Testa was now the boss. His reign was short and ended horrifically.
* * *
On March 15, 1981, the mobster known as “the Chicken Man” doubled-parked his year-old Chevy on the street outside his South Philly home. Testa was fumbling with his house keys when a massive bomb detonated on the front porch. His front door was blown thirty feet inside the house, with its doorknob finally coming to rest in its kitchen.
The explosive device was packed with thirteen sticks of dynamite, carpenter’s nails and shotgun pellets. The results were beyond gruesome. “He looked like he went through a paper shredder,” noted one local cop.
Carrying $10,000 cash in his pocket, Testa was pronounced dead two hours after the 2:55 A.M. blast. An internecine Mob war was blamed for the killing. And, once again, it was Gigante who would reassemble pieces of the shattered Philadelphia family.
If Chin’s role in resolving the Bruno murder was in some part personal, his handling of the Testa hit was all business. Testa’s underboss, Pete Casella, was summoned north to meet with Gigante at the Triangle, like Caponigro before him.
Gigante, in his bathrobe, cut quickly to the chase. Casella admitted his part in the murder plot, but the Chin spared his life. He banished the underboss to Florida and spit at the disgraced amico nostro on his way out onto Sullivan Street.
Scarfo witnessed the whole thing. He was now alone inside the Triangle, face-to-face with the Chin.
“Well, Nick, I don’t see no one else in here,” Gigante finally declared. “I guess that makes you the new boss.”
Scarfo planted a pair of kisses on Gigante’s stubbled cheeks to become the new head of the Philadelphia family. They would be aligned now for good with the people who put them in charge, the Genoveses.
* * *
Not everyone involved in the Testa hit was as fortunate as Casella, who died in Florida at age seventy-six. The Chin signed off on Scarfo’s plan to whack two of the banished gangster’s sidekicks.
Co-conspirator Frank “Chickie” Narducci, forty-nine, died in a January 7, 1982, hail of bullets in an ambush while exiting his car on South Broad Street. And Rocco Marinucci, who allegedly built and detonated the devastating bomb, was found dead in a Philadelphia parking lot. He was shot in the head, neck and chest. The message of his role in the hit was made clear by the killers: three unexploded firecrackers were stuck inside his mouth.
“Now my uncle didn’t respect anybody,” said Leonetti. “But he respected Chin, and Chin respected my uncle, because he knew my uncle was a no-nonsense guy and that my uncle was a real gangster like him.”
Though he was loyal to the Chin, Nicodemo Scarfo proved to be disastrous. The new boss emerged as a killing machine, ordering murder upon murder during a truly insane reign atop the family. Law enforcement attention inevitably followed the trail of bodies, and Scarfo just as inevitably wound up in prison as his family fell apart.
Even worse, his reckless behavior—often in direct contradiction of the “Mob rules” that he so often cited—turned his nephew against Little Nicky. “Crazy Phil” became a devastating FBI informant, as the Chin would learn down the road.
The bloodletting, while the impetus for the Philadelphia Mob’s disintegration, became songwriting fodder for others.
The Bruno murder inspired a Philadelphia-based band, Marah, to give the Docile Don a shout-out in their song “Christian Street.” More memorably, the Testa assassination led Bruce Springsteen to open his “Atlantic City” with a terse summary of the murder: Well, they blew up the Chicken Man in Philly last night/ And they blew up his house, too.
CHAPTER 9
GOTTA SERVE SOMEBODY
BY THE TIME OF THE TESTA BLOODLETTING, THE CHIN HAD VERY quietly settled into the top spot with the Genovese family.
While the ceremony for Mob induction is fraught with symbolism—drops of blood, burning saints, vows of silence and eternal allegiance—Vincent Gigante’s installation as head of the family occurred against a backdrop of bedpans and heart monitors.
In 1981 the cigar-chomping Anthony Salerno was felled by a stroke. As he recuperated at New York University Hospital, a trio of top Genovese leaders arrived for a visit: Gigante, underboss Saverio “Sammy Black” Santora and consigliere-in-waiting Manna. Oddly enough, an ailing Lombardo was recovering in the same hospital at the time.
A decision was reached at the bedside summit: The two older dons would step aside to let the Chin take command of the family. In Mob parlance Salerno was “pulled down.” And Vito Genovese’s Greenwich Village protégé, nearly two decades after the old man’s death, would finally follow him into the family’s top spot.
Gigante assigned Genovese soldier Vincent “Fish” Cafaro to serve as Salerno’s right-hand man in an effort to both ease the transition—and give the Chin eyes on the outgoing boss.
In his first directive as the new don, the Chin ordered Cafaro to keep word of the change to himself—even within the Genovese family. Fat Tony Salerno would continue to stand as the public face of the family, handling commission meetings and drawing the heat from an increasing number of federal investigators.
“Gigante allowed Fat Tony to continue to front as the boss, letting the other families believe . . . that Fat Tony still controlled our brugad (family or borgata),” said Cafaro. “In fact, Fat Tony conferred with Chin on any major matters affecting the family.”
But Vincent Gigante was now unquestionably the man. His reign would stretch into the new millennium.
He did leak word of his promotion to one family: the Gambinos, headed by the equally powerful boss Paul Castellano. The Brooklyn-born Mafioso was a businessman, too, and made a fortune from a wholesale meat business. He was widely considered a Mob success story after taking the chair when Carlo Gambino died of natural causes in 1976.
Castellano had a family tie: His sister was Gambino’s wife. But there was no doubting his Mob pedigree: The six-two “Big Paul” was among the youngest attendees at the ill-fated 1957 Apalachin Mob meeting. And while he preferred peaceable settlements of Mob business, he embraced a more violent approach when necessary.
He was eventually linked to twenty-five murders as boss, including an order to murder his son-in-law after learning his daughter, Connie, was a victim of domestic abuse. The Castellano-approved divorce left Frank Amato’s remains chopped up and tossed into the Atlantic.
Salerno left the hospital and returned to his farm near Morris Levy’s place in Ghent. Once he felt good enough to go back to work at his Palma Boys Social Club in East Harlem, Fat Tony made sure to check with the new boss about his plans.
“I spoke to Gigante, and told him of Salerno’s desire to return,” said Cafaro. “Gigante told me Salerno could return after a few months, but added if Salerno was approached about anything ‘serious’ on his return, ‘I want to know about it.’”
The Chin was now running a powerful family with tentacles throughout the city and much of North New Jersey. There were fourteen Genovese capos, with about four hundred soldiers working for them. And he ran a tight ship: each soldier was required to check in with his captain at least once a week, and to hand over 10 percent of their earnings.
The family controlled a number of important unions, giving them power throughout the construction, shipping and concrete industries. Through capo Matty “the Horse” Ianniello, the Genoveses operated with impunity in the garbage industry. The family ran the waterfront in Manhattan and the Garden State, and made a fortune through their gambling operations.
Cafaro, for example, had seventy-two men running numbers and taking sports bets in East Harlem. He estimated taking about $80,000 a day in action, and personally cleared about $2 million in a good year.
* * *
Gigante’s cold-blooded approach to Mob management wasn’t limited to the streets of Philadelphia. The Chin ordered a pair of local hits around the same time: the murder of Genovese soldier Gerry Pappa, whacked in 1980 for the unauthorized murder of two Colombo made men, and the assassi
nation of Nat Masselli, identified as a snitch in 1982.
The process in the Masselli killing was simple, and took mere days between proposal and execution.
A Genovese soldier, Philly Buono, arranged a meeting with Genovese underboss Saverio “Sammy Black” Santora. When Santora arrived, he was handed a piece of paper inscribed with a single name: Nat Masselli.
“No good,” said Buono. “He’s a rat.”
“Could this kid hurt you?” asked Santora.
“Yeah,” said Buono. “I did a few things with this kid.”
“I am going to go down and see ‘the Skinny Guy’ (Manna) and the Chin,” said Santora, promising an answer within twenty-four hours.
Masselli was the son of another Genovese loyalist, Pellegrino “Butcher Boy” Masselli. But his lineage was no help in this case. Chin approved Buono’s request, and Santora headed back to East Harlem with word that the hit was approved.
On August 25, 1982, Nat Masselli was found shot to death behind the wheel of his Lincoln Continental in the north Bronx, near Van Cortlandt Park. A single bullet from a .38-caliber handgun was fired point-blank into the back of his head in classic Mob execution style.
As it turned out, he was cooperating with Special Prosecutor Leon Silverman’s investigation of Secretary of Labor Raymond Donovan. So was his dad, which explains why his family ties failed to win him a pass.
The Pappa hit was a case of murder as Mob business. He was suspected of killing Tommy “Shorty” Spero who went “missing” in 1980. Spero, a made member of the Colombo family, had actually recruited Gravano into the world of organized crime in 1968—although the Bull eventually landed with the Gambinos.
For Pappa, it was an opportunity to turn a quick profit. Spero was exacting payoffs or just straight robbing Brooklyn drug dealers, who in turn approached Pappa looking for a solution to their problem. Pappa took a $500,000 killing fee, and then whacked Spero.
With the help of two obscure Genovese associates, Peter “Petey” Savino and Bobby Ferenga, he buried the body in a brick warehouse on a grimy stretch of Brooklyn. Savino, also known as “Black Pete,” suggested the spot; he owned the building, which was undergoing renovation. The newly poured concrete would insure Shorty Spero spent eternal rest beneath the ramp outside a loading dock, wrapped in a sleeping bag with his feet pointing toward the entrance.
Except that it didn’t. And it was Savino, along with Ferenga, who would recount what happened in the most pivotal moment of Vincent Gigante’s decades in organized crime—one where he wasn’t even in the same borough, or aware of what was going down.
Pappa, a ferocious Genovese hit man known to his wife as “Pappa Bear,” became an instant suspect in the Spero killing. The Chin, approached by the Colombo family, signed off on his murder—even after assuring the thirty-six-year-old gangster that he was safe. The two met at a Manhattan restaurant, where Gigante questioned Pappa about Spero’s “disappearance.”
The Chin appeared satisfied with the answers. In truth, he was not.
On July 10, 1980, two killers carrying shotguns walked into the Villa 66 restaurant, one of Pappa’s favorite hangouts for the last sixteen years. The Brooklyn eatery was owned by Tieri, who was awaiting trial for racketeering and did not appreciate the extra aggravation caused by Spero’s death.
The killers arrived at 11 A.M., twenty minutes before Pappa rolled in for a late breakfast. The lone woman behind the counter was handcuffed to a sink as the gunmen waited. Pappa didn’t even have time to order his eggs before the shooters delivered a serving of lead.
The employee heard five blasts before one of the two killers told her the cops would arrive soon enough to turn her loose.
His decisive and callous style only enhanced the new Genovese boss’s reputation inside and outside the city. Angelo “Big Ange” Lonardo, head of the Cleveland family, recalled that word of the Chin’s steady ascension was known among the Mob cognoscenti.
“In the early ’80s, I knew Salerno to be the boss of the Genovese family, and I also knew that Vincent Gigante was the consigliere and was being groomed to be the boss,” he recalled. The Chin also represented the concerns of the Cleveland and Chicago families on the commission, giving his family the loudest voice on the ruling panel.
The Chin’s ascension coincided with the departure of one of the family’s oldest hands: Frank Tieri, his partner in the Colombo hit and Pappa’s death. The Funziola died in 1981 of natural causes, ending his run as the original “Teflon Don.” The seventy-seven-year-old Tieri beat nine cases, and passed away before spending a day in jail after his racketeering conviction.
* * *
Among the most profitable businesses inherited by the new boss was the Genovese family’s widespread interest on the New Jersey waterfront. One report indicated the Chin himself pulled in $2 million a year from the family’s control of the docks and its unions.
It was during the 1960s, around the time of the Summer of Love, that the city’s two most powerful Mob families found peace in a deal over the docks—one of the most important jewels in their crooked fiefdom.
Anthony Scotto, a politically connected union official who was friendly with Senator Robert F. Kennedy and Mayor John V. Lindsay, represented the Gambinos. George Barone, a cold-blooded killer associated with Fat Tony’s Harlem crew, stood up for the Genovese family.
The two men were the perfect emissaries, serving as both union officials and organized crime veterans. The pair divided the New Jersey and the city docks evenly: Brooklyn and Staten Island to the Gambinos, the Garden State and Manhattan to the Genoveses.
The negotiations, as Barone recalled years later, were quite civil. The Genovese rep didn’t even need to spring for the $24 that Peter Minuit paid for Manhattan. A bothersome Mob war was avoided, along with the accompanying investigation and bad press. Everyone was happy, and about to get happier—not to mention wealthier.
“Anthony Scotto sat down and discussed it [with me] and finalized it, and it came into effect,” he said. “Anthony Scotto and I . . . came to an agreement that was the way it would be, and I reported that fact to Mr. Tony Salerno.”
Control of the docks came with control of the International Longshoremen’s Union’s various locals. It was a momentous decision that allowed the Genovese family to turn the Jersey unions and docks into their personal piggy banks. A Mob tax was imposed on virtually every item passing through the port, resulting in higher prices for U.S. consumers—and bigger profits for the Chin’s family.
Under Gigante, the family’s grip on the Garden State side of the Hudson grew ironclad. Unions fell completely under the sway of organized crime, with the presidents of some locals dispatched with a bullet rather than a ballot.
There were tales of union workers told to open Christmas Club accounts, typically set up to insure the working class had a little extra cash to buy presents before December 25 rolled around. The money, instead, went to the Genovese family. It was the Cratchits kicking up to Ebenezer Scrooge.
“They had the waterfront sewn up,” said Leonetti. “Chin had it all.”
The crime family’s tentacles dominated three International Longshoremen’s Association locals: 1588, 1804-1 and 1235. Waterfront monitor Tom Gallagher recalled the days when Chin’s underlings Venero “Benny Eggs” Mangano and sidekick John “Johnny Sausage” Barbato, whose aliases conjured up visions of a Jersey diner, collected a flat $25 for every container unloaded. The methods evolved, but the result was inevitably the same: the cost was passed along to the public and the profits to the Genovese hierarchy.
“Somebody pays for it, and it’s always the customer,” said former NYPD commissioner Robert McGuire, who was summoned in the new millennium to clean up 1588.
Leonetti recalled the Chin rather effortlessly arranging a huge favor for a restaurateur under the thumb of the Philadelphia Mob.
“We had a friend who had a restaurant with us, we controlled him,” Leonetti recounted. “It was called the Deptford Tavern and it was ri
ght outside Philadelphia. We got him an appointment with somebody connected to Chin where he could buy food and fish cheap direct from the waterfront, no middleman.
“Our guy had to drive up there at three A.M., and he told ’em whatever he needed—fish, meats, whatever. He paid ’em, and they delivered. Everybody was happy.”
Local 1804-1 was founded by Barone, and 1235 was run for more than three decades by Michael “Mikey Cigars” Coppola— even after he became a suspect in a 1977 murder and went on the lam. He was linked nearly thirty years later to the killing of former local business agent Larry Ricci, a Genovese capo who disappeared in the middle of a federal trial. His body was found in the trunk of a car parked at the Huck Finn Diner in Westfield, New Jersey.
Bayonne-based Local 1588 offered the full package of organized crime corruption inside a single building on Kennedy Boulevard. Kickbacks, extortion and fraud were as regular as an annual Labor Day picnic at the lucrative Genovese outpost, where the ornate front windows were etched with an anchor and rope motif—the better to keep anyone from peering inside.
In 1954, when Marlon Brando was starring in the Oscar-winning On the Waterfront, a delegate from the local was already under investigation for receiving kickbacks from the rank and file. A half century later, the union leadership was accused of running things the same way—demanding cash in return for promotions, overtime and job training.
Union members were also forced to buy $500 tickets to the annual Christmas party, and then ordered to stay home unless personally invited.
John DiGilio—a former boxer turned mobster, like the Chin—was installed at the local in the mid-1970s. “He was a big moneymaker for the Genovese family,” recalled Lawrence Lezak of the Waterfront Commission.
He was also a flamboyant, unrepentant gangster who once punched out a codefendant in the hallways of a federal courthouse. DiGilio liked to run his mouth, too; a federal wiretap caught him boasting, “Bayonne is mine.”
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