Read Mafia Prince: Inside America's Most Violent Crime Family Online
Authors: Phil Leonetti,Scott Burnstein,Christopher Graziano
Tags: #Mafia, #Nonfiction, #Retail, #True Crime
Flanking Scarfo as he walked from the airport terminal to a waiting fleet of white limousines were his top two lieutenants, Philip Leonetti, who was 30 years old, and Salvatore Testa, who was 27.
When Scarfo was away in El Paso, Leonetti and Testa worked together to look after his empire with ruthless efficiency, proving their merit as future leaders in
La Cosa Nostra
and as possible heirs to Scarfo’s throne.
But therein was a problem.
Beneath the surface and all of the smiles, backslaps and kisses on the cheek, Scarfo was an evil and vindictive despot who maintained an unquenchable thirst for blood as a means of both obtaining and keeping power.
While Scarfo loved every minute of it, Leonetti was growing tired of it.
There was a time in my life when all I wanted was to be with my uncle and to be with
La Cosa Nostra
and live that life 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year, just like my uncle.
It’s all that I knew.
But when he went away and I started living my own life, waking up every day and making my own decisions, I started to resent both my uncle and what being involved in
La Cosa Nostra
was doing to my life. I felt like I had no life being in the mob, no identity.
I realized that I was a lot happier doing things with Maria or doing things with Philip Jr. than I was doing things with my uncle, but I was trapped. Once you are in this life there’s only two ways out: jail or death. There was no retiring or quitting.
I felt stuck.
And then there was the pure sport of it.
La Cosa Nostra
was my uncle’s whole life. He lived for
this thing.
Every day was just like the day before it. Where are we getting money? How much are we getting? Whose making what moves? Who do we have to watch? Who do we have to kill? That was our routine, day after day after day.
If you made a big score and made him a lot of money, the second he was done counting the money he would say to me, “This guy thinks he’s a big shot now; all the sudden he’s J. D. Rockefeller,” or “We gotta watch him so he doesn’t get too big for his britches.”
The guy just hands you a bag with $200,000 in it and ten minutes later you’re burying the guy. It didn’t make sense, but that’s how he was.
If he ordered you to kill someone and you did it perfectly and you got the guy just like he asked, he’d say to me, “Now this guy thinks he’s Al Capone because he killed a guy.”
As quickly as he would build somebody up, he’d already be bringing them down.
Nowhere would this be more evident than with the next mobster who found himself in Nicky Scarfo’s crosshairs.
So when we get back to Atlantic City, my uncle stayed in for a day or two, just to get his bearings straight. On the third or fourth day he had me set up a full day of meetings at Scannicchio’s so he could talk to everyone and see what was going on.
He told me to bring down Chuckie and Bobby Simone, and he wanted to see Blackie Napoli from North Jersey. He was going to meet with everyone separately and he wanted an hour or two blocked out for each meeting.
I said, “Do you want me to bring Salvie down?” And he said, “I don’t think we need to.” Now this gets my antenna up, because the whole time my uncle is gone, it was mainly Salvie and his guys who were out there shooting it out with the Riccobenes, and Salvie was also heavily involved in the street-tax collections. I found it strange that my uncle wasn’t bringing him down to meet with him, too.
He tells me, “I want you in on these meetings,” which means I gotta sit there all day.
The first guy down was Blackie Napoli. When my uncle was away I was meeting with Blackie once or twice a month, and he was bringing my uncle’s tribute money down. Now Blackie was getting up there in age and he wasn’t as sharp as he used to be, but him and my uncle went way back, even before they were in Yardville together.
My uncle wastes no time in telling him, “These envelopes you sent down while I was away, they were light. What are you guys doing up there? Did you forget how to make money or are you guys just giving it away?”
When my uncle became boss, remember, it was him and Blackie who first went to see Bobby Manna the day after Phil Testa’s wake. My uncle always knew that Blackie was letting Bobby Manna and the Genovese take more than they should in North Jersey, but my uncle felt like Blackie had given away the store up there when he was in jail.
Then my uncle told Blackie, “We’re gonna tighten our belts up there, no more free lunches for anyone. I don’t care who they are with,” and Blackie left. I could tell he was disappointed, because he thought he had done a good job while my uncle was gone.
When he left my uncle said, “I’m taking him down. He’s getting too old. He’s losing his fastball. I’m gonna keep him up there, but I’m putting Patty Specs in charge up there. Bring him down tomorrow and tell him I want to see him.”
Patty Specs was a guy named Pasquale Martirano who had been with the North Jersey branch of our family dating back to the days when Ange was boss.
The next one in was Bobby Simone. My uncle seemed very concerned about Bobby’s tax case, and Bobby talked about it a little bit. My uncle then went through the litany of criminal charges that everyone in the family was facing—from Chuckie’s bribery case to my thing with the mayor—and asked Bobby to explain every possible scenario of everyone’s individual cases.
This went on for like two hours. My uncle was just asking hypotheticals. Towards the end he said, “I can’t depend on anybody in this entire
borgata.
Everybody’s drunk, stupid, or incompetent. I should go get six black guys from North Philly and start a new gang. They’d be better than what I got right now.”
Now I can’t say anything, but what I’m thinking is: you just came home from jail, you got $3 million sitting in a safe, everybody you wanted us to kill is dead, and you’re still complaining?
So after Bobby leaves, Chuckie comes in. Chuckie’s telling him everything that had been going on in Philly while he was away. He says to my uncle, “We never filled Frank’s spot after he got killed,”
meaning the consigliere position. “And with Ciancaglini in jail, we are down a capo.”
My uncle says, “I’m gonna put my uncle Nick in as consigliere,” meaning his mother’s brother “Nicky Buck” Piccolo. Now, me and Chuckie both know how bad my uncle hates his Uncle Nick. He hated him and his brothers his whole life. He used to say they were no good, that they mistreated him and always tried to hold him back. Now he’s gonna make him the consigliere. The position of consigliere is very important in
La Cosa Nostra.
The consigliere is the counselor, someone to settle disputes in the family and someone who can advise the boss. The consig is the third most powerful position in the family, behind the boss and underboss. Bobby Manna was the Chin’s consigliere and Bobby was the Chin’s eyes and ears. My uncle is gonna make his uncle the consigliere, a guy he hated his whole life—it didn’t make any sense. It’s almost like he was saying, “I don’t need a consigliere, ’cause I ain’t askin’ nobody their opinion or how to settle disputes.” My uncle settled almost every dispute with a gun, but that wasn’t what
La Cosa Nostra
was about. When my uncle got out of La Tuna,
this thing
started to become
my thing
with him.
Then he says, “And as for Chickie’s crew, let’s leave things the way they are for now. Too many chiefs and not enough Indians,” which was his way of saying he wanted more soldiers and less captains. He wanted to keep all the power for himself.
Then he says to Chuckie, “What . . . about . . . Salvie?”
It was like he said it in slow motion, like a movie. I couldn’t believe it. I immediately felt sick. I knew at that very second that my uncle had decided that he was going to turn on Salvie and was now going to make a case for killing him.
Leonetti’s intuitions would prove to be spot-on.
O
NLY DAYS OUT OF JAIL, NICKY SCARFO WAS ALREADY PLOTTING HIS NEXT KILL, AND THIS TIME, INSTEAD OF SALVIE TESTA DOING THE KILLING, HE WOULD BE THE ONE GETTING KILLED.
Prior to this, Philip Leonetti had been Nicky Scarfo’s prized pupil and had never seriously questioned his uncle’s leadership. He was in many respects the perfect soldier, the perfect protégé.
But by putting a hit out on Salvie Testa, Little Nicky had gone too far, even for Crazy Phil.
Nicky Scarfo’s increasingly erratic behavior had shaken Philip’s faith in his uncle, and his blind allegiance to
La Cosa Nostra,
to the core, turning his world upside down.
For the first time in his life, Philip was seriously reconsidering his path in life. Being his uncle’s protégé had worn him down, both physically and emotionally, and he didn’t know how much more he could take.
My uncle went crazy with the power when he became the boss. It was like he got drunk off of it. He became so full of jealousy and hatred that he had turned into something out of a horror movie. This wasn’t a thing of honor or respect anymore. It wasn’t even about the money.
It was all about the power.
Bodies were falling everywhere. He wanted to murder everyone and everything around him. It wasn’t enough for us to kill our enemies. We were now going to start killing our friends.
He used to say, “The only way to hold on to the power is to kill anyone who stands in your way.” That’s the kind of mentality he had on everything. He was just looking for excuses to kill guys. And the more power he got, the crazier and more paranoid he became.
My mother used to call him Adolf behind his back, that’s how bad it was.
He would get angry and tell a whole group of guys, “Don’t fuckin’ test me ’cause I’ll bring in a squad of guys from New York
and wipe everybody in this room right off the fuckin’ map. I won’t leave none of you guys standing.”
He’s talking about killing our whole family and these guys knew he’d do it. And guess what, he would have. I didn’t understand it. Before we were only killing bad people. Now, we’re killing everybody. It didn’t make sense.
Now we’re gonna kill Salvie? He was one of us. He loved my uncle. He believed in
this thing, La Cosa Nostra.
He killed for it and he almost died for it. Salvie looked up to my uncle as almost a second father.
Right before Phil Testa died, we were having dinner and he turned to my uncle. I’ll never forget it, he said, “Nick, if God forbid something were to happen to me, please be sure and always take care of Salvie.”
And my uncle said, “God forbid that would happen, I would treat him as one of my own.”
That kept replaying over and over in my head, when he said that he would treat Salvie as one of his own, and now he’s gonna have him killed.
Who was gonna be next? Me?
Several factors contributed to the animosity that Nicky Scarfo felt toward Salvie Testa in those early months of 1984.
Salvie Testa had ruffled Scarfo’s feathers when he became engaged to Chuckie Merlino’s daughter. Despite the fact that both Testa and Merlino were like family to him, the increasingly paranoid mob dictator saw it as a power play by either Testa or Merlino—or perhaps both—and became obsessed with stopping the marriage.
Salvie Testa’s stock had been on the rise in the underworld since he personally avenged the death of his father by murdering two of the men responsible in such sensational fashion. Testa was, in a lot of ways, like a younger version of Scarfo himself. He had developed a loyal crew of killers with the Young Executioners, and he enjoyed an almost rabid, rockstartype following among many in the Philly underworld.
All of this made Scarfo see Testa as a potential threat to his power, and this paranoia would ultimately lead to Testa’s brutal downfall.
The tipping point in Scarfo’s betrayal of Salvie Testa came in April 1984 after an article in the
Wall Street Journal
referred to the ruggedly
handsome and charismatic Testa as the “fastest-rising mobster in the United States.”
When Testa got cold feet and broke off the engagement to Merlino’s daughter, the always-plotting Scarfo saw an opportunity to manipulate the situation and turn his inner circle, and ultimately the rest of the family, against Testa for disrespecting the daughter of the underboss.
Both Chuckie and Salvie loved my uncle. They were both loyal. They would have never gone against him, but he had it in his head that Salvie marrying Chuckie’s daughter meant they were teaming up to eventually challenge him.
So when things started to go south with Salvie and Chuckie’s daughter, my uncle used it to play both sides against each other and turn Chuckie against Salvie, which he can then use to get Chuckie to back his plan and help him kill Salvie.
What a lot of people didn’t know was that right before Salvie broke off the engagement, Salvie talked to my uncle on the phone when he was in prison and he basically asked my uncle for permission to end it with Chuckie’s daughter. Salvie was trying to do the right thing. He wasn’t trying to disrespect Chuckie or his daughter. They were both young. It didn’t work out; that’s all it was.
Now my uncle’s telling him from jail: “You don’t gotta marry her. You should do what you want, spread yourself around. Don’t worry, when I come home I’ll talk to Chuckie. He’ll understand.”
At the same time, he’s in Chuckie’s ear telling him that what Salvie was doing had dishonored his daughter, was a slap in his face, and that he shouldn’t stand for that kind of disrespect to his daughter and his family.
This cocksucker was stirring the pot. He wanted Salvie to think he was okay with it; meanwhile, he was getting Chuckie all worked up about it.
My uncle started to say things about Salvie like, “This kid is getting too big for his britches” or “This kid’s acting like he wants to be the boss—we’ll see about that.” Or he would say, “This kid is full of treason” or “This kid’s foolin’ with drugs,” or “These siggys are always up to something.” And all of it was nonsense.
I remember that whole summer, Salvie was on edge. He knew that something was up, he just didn’t know what it was. And here
I am, one of his best friends and there was nothing I could do to help him.
I wish I could have saved him, but I couldn’t.
By the summer of 1984, Nicky Scarfo’s plan had worked. Not only was Chuckie Merlino backing his play, he was supervising the plot.
At one point, Nicky Crow and Charlie White had the contract, but they couldn’t get it done. Then Faffy and Tommy DelGiorno had it, but they couldn’t get it done either.
Salvie’s antenna was up and even though he was a lot younger than all of those guys, he knew the street 100 times better. He wasn’t gonna be an easy mark.