Read Mafia Prince: Inside America's Most Violent Crime Family Online
Authors: Phil Leonetti,Scott Burnstein,Christopher Graziano
Tags: #Mafia, #Nonfiction, #Retail, #True Crime
The explosion could be heard blocks away. Like an earthquake, it rocked an entire city. Dozens of police cars, fire trucks, and ambulances raced to the scene, as did dozens of people from the neighborhood—onlookers, many huddled together dressed in their pajamas, wearing sweatshirts and wrapped in blankets.
After all, it was after three in the morning and the air was crisp, permeated by the unmistakable scent of a fire that was slowly burning from within the smoldering heap that had once been the well-kept home of man known to some as Philip Testa, but known to all as the Chicken Man, the boss of the Philadelphia mob.
Within minutes, more than a half dozen clean-shaven and nattily dressed men, wearing navy blue flap jackets with the letters FBI emblazoned in bright yellow across their backs, were on the scene. Unlike most of the spectators present, these men, agents assigned to the FBI’s Organized Crime Unit, did not appear to have just woken up. It appeared quite the opposite; it appeared that these men never slept.
As the crowd of curiosity seekers swelled behind the yellow crime scene tape, sleepy-eyed reporters joined the crowd, the lights from their television cameras illuminating the sky.
Neighbors, friends, and family shrieked in horror when the gurney
carrying a severely burned and mortally wounded Philip Testa was led from the rubble of his home to a nearby ambulance for the short trip to St. Agnes Hospital on Broad Street in the heart of South Philadelphia.
The Chicken Man was dead, literally blown to pieces by a homemade bomb made of nails as he walked through the front door of his house after a late night out on the town. It was a brutal death for a brutal man that highlighted the ruthless and grisly dark side of a life often glamorized and romanticized.
It was roughly three in the morning when Philip Testa returned to his home located on the 2100 block of Porter Street in South Philadelphia’s posh Girard Estates neighborhood from picking up some late night collections. He double-parked his car and made his way up his porch and to his front door.
These would be the final steps of his life.
If the 56-year-old Testa had been paying closer attention, he would have noticed the suspicious black Volkswagen van parked across the street from his house with a young South Philadelphia pizza maker and wannabe wise guy named Rocco Marinucci behind the wheel.
Marinucci was known on the streets as Pete Casella’s driver and protégé.
Even if Testa had realized what was going on around him, he probably couldn’t have done much. Fate was already in motion.
From the second Testa got out of his car, he was in the crosshairs. Underneath his porch was a makeshift bomb made up of carpenters nails and 13 sticks of dynamite, rigged to a handheld detonator in the possession of Marinucci.
Most likely, he didn’t feel a thing. The explosion happened in an instant. As Testa reached for his front door knob, Marinucci pushed a button and blew the Chicken Man into oblivion.
Reverberations from the blast registered for miles.
As the darkness of night gave way to the blinding bright light of dawn, many would casually dismiss the event with a shrug as “just another mob hit” as they read their
Philadelphia Inquirer
or their
Daily News
and sipped their morning coffee, but they were wrong.
This was anything but “just another mob hit”; it was the death of a sitting mob boss, the second such killing that had taken place in the city of Philadelphia in less than a year as a complex struggle over money and power became deadly. The City of Brotherly Love had become the City of Brotherly Blood.
The following year, New Jersey–born American rock icon Bruce Springsteen would release a song about it, immortalizing the event in pop-culture lore.
In the underworld, the killing of a mob boss like Philip Testa was akin to the assassination of a president. Like the earthquake that it resembled, the death of Philip Testa would produce seismic ripple effects and shake the foundation of the underworld in South Philadelphia and Atlantic City to its very core.
The ensuing chaos would last for the next three decades.
It was maybe three-thirty, quarter to four in the morning when I got the call from Salvie. He said, “Philip, they killed my father.” I was in bed and I remember sitting straight up when he said it. I said, “Jesus Christ, Salvie, what happened?” And he said, “There was a bomb at the house and they blew him up, those motherfuckers blew him up.” You could hear the sadness in his voice, but I also heard the anger, the rage. He said, “Philip, I swear on my mother’s grave when I find out who did this . . .” And then his voice trailed off. I said, “Salvie, try and get some sleep. Me and my uncle will be up there in a few hours and we will figure things out.” And he said, “Okay, Philip, you guys come to the house,” and then we hung up.
So I get out of bed and I walk next door to my uncle’s apartment and I go in and I wake him up. It was like four in the morning and he is dead asleep. So I’m nudging him and saying, “Uncle Nick, wake up,” and right away the second he sees me he knows something’s wrong and he says, “What happened?” and I told him.
I said, “Salvie just called, his father got killed, they blew his house up with a bomb.” Without hesitation my uncle is out of bed and I follow him into his kitchen. His wife comes in and makes us coffee, and my uncle is just sitting there, staring straight ahead. Neither one of us are saying anything.
After a few minutes he takes a sip of his coffee and he leans in close to me and he says, “Do you know what this means?” and I nodded my head yes.
I knew that with Phil Testa dead, one of two things was gonna happen: either the guys who killed him were gonna try and kill us; or we were gonna try and kill them. Whoever was left standing, us or them, would take control of the family, the Philadelphia
La Cosa Nostra.
We sat there for a few more minutes and my uncle was just staring straight ahead and I could tell by looking at him, he had a million thoughts racing through his head. This was it, this was kill or be killed for us, and it was like he was computing all of these different scenarios in his mind. Who he could count on; who he had to watch; who he had to kill.
He finished his coffee and got up from the table and without saying a word, he started walking back to his bedroom. As he’s walking away he says, “I’m going back to bed for a few hours. Come down and get me around ten and we will head up to Philadelphia.”
So I walk back over to my apartment, but my adrenaline is going and I can’t get back to sleep. I’m lyin’ there and now my mind starts racing, too.
I started thinking of everything my uncle had taught me about this life since I was a little boy. All of the rules. I knew that death and murder were a part of our life. I started thinking of Ange and how Caponigro had betrayed him and now they were both dead. I thought about Vince Falcone, about how me and him killed Louie DeMarco together, and then I killed Vince. I thought about Phil Testa; I knew that Salvie or my uncle would kill whoever had killed him. The killings never stopped.
I was thinking how in this life, one day a guy is your friend and the next day you’re killing him or he’s trying to kill you.
This was what
La Cosa Nostra
was all about, but now the stakes were much, much higher.
The March 15, 1981, bombing death of Philip “Chicken Man” Testa was the second time in less than a year that the boss of the Philadelphia–Atlantic City mob had been violently murdered, with the assassination of longtime don Angelo Bruno having occurred on March 21, 1980.
With Bruno and Testa gone, Nicodemo “Little Nicky” Scarfo was in prime position to assume control of the family and become boss; and his nephew Philip Leonetti, his protégé and heir apparent, was right by his side.
Every day since he got out of Yardville I was by his side. I drove him everywhere. Where he went, I went. I’d stay with him until he was in for the night and I’d be there at whatever time he needed me the next day.
That was my routine; that was my life in the beginning.
And at 10:00 a.m. sharp, a few hours after the death of Philip Testa, Leonetti was dressed and ready to drive his uncle to Philadelphia to pay their respects to Salvie Testa and his family.
Now when I come down to get him, he’s in a suit and tie, his hair is perfectly in place and he seemed eager to get to Philadelphia. I don’t think it was because he wanted to see Salvie and the family so much; I think it was because he knew guys like Pete Casella and Chickie Narducci would start making moves and he wanted to be there so he could see who was doing what.
My uncle says, “Get Lawrence and let’s get on the road. I want to pick up Chuckie at his house, and then go see Salvie and his sister, and then we’re gonna get to the bottom of this thing and see what’s goin’ on.”
Now I know that things are tense. I mean, they just killed the boss less than twelve hours ago. So I say to my uncle, “Do we need these?” and I make my hand like a gun. And he says, “If we do, we can get them up there,” meaning Philadelphia.
Remember, my uncle is out on bail on the gun possession case from the gun they found in his bedroom when they came to lock us up on the Falcone case. He knows that the cops know that we’re driving up to Philadelphia. It’s a 60-mile ride on the Atlantic City Expressway, a straight shot from Atlantic City right into South Philadelphia using the Walt Whitman Bridge. We could be pulled over and searched at any time.
So my uncle is being extra cautious. “I don’t need no more headaches with those motherfuckers,” he said, meaning the law, and we got in the Cadillac and headed to Philadelphia.
The news of the explosion that killed Philip Testa was the top story on local television and rumors of who had been behind it began to circulate on the mob-infested streets of South Philadelphia.
It takes us about an hour to drive up, and in the car no one is talking because we are always worried about listening devices. We get into the city and we drive to Chuckie’s house and he meets us
outside. At the time he was living around Ninth and Jackson. We park the car, and me, my uncle, and Lawrence get out so we can talk to Chuckie.
Chuckie goes right into what people are saying, “It was a nail-bomb. The word is it was the Irish and the roofers union, as payback for us killing John McCullough.”
Right away my uncle is shaking his head no. He says, “No fuckin’ way an Irishman is killing the boss of a
La Cosa Nostra
family. They’re crazy, but they’re not that crazy. Not in a million fuckin’ years. No way.”
So Chuckie says, “Well, who do you think did it?” And my uncle says, “Well, it didn’t come from New York. It didn’t come from North Jersey. It didn’t come from the Irish. And we didn’t do it,” meaning us guys in Atlantic City, “so it had to come from up here,” meaning South Philadelphia. Just last night he was telling us about his problems with Chickie Narducci, so I’m guessing he has a hand in this.
Then I said, “If Salvie gets wind of this, he’ll kill Chickie right on the spot. He’ll do it himself at the funeral, he don’t give a fuck.”
My uncle says to me, “Chuckie and Lawrence, we need to play dumb for now and see who does what. Who lines up with who. We need to keep Salvie calm and we need to find out exactly who did this, and then we will do what we gotta do,” meaning kill them.
So we get in the car and we drive over to the house and Salvie is there with his sister and some members of his family. A few old-time guys that were around Phil Testa were also there.
We get out and we pay our respects, and Salvie looked like he was ready to kill a thousand guys. He said, “Nick, when I find out who did this, I’m doing them myself. I don’t care who they are or who they’re with.”
My uncle put his hands on his shoulder and looked him right in the eye and said, “We’re gonna get to the bottom of this, and whoever did this is gonna get this,” and he made the sign of the gun. “But we gotta sit back and see who was involved in this treason. We can’t do anything half-cocked.” Salvie just nodded.
While we’re there a lot of guys start coming around. Guys like Joey Pungitore and Gino Milano, who were tight with Salvie. My uncle nudges me and says, “Look who’s here, this treacherous cocksucker,”
and I look and in comes Chickie Narducci with his sons Frank Jr. and Philip. They pay their respects to Salvie and his sister Maria and then Chickie makes a beeline for my uncle.
He says, “Nick, isn’t this awful? Those no good Irish motherfuckers did this to our friend.”
Now my uncle knows that it’s all bullshit about the Irish doing the killing, and he knows that in all likelihood Chickie Narducci was behind it. He knows, but at this moment he doesn’t know enough that he’s certain, and he wanted us to purposely play dumb.
My uncle says to Chickie, “What can we do, Chick? We gotta wait and see what happens. Just like with Ange.” What my uncle was saying is, we gotta wait and see what New York says.
And Chickie kind of nods, but he looks confused by what my uncle said.
These guys like Chickie Narducci didn’t get it. They thought they could pick who the new boss was, but only New York can do that and my uncle was the only guy that New York would speak to.
So we hang around the house for a little while and my uncle tells Salvie, “We’re gonna be here for a few days for the wake and the funeral and we’ll get to bottom of this.”