Read Mafia Prince: Inside America's Most Violent Crime Family Online
Authors: Phil Leonetti,Scott Burnstein,Christopher Graziano
Tags: #Mafia, #Nonfiction, #Retail, #True Crime
As the winter hiatus came to an end, Scarfo, Leonetti, and the entire mob were back home in South Philadelphia and Atlantic City.
It wasn’t long before Little Nicky had set his sights on his next target.
S
HORTLY AFTER BECOMING BOSS IN 1981, NICKY SCARFO BEGAN HAVING PROBLEMS WITH AN OLD-SCHOOL SOUTH PHILLY MOB ASSOCIATE NAMED FRANK “FRANKIE FLOWERS” D’ALFONSO.
D’Alfonso had been closely aligned with former boss Angelo Bruno and had a lucrative working relationship with Bruno. The two men dabbled together in such ventures as bookmaking, loan sharking, real estate development, casino junkets, and even a closed-circuit television business.
Bruno and D’Alfonso made a lot of money together, but Angelo Bruno was dead. And Nicky Scarfo, the new boss, felt that he was entitled to not only the money that D’Alfonso had been paying to Bruno, but an even larger share.
When D’Alfonso balked, Scarfo ordered him beaten within an inch of his life, and had called on Salvie Testa and Testa’s sidekick, Gino Milano, to carry out the beating. But there was a problem.
Salvie came back and told my uncle that every time him and Gino thought they had Flowers, he was always with the Geator and they didn’t want to do the beating in front of him.
The Geator with the Heater was a popular Philadelphia area disc jockey named Jerry Blavat, who was primarily known for spinning oldies records on his radio show; for his nightclub, Memories, in Margate; and for the record hops he held at catering halls and nightclubs in South Jersey and Philadelphia.
When Ange was boss, the Geator was around him a lot. He’d be at parties or gatherings we would attend, and we got to know who he was. When Ange died, the Geator was hanging around Frankie Flowers, who had been real close with Ange.
So around this time, Salvie and Gino are trying to give Frankie Flowers the beating my uncle ordered, but the Geator was always
hanging around Flowers and getting in the way of what we were trying to do.
A week later, Testa and Milano finally caught him alone and, armed with a baseball bat and steel pipe, ambushed D’Alfonso on a South Philadelphia street corner, beating him so badly that Frankie Flowers would spend the next several months in the hospital.
D’Alfonso got the message.
He started paying Scarfo’s street tax, and for a while Scarfo seemed content with their arrangement. But as time elapsed, D’Alfonso began to pay less and less, and then stopped paying altogether.
Little Nicky decided it was time to send D’Alfonoso another message, only this time, instead of bats and pipes, the messengers would be carrying guns and orders to kill.
In the summer of 1985, my uncle decides that he had had enough of Frankie Flowers and wants to kill him. But Flowers did business with Benny Eggs in New York who was the Chin’s underboss, and my uncle goes through the proper channels and reaches out to Benny Eggs and the Chin through Bobby Manna, who was the consigliere. My uncle sent word that he wants to kill Flowers, and the message we got back from New York was: do what you gotta do. So we banged him out as he was walking down the street near the Italian Market in South Philly. They hit him five times, and he died right there in the street. My uncle loved it. He said, “Every once in a while, you gotta show people this,” and he made the sign of the gun. “It keeps ’em in line.”
The July 1985 murder of Frankie Flowers served as a reminder to everyone that failure to pay the Scarfo street tax would result in death.
In the weeks that followed the D’Alfonso murder, the cash was pouring in faster than it ever had before. The Scarfo mob was making money hand over fist.
You have to remember, all the shake money, the money we got from the street tax, went into what we called the Elbow, and it was divided between my uncle—he would take half—and me, Chuckie, Lawrence, Salvie, and Ciancaglini would split the other half. But
Salvie was dead and Ciancaglini was in jail, so the Elbow was now just the four of us.
The new arrangement should have made Leonetti and the Merlino brothers extremely wealthy, but the despotic Scarfo began to exhibit a new trait: unbridled greed.
One day my uncle tells me to go to Longport to see Felix Bocchino, who was an old-timer who used to be around Tony Bananas before he got killed. Everyone called him Little Felix. So I meet up with him at a coffee shop and he gives me a shopping bag with $180,000 in cash inside. He made a score and this was my uncle’s end and the money for the Elbow. I take the bag back to Georgia Avenue and I bring it to my uncle in his apartment, and he says, “Don’t tell Chuckie or Lawrence about this; let’s keep this between us, and for the time being, I’m gonna hold on to your end.” Now what am I gonna do, argue with him?
By this time my uncle was a multimillionaire. He stashed cash all over the place. We built a fake wall in his apartment and we had a safe behind the wall. And we were hiding it in his furniture. We’d cut a hole in a couch or a chair, put $100,000 in there, and sew it back up. So the last thing he needed was to rob my end or what was supposed to go to Chuckie and Lawrence. But he did. He kept all that money for himself.
A year after the death of its street boss, Salvie Testa, the Scarfo mob was still trying to reorganize to fill the void that came with losing someone of Testa’s caliber.
When Salvie died, a lot of things changed. For starters, he was one of our top guys and you can’t replace a guy like that with a guy like Tommy Del, who was now one of the guys running the day-today operations in South Philadelphia, which is what Salvie did when he was alive. My uncle also broke up Salvie’s crew, which is one of the other reasons he wanted to kill Salvie. He didn’t like all them young guys together.
Me and Lawrence were the only capos on the street at the time, but we were both based in Atlantic City. But as time went by, Lawrence
was around less and less and was doing more with his rebar company, Nat Nat, and was starting to really build the business and make good money. This bothered my uncle when Lawrence wasn’t around as much, and he would say, “Where’s Lawrence been?” and I would tell him that Nat Nat just got a new job or something and my uncle would make a comment like, “So now he don’t want to hang around us? He’s too good for us? He wants to go legit?” The truth is, I think Lawrence had gotten sick of being around my uncle and
La Cosa Nostra
and he was trying to do his own thing, trying to break away a little bit.
At that time, Chuckie was still the underboss, but he had that four-year jail sentence hanging over his head and he started drinking very heavily around this time. Chuckie always drank ever since I can remember, but now in the fall of 1985, he was drunk all the time. And not just drunk, I mean fall-down drunk. One night my uncle and I went to dinner at Angeloni’s and he asked me what my thoughts were regarding Chuckie and Lawrence. I’m sitting there thinking: here we go again, now this sick fuck wants to kill the two guys we were closest to, Chuckie and Lawrence. I mean Christ almighty, we just killed Salvie, so why not? Let’s kill everybody. Who gives a fuck? I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. This guy had lost his fuckin’ mind. This was not the
La Cosa Nostra
that I had swore an oath to, had killed for, and had dedicated my life to.
So I looked my uncle square in the eye and I said, “Uncle Nick, Chuckie and Lawrence have been with us since the beginning. They have always been loyal. We’ve got nothing to worry about with either one of them. They are both solid.” When I’m saying this to him, he could tell by looking into my eyes and the way I was talking, how serious I was. I think my uncle was surprised that I voiced my opinion like that, but to be honest, I had to. Enough was enough. I couldn’t take another killing like Salvie’s. As close as we had been to Salvie, we were even closer with Chuckie and Lawrence.
Don’t forget, my uncle had wanted me to kill the Blade, too. These were our top guys who had been with us since the beginning. Me and Lawrence were together almost every day, and my uncle and Chuckie had been like brothers for almost 40 years. My uncle and the Blade went back even further. Right away my uncle backed off of it and said, “Let’s keep an eye on ’em and make sure they are
not up to something,” but I could tell he was steamed that I wasn’t “yessing” him like I always did.
At that very moment I made a promise to myself that if my uncle brought this up again and started to move forward with any plans to kill to Chuckie or Lawrence, not only was I gonna step in and stop it like I wish had done with Salvie and I had done with the Blade, but I was gonna do something that me or someone else should have done a long time ago.
I was gonna kill my uncle.
A
S 1985 CAME TO A CLOSE THERE WAS YET ANOTHER MOB HIT THAT MADE NATIONAL NEWS, ONLY THIS TIME IT HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH NICKY SCARFO, PHILIP LEONETTI, OR THE PHILADELPHIA-ATLANTIC CITY MOB.
On December 16, Big Paul Castellano, the boss of New York’s Gambino crime family, was gunned down outside of the now infamous Sparks Steakhouse as he arrived for a prearranged meeting with several underlings. Castellano’s underboss, Tommy Billotti, was also gunned down. The bodies of both men, two of the nation’s most powerful gangsters, were on the street, riddled with bullets and covered in blood, much to the horror of the throngs of Christmas shoppers who had also lined the same midtown Manhattan street.
Castellano, who had been close to former Philadelphia–Atlantic City mob boss Angelo Bruno, was gunned down in a palace coupe orchestrated by an ambitious underling named John Gotti and one of his top lieutenants, a man that Leonetti knew well, Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano.
My uncle and I had dealt with Castellano a couple of times, and he helped us with the murder of Johnny Keys by authorizing Sammy to do it, but that’s about it. My uncle used to say that Castellano reminded him of Ange, meaning that he was more of a businessman and less of a gangster. That’s the same thing that Sammy used to say about Castellano. He’d say, “This guy ain’t a street guy like us, like your uncle. This guy thinks we’re fuckin’ IBM and not the Gambino crime family.”
Around this time I was hearing a lot about John Gotti, most of it coming directly from Sammy. John and Sammy had become very close and Sammy would say to me, “John’s like us Philip, he’s a gangster’s gangster. You and your uncle are gonna like this guy.”
Me and Sammy had become very close and we would go out drinking together or go out to dinner when he would come down to Atlantic City. I helped him when he got assigned the contract on this guy Frankie Stillitano, who everybody called Frankie Steele in 1981 after Frankie killed Nick Russo’s son in Trenton.
My uncle and Nick Russo had always been close; they were in Yardville together. We used to call him the Reverend. Nick Russo ran the Gambino family’s operations in Trenton. Our family also had a presence in Trenton, and everything was always smooth between the two families because Nick was an absolute gentleman.
Now Frankie Stillitano was a cowboy, a renegade and he had some problems with Nick Russo and ultimately Nick Russo’s son. One night after they had an altercation, Stillitano opened up on them as they left a bar in Trenton and he shot Nick Russo and killed his son.
The Gambinos were looking to kill Stillitano, but no one could find him. He went into hiding. Sammy came down and saw me and my uncle and he asked us for our help in trying to find him. This was after Sammy and his crew had done the Johnny Keys hit while we were on trial.
Scarfo and Leonetti knew that Frankie Stillitano had connections to a loose-knit group of Irish gangsters that worked out of Northeast Philadelphia.
We found him and shot him in the head and left his body in the trunk of a car at the Philadelphia Airport.
Sammy came right down to thank us for whacking this guy out. That’s the kind of guy he was—he was very big on respect. Now a few days after Castellano gets killed, Sammy comes down and he tells me and my uncle that everything is okay in New York and that after New Year’s he wants us to come up to Staten Island to meet his new boss—which we knew was John Gotti, but Sammy didn’t tell us who it was. I had heard from Blackie Napoli that Sammy was going to be part of the new Gambino administration, either underboss or consigliere.
As the NYPD and the FBI investigated the murders of Castellano and Billotti in New York, Nicky Scarfo was busy throwing his annual Christmas party in South Philadelphia.
Everybody was there and everybody brings an envelope, that’s how it was.
The party was great, but Chuckie was fall-down drunk; I’d never seen him that bad and my uncle was furious. I mean Chuckie was the underboss and the underboss can’t behave like that—it makes the family look bad, and with my uncle it was always about appearances and his reputation.
After the party, when we were driving back to Atlantic City, I could tell that my uncle was steaming about Chuckie, but we were in the car so he is not going to say anything. The next day we go for lunch at the Brajole Café and he says, “I can’t take any more of this guy’s drunkenness. It’s an embarrassment to me, and it makes us look weak.”
Now I had already voiced my opinion about a month or so prior, so my uncle knew where I stood in regards to killing either Chuckie or Lawrence. And regardless, Chuckie was going to jail in a couple of weeks; he had to do the four years on the bribery case.
I said, “Maybe we should have a sit-down with them; but Chuckie and Lawrence are solid and they always have been,” and I’m looking him dead in his eye as I’m saying this, just like I did that night at Angeloni’s. I wanted him to know that I was absolutely against killing either one of them, and that my position had not
changed and it wasn’t going to change. We finished our lunch and didn’t discuss it any further.
Now you have to understand that I had to be very careful with my uncle, because if he thought for a second that I wasn’t 100 percent with him, or that I was going against him, he would have had me killed in a heartbeat. The fact that I was his nephew and his own blood meant absolutely nothing to him if he thought I was challenging him as boss—which I was by not backing him up on his plans to take out Chuckie and Lawrence.