Read Mafia Prince: Inside America's Most Violent Crime Family Online
Authors: Phil Leonetti,Scott Burnstein,Christopher Graziano
Tags: #Mafia, #Nonfiction, #Retail, #True Crime
After a week of intensive debriefings, the FBI agents surprised Leonetti by bringing his mother, Maria, and Little Philip to the office one day.
I hadn’t seen them in a few months—this was now late September 1989. Jim Maher and Gary Langan had brought them up, and I was very happy to see them. We had a nice lunch together, and the mood was light, and then Jim Maher told us, “Tomorrow morning, while it’s still dark out, two things are going to happen. The first thing is Philip is going to be picked up by the marshals and put on a plane and taken to a federal prison. We won’t know which one until he gets there. They are going to put him in a top secret witness security unit and no one will know who he is or where he is, including you guys,” and they were talking to my mother, Maria, and Little Philip, who was now 16 years old, and then Gary Langan said, “But don’t worry about him; he will be safe.”
Then I jumped in and said, “What about my family?” And Jim Maher said, “The other thing that is going to happen tomorrow morning while it is still dark out is we are going to send a moving van down to Georgia Avenue and your family needs to leave there before the sun comes up. They need to bring only what is essential and they cannot say good-bye to anyone or tell anyone that they are leaving. This has to all happen before sunrise tomorrow.” I said, “Where are you taking them?” And Jim Maher said, “We can’t tell you that,” and Gary Langan said, “But don’t worry about them; they will be safe.”
I said, “Listen, this is very serious and we have to do what they tell us. Nobody can know what we are doing, not even Mom-Mom. We can’t take the chance that she says anything to Nicky Jr. or his father. You guys need to stick together, lay low, and only concern yourselves with your safety. Don’t worry about me. I can take care of myself wherever they put me.”
We all told each other we loved each other, and we said our good-byes. It was very emotional and very scary. We were all taking a very big risk. Once my uncle learned what I was doing, I knew for certain that he would try and kill all of us—me, my mother, Maria, and even my son, Philip. That’s how dangerous this situation was, and we all knew the stakes.
The next morning, at approximately 4:00 a.m., a team of heavily armed US Marshals picked up Philip Leonetti from the county jail where he was staying and took him to the Philadelphia International Airport, where
they bordered a chartered flight and flew him under an assumed name to El Paso, Texas.
I didn’t ask where they were taking me, because I knew they wouldn’t tell me. But when we got to El Paso, I knew they were taking me to La Tuna, the same place my uncle had been in 1982 and ’83 during the war with the Riccobenes. I remembered flying to El Paso with Bobby Simone on that trip that got cut short when Bobby saw the two guys in our room, and then flying down to pick my uncle up when he got out in January 1984. On one of those trips, Bobby had told me that La Tuna is where Joe Valachi was kept when he became the first member of
La Cosa Nostra
to become a government witness in the early ’60s. Bobby said, “They even built this cocksucker his own cell. They called it the Valachi Suite.”
Sure enough, when I get to intake in La Tuna, one of the guys processing me says, “You ever heard of Joe Valachi and the Valachi Suite?” And I knew that’s where they would be putting me.
As Philip Leonetti was on a plane heading to Texas, his mother, Maria, and Little Philip had quietly loaded their belongings into a moving van with the assistance of a handful of heavily armed FBI agents, under the direct supervision of special agents Jim Maher and Gary Langan. They were then whisked away from the Scarfo compound on Georgia Avenue in Atlantic City and taken to an FBI safe house deep in the Pocono Mountains, almost three hours away.
The operation was successful. The Leonettis were safe and sound.
For now.
Once I got settled at La Tuna, I was placed in the Valachi Suite, which was separate from all the other prisoners, even the other guys who were in Wit Sec. I was all by myself, except for a guard who stayed with me in the suite 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
They had like three or four guys who would rotate in and out, and these guys weren’t regular COs (corrections officers)—they were part of a special unit. We’d watch TV together, play cards, but for the most
part I
kept to myself.
As far as being in prison, they called the place a suite because it was like a little condominium that was connected but separate from the rest of the jail. I had a living room with a TV, a kitchen with a big dining room table, I had a treadmill in there, a nice-size bathroom, and then in the back was a cell where I would sleep at night, but on a regular bed, not the normal cot the other prisoners slept on. During the day, I had access to the roof of the suite, which was like a concrete patio where I could exercise and get some sun. I’d sit up there and read, and let me tell you, that sun was fuckin’ hot down there. I could see the Rio Grande from one of the windows in the suite, that’s how close to Mexico I was. Up on the roof, it had a big black tarp, so that the other prisoners couldn’t see me from their cells or when they were in the yard. They had no idea who was in there, only that it was someone important or significant. Even the guards in the rest of the prison had no idea I was there, because the crew that guarded me had no contact with them and didn’t work at La Tuna.
I had been in La Tuna for maybe a week or so, and Jim Maher and Gary Langan flew down to see me. This is late September/early October 1989. They came right to the Valachi Suite, and we all sat together at the dining room table. The first thing Gary Langan said was, “Your family is safe, and they are in a great place.” I told him, “Great, I am very happy to hear that,” and then Jim Maher said, “We received some information that your uncle found out that you are with us now. I don’t know the specifics just yet; we are waiting for the BOP to send us recordings of his phone calls, but we think it came from either Bobby Simone or Nicky Jr.” I said, “It makes sense with my family disappearing from Georgia Avenue,” and Jim Maher is looking at me like he didn’t finish his sentence, and he says, “And from what we know, your uncle isn’t too happy.”
I said, “Not too happy? My uncle’s not happy on Christmas? He’s gonna go fuckin’ nuts and try and have all of us killed. Me, my mother, my girl, and my son.”
Gary Langan said, “I will personally assure you that you and your family will remain safe—that is my guarantee to you, Philip.”
I grew to like all of the agents I dealt with, especially Jim Maher, Jim Darcy, Klaus Rhor, and Gary Langan, and found these to be honorable men and 100 percent straight shooters. With these guys, there was no bullshit, especially Gary. Me and him became very close. If they said they were gonna do something, they did it. They always kept their word.
They told me that they were coming back down in a month or so with some agents from New York to do some more debriefings. They said the agents they were coming with were involved in ongoing investigations into John Gotti and the Chin and
La Cosa Nostra
in New York.
I said, “I’ll be here; I ain’t going anywhere, except maybe up on the roof,” and we all laughed. Jim Maher then told me that Nicky Jr. was having major problems out on the street. He said, “He’s getting a lot of resistance in South Philly, and from what we are hearing, New York is moving in up in North Jersey and taking a lot of what you guys had up there. The only place he seems to be keeping under control is Atlantic City.”
At that time, it was Nicky Jr., Cousin Anthony, and a few little guys that they were using to try and keep control of the family for my uncle. Patty Specs, who was the capo in charge of North Jersey, had fled to Italy and some of the other capos loyal to my uncle, like Santo Idone, were locked up with their own cases. According to Jim Maher, the only guys on the street with any muscle was the crew that was led by Chuckie’s son Joey and Chickie’s son Michael.
I told Jim Maher and Gary Langan, “Listen to me when I say this, my uncle’s gonna get my cousin killed. Chuckie’s son is no fuckin’ good and one of those guys downtown is gonna make a move against my cousin and kill him. I told that kid to get out of that life, but he didn’t listen. Whatever happens to him, it’s because of his father.”
Philip Leonetti spent the rest of October 1989 settling into the Valachi Suite in the La Tuna federal prison in Anthony, Texas, while his mother, girlfriend, and 16-year-old son were adjusting to a new life under assumed names in a small, rural Pennsylvania town in the Pocono Mountain region.
Several hundred miles away from them sat Nicodemo “Little Nicky” Scarfo, the 60-year-old, jailed-for-life Mafia don. At the same time he was growing accustomed to spending the rest of his life inside an 8 x 10 concrete cell, Scarfo was also full of rage and vengeance, angered over the stunning betrayal of his sister and his nephew.
Little Nicky would vow revenge from the confines of his cage. The word on the street was that there was a $500,000 bounty that would be paid to anyone who found and killed his sister Nancy, and his nephew Philip Leonetti.
But what was most pressing in the tortured mind of Nicky Scarfo was keeping his son Nicky Jr. safe from a blossoming rival mob faction, and preserving both his power and legacy as the undisputed boss of the Philadelphia–Atlantic City
La Cosa Nostra,
despite being sentenced to spend the rest of his life behind bars.
Nicky Jr., 24, was the only one of Nicky Scarfo’s three sons who gravitated toward
La Cosa Nostra.
Scarfo’s oldest son, Chris, had legally changed his last name and was working as a legitimate businessman in the Atlantic City area, having very little, if anything, to do with his imprisoned father.
Scarfo’s youngest son, Mark, still a teenager, remained in a comatose state following a suicide attempt on November 1, 1988, in the middle of his father’s RICO trial.
Nicky Jr., who was not yet a formally made member of
La Cosa Nostra,
was acting as his father’s proxy, and as such, was tasked with meeting underlings and carrying out his father’s orders, working side by side with his father’s cousin, Anthony “Cousin Tony” Piccolo, who had briefly served as Scarfo Sr.’s consigliere and was now his handpicked street boss.
On October 31, 1989, almost a year to the day of his brother Mark’s suicide attempt, Nicky Jr. traveled from Atlantic City to Philadelphia in the late afternoon to meet with Bobby Simone to discuss his father’s appeal. After meeting with Simone, Scarfo Jr. and a companion headed downtown for a dinner meeting with several associates inside of Dante and Luigi’s, one of South Philadelphia’s premier Italian restaurants, and one of Nicky Sr.’s favorites.
Inside the restaurant, the young son of a jailed mob solider stopped by Nicky Jr.’s table and said hello. A few minutes later, what appeared to be a trick-or-treater entered the restaurant wearing a black costume with a yellow mask and carrying a bag. This individual did not attract any
immediate attention, as it was in fact Halloween night and the neighborhood was crawling with kids out looking for candy.
The trick-or-treater moved quickly into the dining room and headed straight for Nicky Jr.’s table, swiftly removing a Mac 10 machine gun pistol from his candy bag, and started pumping bullets into Scarfo Jr.’s chest and neck, hitting him nine times in the process.
As the gunman fled into the night, he symbolically dropped the Mac 10 outside of the restaurant, a nod perhaps to Al Pacino’s character, Michael Corleone, in
The Godfather.
Scarfo Jr. was bleeding and badly wounded, but he would survive.
His father’s plan to run the beleaguered crime family from prison would not.
When I heard what happened to my cousin, I immediately believed Chuckie’s son and Michael Ciancaglini were behind it. But there was nothing I could do about it. I tried to talk to my cousin in Otisville and warn him, but he didn’t listen. Instead, he listened to his father, and it almost got him killed. The whole thing made me sick. I knew my uncle was going absolutely bananas in Marion. When Nicky Jr. got shot, that was it—that was basically Philadelphia telling my uncle to go fuck himself.
Immediately after being released from the hospital, where he spent nine days following the shooting, Nicky Scarfo Jr. left Philadelphia and sought refuge under the protection of the North Jersey branch of the Bruno–Scarfo
La Cosa Nostra,
staying for a few weeks at a Sheraton Hotel near the Newark airport, and then moving to another Sheraton Hotel in nearby Woodbridge.
Nicky Jr.’s movements were carefully measured, he avoided South Philadelphia at all costs, and he only sporadically visited his mother and grandmother on Georgia Avenue in Atlantic City.
The shooting sent a clear message: the Scarfo Era was over.
But unfortunately for the man Leonetti and Scarfo Sr. both believed was the messenger, there would be little time to rejoice.
In early January 1990, less than two months after the shooting at Dante and Luigi’s, Joseph “Skinny Joey” Merlino, the 28-year-old son of former Scarfo underboss Salvatore “Chuckie” Merlino and the man Leonetti believed was involved in the plot to kill Nicky Jr., was sentenced
to more than two years in federal prison following a conviction for participating in a 1987 armored car heist that netted the aspiring young mob leader more than $350,000.