Read Mafia Prince: Inside America's Most Violent Crime Family Online
Authors: Phil Leonetti,Scott Burnstein,Christopher Graziano
Tags: #Mafia, #Nonfiction, #Retail, #True Crime
In a span of about 15 minutes, Nicodemo “Little Nicky” Scarfo had ordered the murders of Nicholas “Nick the Blade” Virgilio, Joe Salerno Sr., Harry “the Hunchback” Riccobene, and everyone connected to Riccobene’s crew.
My head was spinning. It was like he wanted to kill everyone and everything around him. It was a never-ending cycle with him.
Wasting no time carrying out Scarfo’s orders, Salvie Testa drafted a list of everyone connected to the Riccobene faction and ordered that they be killed on sight.
Within days, Salvatore “Wayne” Grande, an ambitious Scarfo assassin and trusted member of Salvie Testa’s Young Executioners crew, caught the Hunchback all by himself on a South Philadelphia street corner, standing in a phone booth.
The Hunchback was a sitting duck.
Wayne Grande ambushed Riccobene, blasting him with five shots from a revolver at close range, but miraculously, the 73-year-old Hunchback was able to wrestle the gun away from the 28-year-old Grande before he could finish the job.
When Philadelphia police arrived moments later they found Riccobene leaning against the phone booth, bleeding and holding his assassin’s gun.
When he was asked how he was able to wrestle the gun from his would-be killer, the Hunchback responded, “He was done with it, so I took it.”
Riccobene would later tell associates he knew that the weapon was a six-shot revolver and had counted the five shots that had hit him. Knowing that there was one bullet left, Riccobene stated he took the gun and attempted to shoot his assailant with the sixth bullet, but the gun was empty.
So far, Harry the Hunchback was winning the war and he was about to return fire with a strike of his own.
While Scarfo’s gunmen were out looking to kill everyone who was part of the Riccobene faction, the Riccobenes were out looking to kill the men aligned with Scarfo.
In late July, Joseph Pedulla and fellow Riccobene loyalist Victor DeLuca found Salvie Testa eating clams while sitting on a wooden crate in the middle of the famous Ninth Street Italian Market, and hit him with multiple shotgun blasts fired from their passing car.
The hit team of Pedulla and DeLuca had previously killed Scarfo’s consigliere, Frank Monte, and now had wounded his street boss.
The spry and vibrant Testa had half of his left shoulder blown off, but like the Hunchback, he survived the attack and after some time in the hospital, he was back on the street leading Little Nicky’s assault on Riccobene and his renegades.
Shortly after the shooting of Salvie Testa in the Italian Market, Joey Grande, a Scarfo hit man and the brother of Wayne Grande, fired multiple
shots at Riccobene as he sat behind the wheel of his Mercedes on a South Philadelphia street corner. However, once again, the old man survived, failing to take a single bullet.
Things were at a standstill. Tensions were increasing and the local press was having a field day as the streets of Philadelphia were engulfed in an all-out mob war.
But killing Harry Riccobene wasn’t the only thing on Nicky Scarfo’s mind.
A few weeks later on August 9, 1982, Joseph Salerno Sr. was in the office of the motel he owned in Wildwood Crest, which was a short distance from the beach and the famous Wildwood Boardwalk, which was one of the most popular destinations at the Jersey Shore.
The
NO VACANCY
sign was lit, yet a young man was pacing outside the office door wearing a jogging suit and a hooded sweatshirt. He was 19-year-old Philip Narducci, the son of the late Frank “Chickie” Narducci.
When Joe Salerno Sr. opened the door, Narducci took a handgun out of his pocket and fired two shots at him, one of which struck him in the neck.
Salerno Sr. was not only alive, but he was able to talk to the paramedics who arrived on the scene and took him to the hospital.
While Philip Narducci, the young would-be mob assassin, had failed to kill Joe Salerno Sr., Nicky Scarfo’s message had been delivered: If you betray me, I will find you and kill you. And if I cannot find you, I will kill your family.
This ominous message still haunts many today, including Philip Leonetti, more than two decades after the shooting of Joe Salerno Sr.
The shooting of Salerno Sr. made front-page news in Philadelphia and all throughout South Jersey, and the headlines were the kind that Little Nicky loved.
The day after the shooting, there were more cops following us than ever. They were everywhere. My uncle said to me, “Look at all these cocksuckers watchin’ us. They got nothing better to do.” I knew we had made a big mistake when my uncle ordered the hit on Joe Salerno’s father, and I think my uncle did, too, but he would never say it.
If Scarfo didn’t know that trying to kill the father of a federally protected witness was likely to draw the ire of law enforcement, he would get
the message loud and clear less than a week later, when the FBI arrested him on Georgia Avenue and whisked him away.
We were standing in front of the office when all the sudden here comes the cops up the street. It was a one-way and they were coming in both directions. Like five or six cars. It was just me and my uncle. There’s like 20 guys. They all got guns.
My uncle says, “What the fuck is all this?” and they moved in and grabbed him, handcuffed him and threw him in the back of one of the cars. They grabbed me, but they let me go once he was in the car. They were only there for him. Before they pulled off I heard him say, “Call Bobby” and that was it, they were gone. It was the FBI; I knew he was in trouble.
The US attorney’s office in Camden had filed a motion to revoke Scarfo’s bail pending appeal because they claimed to have evidence that he had violated the conditions of his bail by associating with convicted felons. The judge took the unusual step of issuing a body warrant for Scarfo in lieu of scheduling a hearing first.
Scarfo was taken directly to the Camden County Jail and placed in solitary confinement to await his hearing.
The next day I went to Philadelphia to see Bobby Simone and Bobby told me, “This is because of what happened down in Wildwood. There’s too much heat.”
I told Bobby, “You gotta get me in to see my uncle. I need to talk to him.”
Two days later Bobby arranged for me to visit my uncle inside the jail. It had been almost ten years since I had visited my uncle in jail, when he was in Yardville, and I found myself thinking of how much had happened over those 10 years. How many guys had been killed, all the stuff we had done, and how things seemed to be spiraling out of control. Then my uncle suddenly appeared on the other side of the glass and picked up the phone. I could tell right away he was agitated.
He started complaining right away. He said, “Tell Bobby to get me out of this place right away. This place is a fuckin’ toilet and I cannot stay here. Tell him I don’t give a fuck where they
send me. They can send me to Russia, I don’t give a fuck, but I cannot stay here.”
I said, “Okay, I’ll go see him.”
My uncle takes his finger and points at me and says, “On this side, and the guy over the bridge on that side. Got it?” and I nodded my head, yes.
He was saying he wanted me to run everything on this side of the bridge, meaning New Jersey, while he was gone, and he wanted Chuckie to run everything on the other side of the bridge, meaning Philadelphia.
He then took his hand and held it out like he was trying to demonstrate someone’s height. He made the height very low, and I knew immediately that he was talking about Harry Riccobene.
He said, “Tell your friend over there that I said him and his friends need to start acting right and stop playing games.”
He’s looking at me through the glass and his eyes are really big as he is saying it, meaning for me to tell Salvie that him and his crew need to start killing the Riccobenes and to stop botching the hits.
My uncle always talked in circles, but I knew what he was saying because I knew what he was thinking.
Then he said, “Bobby says I’m lookin’ at a year and a half,” and he shrugged his shoulders like he didn’t give a fuck, but I know he did. My uncle hated jail. All he ever did was bitch and complain when he was locked up.
Now he’s going on about the food, the guards, the noise, the black kids with their boom boxes, the dust, and all I’m thinking is how great it is going to be to not have to deal with him for the next 18 months. I couldn’t wait for them to ship him the fuck out; I was hoping they’d send him to Alaska.
Two days later Nicodemo Scarfo’s bail was revoked and he was immediately driven to the Philadelphia International Airport, where he boarded a plane with two US Marshals and was flown directly to El Paso, Texas, and sent to the La Tuna Federal Correctional Center to serve his sentence.
Little Nicky was a long way from Atlantic City and would stay there for the rest of 1982, for all of 1983, and into 1984.
In his absence, the murder and mayhem would continue.
But for his nephew Philip Leonetti, life was about to change.
The day after they shipped my uncle to Texas, I remember waking up and I couldn’t have been happier. I felt free for the first time in my life. I can’t even describe the feeling, it was as if I had beaten cancer and had a new lease on life. I remember going up to the boardwalk and walking all the way from Georgia Avenue down to the end of the boardwalk in Ventnor, as if I didn’t have a care in the world.
I was just walking and staring out at the ocean. At that moment I didn’t give a fuck about my uncle, Harry Riccobene, the mob, none of it. It was like I was living a different life.
That night I took my girl out for a nice dinner at the Knife and Fork, which was one of the best restaurants in Atlantic City. I was constantly running around, day and night with my uncle, 24-7. He never shut down, so I never shut down. And now here I was, relaxing, having a night out. I couldn’t remember the last time I had been out with her where I wasn’t worried about what time I had to get home or what time I had to meet someone for my uncle.
My girl told me that I was smiling the whole night.
Philip Leonetti’s girlfriend was accustomed to his daily routine, as she lived directly across the street from the Scarfo compound on Georgia Avenue.
She was also somewhat familiar with the life of a mobster, as she had once dated Vincent Falcone and was dating him when Philip killed him in December 1979.
She was the one who came by the office and asked if I knew where Vince was right after I killed him. Maria. Me and her started dating a few months after I killed Vince, and at the time she had no idea that I had killed him. We never talked about him; it was as if he had never existed.
In addition to having a steady girlfriend for more than a year, Philip Leonetti had something else in his personal life: an eight-year-old son.
Philip Jr. was born in March 1974, right before my 21st birthday. I wasn’t much of a father in the beginning, because I had put
La Cosa Nostra
first, which is what you are supposed to do when you take your oath.
This thing
is supposed to come before everything, even your family and your own kids, and for me, it did. But now I was starting to have second thoughts about this life, mainly because I was so sick of being around my uncle and just the way that he was—all the killings, all of the treachery.
Maria and I started taking Little Philip places like the movies, the Ocean City Boardwalk, the Philadelphia Zoo—things I would
never
do when my uncle was around. He’d go crazy if he found out I took my kid to the zoo. He would have said, “What are you, a jerk off, goin’ there and lookin’ at animals?” But I was having the time of my life with Maria and Philip. I never felt so alive in all of my life.
Just as Philip Leonetti was starting to get accustomed to life without his uncle, a phone call from an angry and agitated Nicky Scarfo from a Texas prison would snap him back to reality.
I was in my grandmother’s apartment with my mother and Little Philip and the phone rings and my grandmother asked me to pick it up, and it says, “You have a collect call from Nick.” I almost got sick to my stomach hearing his voice.
I accepted the charges and before he was connected the operator said, “This call is from an inmate at a federal institution and it will be monitored and recorded,” and the next thing I hear is him screaming into the phone, “Where the fuck have you been? I’ve been trying to get you for two fuckin’ weeks and you are nowhere to be found. Did you go to Philadelphia? Did you do what I asked? I’m sittin’ down here like a jerk off while you’re out gallivanting.” I cut him right off and said, “I’ve been busy with Scarf, Inc. I’ve got a couple new jobs.” And he says, “Fuck Scarf, Inc. and fuck those jobs.” He is still hollering into the phone, and I hand the phone to my grandmother and say, “Here, you talk to him,” and I left the house.
When I got outside, I knew my uncle was steaming. I had never talked to him like that or even talked back to him. But I was sick and tired of all of his ranting and raving.