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.
Ducktown
IN 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.
And now it would be home to the Scarfos and Leonettis.
Spanning a few short blocks, Ducktown covered the area of Texas, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, and Missouri Avenues, from Atlantic Avenue, to Fairmount Avenue, and to the bay. The neighborhood was named Ducktown for the duck houses that were built along the bay front. Poultry and waterfowl were raised there, and then slaughtered and later resold in neighborhood markets.
Ducktown was Atlantic City’s Little Italy. Within two blocks of where we lived on Georgia Avenue, you had the White House, which is the best sub shop in the world. Everyone has been there—the Beatles, Muhammad Ali, Frank Sinatra, you name it—they’ve all eaten at the White House.
You have Angelo’s and Angeloni’s, two of the city’s best Italian restaurants two blocks away. Before Angeloni’s became Angeloni’s it was called the Madrid. There was Dock’s Oyster House right around the corner, which had the best seafood in Atlantic City. Barbera’s Fish Market and the city’s top Italian bakeries—Rando’s, Formica’s, and Panarelli’s—were all a block or two away.
There was a coffee shop called Tommy Howe’s, right next to Angeloni’s on Arctic Avenue. The older men used to go in there and play the number, and there was always a card game going. When I was a little boy, my grandfather used to take me down there when he would go. Joe DiMaggio used to go in there every time he was in Atlantic City, and I’d see him hanging out with the guys from the neighborhood, playing cards and drinking espresso. This was not even 50 yards from where we lived.
On Missouri and Atlantic, you had Skinny D’Amato’s 500 Club, which at the time was the biggest nightclub around. People would come from Philadelphia and New York to go there. The lines would be around the block every night. Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr.—they all used to perform there. Skinny was a friend of my uncle, so we always got the best seats in the house.
I remember this guy we used to call Blah Blah Buckets. He was older and the neighborhood kids would tease him because he was slow. I think he worked at the 500 Club. He was nuts. He’d always be chasing someone up the street, cursing and threatening to kill them. He was out there every day, and the kids never stopped breaking his balls. Like clockwork, if you stayed on the street long enough, you’d see a group of kids running and Blah Blah chasing after them, threatening to kill them.
I had a lot of fun growing up there; this was my home.
Philip’s weekly regimen at that time included waking up at 6:30 a.m. on Fridays and walking a block and a half to Barbera’s Fish Market on Mississippi Avenue, where he would pick up fresh fish, and then deliver it to the nuns who worked and lived at St. Michael’s, the neighborhood’s Catholic Church and the namesake of the adjacent school that Philip attended. The back of the school was directly across the street from the Scarfo compound.
Everyone in the neighborhood went to St. Mike’s. I went to Mass every morning before school and I’d go on Sundays with my grandmother.
After my uncle got out of jail for killing the guy in the Oregon Diner, he left South Philadelphia and he moved in with us on Georgia Avenue. Living there at the time were my grandparents, my mother, myself, my uncle and his wife, Mimi, and right around this time, Nicky Jr. was born. Things were quiet for a while, and a couple years later I was getting ready for high school.
Upon graduating from St. Michael’s, Philip would move on to Holy Spirit High School located in Absecon, New Jersey, less than 10 miles from the Scarfo family home in Ducktown.
I was on the basketball team at Holy Spirit with a lot of kids from the neighborhood, and we were a very good team. My uncle used to come to the games and sit in the bleachers and he would take bets on the games right there in the gymnasium. There was even this guy named Hoffman who used to write the betting lines on our games in the local paper. When our team played it was a very big deal.
A fellow Ducktown resident and Holy Spirit teammate named Chris Ford would eventually go on to Villanova University, and then to the NBA, where he played for both the Detroit Pistons and the Boston Celtics. After retiring as a player, Ford coached NBA teams in Boston, Milwaukee, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia.
Chris Ford was a big deal to all of the kids in Ducktown because he was such an amazing athlete and he was one of us. He grew up right there on Missouri Avenue on top of Capone’s Bar. His brother Harry eventually moved into one of the apartments in our building and would always tell us who was coming around when we weren’t there. He stood all day on the porch above our office—which was on the ground floor of 28 North Georgia Avenue—smoking a cigarette and just watching what was going on in the neighborhood. Who was coming, who was going. He’d also help my mother and grandmother if me or my uncle weren’t around. My uncle would always have me give him a few bucks.
While Ducktown may have been energetic and thriving in the mid- to late ’60s, the rest of Atlantic City was desolate and 20 years past its prime as the World’s Playground. Nicky Scarfo was surviving on traditional mob rac
kets like bookmaking, extortion, and loan sharking to make ends meet.
Skinny Razor died in 1966, so my uncle became the top mob guy in Atlantic City. He basically inherited what Skinny Razor had and Ange gave him the okay to run it how he saw fit. For the most part, he was the only game in town. He was making book and writing small loans, but he was struggling, as there wasn’t a whole lot going on down there at the time. Him and a friend of his named Tommy Butch opened a place called the Penguin Club, and he was also involved in a couple of dirty book stores with this guy named Alvin Feldman, who called himself the King of the Jews.
He wasn’t making a lot of money, but to him at that time, the money wasn’t important. He would always say, “The money will come, but this thing is about respect and honor, it’s not about money.” He was making a name for himself within the Bruno organization and that’s what mattered the most to him—his reputation.
While the nuns at Holy Spirit were teaching Philip the basic curriculum of English, algebra, and history, his Uncle Nick continued to educate him in the ways of the mob.
He was constantly talking to me about La Cosa Nostra. It was all the time. He told me: in this life you never rat, you keep your mouth shut, and you mind your own business. He told me, “We don’t ever discuss our business with women and we don’t discuss our life with outsiders. You don’t tell nobody nothing; it’s just me and you talking.” He would say, “If you want to get involved with me in this thing, just because I’m your uncle, I can’t help you.” He told me I had to do things on my own and be my own man. At this point, I was ready. I wanted to be like him. I wanted to follow in his footsteps.
With his uncle ready to begin his second stretch in jail, Philip would have his chance to do just that.
Yardviile
IN 1971, AS PHILIP WAS GRADUATING FROM HIGH SCHOOL, NICKY SCARFO WAS CALLED TO TESTIFY BEFORE THE NEW JERSEY STATE COMMISSION OF INVESTIGATION (SCI) THAT WAS INVESTIGATING THE INFILTRATION OF ORGANIZED CRIME INTO VARIOUS LABOR UNIONS.
After refusing to answer any questions, including his name, Scarfo was charged with contempt and sentenced to an indefinite prison term. He was sent to Yardville State Prison just outside of Trenton, New Jersey, with several other powerful mobsters, including the boss of the Philadelphia mob, Angelo Bruno.
Scarfo could have been released at any time had he honored the subpoena and testified before the SCI, but instead he followed the same rule that he had taught his nephew Philip and refused to testify.
Scarfo would spend the next two years behind bars.
Already a proven killer, it was now known that Little Nicky could keep his mouth shut.
Besides Scarfo and Bruno, there was longtime New York mob leader Jerry Catena, Trenton mob captain Nicky Russo, North Jersey mobster Ralph “Blackie” Napoli and Genovese crime family capos Anthony “Little Pussy” Russo, Joseph “Bayonne Joe” Zicarelli, and John “Johnny Coca-Cola” Lardiere, and an up-and-coming Genovese soldier named Louis “Bobby” Manna.
Like Scarfo and Bruno, the others were also jailed for refusing to testify before the State Commission of Investigation. Organized crime investigators and members of the press dubbed them the Yardville 9.
For Scarfo, the two-year prison sentence did wonders for his career. Not only did he get valuable face time with Philadelphia mob boss Angelo Bruno, but he also got close to men deeply entrenched in mob operations in North Jersey and New York and forged bonds that he would exploit to his advantage in the years to come.
For Philip Leonetti, his uncle’s prison term would help jump-start his career in the underworld, as he acted as an emissary for both his uncle and for Bruno, and ingratiated himself with the mob heavyweights from New York, whom Philip would interact with when visiting his uncle.
When my uncle was in Yardville it allowed him to get closer to Angelo Bruno, which was a good thing. Back then, my uncle had a lot of respect for Ange, and Ange respected my uncle because he knew my uncle was a killer, a gangster, and that my uncle was 100-percent committed to La Cosa Nostra. Once a week I used to drive my grandmother to see my uncle and I would take Ange’s wife to see him. On the way back I would take them both out to lunch. Before long, my uncle and Ange had me taking messages back to their guys on the street in South Philly and Atlantic City. Guys like Phil Testa and Chuckie Merlino. At the end of each visit, me, my uncle and Ange would huddle in a corner and they would tell me who to see and what to say. I did exactly what they told me. I was still a teenager, 18, 19 years old. My uncle also started getting real close to guys like Jerry Catena, Nick Russo, Blackie Napoli, and Bobby Manna.
Gerardo “Jerry” Catena was a powerful captain in the Genovese crime family and had been a prominent underworld figure for more than 50 years, after joining forces with Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky in the 1920s during the legendary Castellammarese War.
Catena was the influential boss of the Genovese family’s operation in Northern New Jersey and was one of four men who ran the family via a structured ruling panel following the imprisonment of family namesake Vito Genovese in 1959.
Raffaele “Ralph” Napoli, known as Blackie, was a mob solider associated with the Philadelphia mob’s North Jersey operation based out of the Down Neck section of Newark.
Napoli’s capo and direct superior was the powerful and treacherous Sicilian born Antonio “Tony Bananas” Caponigro, who would become Angelo Bruno’s consigliere and the boss of the family’s North Jersey crew.
Louis “Bobby” Manna was a rising star in the Genovese family and was a trusted member of the notorious Vincent “The Chin” Gigante’s Greenwich Village crew.
My uncle and Bobby Manna became extremely close when they were in Yardville. They were the same age and spent a lot of time together. They would walk the track together and talk about their future plans. They were both considered up and comers in the mob and they were both very committed to La Cosa Nostra. My uncle used to tell me, “Bobby is gonna be big one day, you watch.” He would tap his index finger to his head and say “Bobby has this,” meaning he had brains, that he was intelligent. My uncle would always say, “In La Cosa Nostra, in this thing, you need this,” and he would tap his index finger to his head, “and you need this,” and he would shape his finger like a gun and point it to the ground.
A few years after Scarfo and Manna were released from Yardville, Nicky Scarfo’s prediction came true about Bobby Manna when Manna’s close friend, Vincent “The Chin” Gigante, became the boss of the Genovese family (and would eventually become the most powerful mob leader in the United States during the 1980s) and immediately named the “intelligent” Bobby Manna his consigliere, or third in command.
The relationship Nicky Scarfo cultivated with Bobby Manna during their “walk-talks” at Yardville State Prison would benefit Little Nicky and by extension Philip and play a profound role in shaping the Philadelphia–Atlantic City mob in the years and decades to come.
Philip had graduated from high school and was now becoming immersed in his uncle’s secret world, La Cosa Nostra.
During the time my uncle was in Yardville, I flew down to Florida to see my father. I hadn’t seen him since he left me and my mother when I was a little boy. He had an Italian restaurant in the Orlando area called Leonetti’s. We spent a few days together, but that was basically the extent of my relationship with him. He died a few years later and that was it. From that point on, I was with my uncle every day.
College was out; life in La Cosa Nostra was in.
L’inizio (The Beginning)
HIS UNCLE’S PRISON TERM HAD BROUGHT PHILIP INTO THE MOB’S INNER CIRCLE. HE WAS ACTING AS A DRIVER FOR ANGELO BRUNO’S WIFE AND WAS DELIVERING MESSAGES FROM HIS UNCLE AND BRUNO TO THEIR RESPECTIVE CREWS IN SOUTH PHILADELPHIA AND ATLANTIC CITY.
He was rubbing shoulders with men like Jerry Catena, Nicky Russo, Blackie Napoli, and Bobby Manna.
He wasn’t even 20 years old.
On the days I didn’t drive my grandmother and Ange’s wife to Yardville, I’d
go by myself to see my uncle or Ange and they would give me messages to take back to Philadelphia. Usually I’d bring the messages to Phil Testa or Chuckie Merlino. My uncle would also give me messages for the Blade, who was in Atlantic City.
Philip “Chicken Man” Testa was a man whose star was on the rise in the Philadelphia mob under Angelo Bruno and would soon be named the family’s underboss.
When Scarfo’s mentor Felix “Skinny Razor” DiTullio died in 1966, his immediate supervisor or captain became an old-time South Philly mobster named Alfred “Freddie” Iezzi, who was close with Testa. By extension, Scarfo had also become close with Phil Testa. Testa’s son Salvatore, who was known on the streets as Salvie, was only a few years younger than Philip.
Mafia Prince: Inside America's Most Violent Crime Family Page 4
