Read Mafia Prince: Inside America's Most Violent Crime Family Online
Authors: Phil Leonetti,Scott Burnstein,Christopher Graziano
Tags: #Mafia, #Nonfiction, #Retail, #True Crime
They told me that they knew my mother had been communicating with my grandmother back in Atlantic City, and that if my grandmother, even by accident, knew anything about where we were and it got back to my uncle, that he was going to send somebody down to kill us.
Jim Maher said, “You guys have to be extremely careful; you are all in very serious danger if anyone finds out who you are and where you are,” and Gary Langan said, “And it’s not just your uncle. It’s the Gambinos, the Genovese, the Luccheses—it’s everyone you testified against. If given the chance, all of them would kill you and your family, and it’s going to be like that for the rest of your lives.”
I told them I knew that going in and I know the situation I have put myself and my family in. It is what it is, but I am going to be careful and do the best I can—that’s all I can do.
For the next several hours, the agents went through the proper protocol of how Philip Leonetti was going to transform into a John Doe, with a new name and a new background.
That night the Leonetti family and the two FBI agents went out for a huge celebratory dinner at one of the Tampa area’s top restaurants and they reminisced over the past and waxed philosophical over something that was undoubtedly uncertain for Philip Leonetti: the future.
Leonetti had mastered the rules of
La Cosa Nostra
and life as a federally protected witness in La Tuna and FCI Phoenix. That was easy to him; those skills were innate. He was a survivor. But mastering the rules of living life as someone else, a civilian, would be Philip Leonetti’s toughest challenge yet.
Those first couple of weeks I was just driving around, learning the area and seeing what was going on down there. Every day was like a new adventure for me. I laid low for the first two months. I was just getting acclimated to the area, my new identity, and life away from
La Cosa Nostra.
And then they called me back to Philadelphia to testify in the Bobby Simone trial.
While Leonetti may have been released from jail, he was still required to appear as a witness if called to do so by the federal government.
Testifying against Bobby Simone was the hardest thing I ever had to do. It was easier killing Vincent Falcone and getting sentenced to 45 years, then it was to testify against Bobby. Bobby was always good to me and I considered him a dear friend, but I had to tell the truth and the feds knew what the truth was. The evidence was so overwhelming I couldn’t have lied even if I wanted to. There were a lot of times when I was testifying in that case that I had tears in my eyes—that’s how difficult that was for me. Any chance I got to try and help Bobby, I did. I wasn’t trying to hurt him, and he knew it. There were a lot of questions that were asked of me where my answer was “I don’t recall” or “I don’t remember”—and trust me, if I
had
remembered, it wouldn’t have been good for Bobby.
When it was over, Bobby Simone was convicted of racketeering and sentenced to four years in federal prison, with a concurrent 15-month sentence in a separate tax case.
Around this time—I think it was the Spring of 1993—we moved from where we were staying and bought a four-bedroom house right outside of Naples, Florida, which was a few hours south of where we had been living. The place was gorgeous and was right on the water. I started a small landscaping company and things were going good for us.
Even though he was done with
La Cosa Nostra,
in the early part of 1993, Philip Leonetti decided it was time to take another oath.
Maria and I got married. She had stuck by me through everything. I remember her telling me, “I’m not going anywhere,” and that was after I got the 45 years. I don’t know if I would have been able to do what I did without her.
By this point, Little Philip wasn’t so little. He was now 19, and was going to a big university in Arizona. He had come out to see me a few times while I was in FCI Phoenix and he told me that he wanted to go to school there. I couldn’t have been prouder that he
turned out the way he did, considering everything he had to deal with when he was a kid. He had just turned 13 when we got locked up in 1987.
Looking back, I remember his 10th birthday. We had a party for him on Georgia Avenue. We had it inside the Scarf, Inc. office and in the courtyard that separated our two buildings. They didn’t have Chuck E. Cheese back then. All of his friends came to the party and I remember being in the Scarf, Inc. office with Lawrence. My uncle, who was home at the time, never came down to the party. That’s the kind of guy he was. Always the big shot, always a jerk off. So me and Lawrence are in the office and I look out the window and I see this shadow move back and forth very quickly—you could see it was a person, but it looked like they were wearing a mask and you could tell they were right on the other side of the door. I say to Lawrence, “What the fuck is that?” And he says, “I don’t know.”
I told him, “Go out the back door and sneak through the alley, and when I open the door, I want you to grab the guy from behind.” So Lawrence does what I tell him, and when I know that he is in position, I open the door and Lawrence grabs the guy and the guy is wearing a dinosaur costume. We drag the guy into the Scarf, Inc. office and we are punching and kicking him and trying to get his mask off. I think this is a hit—that someone sent this guy to kill either me or my uncle. So Lawrence gets the mask off and we see that it’s a teenager, and the kid is crying and he’s scared to death.
I’m trying to help him up, but he’s shaking like a leaf and Lawrence is trying to give him cake and soda to calm him down. I tell him, “I’m sorry that this happened, we just didn’t know who you were. Please let us give you some money in case we damaged your costume.” That kid said, “I don’t want your money. I just want to go home,” and he runs out the door crying right in front of Little Philip and all of his friends. This is my son’s 10th birthday party. Me and Lawrence beat up the dinosaur who someone got to come to the party and entertain the kids because we thought the dinosaur was there to kill us. This is how fucked up our life was. This is what my kid saw on his 10th birthday.
So the fact that he made it into a prestigious university, coming from where he came from, was a fuckin’ miracle, I couldn’t have been prouder.
Philip Leonetti was a now 40 years old, happily married, running a landscaping company, and putting his son through college.
I felt normal, like everybody else, but I knew there was nothing normal about my life. Normal people hadn’t killed people and lived the type of life that I had led, but that was in the past.
While it seemed that Philip Leonetti was living in a dream, it seemed like anyone still associated with what remained of
La Cosa Nostra
in Philadelphia and Atlantic City was living a nightmare.
For starters, reigning mob boss John Stanfa was engaged in a war with a faction that was dubbed the Young Turks, and consisted of Michael “Mikey Chang” Ciancaglini, Joseph “Skinny Joey” Merlino, and a half dozen of their friends, many of whom were the sons, brothers, and nephews of the defendants who were convicted with Nicky Scarfo and Philip Leonetti in the late ’80s.
What happened was, Stanfa named one of the Ciancaglini brothers as his underboss. There were three brothers. One of the brothers, John, was in jail and the other two, Joey and Michael, were on the street. Stanfa names Joey Chang his underboss and his brother Mikey Chang is in a group with Joey Merlino who are now opposing Stanfa. These kids were very dangerous and very treacherous. They are the ones who I believe had shot Nicky Jr. in that restaurant.
Now I’m reading what’s going on in the papers and I’m hearing things when I’m talking to the agents, and one day I say to Frank DeSimone, who was my lawyer, I said, “Frank, you watch, the one Ciancaglini brother is going to go after the other Ciancaglini brother,” and Frank said, “No way, they are brothers.” And I said, “Frank, you watch, this is how these siggys are.” And, sure enough, I was right. I always felt bad because their father was such a beautiful guy, a real man’s man. I felt bad that he had to watch this happen to his sons from prison.
On March 2, 1993, several gunmen burst into the Warfield Breakfast and Luncheonette Express, a small eatery owned by John Stanfa located only feet away from the warehouse that served as Stanfa’s headquarters
near the corner of Warefield Street and Wharton in the Grays Ferry section of South Philadelphia. Joseph “Joey Chang” Ciancaglini Jr., Stanfa’s 33-year-old underboss and the son of imprisoned Scarfo mob capo Joseph “Chickie” Ciancaglini, was exiting the walk-in freezer to begin the prep work for the morning breakfast rush when two gunmen ambushed him and hit him with six bullets at point-blank range.
Ciancaglini would survive, but he would never be the same. The young wise guy lost his eyesight in one eye, had his speech and hearing impaired, and was forced to walk with a cane following the hit.
Stanfa believed that the hit had come from the Young Turk crew headed by Ciancaglini’s own brother, Michael “Mikey Chang” Ciancaglini, and Joseph “Skinny Joey” Merlino, so he decided to strike back.
On August 5, 1993, two gunmen shot and killed Michael Ciancaglini and wounded Joey Merlino in South Philadelphia. Three weeks later, on August 31, 1993, a white van pulled up next to a car—containing John Stanfa, his son Joe, and an associate who was driving them—and opened fire, spraying bullets from two portholes in the side of the van into Stanfa’s car, wounding Stanfa’s son but failing to exact revenge for the death of Michael Ciancaglini.
Two months later, Nicky Scarfo Jr. was sentenced to seven years in state prison following his conviction in the racketeering case he was indicted for in 1990.
While Natale and Merlino masqueraded as self-appointed mob leaders in Philadelphia, Philip Leonetti was thriving in South Florida.
I spent the rest of 1993 and 1994 building up the landscaping business, but that was pretty much it. They brought me back to New Jersey in ’93 to testify against the Taccettas from North Jersey, but other than that I had very little contact with the government. I would hear from Jim Maher or Gary Langan once in a while, but for the most part life was good and things were quiet. It looked like all of the chaos from
La Cosa Nostra
was behind me.
I
N MARCH OF 1994, JOHN STANFA’S SHORT AND UNEVENTFUL TENURE AS THE BOSS OF THE PHILADELPHIA-ATLANTIC CITY
LA COSA NOSTRA
CAME TO AN ABRUPT END WHEN THE 53-YEAR-OLD SIGGY DON AND THE ENTIRE HIERARCHY OF HIS ORGANIZATION, INCLUDING HIS CONSIGLIERE, ANTHONY “COUSIN ANTHONY” PICCOLO, WERE ARRESTED ON MURDER AND RACKETEERING CHARGES AND HELD WITHOUT BAIL.
Stanfa’s 32-year-old archnemesis, “Skinny Joey” Merlino, would align himself and his Young Turk South Philly street crew with Ralph Natale—the onetime union official and former associate of Angelo Bruno—who, at 60, had spent the last 14 years in federal prison and at one time was Merlino’s cellmate.
When we were having that dispute with Ange over running the union in Atlantic City, Ralph Natale was one of the guys that Ange was pushing instead of us. John McCullough was the other. So after Ange died, we killed John McCullough and we sent word to Ralph Natale that if he ever stepped foot in Atlantic City, we were gonna kill him, and he knew we would have done it. That was the last I heard of him until he got out of jail, and he and Joey Merlino were running the mob. It was a joke; it wasn’t
La Cosa Nostra.
They made themselves the boss and underboss. Ralph Natale wasn’t even made, for Christ’s sake, so how’s he gonna be the boss of a
La Cosa Nostra
family? There is no fuckin’ way it was sanctioned by New York or the Commission. This is how bad things had gotten in Philadelphia; this is what it became.
Nicky Scarfo was now 65 years old, having spent the last seven years behind bars, the last four-and-a-half years in isolation at the federal prison in Marion, Illinois, with the Dapper Don himself, John Gotti, locked down in a nearby cellblock.
But Little Nicky’s situation was about to go from bad to worse, even though that didn’t seem possible.
In November 1994, the BOP opened the United States Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility in Florence, Colorado. The supermax prison, known as Florence ADX, was nicknamed the Alcatraz of the Rockies and was built to restrictively house the most dangerous prisoners in the US federal prison system.
Among the first to be transferred there was Nicodemo “Little Nicky” Scarfo, the jailed-for-life former boss of the Philadelphia–Atlantic City
La Cosa Nostra.
Scarfo was one of approximately 400 inmates sent to Florence ADX, where he was housed in an underground concrete cell in conditions that made Marion look like a five-star hotel.
In a series of letters written to his elderly mother between the winter of 1994 and the summer of 1996, Little Nicky’s writings offer a unique insight into the workings of his evil mind from behind bars.
In one letter, Scarfo discussed life at Florence ADX and his dissatisfaction with the prison job to which he had been assigned: