Mafia Prince: Inside America's Most Violent Crime Family (3 page)

It wasn’t the first time that Scarfo and Leonetti had killed together, and it wouldn’t be the last. Over the next decade, they orchestrated or personally carried out 20 more killings. Another half dozen, or so, that predated the Falcone murder would help define their reign as two of the most notorious gangsters of the 20th century.

Three things figured prominently in many of the murders: money, power, and Atlantic City. Eventually, Little Nicky and Crazy Phil had them all—all the money, all the power, and absolute control over Atlantic City.

They had ascended from a lowly mob street crew, loaning money to cash-strapped gamblers and shaking down two-bit wise guys, and risen to the pantheon of organized crime. They were the boss and underboss of the Philadelphia–Atlantic City mob, the CEO and COO of the nation’s bloodiest and most ruthless Mafia empire.

Ten years after the Falcone murder, the life of crime, power, and big money was over for Little Nicky and Crazy Phil. But in many ways, life was just beginning for Philip Leonetti.

O
N MAY 1, 2011, THE WORLD WAS TRANSFIXED BY THE NEWS THAT OSAMA BIN LADEN, THE EVIL MASTERMIND OF THE 9/11 TERRORIST ATTACKS AND UNDOUBTEDLY THE MOST HATED MAN ON THE PLANET, HAD BEEN HUNTED DOWN AND KILLED BY MEMBERS OF THE UNITED STATES MILITARY’S ULTRAELITE NAVY SEAL TEAM SIX.

For most of the decade leading up to Bin Laden’s long-overdue execution, it was widely believed that the world’s most notorious terrorist was living inside a network of hidden mountain caves in the Afghan region of Tora Bora under the protection of the terror-friendly warlords who control the area.

But when Seal Team Six made its now infamous “trip to Atlantic City” (that is what they called the hit on Bin Laden), they did not find him inside a dusty mountain cave, but rather on the third floor of a carefully built million-dollar high-security compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan, less than 800 yards from a prestigious Pakistani military academy, the country’s equivalent to West Point.

Despite a $25 million bounty on his head, the 6′4″ Bin Laden was hiding in plain sight. Within hours of his bullet-ridden corpse being ceremoniously dumped into the Indian Ocean, the FBI removed him from atop
its Ten Most Wanted List, replacing him with the notorious South Boston Irish mob boss and former FBI informant James “Whitey” Bulger.

Suspected in more than 20 killings, the ruthless and cunning Bulger had vanished without a trace in December 1994 after being tipped off by a corrupt FBI agent that the feds were preparing to wipe out his gang with a massive indictment under the RICO (Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Act.

As the international FBI manhunt for Bulger intensified, credible sightings were reported in South Florida, New York City, London, and Chicago from tipsters looking to cash in on a $2 million reward. Additional confirmed sightings in nondescript, Podunk towns—like Grand Isle, Louisiana; Sloan, Iowa; Sheridan, Wyoming; and Fountain Valley, California—affirmed the belief that Bulger was traveling with ease, always managing to stay one step ahead of the egg-faced FBI agents who remained hot on his trial.

It appeared that Whitey Bulger was everywhere, yet nowhere, at the same time.

That would all change during the early evening hours of June 22, 2011, when FBI agents and US Marshals acting on a tip, found the 81-year-old fugitive gangster holed up in a posh seaside condominium in Santa Monica, California, that was located three blocks from the Pacific Ocean and the scenic open-air Third Street Promenade that houses dozens of boutique-type shops and trendy restaurants.

Like Bin Laden in Pakistan, the elusive Whitey Bulger was hiding in plain sight. As we watched the television coverage and read the newspaper accounts surrounding their respective captures, we wondered where in the world was Philip Leonetti hiding?

Leonetti, the onetime underboss of the Philadelphia–Atlantic City mob, nicknamed “Crazy Phil,” was the crowned prince of the Mafia during the mob’s long-lost 1980s heyday in the Northeast United States. A stone-cold killer, he was the nephew and second-in-command of Nicodemo “Little Nicky” Scarfo, one of the most bloodthirsty and ruthless crime bosses in the history of organized crime.

If Leonetti was the prince, Scarfo was undoubtedly the king of the Atlantic City–Philadelphia mob, and together they ran their Mafia empire from their headquarters on Georgia Avenue in the Ducktown neighborhood
of Atlantic City, less than three blocks from the world-famous boardwalk and the glitz and glamour of the city’s neon-lit casinos, all of which they controlled with an iron fist.

A former associate turned government witness once described Scarfo by saying, “If Nicky had as much power as Hitler, he woulda outdid him,” and also said that “Leonetti was 100-percent Scarfo; he was just as ruthless and deadly as his uncle.”

Murder, mayhem, and wanton violence became the benchmark of the mob under Little Nicky and Crazy Phil, with more than two-dozen mob killings punctuating what would become one of the most volatile and tumultuous periods in the long and celebrated US history of the Mafia, or its more proper name,
La Cosa Nostra,
which is Italian for “this thing of ours.”

Leonetti himself was convicted of participating in 10 gangland killings.

Millions of dollars in cash poured in from traditional mob rackets like gambling, loan sharking, and extortion, while millions more came in from Scarfo’s very lucrative underworld street tax and a seemingly limitless skim from Local 54, Atlantic City’s largest casino union, which Scarfo and Leonetti treated like their own petty cash fund.

Scarfo and Leonetti worked closely with New York crime bosses, including: Vincent “The Chin” Gigante, the leader of the powerful Genovese crime family who stymied law enforcement for decades by pretending to be crazy—walking around his Greenwich Village neighborhood in a bathrobe, mumbling to himself; and “the Dapper Don” John Gotti, the ambitious Gambino crime family boss known for his $2,000 suits.

Scarfo and Leonetti were recognized as elite
mafiosi,
highly regarded and equally feared in mob circles throughout the United States.

In other words, they were untouchable.

Or so it seemed.

As Scarfo and Leonetti grew in power, so did the efforts of the FBI and the US Department of Justice to stop them. They had become Public Enemy No. 1 and Public Enemy No. 2.

When it was over, the Scarfo organization would be decimated and Little Nicky, its supreme leader and Lord High Executioner would be sentenced to life in prison, narrowly escaping the death penalty, following a series of convictions in both state and federal courts in the late 1980s that rocked the foundation of the Philadelphia–Atlantic City mob. The trials featured testimony from several mob turncoats who had betrayed their sacred oath of
omerta
and agreed to cooperate with the government by
testifying against Scarfo, Leonetti, and 15 of their men.

Scarfo, now 83, remains behind bars as this book is published, currently housed at the high-security US Penitentiary in Atlanta, after spending the last 25 years in various maximum-security federal penitentiaries all over the United States.

Leonetti would receive 45 years in prison for his life of crime, which included convictions for murder and racketeering. But Crazy Phil would only serve five years, five months, and five days behind bars after agreeing to cooperate with the federal government in 1989, betraying his uncle Nicky Scarfo and his blood oath to
La Cosa Nostra,
to which he’d sworn his undying allegiance less than a decade earlier.

At the age of 36, Philip Leonetti, who had become the youngest underboss in the history of
La Cosa Nostra
gained the more dubious distinction of being the highest-ranking member of the nationwide crime syndicate to flip and cooperate with the government.

The impact on the underworld was akin to that of a plane flying into the World Trade Center
before
9/11.

It was unfathomable; but it happened, and the Philadelphia–Atlantic City mob would be left in tatters, its infrastructure so badly damaged that more than two decades later it has yet to fully recover.

Leonetti the government witness proved to be just as deadly as Leonetti the mob killer. Dozens of mobsters and associates were convicted as a direct result of Leonetti’s testimony, and he would figure prominently in the demise of New York mob bosses Vincent “The Chin” Gigante and John Gotti and more importantly,
La Cosa Nostra
itself.

When he was done testifying, Leonetti would settle into a life inside the confines of a top-secret world: the witness security wing of a remote federal prison tucked away in a dusty Arizona desert.

Joining him would be Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano, the former underboss of New York’s Gambino crime family, who followed Leonetti’s lead and also defected from
La Cosa Nostra.

Ironically, as Leonetti and Gravano enjoyed life together in the Arizona sun, reminiscing about their glory days in the mob, Nicky Scarfo and John Gotti, the bosses they betrayed, were rotting, locked down for all but a half hour of each day inside eight-by-ten-foot concrete cells in one of the nation’s toughest federal prisons, located in Marion, Illinois.

By the early 1990s, the US
La Cosa Nostra
was still a deadly nationwide criminal organization, but it had become a shell of its former self.

Leonetti, the man who brought the mob to its knees, was released from prison and disappeared into the Witness Protection Program with a new identity and a new lease on life. Not yet 40 years old, Philip Leonetti had to start over and completely reinvent himself, and he couldn’t have been happier to do so.

While Gigante and Gotti would go on to die inside the federal prisons that became their homes, Leonetti’s uncle, Nicodemo “Little Nicky” Scarfo, would remain alive and well in his.

Scarfo has vowed revenge and has openly plotted to kill his once-beloved nephew and his entire family. The evil and vindictive Scarfo would place a $500,000 bounty on his nephew’s head, a bounty, which according to the FBI, still stands today.

A letter written in the mid-1990s by a deranged Scarfo to his own mother, Leonetti’s grandmother, paints a chilling picture, as the jailed mob boss makes a not-so-veiled series of threats against Leonetti and his mother, Nancy, who is Scarfo’s own sister:

“I will never forget them animals and what they did to this family, but you still love them, which makes me know you lost your mind. I want you to live forever, but I want you to have your senses so you could see what is going to happen to those wild animals. If you love that witch, you better say all your prayers for her and her crazy son, because I don’t need no prayers and beside all of that, FUCK GOD, too.”

In another letter, this one intercepted by the Bureau of Prisons, a tamer Scarfo wrote the following to one of his lawyers:

“I maintain myself to see these people suffer one day, this is what keeps me going.”

What keeps Philip Leonetti going is the new life that he started with his family, far away from Atlantic City and the mob, and for the last decade or so, away from the watchful eye of the FBI and the US Marshals who run the Witness Protection Program.

Hiding from both the mob and the government, Philip Leonetti—we would come to learn—was, like Osama bin Laden and Whitey Bulger, hiding in plain sight.

W
HAT WE KNOW AS THE MAFIA IN THE UNITED STATES IS ACTUALLY AN OFFSHOOT OF SEVERAL DIFFERENT SECRET SOCIETIES IN EUROPE THAT DATE BACK CENTURIES. THE MOST PROMINENT OF THESE SECTS WERE THE SICILIAN MAFIA – THE ’
NDRANGHETA
– AND THE
CAMORRA,
WHICH ORIGINATED IN NAPLES.

Originally, the intent of such organizations was not criminal. They existed to protect the common citizens of these regions from a corrupt and oppressive government that did little to nothing to look out for the interests of the regular working man. Over time, as these groups evolved, they became sophisticated criminal organizations.

As Italian and Sicilian immigrants flooded the streets of major American cities in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a number of loosely organized incarnations of these secret societies began to take form, making their presence felt in ethnic neighborhoods across the country.

Street gangs with ties to the Old Country set up shop and operated a vast array of rackets. The onset of Prohibition in the 1920s made many early mob leaders incredibly wealthy, as their street gangs spearheaded an underworld movement supplying illegal liquor to a thirsty public, while causing heaps of newspaper headlines and bloodshed as they battled over turf.