In the fall of 1989, Philip Leonetti sat with a number in front of him. 45 years. The federal court had been specific about the arithmetic. He was 36 years old, and he had just been told that the government intended to keep him until he was 81. He had spent his entire life inside a world his uncle built, and the uncle was across the room receiving his own number. 55 years.
The uncle shrugged. That shrug was not a surprise. Leonetti had watched his uncle for three decades and understood that what other people experienced as catastrophe, this man experienced as weather. What Leonetti could not get past was a different moment, one that had happened a year earlier in the middle of the trial.
A lawyer had crossed the courtroom floor during an afternoon break and delivered a piece of news. Scarfo’s youngest son, Mark, 17 years old, had hanged himself inside the family business. The boy was alive, barely. He was not expected to remain so. Leonetti said later that he had tears in his eyes. He looked at his uncle.
Nicodemo Scarfo showed no emotion. He registered what was reported to him with what his nephew described as no reaction, nothing. His characterization of the act was that it showed weakness. His concern was embarrassment. That was the moment, not the sentencing, not the 45 years. It was the shrug before the shrug.
A man who had trained Leonetti to kill since he was a boy, who had provided the only model of authority and loyalty Leonetti had ever known, could not find grief for his own child. And if that man could not find grief for his own child, then the code they both live by, the obligation and the silence and the absolute loyalty to this thing of ours, was built on nothing at all.
Nicodemo Scarfo built the bloodiest and most violent organized crime enterprise in the history of the Philadelphia mob. He held absolute power for 8 years and commanded the loyalty of hundreds of soldiers and associates across two states. He placed his nephew at the center of everything, made him a millionaire while he was still a young man, appointed him the youngest underboss in the history of the American Mafia.
He believed that keeping Philip Leonetti close meant keeping him loyal. It meant the opposite. When Leonetti walked out of federal custody with a new name and a new life, the organization that had consumed both their lives began to collapse behind him. And the man who had built it spent the rest of his days in a succession of federal prison facilities, accumulating sentences he would never outlive.
This is the story of what happened in the space between those two outcomes and what it required to get from one to the other. Drop your location in the comments. It is one of the best parts of putting these stories together. If you are new here and want more history like this coming straight to you, subscribe now.
Back to Atlantic City and the building on Georgia Avenue where everything in this story begins. Nicodemo Dominico Scarfo was born March 8th, 1929 in Brooklyn, New York to immigrant parents from Southern Italy. His family moved to South Philadelphia when he was a boy and he grew up in the specific world of that neighborhood in the 1930s and 1940s.
A world where the distinction between the Italian working class community and the organized crime network that ran through it was a distinction few people bothered to maintain. He trained as a boxer. He worked as a newsboy at a train station. He was not large, 5 ft 5 in according to every physical description, with a frame that never became imposing.
What his frame lacked, his temperament more than compensated for in a direction that would trouble him and the people around him for the rest of his life. He entered the Philadelphia crime family as a young man in the 1950s, working under Angelo Bruno, the general don who ran the organization with a preference for diplomacy over force.
Scarfo worked as an enforcer and a numbers runner, accumulating a reputation for one specific quality. He responded to disrespect with immediate violence and the calculation that other men applied to whether violence was appropriate was a calculation he did not seem to perform. Philip Michael Leonetti was born March 27th, 1953 in Philadelphia to Pasquale Leonetti and Annunziata Scarfo.
Annunziata was Nicodemo’s sister. Leonetti’s father left early and left permanently. Philip was raised by his mother Nancy in a building on North Georgia Avenue in the Ducktown neighborhood of Atlantic City, the tight-knit Italian section of a city that by the 1950s had already seen its golden era pass. The building was organized around the Scarfo family in a way that made its residential arrangement also a declaration of organizational affiliation.
Nicodemo Scarfo lived in one apartment with his wife and three sons. Nancy and Philip lived in another. Catherine Scarfo, the matriarch of the family, occupied a third. One building, three households, one world. Leonetti attended Holy Spirit High School in Atlantic City. He played basketball well enough to be noticed.
He was described by people who knew him then and later as quiet, composed, outwardly calm, the temperamental opposite of the uncle who controlled his daily existence. He was not quiet because he was timid. He was quiet the way water is quiet before it moves fast. The education his uncle provided began when Leonetti was 8 years old.
Scarfo took the boy along to dispose of a vehicle connected to a killing, explaining the logic of the arrangement with the directness he applied to everything. Police were less likely to stop a car with a child in the front seat. The boy sat in the passenger seat of a vehicle used in a murder and did not ask questions.
This was not unusual in the world of building on North Georgia Avenue described. It was the first lesson in what was expected. Scarfo by this point had already established himself as a useful and violent presence within the Bruno organization. He had also already demonstrated the quality that would define the arc of his life.
He had no reliable break between a feeling of insult and a physical response. Angelo Bruno understood this and watched it carefully. What he could not have anticipated was how soon it would produce a result that changed the geography of both their lives. By the early 1960s, Scarfo was working as a numbers runner in South Philadelphia, one of several low-level earners in the organization Bruno had built into the dominant criminal enterprise between New York and Washington.
Bruno’s organizational philosophy was explicit. The family made money through gambling, loan sharking, and extortion, and it avoided the attention that came with public violence, drug trafficking, and unauthorized killings. This was not sentimentality. It was operational calculation. An organization that generated headlines also generated federal attention, and federal attention destroyed organizations.
Bruno had watched it happen to others and intended not to have it happen to him. Scarfo’s relationship to this philosophy was complicated by his temperament. He could accept its logic in the abstract. What he could not do was apply it in the moment when he experienced disrespect from a man sitting in a booth he believed should be his.
On May 25th, 1963, Scarfo walked into the Oregon Diner in South Philadelphia and encountered William Dugan, a 24-year-old longshoreman, in an argument over seating. The argument escalated. Scarfo picked up what at least one account describes as a butter knife and stabbed Dugan to death. He was arrested, charged with murder, and pleaded guilty to manslaughter.
His sentence was 6 to 10 months, with the exact figure varying across the sources that documented the case. He returned from serving that sentence to news that Angelo Bruno had made a decision. The killing had been unnecessary, visible, and embarrassing to the organization. Worse, it had produced the kind of neighborhood attention that Bruno spent his entire professional life avoiding.
The penalty was banishment. Scarfo was sent from Philadelphia to the organization’s operation in Atlantic City, a backwater posting in a city that had already lost its resort glory and was doing very little of interest to anyone. From the perspective of 1963, it looked like the end of his ambitions in the Philadelphia organization, or something close to it.
Scarfo moved into the apartment at 26 South Georgia Avenue in Ducktown and set about managing the family’s bookmaking and gambling operation in a city that offered almost nothing in return for the effort. Nancy and young Philip followed and settled into the North Georgia Avenue building that would organize all their lives. The exile looked permanent.
The city looked like a dead end. Scarfo was 34 years old and had been consigned to the margins of an organization that had been his entire professional world. In 1971, he refused to testify before the New Jersey State Crime Commission on organizational matters, serving additional prison time as a consequence. Within the logic of the organization, refusing to cooperate with authorities was the only acceptable choice.
And the time he served for that refusal elevated his standing among the men who watched how others conducted themselves under institutional pressure. He also served 2 years in federal prison later in that decade for illegal possession of a firearm. Each term added to the record of a man who took his obligations to the organization seriously.
What neither he nor anyone else could see in those years was that the banishment to Atlantic City had placed him exactly where the most consequential economic event in the history of the American mob was about to unfold. He was already on the ground. He was already connected to the labor networks of the city.
He was already running operations through which money could move, and he had brought his nephew along. On November 2nd, 1976, New Jersey voters approved a referendum legalizing casino gambling in Atlantic City. The governor signed the Casino Control Act into law on June 2nd, 1977, making Atlantic City the first place in the United States outside Nevada where casino gambling was legally permitted.
A construction rush followed that dwarfed anything the city had seen. Developers poured in. Architects were commissioned. Labor contracts were negotiated. And the man who had been exiled to that city more than a decade earlier was already there with his nephew watching from four blocks away when the governor made the announcement.
Governor Brendan Byrne used the ceremony to address organized crime directly. “Keep your filthy hands off of Atlantic City,” he said. “Keep the hell out of our state.” According to Philip Leonetti’s documented account of that moment, he and his uncle watched the announcement together on a television set not far from the boardwalk.
Scarfo’s response to the governor’s command has been recorded by Leonetti with the specificity that only a witness present in the room can provide. “What’s this guy talking about?” Scarfo said. “Doesn’t he know we’re already here?” What followed was not improvised. Scarfo and Leonetti formed a concrete contracting company called Scarf Inc.
with Leonetti listed as president. They also created a company called Nat Nat Inc. to install steel rods in reinforced concrete structures. These were not incidental businesses. They were the precise businesses required for casino construction and the leverage they provided was enormous.
A developer who refused to use Scarf Inc. for concrete work or who faced labor trouble from Local 54 of the Bartenders and Hotel Workers Union, which Scarfo controlled, was looking at construction delays that could cost between 15 and 20 million dollars for every 30 days of stoppage. Cooperation was not optional. It was the cost of doing business in a city where the most powerful man in the room had been placed there by accident and had spent a decade preparing. Scarf Inc.
poured the foundations for five of the first nine casinos built in Atlantic City. By 1987, documented records place Scarfo’s earnings from at least eight casino construction projects at three and a half million dollars. Through Local 54, he extracted between 30,000 and 40,000 dollars monthly from union pension funds throughout the 1980s.
The Showboat, Bally’s, Caesars, the Golden Nugget, and what eventually became Trump Plaza all involved Scarfo’s network in some documented form. It was the most consequential sustained extraction of casino construction money in the resort’s history and it was conducted by a man who had been sent there as punishment for losing his temper in a diner.
Leonetti was inside all of it. His name was on the incorporation documents. His face was the one that appeared at construction meetings. He was the front and the enforcer and the administrator simultaneously, running the day-to-day reality of an operation that generated more money than anything the Philadelphia family had seen since Bruno was running it at full strength.
He was also, by his own admission, already a killer. His first documented murder occurred at age 23 in the parking lot of the Ensign Motel on Pacific Avenue in Atlantic City, conducted in daylight. He would later describe the experience as easy. He said he hated to say that, but everything went so smoothly.
He used the word unnatural. It was the same word he would use in different contexts over the rest of his life when he tried to explain what had been built into him. The killing that defined his standing within the organization came on December 16th, 1979. Vincent Falcone was a cement contractor and mob associate who had been treating Scarfo with insufficient deference and maneuvering for a larger cut of the casino construction business.
To Scarfo, both of these things were intolerable, and Falcone had committed them simultaneously. Scarfo gave the assignment to Leonetti. The mechanics of the Falcone killing were documented in detail at the subsequent trial of Scarfo, Leonetti, and a third defendant in Atlantic County Court.
Falcone came to a kitchen in Margate under the pretext of drinks with associates. Leonetti told him to get ice. As Falcone turned, Leonetti shot him in the back of the head. The murder was, by every subsequent account, including Leonetti’s own, carried out with complete composure. Afterward, according to documented testimony, Scarfo drank the bottle of Scotch that had served as the pretext for the gathering, became extremely drunk and sat at the kitchen table delivering commentary on the dead man and the organization’s future.
Leonetti was inducted as a made man in the Philadelphia family in 1980, completing the formal transition from the nephew who sat in the front seat of a murder vehicle at age eight to the full member of the organization that vehicle had served. He was 26 at the time of the Falcone killing, 27 at his induction.
He was already a millionaire. He was the most trusted operational figure at his uncle’s side, and in the particular irony that the subsequent decades would supply, he eventually married the woman who had been Vincent Falcone’s girlfriend at the time Leonetti shot him. He has said they never discussed the killing.
He has said they live a happy life. Everything in that killing, in that kitchen, in that silence about what had happened in that kitchen, was a compressed version of the world Philip Leonetti had been raised to inhabit and had accepted completely until the moment he did not. Angelo Bruno died on March the 21st, 1980.
He was 69 years old and he died the way the men his organization had protected itself against for two decades died. Shot in the head while sitting in a vehicle outside his South Philadelphia home with the trigger pulled by people operating inside his own structure. The man who ordered it was Antonio Caponigro, Bruno’s own consigliere, known as Tony Bananas.
Caponigro believed he had secured approval from the commission, the governing body of the national organized crime network, to remove Bruno and take his position. The commission had not given that approval. The unauthorized murder of a boss was among the most serious violations an organization could commit. Caponigro and his associate Alfred Salerno were themselves killed by the commission in response.
Their bodies deposited in different about what unsanctioned killing of that order produced. Philip Testa, known as the chicken man for his involvement in a poultry distribution business, became boss. He was born April the 21st, 1924, and he had been one of Bruno’s most loyal soldiers. Scarfo was named consigliere under Testa.
Leonetti aligned entirely with Scarfo’s position within the reorganized family. Testa’s reign lasted approximately 1 year. On March 15th, 1981, a bomb packed with roofing nails detonated under the front porch of his home at 2117 Porter Street in South Philadelphia. The detonation was remote-controlled, operated by Rocco Marinucci from a vehicle parked outside.
The killing had been ordered by Testa’s own underboss, Peter Casella, and his capo, Frank Narducci, who had positioned themselves to claim the organization’s leadership after removing the boss. Casella moved immediately to claim authority, stating that the New York families had approved his assumption of power.
Scarfo called that claim and demanded a meeting with the heads of the Genovese and Gambino families. The New York families confirmed they had not approved Casella. They appointed Scarfo as boss instead. It was 1981. The man Angelo Bruno had exiled to what looked like the edge of the organization was now running it. The exile had lasted 18 years and had positioned him perfectly.
The violence that defined Scarfo’s rule as boss was different in character from the violence that preceded it. Bruno had used force as a final resort. Scarfo used it as a daily operating tool, and the line between force applied to enemies and force applied to allies was a line his organization crossed repeatedly and fatally.
In the four years after Bruno’s murder, 30 members of the Philadelphia organized crime community died in mob-related disputes. The internal war with Harry Riccobene, who operated an independent crew that refused submission to Scarfo’s authority, consumed much of the early part of the decade. Riccobene was physically distinctive, known in the neighborhood by nickname that referenced his posture and operationally resilient enough that the conflict against his faction ran for years and produced casualties on multiple sides.
He was ultimately convicted of murder and imprisoned. He died there in 2000. The man who carried the weight of that war on Scarfo’s behalf was Salvatore Testa, the son of the murdered boss, whom Scarfo had appointed as his godson. Salvy Testa was born March 31st, 1956 in Southwest Philadelphia. He was an efficient and violent presence whose loyalty to Scarfo extended to conducting 15 or more killings over the course of the Riccobene conflict.
On January 30th, 1982, he was promoted to caporegime. On July 31st of that year, he survived a shotgun attack at the Italian Market section of Philadelphia, absorbing injury in Scarfo’s service and continuing. Leonetti was present throughout this period as Scarfo’s constant operational extension. His role was not that of a man who gave orders.
He was the man who ensured that what was ordered was done, who appeared at meetings Scarfo preferred not to attend personally, who carried authority in his silence. The construction empire ran at its peak through these years. The casino labor infrastructure continued generating its monthly income.
Every meeting between the Philadelphia organization and the New York families included Leonetti as Scarfo’s representative at the table. The organizational philosophy Scarfo operated from contained a contradiction he could not see from where he was standing. Violence as an external tool produces results. Competitors retreat, rivals submit, territories are secured.
Violence applied internally produces a different result, which is that every person in the organization begins to understand that their survival depends not on their loyalty, but on their current usefulness to the man with the authority to have them killed. Salvatore Testa was the demonstration. After the Riccobene conflict concluded, Scarfo’s attention turned to the rising profile of the man who had carried it.
A Wall Street Journal article had written about Testa as a rich young power in organized crime. Scarfo’s organization was built on the principle that visibility destroyed organizations, and here was his most effective associate The irritant compounded when Testa broke off his engagement to Maria Molino, the daughter of underboss Salvatore Molino, shortly before the wedding was to take place.
The combination of the article and the broken engagement was processed by Scarfo as a display of unacceptable independence from a man who had already grown powerful enough to attract public attention. He ordered Testa’s death in 1984. The execution required a particular arrangement because Testa was himself a professional who was aware that his environment had turned hostile.
He was careful in the way that people are careful when they understand that the profession they have chosen does not offer retirement. His closest associate was a made man named Joey Pungitore. Pungitore agreed to participate in the plan that would kill Testa, but on a specific condition. He would not pull the trigger himself.
He could not do that to the man who was his closest friend. He could only provide the access. On September 14th, 1984, Pungitore brought Testa to the back room of the Something Sweet Candy Store at 951 East Passyunk Avenue in South Philadelphia. A second man was waiting. Testa was shot in the back of the head.
He was 28 years old. His godfather had arranged his death. The killing sent a message through the organization that was the opposite of what Scarfo believed he was sending. He believed he had demonstrated control. What he had demonstrated was that loyalty offered no protection. Testa had killed for Scarfo 15 or more times.
Testa had survived a shotgun attack while working in Scarfo’s interests. Testa was Scarfo’s godson. If none of that history provided protection, then nothing provided protection. And the men who had been in Scarfo’s orbit began drawing the obvious conclusion. The flood of cooperating witnesses that eventually destroyed the organization did not begin in a moment of principle.
It began with men doing arithmetic and finding that the loyalty side of the ledger no longer added up. Two years after Testa’s death in 1986, Scarfo made the appointment that formalized everything Leonetti had been accumulating. He named his nephew underboss of the Philadelphia crime family. Leonetti was approximately 32 years old at the time, with sources placing the figure anywhere between 30 and 33.
The precise age varying depending on which account and which edition of the documented record is consulted. What every source confirms without variation is that no underboss in the history of the American Mafia had been appointed at a younger age. The distinction was not honorary. It reflected what Scarfo believed Leonetti was, the most trusted man he had, the extension of his own authority into every room where that authority needed to be present.
The FBI classified Leonetti as public enemy number two. The Department of Justice focused considerable attention on the organization he helped run. He understood this and accepted it as the price of the position. He had been in the organization since he was 8 years old, in the formal criminal structure since his early 20s, in the inner circle for a decade.
The appointment did not change what he did. It changed the legal weight attached to what he had already been doing. What the appointment also produced was a comprehensive view of every decision the family made. He attended every significant organizational meeting. He was present for every murder contract, every extortion arrangement, every inter-family negotiation, every conversation about organizational structure and discipline.
His memory, by the time he agreed to cooperate, was a precise record of the Philadelphia family’s operations from the inside at the second highest level of authority. He had not been a peripheral observer. He had been the participant with access to everything. The organization at this peak extended far beyond street corners and construction sites.
The casino labor network was generating money through pension extraction, extortion of hospitality workers, and the specific leverage that came with controlling whether a The construction operation continued. Loan sharking and gambling ran across both states. The family maintained relationships with the Genovese and Gambino organizations in New York that extended into shared criminal projects.
Scarfo himself had grown into the role with a certainty that had shaded into something approaching invulnerability in his own assessment, a quality that turned out to be the most dangerous thing about him. The legal structure began to close in before the organization recognized what was happening. In 1986, Scarfo was indicted for attempting to extort a developer who wanted to build on the Delaware River waterfront, seeking a $1 million bribe to be delivered to a Philadelphia City Councilman who would direct city
contracts accordingly. That charge produced a 14-year federal sentence in 1988. The main proceeding came in November of that same year. Scarfo and 16 associates went to trial on federal racketeering charges under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. The indictment covered nine murders, four attempted murders, loan sharking, bookmaking, drug dealing, and 17 counts of extortion.
The jury found Scarfo guilty across the significant majority of the charges, determining that he had personally ordered nine killings. Informants Thomas DelGiorno and Nicholas Caramandi had already agreed to cooperate with prosecutors before the trial began, and their testimony had begun the process of opening the organization’s internal structure to federal scrutiny.
The moment inside that trial that decided the subsequent decade was not a legal finding. It was a piece of information delivered during an afternoon break. A lawyer approached Leonetti and his uncle and told them that Scarfo’s youngest son, Mark, 17 years old, had hanged himself inside the family business.
The boy was still breathing. Whether he would continue to do so was not certain. Leonetti had tears. He was watching the news arrive about a 17-year-old who had grown up in the same building on Georgia Avenue, who was his own cousin, whose father had just been told his son might be dying. He looked at the man who was that father.
Nicodemo Scarfo showed nothing. His characterization of the act was that the boy had shown weakness. He was embarrassed. Leonetti wrote in his memoir published in 2012 that he knew in that moment what he intended to do if they survived the trial. He and his family would disappear. He had spent 36 years inside a structure built on the principle that loyalty was its own reason and obligation, and he had watched the man who built that principle fail to feel anything for his own dying child.
The principle had no remaining foundation. The racketeering guilty verdict came in November of 1988. In May of 1989, the court sentenced Scarfo to 55 years in federal prison on those charges to run consecutive with the 14 years already received. He shrugged at the sentencing. It was not defiance.
It was the same absence of feeling he had shown in the courthouse corridor when told about his son. Leonetti received 45 years. He looked at the number and made his decision. At the time, Philip Leonetti agreed to cooperate with federal authorities in 1989. No member of the American Mafia at his level of organizational authority had ever done so.
The blood oath was clear on the matter. Silence was permanent regardless of personal consequence. The organization’s method of enforcing that expectation was equally clear. And Leonetti was aware of both these facts and proceeded anyway. The terms of what he offered and what he received were built on the scope of what he knew.
He had attended every significant organizational meeting for years. He had been at Scarfo’s side through the casino construction era, through the internal wars, through the Testa killing, through the period when the organization generated and spent and killed on a scale that most criminal enterprises never approach.
What he carried in his memory was not peripheral information gathered from the edges of the structure. It was the complete operational record of the Philadelphia crime family during its most violent and most profitable years, seen from the position of second command. He admitted to participating in 10 murders. He acknowledged being the direct trigger man in two of those killings and a participant in eight others.
Federal authorities reduced his 45-year sentence over time and he ultimately served 5 years, 5 months, and 5 days. He walked out of federal custody and did not go back. The testimony he provided was used in courts in five states across six separate trials. His account of Scarfo’s direction of the organization provided direct confirmation that extended and deepened the racketeering convictions already secured.
His account of inter-family meetings and shared criminal projects reach beyond the Philadelphia family to its relationships with other organizations. When federal prosecutors built their case against John Gotti in the early 1990s, Leonetti was among the witnesses they considered. He had attended meetings at which, by his documented account, Gotti told Philadelphia mob leadership that he had ordered the December 1985 murder of Paul Castellano.
Gotti had done this the way powerful men sometimes do when they believe they are entirely among allies. Leonetti had been in that room. Before he testified in the Gotti proceeding, however, Gambino underboss Sammy Gravano reached his own agreement with federal prosecutors and Gravano’s testimony carried the weight the government needed.
Leonetti’s Gotti testimony became unnecessary. The testimony that went forward and became part of permanent federal record was his account of Vincent Gigante, the Genovese family boss who had spent decades performing mental incompetence to avoid prosecution. In 1997, Leonetti appeared as one of six cooperating witnesses in Gigante’s trial.
He told the court that Gigante had attended inter-family organizational meetings with full lucidity, that the performance of confusion and incompetence was exactly that, a performance, and that Gigante had ordered six murder contracts against Philadelphia figures in connection with the unauthorized killings of Angelo Bruno and Philip Testa.
The trial jury convicted Gigante on racketeering and conspiracy charges, and Leonetti’s testimony was among the evidence that established the documented record of what Gigante had actually been doing while the world watched him shuffle around in a bathrobe. His own organization did not survive his cooperation.
Tel Giuorno and Caramandi had begun the cascade before Leonetti joined it, and the combination of their testimony with his effectively ended the Philadelphia crime family as a functioning enterprise at its former scale. The men who remained faced a federal apparatus that now held first-hand testimony from people who had participated in every significant organizational decision.
Subsequent bosses were convicted in rapid succession. The organization shrank to a fraction of its former reach and authority. Nicodemo Scarfo spent the remaining 27 years of his life moving through a succession of federal facilities. The state conviction for the murder of Frank D’Alfonso, the South Philadelphia florist and bookmaker known as Frankie Flowers, who had been shot on a neighborhood street in July of 1985 as he paused to light a cigarette, was overturned on appeal.
An appellate court found that the prosecutor had committed reversible error by repeatedly calling the defendants criminals in closing argument. In the retrial that followed, Scarfo and his co-defendants were acquitted. The federal racketeering sentence alone was sufficient to ensure he would not be released regardless.
Mark Scarfo, the boy whose near-death in a family business office had been the pivot point of his cousin’s decision, had survived the suicide attempt, but not without permanent consequence. He suffered cardiac arrest during the episode when oxygen supply to his brain was interrupted. He entered a coma. He remained there for years and died in April 2014.
He was 45 years old. Nicodemo Scarfo Jr., who had grown up in Atlantic City under the long shadow of his father’s authority, took a different path to the same destination. On Halloween night, 1989, a masked gunman shot him multiple times in a crowded Italian restaurant in one of the city’s most discussed attempted mob incidents. He survived.
He eventually connected himself to the Lucchese crime family in New York rather than the remnants of his father’s organization. In 2015, he was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison for racketeering, illegal gambling, and securities fraud, having been convicted on 25 counts. A third son changed his name. Nicodemo Domenico Scarfo died January 13th, 2017, at the Federal Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina.
He was 87 years old. The cause of death was reported as cancer. A government sentencing memorandum had once described him as a man who sought and achieved a career in the major leagues of crime. A federal prosecutor called him remorseless and profoundly evil. George Anastasia, who covered the Philadelphia mob for the Philadelphia Inquirer for more than a decade and wrote the definitive account of the Scarfo era in a book called Blood and Honor, compared him in temperament to John Gotti, noting that both men were
arrogant, power-hungry, and ultimately destroyed by the qualities that had elevated them. That comparison holds and extends further than temperament. Gotti and Scarfo represent the same organizational philosophy applied in two cities. Visibility is power. Personal loyalty is the foundation of an enterprise that needed structural discipline and violence as the language through which every disagreement was ultimately resolved.
Both organizations collapsed. Both men died in federal custody. The contrast is not between Gotti and Scarfo, but between both of them and the bosses who understood what every durable organization eventually understands, that the men who survive are the ones who cannot easily be seen. Philip Leonetti did not survive in the sense of continuing to run an organization.
He survived in the sense that he left federal custody while the man who had decades. He left the federal witness protection program at some point after his release and arranged his own security under a name that is not Philip Leonetti. He ran a landscaping business in Naples, Florida. He traveled on a 44-ft yacht.
He lived in a gated community in Hilton Head, South Carolina. When his memoir was published in 2012, a source familiar with the situation indicated a bounty still stood on his head. He said he felt safer taking care of himself. He returned to Atlantic City around the time the book came out. He walked past the building on North Georgia Avenue.
The neighborhood had changed across the decade since he and his uncle and his grandmother had lived in adjacent apartments. The casinos he had helped build, whose foundations Scarfo Inc. had poured when the governor was saying keep the hell out, were in various stages of closure and diminished operation. The world the 1976 referendum had created, had crested and begun its own long recession.
The woman beside him had once been in love with Vincent Falcone. Leonetti shot Falcone in a Margate kitchen on December 16th, 1979, and then eventually married the woman who had been Falcone’s girlfriend. He has said they never discussed it. He has said they live a happy life. What sits inside that description is the essential nature of what this story is about.
Philip Leonetti was raised from childhood inside a world where violence was professional conduct, loyalty was unconditional, and the organization’s requirements defined what was owed to anyone. He carried out murders for his uncle and called the experience natural. He served as a second-in-command of one of the most violent criminal enterprises in American history and ran it efficiently.
And then he watched a man he had known since he was a boy fail to produce grief when that man’s own child was dying. And something that had been held in place by a lifetime of conditioning came undone. The code broke at the point where Scarfo’s own indifference to his son proved that the code had never been about loyalty at all. It had been about compliance.
And compliance, when the man enforcing it shows you what he actually values, is a different thing entirely. The organization Scarfo built is gone. The Philadelphia family has not recovered its former scale or authority. The men who built it are dead or incarcerated or living under names that are not their own. The casinos Scarfo Inc.
poured concrete for have mostly closed. The thing they built their world around, the particular version of this thing of ours that Scarfo commanded and Leonetti served, ended when a man facing 45 years decided that a shrub was a kind of answer, he walked out. The organization did not survive the door closing behind him, and somewhere on the California coast, by one account from the period after the memoir was published, a man who was not named Philip Leonetti watches the sun go down over the water with a woman who was there when
everything began. The building on North Georgia Avenue still stands. The people who lived in it are scattered across the outcomes that violence and loyalty and their eventual collapse tend to produce. That is what happened to the family in the building and to the thing they built and to the two men at the center of it, one of whom got out and one of whom never did.
