My mother used to call him Adolf behind his back, that’s how bad it was.
He would get angry and tell a whole group of guys, “Don’t fuckin’ test me ’cause I’ll bring in a squad of guys from New York and wipe everybody in this room right off the fuckin’ map. I won’t leave none of you guys standing.”
He’s talking about killing our whole family and these guys knew he’d do it. And guess what, he would have. I didn’t understand it. Before we were only killing bad people. Now, we’re killing everybody. It didn’t make sense.
Now we’re gonna kill Salvie? He was one of us. He loved my uncle. He believed in this thing, La Cosa Nostra. He killed for it and he almost died for it. Salvie looked up to my uncle as almost a second father.
Right before Phil Testa died, we were having dinner and he turned to my uncle. I’ll never forget it, he said, “Nick, if God forbid something were to happen to me, please be sure and always take care of Salvie.”
And my uncle said, “God forbid that would happen, I would treat him as one of my own.”
That kept replaying over and over in my head, when he said that he would treat Salvie as one of his own, and now he’s gonna have him killed.
Who was gonna be next? Me?
Several factors contributed to the animosity that Nicky Scarfo felt toward Salvie Testa in those early months of 1984.
Salvie Testa had ruffled Scarfo’s feathers when he became engaged to Chuckie Merlino’s daughter. Despite the fact that both Testa and Merlino were like family to him, the increasingly paranoid mob dictator saw it as a power play by either Testa or Merlino—or perhaps both—and became obsessed with stopping the marriage.
Salvie Testa’s stock had been on the rise in the underworld since he personally avenged the death of his father by murdering two of the men responsible in such sensational fashion. Testa was, in a lot of ways, like a younger version of Scarfo himself. He had developed a loyal crew of killers with the Young Executioners, and he enjoyed an almost rabid, rockstartype following among many in the Philly underworld.
All of this made Scarfo see Testa as a potential threat to his power, and this paranoia would ultimately lead to Testa’s brutal downfall.
The tipping point in Scarfo’s betrayal of Salvie Testa came in April 1984 after an article in the Wall Street Journal referred to the ruggedly handsome and charismatic Testa as the “fastest-rising mobster in the United States.”
When Testa got cold feet and broke off the engagement to Merlino’s daughter, the always-plotting Scarfo saw an opportunity to manipulate the situation and turn his inner circle, and ultimately the rest of the family, against Testa for disrespecting the daughter of the underboss.
Both Chuckie and Salvie loved my uncle. They were both loyal. They would have never gone against him, but he had it in his head that Salvie marrying Chuckie’s daughter meant they were teaming up to eventually challenge him.
So when things started to go south with Salvie and Chuckie’s daughter, my uncle used it to play both sides against each other and turn Chuckie against Salvie, which he can then use to get Chuckie to back his plan and help him kill Salvie.
What a lot of people didn’t know was that right before Salvie broke off the engagement, Salvie talked to my uncle on the phone when he was in prison and he basically asked my uncle for permission to end it with Chuckie’s daughter. Salvie was trying to do the right thing. He wasn’t trying to disrespect Chuckie or his daughter. They were both young. It didn’t work out; that’s all it was.
Now my uncle’s telling him from jail: “You don’t gotta marry her. You should do what you want, spread yourself around. Don’t worry, when I come home I’ll talk to Chuckie. He’ll understand.”
At the same time, he’s in Chuckie’s ear telling him that what Salvie was doing had dishonored his daughter, was a slap in his face, and that he shouldn’t stand for that kind of disrespect to his daughter and his family.
This cocksucker was stirring the pot. He wanted Salvie to think he was okay with it; meanwhile, he was getting Chuckie all worked up about it.
My uncle started to say things about Salvie like, “This kid is getting too big for his britches” or “This kid’s acting like he wants to be the boss—we’ll see about that.” Or he would say, “This kid is full of treason” or “This kid’s foolin’ with drugs,” or “These siggys are always up to something.” And all of it was nonsense.
I remember that whole summer, Salvie was on edge. He knew that something was up, he just didn’t know what it was. And here I am, one of his best friends and there was nothing I could do to help him.
I wish I could have saved him, but I couldn’t.
By the summer of 1984, Nicky Scarfo’s plan had worked. Not only was Chuckie Merlino backing his play, he was supervising the plot.
At one point, Nicky Crow and Charlie White had the contract, but they couldn’t get it done. Then Faffy and Tommy DelGiorno had it, but they couldn’t get it done either.
Salvie’s antenna was up and even though he was a lot younger than all of those guys, he knew the street 100 times better. He wasn’t gonna be an easy mark.
Killing the leader of the Young Executioners crew wouldn’t be easy.
Attempted hits were set up to kill Testa at various locations, including: a South Philadelphia health club where he worked out; a beauty salon he owned; mobster Faffy Iannarella’s house, where a baby shower had been scheduled; a mob gathering at Tommy DelGiorno’s condominium on the Ocean City Boardwalk; aboard Salvie’s boat, which was docked in Ventnor; and an exit ramp in Northfield coming off of the Garden State Parkway. But all of the plans failed.
The setting of the next plot to kill Salvie Testa showed just how far the Scarfo mob had deteriorated.
Joe Punge was Salvie’s best friend. Joe Punge had a brother, Anthony, who was with us. They were part of Salvie’s crew. Their father, old man Pungitore, who we called the Blonde Babe, was a made guy and had been around since Ange was boss.
The Blonde Babe’s sister died, Joe Punge’s aunt, and the whole family was going to the wake, which was in South Philadelphia, to pay their respects. My uncle was very big on this. Nobody ever missed a wake.
Chuckie had gotten involved in the planning of Salvie’s murder and decided he wanted to bang him right there in the funeral parlor at the wake and that he wanted Tory Scafidi, who hung around his son Joey, to do the shooting.
And guess what, my uncle loves the idea. This is how crazy we had gotten. We’re gonna shoot a guy inside a funeral parlor during a wake for an old lady. Are you kidding me? That’s honorable? That’s respectful?
So what happens is the night before Tory got into a fight at a bar and he got pinched. When my uncle finds out about it he went nuts. He said, “These fuckin’ kids, you can’t count on ’em for nothin’.”
But as in the Hollywood gangster film life that life in the Scarfo mob had come to resemble, the show must go on.
So Chuckie assigns the killing to Charlie White, and he tells Charlie White to bring a .38 to the funeral parlor, which he did.
The plan was to shoot Salvie inside the bar area. This funeral parlor had a little lounge, and there was a small bar that was separate from the room where the body was.
But when we were there, the place was packed; you couldn’t even move. We are all at the bar—me, my uncle, Chuckie, Lawrence. Salvie was 10 feet away from us. My uncle told Chuckie, “Call it off, this place is no good,” and Chuckie made eye contact with Charlie White, who was across the room waiting for the signal, and Chuckie shook his head no, and Charlie White just disappeared into the crowd.
So now it’s time to leave, and they have a receiving line outside for the Pungitore family, and we all go through it together, one at a time, the whole mob. As we are going through the line, the guys are gathering near our car so that they can greet my uncle and Chuckie, the boss and the underboss, as a sign of respect. Me, my uncle, Chuckie, and Lawrence were the last four guys in the line—it was Lawrence, Chuckie,
then my uncle, then me. I was always in front of, next to, or behind my uncle—we never deviated from that. I was his eyes, making sure no one was sneaking up on him.
So we are going through the line of our guys and everyone is there lined up, the whole mob: Faffy, Tommy Del, the Narducci brothers, Nicky Crow, Charlie White, the Milano brothers, the Grande brothers, Joe Ligambi, even the Pungitores left their receiving line to come over and pay their respects. All the other guys were there and all the way at the end of this line was Salvie. He was standing right next to the limousine we drove up in.
So we are going through the line and we are hugging and kissing everyone, and we are now coming up to Salvie, and when Chuckie goes in to kiss him, he grabs both of Salvie’s cheeks and kisses him square on the lips for like 10 seconds, and then pulls away and is looking at him with a crazy look in his eye. Salvie looked stunned and all the guys around, their mouths were hanging wide open.
It was the kiss of death.
Salvie knew after that my uncle was going to kill him. There was no more doubt about it.
Scarfo decided it was time to up the ante and he called for another meeting with Tommy DelGiorno to discuss a revised plan to murder Salvie Testa.
My uncle tells Tommy, “Give the order to Joe Punge.” Now Joe Punge was Salvie’s best friend, he was his right-hand man. They were together every day since they were kids. The whole time this is going on, nobody in Salvie’s crew knew we were going to kill him. They knew there was some tension, but no one knew exactly what was going on.
A few days later, Tommy Del comes back and he says to my uncle, “Joe Punge said he’d do it, but he doesn’t want to pull the trigger.”My uncle laughed and said, “What’s the fuckin’ difference?”
The plot to murder Salvie Testa had become more sinister by enlisting Joseph “Joe Punge” Pungitore, Testa’s best friend, to lure him into what was to be a death trap.
Joe Punge knows the rules. If he tells Salvie or he drags his feet, my uncle will kill him, his brother, and his father, because they are all connected to La Cosa Nostra.
Pungitore enlisted two other members of the Young Executioners crew to carry out the killing of their friend and leader.
Joe Punge brought Wayne and Joey Grande in on the plot, and he set up a meeting at a candy store on Passyunk Avenue in South Philly, and when he and Salvie arrived, Wayne pulled out a gun and shot Salvie in the back of his head. I heard that Wayne then stood over him and shot him again to make sure he was dead.
He was.
Hours later, another crew of bloodthirsty Scarfo mobsters would go to the candy shop and retrieve Testa’s corpse, which was then loaded into a van and dumped on the side of a trash-strewn road in a wooded area just outside of Washington Township, New Jersey, a 20-minute ride from South Philadelphia.
Later that night Nicky Scarfo hosted a mob feast at an Italian restaurant in South Philadelphia, where members of the gang toasted Testa’s murder. Scarfo also introduced his gang to the two Mexican pistoleros who had watched his back in El Paso, after he had Leonetti fly the two men up for the celebration.
I hadn’t seen my uncle that happy since we killed Vincent Falcone. The whole thing made me sick to my stomach.
The following day, September 15, 1984, authorities found the body of “the fastest rising mobster in the United States” hogtied and in a ditch off of Sicklerville Road in Camden County, about 50 yards from the Atlantic City Expressway.
Testa’s tennis whites, the clothes that he was wearing at the time of his execution, had been so badly stained by blood that they had turned a crimson red.
It was a macabre scene and told you everything you needed to know about life in the Scarfo mob.
Nobody was safe.
Heading South for the Winter
AS 1984 DREW TO A CLOSE, THERE WAS A LOT MORE GOING ON IN AND AROUND THE SCARFO MOB BESIDES THE MURDER OF SALVIE TESTA.
Harry “the Hunchback” Riccobene, who was serving concurrent sentences on a federal racketeering conviction and a state charge on unlawful possession of a handgun, got dealt even worse news when he learned that three of his top aides—Joseph Pedulla, Victor DeLuca, and his own brother, Mario “Sonny” Riccobene—had worked out deals with the feds and were set to testify against him in a new racketeering indictment that included the 1982 murder of Scarfo family consigliere Frank Monte.
Harry “the Hunchback” was likely going to die in prison.
Two other Scarfo associates, Raymond “Long John” Martorano and Al Daidone, met similar fates after both had been arrested and convicted of the December 1980 murder of union boss John McCullough, with both receiving life sentences as a result, which would later be overturned.
Like Riccobene, Martorano and Daidone had been betrayed by one of their own. Willard “Junior” Moran, the triggerman in the McCullough hit, pled guilty and cooperated in the prosecution of both men.
Atlantic City mayor Michael Matthews and former Local 54 official Frank Lentino were convicted in federal court in connection with their scheme to siphon money from the sale of the old city dump known as the H tract to a would-be casino developer who turned out to be an undercover FBI agent.
Matthews was given the opportunity to cooperate against Philip Leonetti, who had also been indicted in the scheme, but the mayor told the FBI that, while he was afraid of Nicky Scarfo, he was “petrified” of his nephew, Philip Leonetti.
Without Matthews’s testimony, the case against Leonetti fell apart and the charges were dismissed.
The disgraced former mayor was ultimately sentenced to 15 years in federal prison.
The family’s underboss, Salvatore “Chuckie” Merlino, wound up pleading guilty to the bribery case out of Margate and was sentenced to four years in New Jersey state prison. Merlino’s lawyer promptly filed an appeal and Merlino remained free on bail pending his appeal.
Deciding that he’d had enough of Atlantic City and South Philadelphia for a while, Scarfo took a long vacation to South Florida during the winter of 1985 to relax and to clear his head a little bit.
Philip Leonetti and Lawrence Merlino would join him on the excursion, much like they did following their acquittal for the Falcone murder in 1980.
Me, my uncle, and Lawrence went down to Florida for almost three weeks. It was nice. We sat on the beach all day and ate at the best restaurants at night. We were staying at a condominium in Turnberry, which was a little ways from Miami. I loved these vacations. I needed them. We all did.
While we were there I said to my uncle, “We should get a place down here.” My uncle loved the idea and told me and Lawrence to start looking at houses.
We found a place in Fort Lauderdale that was owned by a guy from Philadelphia who was a real estate developer. It was a gorgeous, sprawling hacienda-style home right on the water. My uncle loved it. He had me pay the guy $650,000 in cash, and we bought the place. We named it Casablanca South and we had a little sign made up that said that and we put it on the front of the house. The place was gorgeous. It had a pool, a boat slip—the whole nine yards.
Scarfo’s South Florida shopping spree wasn’t done.
We bought a white Rolls Royce Silver Shadow that we drove whenever we were there. We brought our boat up from Atlantic City which was a 40-footer and we docked it right behind the house. We named the boat, The Usual Suspects, and I was the captain of the boat. No one drove that boat except me.
My uncle put a guy who was with us named Anthony “Spike” DiGregorio in the house and he maintained it all year when we weren’t there. He would cook Italian food, make homemade red wine, and tell stories all night. We would eat, drink, and laugh all night when Spike was around, even my uncle. He used to say to me, “Where the fuck did we find this guy?” sometimes as he was wiping tears out of his eyes from laughing so hard. Spike was a character and one of the best guys you could ever meet, but he was also a degenerate gambler and a con man. He’d rob anything he could get his hands on and he owed everybody and their mother money.
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br /> One time a guy told me a story that he went to Spike’s mother’s house in South Philadelphia to see Spike and he needed to borrow $5,000. He said Spike brought him in the house and listened to him and why he needed the money, and then said to the guy, “Do you see that woman in there,” and he pointed to his mother who was in the kitchen cooking, “I love her more than anything on this planet, but guess what, if she asked me for $5,000 I wouldn’t give it to her.” The guy told me he was going back and forth, begging Spike for the money because he knew Spike had just made a score, and within a few minutes Spike had turned the whole thing around and was now asking the guy if he could borrow money off of him. The guy said to Spike, “Spike, if I had money to loan you, I wouldn’t be in your living room asking to borrow $5,000,” and Spike said, “You have a point there.” It was a never-ending comedy routine when Spike was around, and my uncle put him in charge of the house in Florida.
When we were down in Florida, we were relaxing every day. The pool, the beach, the boat, we’d go out drinking, we’d go to dinner. Life was great when we were down there. Even my uncle was relaxed.
It’s almost like I forget how bad things really were when I was down there. I guess I blocked it all out.
Eventually Scarfo’s South Florida home became a retreat for the rest of his crime family members. Many of them had never ventured outside of Philadelphia, New Jersey, and New York. Their gracious host, who happened to be the most violent mob leader in the country, welcomed everyone to his lavish home and did his best to make it a family-friendly destination for the members of his gang.
I would bring Little Philip down. My uncle would have Chris, Nicky Jr., and his son Mark down there. Other guys would bring their sons or their nephews. I think my uncle was using Florida to bring everyone together and keep everyone together and strengthen our family.
With all of the killing and all of the treachery going on around us, there wasn’t a whole lot of joking going on. But one time when we were down in Florida, it was me, my uncle, Nicky Jr., Spike, and a guy we were friendly with named Sam the Barber. Sam the Barber owned La Cucina, the restaurant on South Street in South Philadelphia that we used to go to. Now Sam wasn’t a made guy, but he was with us and he was very close with Spike. My uncle had put Sam in charge of the renovations at the Florida house and my uncle ended up spending close to $100,000, and Sam was overseeing all of it. When it was done, the place looked amazing and my uncle was very happy. One night after dinner, my uncle stands up and makes a speech thanking Sam for everything he did in getting the house ready and he tells Sam he wants to give him something to show his appreciation and he takes out a medal, like you would get in the army. Now while he is talking to Sam and getting ready to give him the medal, Spike gets right in on the joke and starts saluting my uncle, like my uncle was a general. Even Sam’s going for it and he starts crying, because he’s so happy that he made my uncle proud. Me and Nicky Jr. were off to the side and we were trying to keep our composure, but we were pissing ourselves. It was really funny. My uncle would only act like that down in Florida—that was the only place that he would ever slightly let his guard down, and that was usually because of Spike and all of his antics.
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