for a while and get ready for this trial. If we don’t win this trial nothing else matters because we’re dead.”
At the time, I was busy with Scarf, Inc. and Lawrence was busy with Nat Nat, his rod company. My uncle was meeting a lot with Harold, going over the discovery in the Falcone case with the lawyers.
Meanwhile, up in North Jersey, Antonio “Tony Bananas” Caponigro, the consigliere of the Bruno crime family, was doing everything but lying low; he was planning to assassinate his boss, longtime Philadelphia mob don Angelo Bruno and take over the family.
The Chicago-born Caponigro earned his nickname, Tony Bananas, from his early days in the underworld, when he ran a profitable sports
book and juice loan operation out of a produce market in the Down Neck section of Newark.
As 1979 turned to 1980, he was the head of a growing intrafamily movement that opposed the old-school Bruno’s strict opposition to allowing mobsters to engage in the extremely lucrative distribution of narcotics and his continued resistance to exploit the family’s Atlantic City operation beyond the traditional street rackets, which at the time consisted primarily of gambling, loan sharking, and extortion under the careful watch of Nicodemo “Little Nicky” Scarfo, who ran Atlantic City, much like Caponigro ran North Jersey.
In the months prior to his death, Angelo Bruno had all but lost control of the crime family he had led for the previous two decades.