In 1989, Philip Leonetti stood in a federal courtroom and made a decision that would have gotten him killed in any other circumstance he could imagine. He was 36 years old. He had just been convicted on racketeering charges and sentenced to 45 years in federal prison. His uncle, Nicodemo Scarfo, had received 55 years.
The two men had been inseparable for 25 years. Leonetti had been at his uncle’s side since he was 10 years old, had killed his first man at 26 on his uncle’s orders, had risen to become the underboss of the Philadelphia crime family at 33, the youngest underboss in the history of the American Mafia. He had witnessed every meeting, carried out every order, participated in murders that spanned two states and a decade.
He knew everything because his uncle had shown him everything. And now he was going to tell the government all of it. The decision meant his uncle would put a half million-dollar price on his head. It meant he could never go home, never see his neighborhood again, never live under his own name. It meant violating the blood oath he had sworn during his making ceremony, when they pricked his finger, put his blood on a picture of a saint, set the saint on fire in his cupped hands, and told him he would burn like that if he ever betrayed his friends. It meant becoming
the highest-ranking member of the American Mafia to ever break omertà. But it also meant he would testify in approximately 15 trials across five states. His testimony would contribute to the convictions of over 50 mob figures, including John Gotti, Vincent Gigante, and the entire hierarchies of multiple crime families.
He would admit to 10 murders, describe them in detail, name the victims, explain the orders. He would provide first-hand accounts that no other witness could match because he had been in every room, at every meeting, for a quarter century. He would serve only 5 years of his 45-year sentence and disappear into witness protection with a new name and a new life that his uncle could never reach.
This is the story of the uncle who turned his nephew into a killer and the nephew who turned on his uncle to save what was left of his own life. Drop where you are watching from in the comments below. It is genuinely one of the best parts of doing this. If you are new here and want more history like this delivered straight to you, subscribe now.
Back to South Philadelphia in the 1950s and the short-tempered young man who was learning the only business his family knew. Nicodemo Domenico Scarfo was born on March 8th, 1929 in Brooklyn, New York, the son of Italian immigrants from Naples and Calabria who moved to South Philadelphia when he was 12 years old.
His father, Philip, was a laborer. His mother, Catherine, kept the household. Young Nicodemo worked as a newsboy at the train station, graduated from Benjamin Franklin High School in 1947, and stood 5 feet 5 inches tall, which would earn him the nickname that followed him for the rest of his life, Little Nicky.
He made up for his height with an aggressive temper that showed itself early, first in the amateur boxing clubs throughout the Philadelphia area where he fought as a young man, then in the streets where his uncle, Nicholas “Nicky Buck” Piccolo, was a soldier in the Philadelphia crime family. Two other uncles, Joseph and Michael Piccolo, also worked for the organization.
The path was already laid out before Nicodemo Scarfo was old enough to understand what he was looking at. And in 1954, he was formally inducted into the Philadelphia family by boss Joseph Ida at a ceremony held in New Jersey alongside two of his uncles. He was 25 years old and already had a reputation as a dependable earner and an efficient killer.
The world he entered was organized around a different kind of leadership than the one he would eventually practice. Angelo Bruno had become boss of the Philadelphia crime family in 1959 after Antonio Pollina was deposed and Bruno ran the organization the way he ran his legitimate businesses. He was known as the docile Don, the gentle Don, a man who preferred conciliation over violence and understood that uncontrolled bloodshed in the streets was bad for the bottom line.
His reign from 1959 to 1980 was marked by peace and prosperity. The family controlled gambling, loan sharking, extortion, and labor rackets across Philadelphia and South Jersey without the constant warfare that characterized other crime families. Bruno publicly ranted against narcotics, though privately he allowed certain exempt members of his inner circle to profit from the drug trade.
He had close ties to Carlo Gambino and the five families in New York and his approach to organized crime was diplomatic, strategic, patient. For 21 years Angelo Bruno kept the peace, made money, and avoided the kind of violence that attracted federal attention. It was the longest stable reign any Philadelphia boss had enjoyed and it created a world where men like Nicodemo Scarfo could operate in relative safety as long as they followed the rules Bruno had established.
Scarfo did not follow the rules. In 1963 he stabbed a longshoreman named William Dugan to death in a South Philadelphia diner during an argument over which booth to sit in. He pleaded guilty to manslaughter and served six months in prison. The incident drew exactly the kind of attention Angelo Bruno had spent years avoiding and when Scarfo was released, Bruno made a decision that was intended as punishment, but would eventually reshape the entire organization.
He exiled Scarfo to Atlantic City to oversee the family’s gambling rackets. It was a banishment dressed as a promotion, a way to get a violent, short-tempered soldier out of Philadelphia before he caused more problems. Scarfo moved to Atlantic City in 1963 and lived there with his mother Catherine, his second wife, and his three sons in a boarding home his mother operated.
The exile would last 17 years, and during that time, Scarfo bided his time, ran small rackets, and waited. Philip Leonetti was born on March the 27th, 1953 in Philadelphia, the son of Pasquale Leonetti and Annunziata Scarfo. Annunziata was Nicodemo Scarfo’s sister. Pasquale Leonetti abandoned the family when Philip was young, and the boy was raised by his mother in the Ducktown section of Atlantic City, the Little Italy neighborhood where his uncle Nicky had been sent into exile.
Leonetti was a quiet child, laid-back, the opposite of his uncle’s volatile temperament. He was protected and supervised by Scarfo and other family members, and he grew up watching his uncle operate on the margins of the organization, far from the center of power in Philadelphia. At some point, when Leonetti was 8 or 10 years old, his uncle stopped by with a favor to ask.
Would Philip like to take a ride? He could sit up front. Leonetti jumped at the chance. As they drove, Scarfo told his nephew about the dead body in the trunk. He was a bad man, Scarfo explained, a man Scarfo had stabbed with an ice pick in a New Jersey bar for disrespecting him, and sometimes you had to take care of men like this. Leonetti felt special, like he was really helping his uncle.
Scarfo explained that the cover of a little boy in the vehicle ensured they would not be stopped by law enforcement. The moment sucked Leonetti into his uncle’s orbit, and for the next 25 years, he would rarely leave Scarfo’s side. In 1976, New Jersey legislators approved a referendum legalizing gambling, but only within the confines of Atlantic City.
Governor Brendan Byrne attended a ceremony on June 2nd, 1977 to announce the coming transformation, and he had a message for organized crime. Keep your filthy hands off of Atlantic City. Keep the hell out of our state. The first casino, Resorts Atlantic City, opened in 1978, and by the time the construction boom was fully underway, Nicodemo Scarfo, who had been living in exile in Atlantic City for 13 years, controlled the cement.
His company, Scarf Inc., which he shared with his nephew Philip Leonetti, intimidated businesses into buying from them as developers built new casinos in the city. The money that came from the casinos, the construction, the unions, and the rackets that followed the gambling boom transformed Atlantic City from a backwater into one of the most valuable criminal territories on the East Coast.
And the man who had been sent there in disgrace suddenly found himself running an empire. Between 1971 and 1973, Scarfo had served nearly 2 years in prison for refusing to testify before the New Jersey State Commission of Investigation. He served that time with Angelo Bruno and with Genovese family members Gerardo Catena and Louis Manna, forming relationships that would prove valuable later.
But it was another act of violence that showed Philip Leonetti exactly what kind of organization he was being trained to join. On February 15th, 1978, a masked gunman walked into the cocktail lounge of the Flamingo Hotel in Atlantic City and shot Judge Edwin Helfant five times in the face in front of his wife. The gunman was Nicholas Nick the Blade Virgilio.
The driver of the getaway car was Nicodemo Scarfo. Helfant had refused a $12,500 bribe to give Virgilio a lighter sentence on murder charges, and Scarfo wanted the public execution to serve as a warning to anyone else who might be unwilling to cooperate. The murder went unsolved for years. Scarfo and Virgilio were not indicted until April of 1987, and by then the violence they had committed together was only a small part of what the government was trying to prove.
Leonetti committed his first murder on December 16th, 1979. The victim was Vincent Falcone, a cement contractor who socialized with Scarfo and Leonetti, and who had made disparaging comments about both men. Scarfo ordered the killing. Leonetti, who was 26 years old, carried it out. He described the moment years later with a precision that showed how completely his uncle had trained him.
He tried to relax Falcone, told him to make some drinks, get some ice. As soon as Falcone turned around, Leonetti shot him. He remembered the feeling he had. He felt cold. He did not feel any remorse. He ran behind Falcone, stuck the gun to the back of his head, and fired. He thought Falcone was running away because the force of the gun moved him forward.
And then Falcone fell down, and Leonetti emptied his gun into him. Years later, when asked what it felt like to kill someone, Leonetti said he hated to admit it, but it felt natural. The murder prompted associate Joe Salerno Jr. to become a government witness, but by then Leonetti had already crossed the line that separated the life he might have lived from the life his uncle had chosen for him.
In 1980, Philip Leonetti was formally inducted into the Philadelphia crime family in a ceremony where they pricked his finger, put his blood on a picture of a saint, set the saint on fire in his cupped hands, and told him he would burn like that if he ever betrayed his friends. On the evening of March 21st, 1980, Angelo Bruno was sitting in a car outside his home at the corner of 10th Street and Snyder Avenue in South Philadelphia smoking a cigarette when his own driver gave the signal and someone stepped out of the darkness with a shotgun.
Bruno was 69 years old. The shotgun blast struck him in the back of the head leaving a single gaping wound behind his right ear. He died instantly. The driver, John Stanfa, was wounded in the arm but survived. The execution-style killing shocked the underworld and ended Bruno’s 21-year reign as boss, the longest period of peace and stability the Philadelphia family had ever known.
The conspiracy had been led by Bruno’s own consigliere, Antonio Tony Bananas Caponigro. Caponigro was heavily involved in the drug trade against Bruno’s public wishes and wanted to expand the family’s narcotics operations. He approached Genovese family boss Frank Funzi Tierri seeking the Commission’s permission to kill Bruno and take over the family.
Tierri lied. He told Caponigro the Commission supported the move. Tierri wanted Caponigro’s North Jersey gambling operation and saw an opportunity to set up operations in Atlantic City. What Tierri did not tell Caponigro was that the Commission had not approved the murder and had no intention of allowing Bruno to be killed without proper authorization.
Caponigro believed he would travel to New York after the assassination and be confirmed as the new boss of Philadelphia. Instead, he was tortured and murdered. His body was found in the trunk of a car in New York, shot dozens of times with $300 in bills stuffed in his mouth and anus as a symbol of his own greed.
His co-conspirators, Frank Sindone, Alfred Salerno, and John Simone were also murdered by order of the commission. Within months, four of the men involved in Bruno’s murder had turned up dead. The message resonated through every family in the country. You do not kill a boss without permission from the commission.
And if you are stupid enough to try, you will die badly. Philip Testa became the new boss of the Philadelphia family, appointing Nicodemo Scarfo as his consigliere. For the first time since the stabbing in the diner in 1963, Scarfo held a position of real authority in the organization that had sent him away. Testa was known as the chicken man for his involvement in the poultry business and for the pockmarked face that some believed came from a severe case of chicken pox.
He was an old-fashioned mobster in the way Angelo Bruno had been old-fashioned, staunchly Catholic, loyal to his wife, a man who did not keep a mistress, and who schooled his son Salvatore in the ways of the old mafia. He tried to run the family the way Bruno had run it with discipline and restraint, but the world Bruno had built was already coming apart.
One month before his death, Testa was indicted in a federal racketeering case called Operation Gangplank, one of the first prosecutions built on the RICO Act by the United States Attorney’s Office in Philadelphia. The charges centered on gambling and loan sharking operations. The co-defendants included Frank Narducci Sr., Harold and Mario Riccobene, Pasquale Spirito, Joseph Ciancaglini, and several associates.
Testa’s reign as boss would last less than 1 year. On March 15th, 1981, just before 3:00 on a Sunday morning, an explosion shook the Girard Estates neighborhood of South Philadelphia. Philip Testa had returned to his home at 2117 Porter Street, across the street from Stephen Girard Park. As he opened the door to his twin home, a nail bomb exploded under his front porch.
The blast threw bricks, mortar, and concrete into the roadway and across the street into the park. The porch roof was torn apart and collapsed. The front door was forced 15 ft into the residence. A 30-in wide crater was punched through the 6-in concrete porch floor. Officers found Testa on the far side of the crater, somehow still alive.
His body was burned and badly torn. His lower body was mangled. One officer told the press that Testa looked like he had gone through a giant paper shredder. He was rushed to the hospital unconscious and died at 4:15 that morning. The medical examiner reported that death had been caused by multiple injuries to his head, trunk, arms, and legs.
The murder was allegedly ordered by Testa’s own underboss, Peter Casella, and by capo Frank Narducci Sr. Retaliation was swift. Narducci was gunned down. Casella was banished from the mob and fled to Florida. On March 15th, 1982, exactly 1 year after the bombing, the body of Rocco “Rocky” Marinucci was found in a pile of debris at a parking lot at South 8th Street and Tasker Street.
Marinucci, who was 30 years old and owned a pizza shop in South Philadelphia, had been a driver for Cassella. Witnesses had reported seeing a black van like one Merlino she used to speeding away from the scene just after the explosion at Testa’s home. Merlino she had been beaten and shot. Three large firecrackers were stuffed in his mouth as a symbolic link to the bombing.
In September of 1983, Theodore Dippolito, who was 23 years old and already serving a life sentence on another matter, confessed to participating in the Merlino. The organization remembered every betrayal and answered every killing with another killing. Bruce Springsteen wrote Atlantic City in April of 1982 memorializing Testa’s death in the opening line.
Well, they blew up the chicken man in Philly last night. Nicodemo Scarfo seized the top position for himself promoting Salvatore Merlino to underboss and naming Frank Monte as consigliere. The man who had been sent to Atlantic City in disgrace 18 years earlier for killing a man in an argument over a seat was now the boss of the Philadelphia crime family and the bloodiest period in the organization’s history was about to begin.
Where Angelo Bruno had preferred diplomacy and Philip Testa had tried to maintain the old ways, Nicodemo Scarfo loved violence for its own sake and demanded that his men kill constantly to prove their loyalty. He told his nephew Philip Leonetti repeatedly that the foundation of La Cosa Nostra was murder. “You got to kill people,” Scarfo said, “and you got to keep on killing them.
That’s how this thing works.” On one documented occasion, while watching his soldiers tie up the body of an associate he had ordered killed for allegedly insulting him, Scarfo was heard to say with what witnesses described as joyous excitement, “I love this. I love it. He stood 5 ft 5 in tall and made up for his small stature with a hair-trigger temper and an appetite for violence that disturbed even hardened criminals.
He was paranoid, impulsive, ruthless. He did not hesitate to order people murdered over moderate disputes. He demanded that all criminals pay a street tax for operating in his territory. He increasingly involved the family in narcotics trafficking. His violent approach attracted unwanted attention from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Pennsylvania State Police, and the New Jersey State Police.
Between 1981 and 1989, the period of Scarfo’s reign as boss, 20 to 30 mob-related murders occurred in the Philadelphia and South Jersey area. A body count that stood in stark contrast to the relative peace of Angelo Bruno’s 21 years. On September 14th, 1984, Scarfo ordered the murder of Salvatore Testa, one of his captains and top hitman.
Salvatore was the son of Philip Testa, the Chicken Man, the boss who had been Scarfo’s close friend and mentor. Salvatore’s ambition and growing popularity within the organization made Scarfo feel threatened. He was shot and killed by Salvatore Wayne Grande in New Jersey less than 4 years after his father had been torn apart by a nail bomb.
The murder of the son of the man who had made him boss gave Scarfo a reputation for disloyalty, and criminal organizations across the United States began to distrust him. If Scarfo would kill the son of his mentor for no reason other than paranoia, he would kill anyone. By the early 1980s, Philip Leonetti was already a millionaire, controlling a lucrative trade of racketeering, illegal gambling, loan sharking, extortion, and skimming from the Atlantic City casinos.
Scarfo demoted Bruno’s old mob captains and replaced them with men loyal to him, including Leonetti, Lawrence Yogi Merlino, and Joseph “Chickie” Ciancaglini Sr. The moves created resentment among soldiers who had been well situated under Bruno and Testa, but were passed over by Scarfo. South Jersey soldiers grew angry that Scarfo was allowing New York mobsters to operate in Atlantic City.
Bodies regularly turned up in trash cans and car trunks, often with symbolic messages showing which family should be feared. The stable world Angelo Bruno had built for 21 years was gone, replaced by an atmosphere of constant fear, where loyalty did not protect you and success made you a target. In February of 1986, Nicodemo Scarfo demoted Salvatore Merlino from underboss to capo and promoted his nephew Philip Leonetti to the second highest position in the Philadelphia crime family, making Leonetti, at age 33, the youngest
underboss in the history of the American Mafia. Leonetti had been a capo since 1981. When he was promoted to underboss, he took over Merlino’s ownership interest in the family’s illegal sports betting business, a highly successful operation that had been running since 1983. The business had originally been a partnership.
In 1983, three men each invested $25,000: Joseph “Pungie” Torre, Thomas Del Giorno, and Salvatore Testa. After Salvatore Testa was murdered in September of 1984, Scarfo and Salvatore Merlino assumed his 1/3 interest and split the profits. When Leonetti replaced Merlino as underboss in February of 1986, he took over Merlino’s share.
Pungitore managed the daily operations. After Del Giomo became a cooperating government witness, Pungitore controlled the business’s $300,000 bankroll. The sports betting operation provided year-round profits from football, baseball, and basketball bets. As underboss, Leonetti was present at every major meeting.
He witnessed every order Scarfo gave. He participated in organizational decisions. By this point in his life, he had admitted to participating in 10 total murders. His first involvement had been at age 10, when he helped his uncle dispose of a body. His first actual killing had been at age 26, when he shot Vincent Falcone in 1979. He described the act of murder as feeling natural, something that made him feel cold, but produced no remorse.
Despite his reputation for violence, Leonetti consistently denied that Crazy Phil was a real nickname, maintaining that it had been concocted in the late 1970s by a reporter, and that he had sent an emissary requesting they stop using it. He was living lavishly, a millionaire from the casinos, gambling, loan sharking, and extortion operations he controlled.
His relationship with his uncle had defined his entire life. Scarfo had raised him from age 10, shown him everything, trusted him with everything. For 25 years, Leonetti rarely left Scarfo’s side. He was protected by his uncle’s position and by his own reputation, but he was also trapped by the same forces. He could not leave.
He could not refuse orders. He could not show weakness. His uncle had told him repeatedly that the foundation of their world was killing, and by 1986, Leonetti understood that he was part of a machine that would never stop. The more successful he became, the more complicit. The more complicit, the more trapped.
The Philadelphia crime family under Nicodemo Scarfo generated an estimated $100 million annually from illegal gambling, loan sharking, drug trafficking, labor racketeering, extortion, and control of the construction industry and the waterfront. And every dollar that came in attracted more attention from law enforcement agencies that had been waiting for the right witnesses to build a RICO case that would bring the entire operation down.
The family controlled construction through intimidation and bid rigging. They controlled the waterfront and the unions governing the ports. They demanded street tax from all criminals operating in their territory. The operational reach extended across Philadelphia, South Jersey, and Atlantic City, making it one of the most profitable criminal organizations on the East Coast.
But the success created vulnerabilities. In 1985, Scarfo plotted to extort $1 million from developer Willard Rouse. He sent soldier Nicholas Caramandi and an associate to carry out the extortion. Rouse refused the demand and immediately contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The FBI sent an undercover agent to pose as a representative of Rouse.
When Scarfo realized the operation had been compromised, he ordered a hit on Caramandi. The order to kill him influenced Caramandi, who was a notable and feared hit man, to cooperate and testify against the Philadelphia family. In January of 1987, Scarfo was convicted of the Rouse extortion and sentenced to 14 years in prison.
He was arrested at Philadelphia International Airport on suspicion of extortion and had been in jail ever since. In April of 1987, Scarfo and Nicholas Virgilio were indicted for the murder of Judge Edwin Helfant, the killing that had taken place in February of 1978. In November of 1986, two of Scarfo’s men made the decision that would crack the organization open.
Nicholas Nicky Crow Caramandi and Thomas Tommy Del Degiorno turned government witnesses. Both men believed they were in danger from the violent Scarfo for what they knew. Degiorno was a capo. Caramandi was a soldier under his command. Both had been implicated in several murders allegedly committed at Scarfo’s behest.
They negotiated plea agreements that included transactional immunity and post-trial witness relocation. Their testimony would show that a prospective witness had been killed in the past, that a judge had been murdered, and that attempts had been made to bribe other judges. Their lives had been threatened, and they would remain under heavy guard during their appearances in court.
Degiorno’s information solved 24 homicides. Together, the two men would provide the critical testimony needed to build a comprehensive RICO case against Scarfo and the entire leadership of the Philadelphia family. The dramatic rise in violence under Scarfo’s leadership had attracted federal attention. The increased prosecutions convinced several mobsters that cooperating with the government was preferable to either dying on Scarfo’s orders or spending the rest of their lives in prison.
By early 1987, Nicodemo Scarfo was serving a 14-year sentence for extortion, facing a murder indictment for the Judge Helfant killing, and watching two of his own men cooperate with the government to build a case that would charge him and 16 others with running a criminal conspiracy that included 13 murders, and he still did not understand that the violence he had used to build his empire was the the violence that would destroy it.
On January 11th, 1988, a a federal grand jury in Philadelphia returned a sweeping indictment charging Nicodemo Scarfo and 18 other members and associates of the Philadelphia crime family with racketeering and racketeering conspiracy covering a period from April of 1976 through October of 1987. The indictment charged a total of 19 defendants.
The racketeering counts included 13 murders or attempted murders as predicate acts, along with charges of extortion, gambling, and conspiracy to distribute methamphetamine. Federal, state, and local officials who announced the charges at a news conference called the indictment unprecedented in scope. Joel Friedman, head of the Organized Crime Strike Force in Philadelphia, said the charges attacked organized crime at the highest levels.
Pennsylvania Attorney General LeRoy Zimmerman said the indictment was clear evidence that the answer to organized crime was organized law enforcement. Authorities announced their intention to try all 19 defendants together. The defendants included underboss Philip Leonetti and three of the family’s four capos, Joseph Ciancaglini, Francis Iannarella, and Joseph Pungitore.
Multiple soldiers were also charged. Scarfo had been in jail since January of 1987 serving his 14-year extortion sentence. He also faced trials in three separate murder cases in Pennsylvania and New Jersey. In December of 1987, he had been acquitted of trying to corner the local methamphetamine market by importing and distributing over 100 gallons of a precursor chemical.
Trial preparation began for what would become one of the most significant organized crime prosecutions in the the of the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. The trial judge approved the use of an anonymous jury due to the threats against witnesses and the climate of fear the defendants had created. The cooperating witnesses, Thomas Del Giordano and Nicholas Caramandi, would be central to the prosecution.
Both had negotiated plea agreements that included immunity and witness relocation. They would testify about murders allegedly committed at Scarfo’s behest, describe the organizational structure, explain Scarfo’s leadership role, and detail the consequences of disobeying his orders. The jury would be sequestered due to security concerns.
The proceedings would take place under extraordinary measures that recognized the danger posed by men who had murdered judges and witnesses and who had created an organization built on the systematic use of violence to maintain control. On November 1st, 1988, 3 days before the trial was set to begin, Mark Scarfo, Nicodemo Scarfo’s youngest son, attempted suicide. He was 17 years old.
He had been taunted for years by classmates about his father’s criminal activities. He had grown increasingly despondent over his father’s possible imprisonment. He hanged himself in the office of his father’s concrete supply company in Atlantic City. His mother discovered him. Paramedics were able to resuscitate him, but he had suffered cardiac arrest and his brain had been deprived of oxygen.
He entered a coma where he would remain until his death in April of 2014. 3 days after his brother’s suicide attempt, on November 4th, 1988, Nicky Scarfo Jr. and a friend assaulted a woman in an elevator at Hahnemann University Hospital in Philadelphia. The woman said the two men had looked menacingly at her and she pretended to reach for a gun in her coat.
The two men punched her, pushed her to the floor, and kicked her several times. Scarfo Jr. was arrested for the assault, convicted, fined, and put on probation. The family was disintegrating under the pressure of the indictments, the cooperating witnesses, and the impending trial.
Before a single witness had taken the stand, before a single piece of evidence had been presented to the jury, the Scarfo family had already suffered casualties that no acquittal could repair. The trial commenced on September 28th, 1988 in federal court in Philadelphia before an anonymous jury that had been impaneled under extraordinary security measures because the defendants on trial had murdered judges, threatened witnesses, and created an atmosphere of fear that required the government to take precautions that were unprecedented in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.
Neither party was permitted to learn the jurors’ names, residence addresses, or places of employment. The prospective jurors completed an extensive written questionnaire that covered topics including the nature of their employment, the general neighborhood in which they lived, their age, reading habits, television viewing preferences, education, experience as jurors in previous criminal cases, membership in various organizations, hobbies, and connections to law enforcement.
The questionnaire allowed the attorneys to evaluate jurors without exposing them to potential retaliation. The jury was sequestered throughout the trial. The trial judge had granted the government’s motion for these measures based on the documented history. A prospective witness had been killed in the past, a judge had been murdered, attempts had been made to bribe other judges, and the lives of the cooperating witnesses, Thomas Del Giorna and Nicholas Caramandi, had been threatened.
Both men remained under heavy guard during their court appearances. Del Giorna testified that as a capo in Scarfo’s organization, he and his underlings carried out activities in accordance with instructions received from Scarfo. Caramandi had been under DelGiorno’s command. Both men had negotiated plea agreements that included transactional immunity and post-trial witness relocation in the federal witness protection program.
Both had been implicated in several murders allegedly committed at Scarfo’s behest. Their testimony described Scarfo’s leadership role in the mafia, the grave consequences of conducting unapproved criminal activities, and why they had chosen to cooperate despite the likelihood of death or serious injury for breaking faith with the mob.
The testimony linking Scarfo to murders unrelated to the specific charges was admitted to explain why Caramandi and DelGiorno had turned government witnesses. The evidence showed that Scarfo had tight control over an organization capable of executing those who incurred his displeasure. The witnesses themselves had participated in the slaying of compatriots accused of disloyalty to the crime family, which gave credence to their fear that they had been slated for the same fate.
The indictment charged 32 RICO predicate acts. The jury would eventually find Scarfo guilty of directly participating in eight murders, four attempted murders, two distributions of methamphetamine, one extortionate collection of credit, 14 extortions, one Hobbs Act extortion, and one illegal sports bookmaking operation.
17 defendants stood trial together. Some from the original indictment of 19 had pleaded guilty or become fugitives. The defendants convicted included underboss Philip Leonetti and three of the family’s four capos, Joseph Ciancaglini, Francis Iannarella, and Joseph Pungitore. The trial concluded on November 17th, 1988.
The jury deliberated for a few days. On November 19th, 1988, the jury returned guilty verdicts on all counts against all 17 defendants, convicting Nicodemo Scarfo of conspiracy, racketeering, eight murders, four attempted murders, and a criminal enterprise that had operated for over a decade. And the only question that remained was how long the sentences would be, and whether anyone else would decide that cooperation was preferable to dying in prison.
Philip Leonetti was 36 years old when he was sentenced to 45 years in federal prison, and the calculation he made was simple. He could spend the rest of his life behind bars for a man who had taught him to kill, and then killed everyone around him, or he could break the oath he had sworn when they burned the saint in his hands, and tell the government everything he knew.
His uncle Nicodemo Scarfo had been sentenced to 55 years on the racketeering conviction. Scarfo also received a separate life sentence for the 1985 murder of bookmaker Frank Frankie Flowers D’Alfonso, though that life sentence would later be overturned. Federal prosecutors called Scarfo the first La Cosa Nostra boss to be convicted of first-degree murder.
On May 11th, 1989, Scarfo was formally sentenced. Shortly after his uncle’s sentencing, Philip Leonetti agreed to cooperate with the government. At that moment, Leonetti became the highest-ranking member of the American Mafia to break the blood oath of omerta. The decision was driven by the prospect of lifelong imprisonment at age 36, by Scarfo’s paranoia and executions, which had undermined the very code of silence they were supposed to be protecting, and by pressure from Leonetti’s immediate family, who urged him to
prioritize freedom over mob allegiance amid the organization’s collapse. Leonetti stated that his primary reason for cooperating was that he wanted his son, Philip Jr., who was 17 years old, not to become part of organized crime. He also wanted to protect his fiancee and his mother. But the decision meant violating the oath he had sworn during his making ceremony when they had pricked his finger, put his blood on a picture of a saint, set the picture on fire in his cupped hands, and told him to keep juggling it until it burned out
while he recited the vow, “May I burn like this saint if I betray my friends.” He was now betraying everyone who had been in that room. His uncle’s response was immediate. Nicodemo Scarfo put a half million-dollar price on Philip Leonetti’s head. Scarfo called him “my [ __ ] nephew.
” The organization’s code demanded a death sentence for cooperating witnesses. Leonetti expected the price. As he said later, “It was expected.” What he was doing was going against all the rules of La Cosa Nostra. He acknowledged that he had put himself and his family in a bad situation. They would have to be careful for the rest of their lives.
The Federal Witness Protection Program would provide new identities and relocation. But first, Leonetti would have to testify. He would appear in approximately 15 trials. He would admit to 10 murders and describe each one in detail. He would name the victims, explain the orders he had received, and describe the executions he had carried out or witnessed.
He would testify against his uncle, against the men he had worked with for 25 years, against the organization that had been his entire world since he was 10 years old. At the moment he made his decision to cooperate, Philip Leonetti became the most valuable cooperating witness in the history of organized prosecution. Over the next several years, Philip Leonetti testified in approximately 15 trials across five states, admitted to killing two people, and helping in the murder of eight others, and provided testimony that contributed to the
convictions of over 50 defendants, including some of the highest-ranking members of organized crime in the United States. By May of 1992, he had testified in six trials in five states. By June of 1993, he had testified against at least 45 former mob members. He admitted to 10 murders total, killing two people personally and helping in eight others.
He described each murder in detail, naming the victims, explaining the orders, describing the executions, and the locations. His testimony contributed to the convictions of John Gotti, the boss of the Gambino crime family, and Vincent Gigante, the boss of the Genovese crime family. It helped convict Nicholas Bianco, who had been elevated from underboss to boss of the Patriarca family of New England.
It brought down virtually the entire hierarchy of the Patriarca family. It helped convict Charles Chuckie Porter, the underboss of the Pittsburgh La Cosa Nostra, and Venero Benny Eggs Mangano, the consigliere of the Genovese family. It contributed to convictions of members of the Lucchese family’s New Jersey branch, and over a dozen associates of the Philadelphia crime family.
Leonetti had been scheduled to testify against John Gotti on January 21st, 1992, but his appearance was canceled after Salvatore Sammy the Bull Gravano, the underboss of the Gambino family, agreed to testify instead. Gotti was convicted of racketeering and murder. Leonetti’s defection had been a major factor in Gravano’s decision to flip.
If the underboss of the Philadelphia family could break the oath and survive in witness protection, then cooperation was possible even for high-ranking members of other families. Leonetti was considered one of the best mob witnesses to ever take the stand. His testimony was credible because of his position and because he admitted to his own crimes, which made his accounts of others’ crimes more believable.
On May 30th, 1992, a federal judge reduced Leonetti’s sentence in recognition of his cooperation. The judge told Leonetti, “I commend you. It took a lot of guts.” Leonetti served 5 years, 5 months, and 5 days of his original 45-year sentence. Some of that time was actually spent in a beach house where officials thought he was better protected while waiting to testify.
He was released in the early 1990s and entered the federal witness protection program. He was given a new identity and relocated to another part of the country. He has been living there ever since as a successful businessman and model citizen whose neighbors know him only as a friendly and successful member of the community.
Despite his cooperation against mob associates, Leonetti never testified against his blood relatives. He stated proudly that he never testified against family members, including his uncle Nicodemo Scarfo, his mother Annunziata, or his cousin Nicky Scarfo Jr. He testified only against mob associates.
After his release from prison, he occasionally visited Atlantic City, checking in with his grandmother and his cousin. Years later, he married the former girlfriend of Vincent Falcone, the man Leonetti had shot in the back of the head in 1979, his first murder. He co-authored a book titled Mafia Prince with investigative journalist Scott Burnstein.
The book was published on November the 27th, 2012. It detailed his first-hand experiences within the Philadelphia crime family and his life under his uncle’s control. The book blistered his uncle, describing Nicodemo Scarfo as a Svengali who had manipulated and destroyed everyone around him. When Leonetti was informed that his uncle had died on Friday the 13th of January, 2017, he reportedly replied, “That’s appropriate.
” In interviews, Leonetti described his uncle in blunt terms, “He’s no [ __ ] good. You don’t know how evil he is. My uncle destroyed his whole family.” The FBI spent more than $1 million on the protection of Leonetti and the other cooperating witnesses before they even testified. Philip Leonetti, who had killed 10 people and risen to become the youngest underboss in the history of the American Mafia, served 5 years in prison, testified against everyone he had worked with for a quarter century, and disappeared into a new life that his uncle could never
reach, while Nicodemo Scarfo remained in federal prison serving a sentence that would keep him there until his death, which came on January 13th, 2017, 28 years after the nephew he trusted with everything stood in a courtroom and told the truth about who his uncle really was. The story of Nicodemo Scarfo and Philip Leonetti is a story of how a criminal organization built on blood loyalty destroyed itself through violence.
Scarfo’s paranoia and brutality created the conditions for his own downfall. The nephew he had raised to be the perfect underboss became the perfect witness. The Philadelphia mob never recovered from the convictions that followed Leonetti’s cooperation. The family that had generated an estimated $100 million a year under Scarfo’s leadership fragmented and lost its power.
Scarfo died in prison on January 13th, 2017 at the Federal Medical Center in Butner, North Carolina. He was 87 years old. The cause of death was cancer. He had spent the final 28 years of his life behind bars. Leonetti lives today under a new name in the Federal Witness Protection Program, a businessman somewhere in America whose neighbors have no idea who he was or what he did.
The uncle who called him my favorite nephew died in the same federal facility where John Gotti had died 5 years earlier. Both men destroyed by witnesses who had been close to them and who decided that cooperation was preferable to dying in prison. What Philip Leonetti’s testimony demonstrated was that loyalty only works when it runs in both directions.
When a boss kills everyone around him, eventually someone makes the calculation that 45 years in prison is better than one more year under that boss’s rule. The testimony of one nephew brought down mob families in five states. The bloodiest reign in Philadelphia mob history lasted 9 years. From Scarfo’s seizure of power in 1981 to his conviction in November of 1988, the cooperation of the man who had been closest to him ended it.
Nicodemo Scarfo built an empire on violence and discovered that violence is the least stable foundation any organization can rest on. The organization demanded absolute loyalty but offered none in return. The code of omerta held only as long as the people sworn to it believed they were safer inside the organization than outside it.
When Scarfo killed Salvatore Testa, the son of his mentor, for no reason other than paranoia, he showed everyone in the family that loyalty meant nothing and that success made you a target. When he created an atmosphere where no one was safe and where every conversation might be your last, he gave his own underboss a reason to break the oath and tell the government everything.
Philip Leonetti broke the oath and survived. Nicodemo Scarfo kept the oath and died in prison. The nephew who violated every rule of La Cosa Nostra lives free under a new name. The uncle who demanded that everyone follow those rules spent nearly three decades in a federal cage, which was, by any measure of what mattered to the people involved, the entire point.
