Read Mafia Prince: Inside America's Most Violent Crime Family Online
Authors: Phil Leonetti,Scott Burnstein,Christopher Graziano
Tags: #Mafia, #Nonfiction, #Retail, #True Crime
Nowhere was this more evident than in Chicago, where Al Capone, the most celebrated gangster of his era, became the face of organized crime in the United States.
At first, there was little to no connection between the various burgeoning crime conglomerates operating throughout the United States. A move toward consolidation slowly began to take form as the bosses began to recognize that true power and strength could only be accomplished by establishing a nationwide crime syndicate.
This American organized crime syndicate would come to be known as
La Cosa Nostra,
which in Italian means “this thing of ours.”
The inaugural summit of this newly organized syndicate would feature the nation’s top gangland bosses, nearly 50 men operating street
rackets in US cities from coast to coast. The meeting took place in the spring of 1929 at the legendary Ritz Hotel on the world-famous Atlantic City Boardwalk. Atlantic City, known as the World’s Playground, was riddled with vice and became the original Sin City long before modern-day Las Vegas was even contemplated.
Backroom casinos, showgirls looking for a quick buck, and a nonstop flow of booze during Prohibition made Atlantic City the perfect choice for such a gathering.
Two years later in 1931, the modern American Mafia was created in the aftermath of a carnage-filled mob war in New York City that pitted a group of old-school underworld leaders, known as Mustache Petes, against a group of young and hungry underworld visionaries led by a man born Salvatore Lucania, who would come to be known as Charles “Lucky” Luciano. With Luciano’s group emerging victorious, the ambitious new “Godfather” called a meeting of fellow mob leaders in Chicago and laid out his vision for what would become
La Cosa Nostra.
Luciano proposed a nationwide crime syndicate made up of regional mob factions, called Families, which would be overseen and governed by a board of directors known as the Commission. The Commission would be comprised of only the most powerful and respected mob dons—men like Luciano and Capone.
The syndicate and its rules would be paramilitary in structure. Each family would be headed by a boss, an underboss, and a consigliere, or counselor. The hierarchy of the family would also include a cadre of capos, or captains, who would each be responsible for a crew of family soldiers and associates.
Attendees of Luciano’s underworld conference, held at the Blackstone Hotel in the heart of the Windy City’s famous Miracle Mile on Michigan Avenue, unanimously agreed to the proposal and unanimously pledged their allegiance to the newly established
La Cosa Nostra.
Following the meeting of the nation’s top criminal minds in Chicago, 26 American mob Families were formed. There was one for almost every major city in the country, with the New York and Chicago mobs being the most prominent.
In the city of Philadelphia, John Avena, a longtime lieutenant under Prohibition-era crime lord Salvatore Sabella was named the city’s first modern-day mob boss. Sabella had sided against Luciano in his war with the Mustache Petes, and as a result was told to step down and turn over the
reins to Avena. From the moment he assumed power, Avena butted heads with a former ally and onetime Sabella lieutenant named Joseph Dovi. Feeling slighted by Avena’s promotion, Dovi immediately challenged his authority. The two men and their respective factions battled for control on the streets for nearly five years, a war that culminated with Avena, the boss, being killed in 1936.
Dovi took control of the Philadelphia Mafia for the next decade, expanding the crime family’s territorial reach into parts of neighboring states New Jersey and Delaware. When Dovi died from natural causes in 1946, Joe Ida, another former Sabella disciple, was named the city’s new don. Ida ruled unfettered for over a decade, but his reign would end following his arrest at the infamous Appalachian mob summit in 1957, which ultimately led to his deportation.
Like the Atlantic City conference in 1929, the Appalachian summit was designed to bring together the top gangland leaders in the nation. But many of these men were arrested as they converged on the upstate New York hunting cottage where the conference was to take place. Law enforcement had been tipped off and was lying in wait as the unsuspecting mobsters converged on the location.
For a brief period of time following Ida’s deportation, Antonio “Mr. Miggs” Pollina was named his successor. But Pollina quickly fell out of favor with those within the organization by plotting the murder of a popular mob captain born Angelo Annaloro, who would come to be known as Angelo Bruno. Getting wind of Pollina’s plan to murder him, Bruno, a cunning and even-tempered gentleman gangster, turned the tables on Mr. Miggs.
Using his many connections to the New York underworld, which included a deep personal relationship with the powerful Carlo Gambino, Bruno got the Commission to depose Pollina and Bruno was anointed his successor.
Showing a level of mercy not often displayed by men in his position, Bruno spared Pollina’s life. Instead of killing him for his indiscretion, he banished the defeated former boss into retirement.
The controversial move earned Bruno the nickname, the Docile Don.
What the future would hold for Bruno and those operating in and around the Philadelphia mob, which now included rackets in neighboring Atlantic City, would be anything but docile, especially once Nicky Scarfo and his nephew Philip Leonetti gained control.
My name is Philip Michael Leonetti, and I was born on March 27, 1953, in Philadelphia. My father’s name was Pasquale Leonetti and my mother’s name was Annunziata Scarfo, but everyone called her Nancy. I was born into this life, the Mafia,
La Cosa Nostra.
It was inevitable for me. It was literally in my blood.
Both sides of my family, the Leonettis and Scarfos, had immigrated to the United States from Naples and Calabria, and both families had strong ties to the Mafia in Italy before I was born.
My grandfather Christopher Leonetti was a mob-connected hood who ran with a crew of guys in Manhattan’s Little Italy. In the ’20s, he got killed after his crew tried to shake down a couple of guys they thought were low-level greaseballs, siggys, but turned out to be high-ranking Sicilian gangsters. They ended up whackin’ him and leavin’ him in the street.
Growing up, my Uncle Nick would tell me, “The Sicilians, the siggys, they are not like us, they can’t be trusted.” It’s something I would never forget.
My father, Pasquale Leonetti, was a well-respected gambler who was picked by Angelo Bruno to oversee many of the mob-controlled card and dice games that operated in and around South Philadelphia in the late ’50s and early ’60s. Angelo Bruno was the boss of the Philadelphia mob; he was the Don.
Back then the mob had games in the back rooms of almost every restaurant, neighborhood bar, corner store, and social club in South Philly. Knock-around street guys from the neighborhood would come and gamble, drink booze, smoke cigars, and escape from their wives or girlfriends for a few hours in these joints, and the mob was making money catering to them.
First of all, the mob ran the games, which means they won more than they lost. The house always wins. Second, they were selling booze to the gamblers, which means they were making money on the booze and the gamblers would get drunk and end up gambling more than they should. That’s when one of the mob guys who was workin’ in that joint would pull the gambler aside and loan him
money at a high-interest rate so that he could keep drinking and gambling, or use the money to pay the rent or the electric bill.
If a guy borrowed $10,000 and the loan shark charged him two points, he would have to pay $200 a week in interest—which was known as the vig or the juice—every week, and he still owed the $10,000. So let’s say it took him 10 weeks to pay the money back; he’d pay $2,000 in juice money and the $10,000 in principal, so he’d end up paying $12,000 on a $10,000 loan. If it took him a year to pay back, he’d pay over $10,000 in interest and still owe the $10,000 in principal. This is primarily how the mob makes its money even today—illegal gambling and loan sharking.
Now my father had a reputation as a serious gambler, not only in South Philadelphia, but in Jersey and even New York. He was so well known and respected that Walter Winchell, the famous journalist, wrote a piece on him. This is why Ange picked my father to run those games. He was that good. But when it came to being a father, he was no good; he was a bum.
After his luck took a turn for the worse, Pasquale went from running the mob’s top card games to owing the mob the money he lost and couldn’t pay back when he gambled himself. Pasquale Leonetti had crapped out.
When Philip was just a baby, Pasquale left Philadelphia and headed south to Florida, leaving Nancy and young Philip to fend for themselves. Angelo Bruno had taken Pasquale’s exterminating business as a way of clearing his debts. Philip and his mother were left with nothing.
By this time Nancy’s parents, Philip and Catherine Scarfo, had also left South Philadelphia, moving 60 miles east to Atlantic City. The once booming seaside resort known as the World’s Playground had fallen on hard times and was considered down and out by the early ’60s. It had literally gone from boom to bust.
The Scarfos purchased two connecting apartment buildings at 26-28 North Georgia Avenue in the city’s Italian enclave known as Ducktown. Each building stood four stories tall and was two and a half blocks from the world famous Atlantic City Boardwalk and the sandy beaches leading to the Atlantic Ocean, and was surrounded by other similarly structured row homes.
Nancy’s father, Philip Scarfo, was a laborer who worked at Atlantic City’s prestigious Chalfonte-Haddon Hall Hotel.
My grandfather, Philip Scarfo, was a wonderful man. I was named after him. When I was little and we lived in South Philadelphia, he had a job where he had a horse with a wagon and he used to give me rides around the neighborhood. He’d also take me crabbing when I was a little boy. He was a hard worker his whole life and was never involved in the mob or anything illegal. He was 100-percent legit.
Nancy’s mother, Catherine Scarfo, was a homemaker and a devout Catholic who faithfully attended Mass every morning at St. Michael’s Church, which was located less than 50 yards from the Scarfo family home.
My grandmother was the typical old-school Italian matriarch. All of her grandchildren called her Mom-Mom. She went to church every morning, not just Sundays, and her cooking, my God, nobody cooked like her. She was a real character, one of a kind. She was well liked in the neighborhood; if someone had a problem or needed advice, they’d come and see Mom-Mom.
Her three brothers, Nick, Joe, and Mike Piccolo, were all well-respected soldiers in the Bruno crime family, which was based in Philadelphia but maintained a strong presence in New Jersey, particularly in the cities of Trenton, Newark, and Atlantic City. Each had been adorned with the same nickname; they were known respectively as Nicky Buck, Joe Buck, and Mikey Buck, and owned and operated Piccolo’s 500, a notorious mob hangout that grew into a popular restaurant and club in South Philadelphia. Michael “Mikey Buck” Piccolo was Philip Leonetti’s godfather.
My great-uncle Mike used to take me fishing when I was a little boy with my cousin Ronald. He was a nice man, a gentleman.
My great-uncle Nick Piccolo, Nicky Buck, who was on my mother’s side, was married to my grandfather’s sister, my aunt Mary, on my father’s side.
This marriage strengthened the Scarfo–Leonetti bond.
Then there was Philip’s Uncle Nick.
N
ICODEMO DOMENIC SCARFO WAS BORN ON MARCH 8, 1929, TO PHILIP AND CATHERINE SCARFO IN BROOKLYN, NEW YORK. IN 1941, WHEN NICK WAS 12 YEARS OLD, THE SCARFO FAMILY, WHICH NOW INCLUDED YOUNGER SISTER ANNUNZIATA (NANCY), LEFT NEW YORK AND SETTLED IN SOUTH PHILADELPHIA, WHICH WAS BY THEN HEAVILY POPULATED BY SECOND-GENERATION ITALIAN FAMILIES.
As a young boy, Scarfo spent his summers working in the sprawling blueberry fields in Hammonton, New Jersey. Known as the Blueberry Capital of the World, Hammonton is a small town located 30 miles east of Philadelphia and 30 miles west of Atlantic City. It sits smack dab in the middle of the 60-mile corridor that connects the two cities with the Atlantic City Expressway. Scarfo had learned first-hand about the tireless life of a laborer, a life that he wanted no part of as an adult. His big dreams didn’t involve picking blueberries for a living. To him, people who worked for a living were “jerk offs,” and Nicky Scarfo didn’t fancy himself a “jerk off.”
Scarfo, who would come to be known as Little Nicky for his diminutive size, stood a mere 5′5″. He was voted most talkative by his classmates at Benjamin Franklin High School, which he graduated from in 1947, and his senior yearbook declared the same year that he was out to “lick the world.” What Scarfo lacked in height, he made up for in fearlessness. Despite his size, he began to box in his late teens under the name Nick Scarfo and amassed an impressive record in small clubs fights on the Philadelphia boxing circuit. But as the 1950s came, the bantamweight Scarfo decided that he was better suited for life outside the ring.
Nicky Scarfo wanted to be a gangster, just like the movie-star mobsters he grew up admiring in the shoot-’em-up flicks he would sneak into the theater to see as a kid. Guys like Paul Muni in the 1932 gangster classic
Scarface,
not the top baseball players of the late 1940s like Stan Musial
and Ted Williams, were Nicky Scarfo’s idols. Like the working stiff, athletes were also “jerk offs” to Little Nicky.