Read Mafia Prince: Inside America's Most Violent Crime Family Online
Authors: Phil Leonetti,Scott Burnstein,Christopher Graziano
Tags: #Mafia, #Nonfiction, #Retail, #True Crime
It’s sad to say, but my uncle looked down on his own father because he was a hardworking guy and not a gangster. He was never outwardly disrespectful to his father, but they weren’t very close. My uncle’s only ambition in life was to be a gangster, even from the time he was young.
In the late 1940s and early ’50s, Scarfo began his mob apprenticeship, working as a bartender and a bookmaker at Piccolo’s 500, where his schooling in the ways of
La Cosa Nostra
began under the direction of his uncles, the Buck brothers. While Nicholas “Nicky Buck” Piccolo was teaching his nephew about the ins and outs of mob business life—like how to be a bookmaker and run numbers—Felix “Skinny Razor” DiTullio, one of the mob’s most feared hit men, was teaching him how to be a killer.
My uncle’s first hit, he did it with Skinny Razor. There was a guy in South Philly who had a fruit stand; they called him the Huckster. The Huckster’s brother had a problem with Skinny Razor and Skinny Razor got the okay to kill him. So him and my uncle went to the guy’s store in South Philadelphia. It was during a real bad snowstorm and the guy let them into the store and they killed him. They stabbed him to death. When they were done, they cut his balls off and put them in the guy’s mouth. That’s how my uncle learned about killing, from being around Skinny Razor.
Felix “Skinny Razor” DiTullio took an early liking to the young Scarfo, and Little Nicky was an eager student. Bonding in bloodlust, Skinny Razor taught Scarfo the art of the mob hit. It was a skill he would cherish, continue to hone, and eventually master.
By 1954, at the age of 25, Nicodemo “Little Nicky” Scarfo had acquired the reputation in the underworld that he had sought: he was known as a mad-dog killer, thanks in large part to the teachings of his mob mentor, Skinny Razor DiTullio. Scarfo was proposed for membership in
La Cosa Nostra
by DiTullio and his uncle Nicholas “Nicky Buck” Piccolo, and as a result was formally inducted into the mob by then-Philadelphia mob boss Joseph Ida at an official making ceremony held at a restaurant and lounge
named Sans Souci in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, just over the bridge from Center City Philadelphia.
Two of Scarfo’s uncles, Tony and Mike Piccolo—the younger brothers of Nicholas “Nicky Buck” Piccolo—were also inducted into
La Cosa Nostra
at the same ceremony.
Nicky Scarfo had achieved his dream: he was a bona fide wise guy, a made man.
The blueberry farms of Hammonton were ancient history. He would never again be a working stiff, a civilian, a “jerk off.”
Back then it was almost unheard of to be made at such a young age in Philadelphia. My uncle was only 25. His uncles, Tony and Mike Buck, who were made at the same time, were twice his age—they were close to 50 at the time.
Even then, Nicky Scarfo was on the fast track in
La Cosa Nostra.
Because he was with Skinny Razor, my uncle got to meet a lot of gangsters in North Jersey and New York and they respected him because Skinny Razor had a reputation of being a stone-cold killer and everyone knew it. He was both feared and respected on the streets, and my uncle looked up to him. He wanted to be just like him.
In 1957, with Pasquale out of the picture, Nancy and four-year-old Philip would leave Philadelphia and settle into the Scarfo family compound in Atlantic City, which at the time was more than a decade past its prime.
Nancy would take a job in Atlantic City working for the Bureau of Children Services, which functioned like an adoption agency and provided care for underprivileged children. With his father out of the picture, Philip gravitated towards Nancy’s older brother, his Uncle Nick, as a father figure.
At that time, it was just my mother, my grandparents, and myself living on Georgia Avenue. My father was gone. I was just a little boy, maybe five or six years old. My uncle was still living in South Philadelphia, but he used to come down a lot to see us or to do business with Skinny Razor.
In the 1950s and ’60s, Felix “Skinny Razor” DiTullio was a mob captain, a
caporegime,
and the Philadelphia mob’s top guy at the Jersey Shore. And Nicky Scarfo was quickly becoming his No. 1 protégé.
When Philip was seven years old, his great-grandmother, Catherine Scarfo’s mother, died and the wake and funeral remain etched in Philip’s memory more than five decades later.
Back then, the Italian wakes lasted three days. I remember my grandmother and her brothers, the Piccolo brothers—Joe, Mike, and Nick—were standing next to the coffin, and all of these people were coming in to pay their respects. I was standing in the audience with my Uncle Nick and in walked a man with several guys around him. Everybody was going over to pay their respects to him and shake his hand or kiss him on the cheek. I remember this man looked very important, like the president. So I said to my uncle, “Who’s that guy?” And he said, “That’s Angelo Bruno, he’s the boss of the family.” And even though I was only seven years old, I understood what he was talking about.
As I got older I started spending more time with my uncle. He was like my father because my real father was gone. When we were alone he would talk to me about what
La Cosa Nostra
was all about, how we were different from everyone else, and how we had certain rules that we had to follow. This is how I was raised, from the time I was a little boy.
When Philip was eight years old, his Uncle Nick was given an order by his mentor, Felix “Skinny Razor” DiTullio. A wayward mob associate named Dominick “Reds” Caruso had disrespected Joseph “Joe the Boss” Rugnetta, the consigliere, or counselor, to the family’s boss, Angelo Bruno. And Bruno had handpicked Skinny Razor’s up-and-coming protégé, Nicky Scarfo, to oversee Caruso’s murder. Scarfo was happy to oblige and show Bruno and DiTullio that he was an able killer, a real gangster.
To kill Reds Caruso, Salvatore “Chuckie” Merlino, one of Scarfo’s oldest friends, would go to Caruso’s home in South Philadelphia and tell him that Scarfo wanted to see him. Like a scene out of the very type of movie he loved so much as a young boy, Scarfo lulled Caruso into a state of relaxation, taking him to a bar in Vineland, New Jersey, that was owned by an associate of the Bruno crime family.
Two more Bruno associates, Santo “Little Santo” Romeo and Anthony Casella, were inside the bar, with Romeo working as a bartender.
Shortly after arriving at the bar, Scarfo wasted little time in carrying out the hit. Little Nicky pulled out a handgun and shot Caruso six times at point-blank range. But Reds Caruso was still alive.
My uncle told me the guy was lying there after he shot him and he said, “You got me, Nick,” and my uncle grabbed an ice pick from the bar and he stabbed him over and over again in the back until he died. He told me he stabbed him so hard that the ice pick got stuck in his back and part of it broke off when he tried to pull it out.
But killing Caruso wasn’t enough; the Sicilian-born Bruno had wanted him killed in a certain way to send a message. And while he wanted Scarfo to oversee the murder, he wanted another up-and-coming mobster to actually commit it.
Ange had ordered that this Reds Caruso be strangled to death, not shot, because he had talked fresh to Joe the Boss, and he wanted Santo Idone to strangle him and send a message that his mouth had gotten him killed. These siggys were big into sending messages.
But what happened is, Santo Idone was late getting to the bar and by the time he got there, my uncle had already killed the guy. Now when the boss says he wants a guy killed and he wants it done a certain way, that’s the way you gotta do it. So when Santo got there, my uncle had him choke the corpse with some rope and leave marks around the neck so just in case they found the body, Ange would know that he had been strangled like he ordered.
Scarfo would also now have a lifelong ally in Santo Idone, who was born in Calabria, the same part of Italy where Scarfo’s family came from.
My uncle told me that Santo told him, “Thanks for covering for me, Nick. I won’t forget it,” and my uncle said, “You and me are Calabrese; we gotta stick together around all these siggys.”
The hit team led by Scarfo would leave Caruso’s dead body inside the bar as another team removed the body and moved it to another location,
where a third team was supposed to dig a hole and bury the body, which was doused in lime to accelerate its decomposition.
But what they did was they got a fourth group to dig up the body and move it somewhere else, so that way the guys who did the killing and the guys who moved the body and the group that buried the body the first time had no idea where the body was, in case someone flipped and ratted them out.
As Caruso’s bullet-ridden corpse, still with part of an ice pick lodged in his back, lay buried in a makeshift grave somewhere in South Jersey, Scarfo still had work to do.
Skinny Razor wanted my uncle to take the truck that had been used to transport the body back to Philadelphia so it could be destroyed—so no one could trace any evidence from the killing. My uncle decided to take me along because he thinks that he would look less suspicious driving this truck if he was with a little boy. I was eight years old at the time. As we were driving he told me that he had killed a very bad man the night before and he needed my help in getting rid of the truck they used to transport the body. Here I was, an eight-year-old kid, and these guys that I looked up to, they needed my help. I felt like I was doing what was right, because my uncle said the man they killed was a very bad man who had broken the rules, and when you break the rules, this is what happens. This was what
La Cosa Nostra
was all about—the rules. I understood this from a very early age. My uncle was always talking about the rules and how you can’t break them. I remember my uncle describing how he killed the guy, how he shot him and stabbed him with an ice pick, and what they guy said to him. Looking back, I didn’t think there was anything wrong with it.
In Philip’s young world, everyday life and organized crime were interchangeable.
My uncle taught me about our life, the mob,
La Cosa Nostra,
from an early age. It was natural, almost instinctive for me. I remember just knowing what it meant without someone having to
spell it all out for me. I understood what it was.
All of the men I looked up to were part of this world, so naturally I wanted to be a part of it, too. When I was ten, my uncle taught me how to shoot. He used to take me hunting and we would shoot .22s. He said it was important for me to know how to use a gun in our life. Even though I was this young kid, my Uncle Nick always talked to me like I was an adult. He didn’t treat me like I was ten or eleven. Everything he did, I wanted to do. I wanted to be just like him. In my mind, he was a man of honor and respect.
Obviously, my uncle wasn’t your average uncle. I mean, he wasn’t out in the yard playing catch with me or coaching my Little League baseball team. He was teaching me how to shoot guns and how to commit a murder, and then how to successfully cover your tracks. That’s the kind of stuff I grew up around. And it seemed completely normal to me. I felt like Marilyn on that old TV show,
The Munsters,
the one human member of the family who lived amongst all of these strange characters, but I didn’t think twice about it. It’s scary to think how natural it all was.
As Philip got ready for junior high school at St. Michaels in Atlantic City, his uncle had to deal with his first serious brush with the law.
In May of 1963, my uncle and Chuckie Merlino were in the Oregon Diner in South Philadelphia. My uncle gets into an argument with this longshoreman, this big Irish guy. And my uncle’s little; he’s only 5′5″ and weighs like 135 pounds. So he and the longshoreman get into an argument over a booth and the guy grabs my uncle by the throat and starts choking him. As he’s choking him, he pushes my uncle up against the counter. My uncle is getting ready to pass out and he reaches on the counter behind him and grabs a butter knife and stabs the guy in the chest. The knife went right into his heart and the guy died. My uncle used to love to tell this story about how he gutted this big Irish guy. The way he would tell the story, you’d think he was talking about hitting a home run to win the World Series. He would act it out. He’d take his hands and simulate what the guy had done by putting his hands around his neck, showing how they guy had choked him, then he’d show how he grabbed the knife and thrusted it right into the guy’s heart. He was
so proud of himself that he killed this guy, who was bigger than him, with a butter knife.
Nicky Scarfo would plead guilty to manslaughter for the killing of William Dugan, the Irish guy in the diner. His sentence was a mere 23 months in prison. He was out in less than a year and would join the rest of his family in Atlantic City, leaving Philadelphia behind . . . for now.
I
N THE MID-1960S, DUCKTOWN WAS A SMALL, CLOSE-KNIT ATLANTIC CITY NEIGHBORHOOD POPULATED BY PROMINENT WORKING-CLASS ITALIAN FAMILIES WITH NAMES LIKE RANDO, FORMICA, DIGIACINTO, MATTEO, BASILE, SACCO, AND MANCUSO.