by Gordon Kerr
‘Little Nicky’ was also known to be a narcissistic individual. There are countless reports of him gleefully scanning the crime reports in the newspapers to see if he had rated a mention. This was, of course, contrary to the customary Mafia way. Mobsters tended to be media-shy. It was good for business if nobody knew who you were.
In the 1970s Scarfo was working in Atlantic City. He had been sent there long before casinos had been legalised but had established a network of contacts so that by the time the New Jersey legislature decided in 1976 that gambling could provide the state with some easy income, Scarfo was in a good position to create the steel and concrete companies that would be contracted to lay the foundations for the 35 casinos that would be built in the last few years of the seventies. The Scarfo and Bruno families controlled the unions and if casino developers caused them any trouble, all it took was the threat of a strike which would delay their projects and, ultimately, lose money for everyone; a 30-day delay, for instance, could cost a casino owner $15–20 million.
Scarfo and Bruno also ensured that a man called Mike Matthews was elected as mayor of Atlantic City. Matthews would present them with no problems as they went about their business and he understood very well that if he did, he would be trying a concrete overcoat on for size. Eventually, Matthews was found guilty of accepting a $10,000 bribe and went to prison for 15 years.
When Bruno Family boss Angelo Bruno was murdered in the summer of 1980, his underboss Philip Testa and his consigliere Anthony Campanegra were left in charge, but when Campanegra was himself murdered a month later, Testa named Scarfo as the new consigliere.
Testa himself did not last long. He believed that a captain in the Bruno Family, Chickee Narducci, was robbing the Mob through his numbers business and, in addition, the two men were having disagreements about loans. Narducci had a bomb packed with roofing nails and explosives placed under the porch of Testa’s home, because he thought, probably correctly, that if he did not murder Testa, Testa would murder him.
The Crime Commission realised that Narducci must have called the hit on Testa and what’s more, he had done it without their authority, a serious breach of the rules. They contracted Scarfo to take care of Narducci and before too long he was found in a pool of blood in the back of his Cadillac. Scarfo also took care of one of Narducci’s men who had been involved in the Testa murder. He placed a home-made bomb in the man’s mouth and set it off.
Peter Cassella, Testa’s underboss, called a meeting of the Family and said that he had been cleared by New York to be the next boss of the Family. Scarfo did not believe him and, on the day of Testa’s funeral, travelled to New York to meet the heads of the Genovese and Gambino Families. He was told that Cassella was lying and no approval had been given for his assumption of leadership of the Family. Scarfo persuaded them to make him the next boss of the Family. He was invited onto the Crime Commission in 1981, becoming an ally of the powerful Genovese Family.
As a soldier, Scarfo was ruthless. In 1962, a man called Dominick ‘Reds’ Caruso had shown fatal disrespect to Bruno Family consigliere Joe Rugnetta by slapping him on the face. Scarfo, along with Sal Merlino, Santo Idone, Anthony Cassella and Santo Romero, was ordered by the then boss, Angelo Bruno, to strangle him. One of the secrets of a successful hit is to get close to your target and Scarfo was already friendly with Caruso. For a few weeks he kept his company, eating and drinking with him. Consequently, it did not seem at all out of the ordinary to Caruso when Scarfo invited him to Anthony ‘King Kong’ Perella’s Bar in Vineland, New Jersey. Idone was going to carry out the hit according to the orders of their boss, by strangling Caruso. But he was late and Scarfo reached for his gun and shot Caruso five times, but without killing him. Scarfo reached for what was to hand which happened to be an icepick. He buried it so deeply in Caruso’s back that it would not come out and had to be broken off. Idone eventually appeared with a rope that they wrapped around Caruso’s neck. They then took the body for perusal by Bruno. He ordered it to be buried in rural Vineland and then removed and reinterred, just in case one of the original gravediggers decided to inform on them. You could never be too careful.
As boss, Scarfo was even more ruthless. He broke all the records for mob violence, having at least 30 members of his own crime family rubbed out in the four years following Testa’s murder. They were killed for failing to obey orders or simply because he suspected them of being disloyal to him. He also homed in on the Riccobene faction of the former Bruno Family that was vying for control of Atlantic City. More than 24 Riccobenes were targeted in a war that went on for months.
He drove a white Rolls-Royce and took the entire Bruno Family on holiday to Florida where he had a yacht, The Casablanca, much photographed by the FBI as hoods came and went. They were able to make connections from these images which could be used as evidence that individual crooks were, in fact, working for one organisation.
Scarfo learned from the methods of the Families in New York and Chicago, running loan-shark operations and providing protection. On pain of death, they demanded a piece of the action from every independent business in their area. He moved his Family’s business affairs into narcotics – once taboo for the Mafia – and, by 1984, Philadelphia was the United States’ amphetamine capital.
There are stories of Scarfo’s out-and-out love for killing. It is said he loved it so much that, even when he was boss, he would accompany his soldiers on hits. Bosses of Families never did this and it is testament to his bloodlust. At the trial of Scarfo, his underboss Philip Leonetti and capo Lawrence Merlino for the murder of Vincent Falcone, Joseph Salerno, a former associate of the Mafia boss, testified for the prosecution. Falcone was Scarfo’s partner in his construction company but, unfortunately for Falcone, Scarfo believed he was ripping him off. In reality, Falcone’s biggest mistake was to be critical of the workmanship of Scarfo’s men.
Scarfo and Leonetti invited him to a hideaway where they all had dinner. After the meal, Leonetti stood behind Falcone and shot him in the back of the head. Scarfo celebrated the hit with more alcohol, but putting his hand on Falcone’s body he felt a heartbeat and ordered Leonetti to finish him off with a bullet in the heart. Scarfo then mocked the dead man, calling him a ‘no-good motherfucker’. Chillingly, Salerno related that Scarfo exclaimed: ‘I love this!’ during the killing, as if he were playing a game of pool.
Scarfo and Leonetti were arrested and charged with Falcone’s murder in 1983 and Salerno became a star witness for the FBI under the witness protection programme. However, a local cop who was on the Bruno Family payroll testified that Scarfo’s car was not at the property where the murder was committed, contradicting Salerno, who testified that Scarfo had parked his black Cadillac in front of the building. As a result of his testimony, the cop was thrown off the police force but it sowed enough seeds of doubt to mean that the two men were found not guilty. With a grin on his face, Scarfo declared after the trial, ‘Thank God for the American jury system. And an honest jury.’
Scarfo could be dangerously unreliable. Even his closest friends were reluctant to trust him. Salvatore Testa, son of Phil Testa, was a good example. In the months following his father’s murder, Salvie was promoted through the ranks to the position of capo. He was an extremely violent man, a violence exploited by Scarfo who used him in 15 different hits. But this was Scarfo and with him there was always danger. Salvie was a childhood friend of Leonetti, now underboss to Scarfo, and he relied on his friend to give him a warning if anything bad was going down. Leonetti failed to do so, however, when Salvie made the mistake of falling for the wrong girl. He had been engaged to Leonetti’s daughter, but when he broke it off in favour of another girl, his reliability and unflinching obedience counted for nothing. Scarfo ordered his death and Salvie was eliminated by Nicky ‘The Crow’ Caramandi in September 1984.
Caramandi was worried, however, that Scarfo had, in turn, ordered that he be hit and went to the FBI who put him into the Witness Protection Programme.
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p; Scarfo relied on fear but it eventually backfired on him when, between 1987 and 1989, no fewer than five of his trusted lieutenants, who could not stand working in such an atmosphere, turned against him and became government informers.
The FBI played on the insecurity felt by members of the Family as their colleagues were rubbed out by Scarfo. In the summer of 1989, they arrested Leonetti for the murder of Salvatore Testa. He contacted the FBI before his trial, but they told him to wait until he had been sentenced. He was given 45 years’ imprisonment, but as soon as the trial was over he began talking. He went into protective custody with his wife and children and served only five years of his sentence.
Capos, Tommy DelGiorno and Lawrence Merlino, plus soldier Gino Milano, joined Leonetti and Caramandi on the programme. By the end of 1989, no fewer than 20 members of Scarfo’s Family were incarcerated and an additional ten were under indictment or awaiting Grand Juries.
As for Scarfo, already serving 14 years for extortion, he was convicted in 1989 of the murder of Frank ‘Frankie Flowers’ D’Alfonso.
D’Alfonso had refused to pay tribute to Scarfo and Scarfo had ordered Salvie Testa and another soldier, Gino Milano, to persuade him to come into line. D’Alfonso was beaten with a steel rod and a baseball bat and received a fractured skull, broken jaw and a broken kneecap. The bones under both eye-sockets were shattered and two bones in his left leg were broken. He needed 64 stitches in a head wound. When asked by police officers what had happened, he merely replied that he had been hit by a truck.
The beating did not yield the correct response, however, and several years passed during which D’Alfonso continued to refuse to pay tribute. One day in July 1985, when he went out to buy cigarettes, two men walked up to him and fired five bullets into his back and head.
Scarfo was sent to prison for life and is scheduled for release in 2033 when he will be 104 years old.
John Gotti, ‘The Dapper Don’
It was Monday, 16 December 1985. The black Lincoln negotiated the driveway of the mansion, known as the White House, in Staten Island and pointed its nose towards Manhatten. Paul Castellano, owner of the mansion and head of the Gambino Crime Family, was relaxed. Christmas was only nine days away and, on his way to dinner, he was going to stop off at his lawyer’s office to distribute a few presents to the staff. Then he would do a little Christmas shopping before heading for the restaurant. He sat back in the front seat of the Lincoln as his driver and bodyguard, Thomas Bilotti, guided it sedately through the late afternoon traffic. Neither man was carrying a gun.
Dinner was at 5 p.m. at Sparks Steak House restaurant on 46th Street, between Second and Third Avenue, and his guests would be three of the capos of the Gambino Family of which he was head – Thomas Gambino, son of Carlo and head of a successful trucking company, James Failla whose interests lay in rubbish disposal and Gambino soldier Frank DeCicco.
As they drove into town, they hit heavy midtown traffic as the evening rush hour began to build. Christmas shoppers, out in force, did not help. Eventually, however, having done their other chores, they arrived at the restaurant and Bilotti nosed the Lincoln into a space which said ‘No Parking’. It’s amazing the effect a Police Benevolent Fund sticker on the windscreen could have on parking wardens. It was 5.45 p.m.
As the two men climbed out of the car, three other men who had been hanging about outside the restaurant straightened up and approached them. The men were dressed oddly, in Russian-style fur hats and white raincoats. Castellano and Bilotti, straightening their suits on the sidewalk, looked up and were horrified to see pistols, .32s and .38s, in the hands of the three men who stopped not too far distant and, raising the guns, opened fire. Numerous bullets thudded into the bodies of Castellano and Bilotti before they could react. Castellano was hit six times in the head and chest and Bilotti took four bullets. They fell to the ground and one of the fur-hatted men stood over Castellano and delivered the coup de grâce, a final bullet in the head. The three then ran off in the direction of Second Avenue.
It was the first assassination of a Commission member since Alberto Anastasia had been rubbed out in the barbershop of the Park Sheraton Hotel in 1957. And with Big Paul out of the way, John Joseph Gotti was now top of the heap in the Gambino Family, one of the Mafia’s five Families.
He had been born 45 years previously in the Bronx to Naples-born John Gotti Sr. and Philomena ‘Fannie’ Gotti, the fifth of their 13 children, and when he was 12 the family moved to the rough Italian neighbourhood of Sheepshead Bay in Brooklyn. They were poor which gave Gotti something of an inferiority complex, especially around anyone more fortunate than himself. He had a quick temper and envied the gangsters he saw strutting around the neighbourhood in their $100 suits and fancy cars. He wanted nothing more than to be one of them when he grew up.
School was only a minor irritant to Gotti and, generally speaking, he ignored it and it ignored him. On the rare occasion he did attend, he distinguished himself by being the class bully and by being disruptive. So he got his education on the street where he ran messages for the local hoods and hung out with a gang.
His first real criminal act took place when he was 14 – a robbery at a construction site. It ended in farce, however, when a cement mixer he and some acquaintances were trying to steal tipped over and crushed his toes. The remainder of his summer was spent in hospital.
At the age of 16 he became a fully-fledged member of the Fulton-Rockaway Boys, a local teenage gang that stole cars, fenced stolen goods and mugged drunks. It was around this time that he first met two men who would become long-term associates – Angelo ‘Quack Quack’ Ruggiero and Wilfred ‘Willy Boy’ Johnson. Gotti was arrested five times while he ran with this gang, but true to one of the nicknames given to him later in his career, ‘the Teflon Don’, he got no more than probation.
He married in 1962 and had five children – Angela ‘Angel’, Victoria, John A., Frank and Peter, named after Gotti’s brother Peter, a minor gangster who hung around with the Gambino Family. He also had three illegitimate children with a Staten Island woman, Shannon ‘Shady’ Connelly, wife of a Gambino soldier, Ed Grillo.
Marriage straightened out the 22-year-old Gotti . . . for a short while. He got work as a presser in a coat factory and was also a truck driver’s assistant for a while. But it did not last and after a year or so he was arrested for being in a stolen hire car. This resulted in his first jail term, but he was only inside for 20 days. His arrest record quickly began to grow, however, and he was picked up often, for crimes such as burglary, larceny and bookmaking. He did some more time in jail in 1966 – a couple of months for attempted theft. In that same year, however, he became involved with the Mob, working for Carmine Fatico, a Gambino capo who reported to underboss Aniello Dellacroce.
Gotti started out pretty low in the pecking order, fencing goods stolen from Idlewild Airport, later to be known as Kennedy Airport, but was soon doing well enough to move his family to a better apartment in Brooklyn. In 1967, however, he was arrested by the FBI while hiding in the back of a truckload of stolen merchandise. They charged him with three hijackings and he was sentenced to four years at Lewisburg Federal Penitentiary. He was inside for less than three.
Released from prison, he was put on probation and ordered to get a job. His wife’s stepfather’s construction company provided the job, but Gotti, of course, never did a single day’s work there. He returned to his old ways, hanging out with the Gambinos at their headquarters, the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club in Queens. He got lucky when his boss, Fatico, was indicted for loan sharking and, although he was not a ‘made’ man – a full member of the Mafia – neither were any of the other guys on the crew. So Gotti was asked to mind the shop which brought him to the attention of the Gambinos and Aniello Dellacrace, a man just as foul-mouthed and vicious as Gotti. Dellacroce made him acting capo, at the age of 31. He began to cultivate friendships in high places. He became a good friend of the powerful Dellacroce and was close to the head of the Family, Carlo
Gambino, until his death in 1976.
Gotti was now involved in much more serious matters than just hijacking trucks or fencing stolen goods. In 1973, when a nephew of Gambino’s was kidnapped and found dead, even after a ransom of $10,000 was paid, the boss called on Gotti to wreak revenge. A couple of men, Edward Maloney and James McBratney, were linked to another kidnapping, but were almost certainly not the abductors of the boy in question. That was a mere detail to Gambino. He ordered Gotti to go after them.
On 22 May 1973 McBratney was sipping a crème de menthe at Snoop’s Bar and Grill on Staten Island when three men entered the bar and surrounded him. They told him they were detectives and that he was under arrest. When they tried to put handcuffs on him there was a vilolent struggle. When a bystander shouted out to them to show some ID, one of the men did indeed show his credentials. He pulled out a gun and fired a slug into the ceiling. Then the two others held McBratney and he fired three shots into his body. McBratney’s crème de menthe was left unfinished.
Witnesses to the murder picked two men out of the police mugshot book immediately – Angelo Ruggiero and Ralph Galione – and the third man was identified as John Gotti. The three were arrested and pleaded guilty to manslaughter – it had just been a bar-room brawl after all, they claimed. Gotti was sentenced to two years, but when he was released he achieved his life’s ambition – he became a ‘made’ member of the Mafia.
But, suddenly it all started to go wrong.
Paul Castellano was now in charge and when Gotti’s crew were caught selling heroin he disbanded them. It had been decreed at the infamous Apalachian summit of Mafia heads that drugs were off-limits – ‘if you deal, you die’. So, in reality, Gotti was lucky to get away with his life.
