In addition, the FBI had gotten in touch with Leonetti and told him they wanted him to testify against Vincent “The Chin” Gigante in a RICO case, and that they were interested in using him as a witness in the upcoming Frankie Flowers retrial, which had been scheduled after Nicky Scarfo and his codefendants had their convictions reversed in that case.
One day I call my grandmother’s house and my mother answers and she tells me that my uncle called the house and she had answered the phone. My mother said, “He cursed at me in Italian and he hung up.” I told my mother, “That’s it, we cannot stay here, I will bring Mom-Mom with us, but we cannot stay here anymore—it’s not safe.”
For the next several weeks, leading up to July 4, 1996, Philip Leonetti was sneaking into Atlantic City three or four times a week and visiting both his mother and grandmother to try in earnest to get them both to leave Atlantic City. Leonetti’s routine in getting to the Georgia Avenue compound was always the same.
I would park on Texas or Florida Avenue and I would walk through the alleys with my hand up under the brown shopping bag with the hole cut in it and I was carrying a .38.
Whereas before I was slipping in undetected, now some of the old ladies who lived back there and knew me since I was kid started seeing me. Some of them would say things in Italian to me like, “Fare attenzione” which means, be careful and pay attention. I knew that it was only a matter of time before someone was going to come looking for me, but I couldn’t get my mother and grandmother to leave, and there was no way I was going to leave them behind.
The very next day there was someone on Georgia Avenue who was looking for him. It was the FBI.
Gary Langan, who was Philip’s FBI handler and who become one of his most trusted allies, had gotten word that Philip was back on Georgia Avenue and went looking for him to find out the truth.
One day, I’m inside Mom-Mom’s house and there’s a knock at the door and my mother answers it, and it’s Gary Langan. I knew he wasn’t happy because he was always talking about us being careful and here we were on Georgia Avenue in my uncle’s apartment. Gary said, “Philip, we received information that Joey Merlino has been sending guys around here looking for you. The word is out that you are back. You’re putting yourself in a very bad position.” I said, “Who is he sending, so I know who to look for?” And he said, “I’m not joking—you can’t stay here; it’s not safe.”
I knew he was right, but what was I going to do? Right around this time my mother got sick with lung cancer and she was going to the doctors, and now in addition to checking on my grandmother, I had to check in on my mother and take her to her appointments.
As the summer of 1996 continued, Ralph Natale and Joey Merlino were running what remained of the Philadelphia–Atlantic City La Cosa Nostra.
Nicodemo “Little Nicky” Scarfo, now 67, remained behind bars at Florence Supermax ADX in Colorado, and Philip Leonetti was living on a 44-foot yacht in Cape May, New Jersey, and traveling to Georgia Avenue in Atlantic City on an almost daily basis.
One of the guys who lived in one of my grandmother’s apartments and who had always helped me and my uncle by telling us who was coming around, was still on the front porch of his apartment—all day, every day, smoking a cigarette, and keeping an eye on the comings and goings of the street. He knew me and my mother were around.
One day, he sees me in the courtyard between the buildings and he says, “Philip, all week there’s been a car parked up the street with two guys in it and they ain’t cops. I seen one of them real good and he looked real sloppy, kind of dirty,” and I knew right away that he was talking about a bum who was part of the North Jersey branch of our family. I never liked him and neither did my uncle, and now I’m thinking to myself, “This is the guy they are sending down to kill me.”
The next day, when I come to Georgia Avenue, I park in the same spot, only this time I walk all the way down to Atlantic and come right up Georgia Avenue for anyone who was looking for me to see. I wanted him or someone else to jump out and take a shot at me, because I was ready. I had the .38 in the shopping bag and I woulda blasted any one of them.
For the next week, Leonetti made his presence on Georgia Avenue known by continuing to walk up and down the street, eating at Angeloni’s, which was on the corner, and doing anything he could to attract anyone looking to make a name for themselves.
This is how crazy I was at this point—I wanted one of these guys to come after me. Put it this way, they knew I was there. If they really wanted to do something, they would have done it. The fact is, none of them guys wanted any problems with me. They knew I’d kill every last one of them, and I think they knew I was trying to bait them. I never worried about Joey Merlino or any of his guys, because they were always punks to me. They weren’t men; they weren’t gangsters; they weren’t La Cosa Nostra. I worried about the guys from New York or someone my uncle might send, because I knew I was vulnerable being back in Atlantic City.
That summer was very, very hectic. Finally, in early September, I convinced my mother and grandmother to leave Atlantic City and I put them both on a plane and flew them down to Hilton Head. Maria and I were going to take the boat from Cape May back down to Hilton Head and start looking for a house.
Leonetti’s days on the water were coming to an end.
I saw Nicky Jr. only one more time before I left and I reiterated what I told him about getting out of this life, and his answers were always the same. He came to see me on Georgia Avenue and I told him I was taking Mom-Mom with me. He got a chance to say good-bye to her, which he did. I even saw my uncle’s wife, Mimi, and she said to me in her Italian accent, “You a lookin’ good,” and I just walked right by her without saying a word.
The only unfinished business I had in Atlantic City was going back to the bar in Ducktown and giving my friend his gun back. I told him, “Where I am going, I won’t be needing this.”
The Back Nine
PHILIP LEONETTI HAD DONE THE UNTHINKABLE: HE SPENT THE SUMMER OF 1996 AT THE JERSEY SHORE AND MANAGED TO SUCCESSFULLY DODGE THE MOB. BY EARLY NOVEMBER, HE AND MARIA HAD MADE IT TO HILTON HEAD, WHERE THEY JOINED HIS MOTHER AND GRANDMOTHER AND QUICKLY FOUND A HOME IN AN UPSCALE, GATED COMMUNITY ON ONE OF HILTON HEAD’S MOST EXCLUSIVE GOLF COURSES.
As everyone was settling in, Nicodemo Little Nicky Scarfo, now 67, was also settling into some new digs—the maximum security federal penitentiary in Leavenworth, Kansas, where he was housed with his successor, John Stanfa, who had received five life sentences following his conviction in the RICO case brought against him.
As 1997 got started, Little Nicky Scarfo, Chuckie Merlino, and several members of the old Scarfo mob were brought back to Philadelphia and housed in the same prison while awaiting their retrial for the 1985 murder of Frank “Frankie Flowers” D’Alfonso.
The FBI had called Leonetti’s home in Hilton Head and told Philip they wanted to use him as a witness against his uncle in the retrial.
I knew they were going to use me at the Chin’s trial later in the year, but now they wanted me to come back to Philadelphia and testify against my uncle in the Flowers case. I told them, “Absolutely not.” When I made my deal, I told them I would never testify against my uncle and I never did. It’s not that I was against testifying against him; it’s that I never wanted to give him the satisfaction of seeing me testify so he could snicker at me or make some remark. Every time we were on trial and someone would testify against us—whether it was Joe Salerno, Tommy Del, or whoever it was—my uncle would say, “Look at this cocksucker, look at this rat,” and the feds knew this, they knew that I would never put myself in that situation, to be in the same room with him.
Now, they were trying to break that deal. They already had Lawrence, Tommy Del, Nicky the Crow, and Gino Milano as witnesses, so I don’t know why they needed me. I told Jim Maher, “Tell them if they force me to come, I ain’t gonna help their case,” and that was the last I heard about it.
In the spring of 1997, Little Nic
ky Scarfo was reunited with several members of his gang, when he and his codefendants—including Salvatore “Chuckie” Merlino, Francis “Faffy” Iannarella, Frank Narducci, Philip Narducci, and Joe Ligambi—were housed together at Philadelphia’s newest prison, the Curran Fromhold Correctional Facility (CFCF), which was situated off of I-95 in North Philadelphia.
One of the agents told me that all of the guys looked like they had aged 20 years since the last time they were in Philadelphia, except for my uncle. They didn’t use me as a witness and they didn’t use Lawrence—just Tommy Del, the Crow, and Gino Milano. And this time around, my uncle and the rest of them beat the case.
The acquittal in the D’Alfonso retrial meant little to Nicky Scarfo, as he was still serving consecutive 14- and 55-year sentences. But to his codefendants, the not guilty verdict meant that they would one day walk out of federal prison, albeit in another twelve or 15 years, depending upon their sentences.
The only defendant to immediately benefit from the acquittal was 57-year-old Joe Ligambi, the alleged triggerman in the D’Alfonso murder who had received only three-and-a-half years in the RICO case. Ligambi was immediately released from jail.
The dynamic inside the courtroom was unique in that the defendants were separated from the courtroom gallery by thick, bulletproof glass and many of those in the audience were members of Skinny Joey Merlino’s crew, including Merlino himself.
Merlino was there to support his father, who sat directly in front of Scarfo during the trial. The two men, lifelong friends turned bitter enemies, seemed to exchange pleasantries from time to time, with the elder Merlino making jokes with Scarfo as Tommy DelGiorno testified.
On several occasions, Little Nicky reportedly turned around and fixed an icey stare on Joey Merlino, the man he belittled as “the drunken punk” in those prison letters, and the man many believed was responsible for shooting his son in 1989.
Merlino, no longer a kid, was now the 35-year-old underboss of the mob under new boss Ralph Natale. Known as the Prince of Passyunk Avenue, he had become a cocksure celebrity gangster who was the toast of the town. Joey stared right back at Little Nicky.
With the D’Alfonso trial behind him, Scarfo was transferred to the maximum security United States Penitentiary in Atlanta, which was also home to his former underboss Salvatore “Chuckie” Merlino. The two men would live on the same cellblock, but on different tiers, and work together in the prison dining hall. According to sources, they did not socialize with one another.
It is believed that while Merlino immersed himself in illicit activities inside prison like gambling on sporting events and running card games in which items from the prison commissary served as money, Scarfo, the regal mob don, thought such activities were beneath him, and spent most of his time in his cell reading or walking the track with an inmate that he felt was more suited to a man of his character, Vittorio “Vic” Amuso, the imprisoned boss of New York’s Lucchese family.
Scarfo reportedly convinced Amuso to formally initiate his son, Nicky Jr., into the Lucchese crime family, and very quickly the younger Scarfo was placed under Amuso’s protection, which meant rival mobsters like Chuckie Merlino’s son were prohibited from harming him, and would draw the wrath of the powerful Lucchese family if they did.
The FBI believes that Scarfo and Amuso were planning on using Nicky Jr. to expand the Luccheses’ existing North Jersey operation into South Jersey, namely Atlantic City, with the hope that one day the younger Scarfo, with the backing of the Lucchese crime family, would regain control of the Philadelphia–Atlantic City mob, and run it under the Lucchese umbrella.
My uncle was obsessed with La Cosa Nostra and being the boss, so I have no doubt he spent all of his time in jail trying to regain control of the mob using Nicky Jr.—and finding and killing me and my mother.
That summer, I went to New York, and me and Sammy the Bull both testified against the Chin. The whole time I was testifying, the Chin was sitting in a wheelchair, slumped over, and he looked disheveled. I’d catch him mumbling to himself, but every once in while I’d catch a look in his eye and I knew his whole act was bullshit. He wasn’t insane crazy, this guy was crazy like a fuckin’ fox. He was the last true Cosa Nostra boss, the last of the dons. After him, it wasn’t the same.
Sammy told me a story about a sit-down that him and John Gotti had with the Chin where Gotti told the Chin that he was making his son John Jr. and inducting him into the Gambino crime family. Sammy told me the Chin said, “Geez, I’m sorry to hear that,” with the implication that no father who loved their children would want them involved in this life. When Sammy told me this story, I immediately thought of what my uncle had done with me and what he was doing with Nicky Jr. and I shook my head and said to myself, the Chin wasn’t the crazy one, it was my uncle and Gotti who were.
Me and Sammy got a chance to catch up, and he told me he was living in Arizona and invited me to come and see him. Little Philip was actually living about 20 minutes from where Sammy and his family had settled, but as much as I liked Sammy, I wasn’t interested in going to Arizona to hang out with him. I was very happy with my new life and being away from everyone and anyone that had any connection to La Cosa Nostra.
Like Scarfo, Amuso, and Gotti before him, the 69-year-old Gigante was convicted of violating the RICO statute and shipped off to spend the rest of his days in a maximum-security federal prison.
Things couldn’t have been better for me at that time. I was living in Hilton Head, and I had started up a small contracting business just like I did in Florida. The difference this time was that I was doing a lot less of the grind work. I put together a nice little crew, and they did most of the work. This was my routine for the rest of 1997 and 1998: stay low-key, go to work, relax, enjoy life, and keep makin’ money.
Looking Back, Moving Forward
PHILIP LEONETTI WAS NOW 46 YEARS OLD AND A DECADE REMOVED FROM HIS LIFE IN LA COSA NOSTRA.
But instead of looking forward, Leonetti found himself looking back.
In early 1999, I had heard from one of the agents that Lawrence was out of jail and that he was sick with cancer and that Saul Kane was in a prison hospital in Kentucky and he wasn’t doing well. I knew the Blade had had a heart attack and died back in 1995 in a prison hospital in Missouri.
I started thinking a lot about the old days in Atlantic City, before my uncle was the boss, and all the fun I had had with guys like the Blade, Lawrence, and Saul Kane. And now these guys were dying. It made me sad. At this time, my mother was very sick and getting sicker with the lung cancer, and my grandmother wasn’t doing great either. I knew it was only a matter of time with my mother. Little Philip, who was now 25 and had just graduated from graduate school, came to stay with us in Hilton Head. As my mother got sicker, we all spent that time being together as a family. It was me, my mother, my grandmother, Maria, and Little Philip. We had been through a lot together, but we toughed it out and we stuck together through thick and thin.
Philip’s mother, Annunziata (Nancy) Scarfo Leonetti, would pass away on April 23, 1999, after courageously battling lung cancer. She was 68 years old.
I took it very hard, but we knew that it was coming. I had her body flown back to New Jersey and we buried her in the family plot, which was in Pleasantville, just outside of Atlantic City. We all flew back for the services and it was very low-key and quiet. Gary Langan came, and he and I caught up, but after we had the services, we all flew back to Hilton Head.
By the summer of 1999, what was left of the Philadelphia–Atlantic City mob was crumbling. Ralph Natale and Joey Merlino were jailed and facing racketeering charges, as were most of their top associates. And the worst news yet was that Natale, the reputed boss, was cooperating with the government.
According to the FBI, former Scarfo mob solider Joe Ligambi, recently released from prison following his acquittal in the Frankie Flowers retrial, would soon be named acting boss of the Philadelphia–Atlantic City mob.
Joe’s a good guy an
d was one of the best bookmakers in the history of South Philadelphia. He knew every single college team and he knew all of the players; he was like an encyclopedia. I always got along with Joe and I liked him, so did my uncle. Joe and my uncle shared a cell together when we were all at Holmesburg.
As 1999 came to a close, Philip Leonetti was now setting his sights on looking ahead, instead of looking back.
The New Millennium
PHILIP LEONETTI SPENT THE NEXT SEVERAL YEARS LIVING ANONYMOUSLY AND WORKING IN HILTON HEAD.
My grandmother died in 2003, and I flew her back to New Jersey and buried her in the family plot with my mother and my grandfather. And again I saw Gary Langan. By this time, both Lawrence and Saul Kane had died in prison, and so did John Gotti. Joey Merlino had gotten 14 years in his racketeering case and now Nicky Jr. was back in jail doing a 33-month sentence on gambling and loan-sharking charges. I read in the news that Joe Ligambi was now officially the acting boss and my uncle was still in Atlanta with Vic Amuso trying to regain control of the mob and figuring out a way to kill me.
Once my grandmother died, I told Maria that I wanted to get out of Hilton Head, and she agreed, so we sold our place there and I sold my contracting business. I had actually grown tired of being on the East Coast and I was ready for a change of scenery. Little Philip was back in Arizona, so we headed west and spent the next few months relaxing and trying to figure out what we were going to do with the next chapter of our lives.
In early 2004, Philip Leonetti was 51 years old and living in a spacious condominium not too far from where Little Philip, now 30, was living in an area just outside of Scottsdale, Arizona.
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