The Mafia Encyclopedia (112 page)

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Authors: Carl Sifakis

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Page 330
Scarfo, Nicodemo "Little Nicky" (1929- ): Philadelphia crime family boss
He was described by one law enforcement official as Philadelphia's answer to Crazy Joe Gallo. That was one of the more favorable comments made about Nicodemo "Little Nicky" Scarfo, who after four years of unrelieved bloodletting, emerged in the mid-1980s as the undisputed leader of Philadelphia's crime family.
Lt. Col. Justin Dintino, head of New Jersey's State Police Intelligence Bureau, told a U.S. Senate committee Scarfo was "an imbecile." How then by 1984 had this "imbecile" jockeyed his way to the top of the Philadelphia Mafia underworld when in the last four years some 20-odd mobsters had been rubbed out? Frank Booth, director of intelligence for the Pennsylvania Crime Commission, said it was because "there is nobody left to challenge him." But Little Nicky Scarfo, with fierce instincts for survival, is a lot smarter than he is given credit for. Always on guard, he was confined in prison during part of the Philadelphia bloodletting and officials noted he actually patted down a son when he came to visit.
During the gang war, the 5-feet-5-inch Scarfo was sent away for 17 months to a federal penitentiary on a gun charge, perhaps a fortuitous sentence since it kept him out of the line of fire during the height of the killings. And Little Nicky, renowned for his hot temper and penchant for violence, turned his incarceration into a bona fide plus, maintaining and even enhancing control of his organization while in a prison 2,500 miles from his home. Probably realizing he was on top of the heap, Scarfo did nothing to upset his chances while behind bars, and showed the unusual forebearance actually to request he spend the last two weeks of his 17-month stay on a two-year sentence in solitary confinement. The reason: He had been feuding with another inmate and didn't want the dispute to get out of hand and in any way endanger his upcoming release.
There had been considerable speculation that Scarfo had succeeded where predecessors like Angelo Bruno and Phil "Chicken Man" Testa had failed. He cut deals that they had not been able to do, so that gunners from the much larger Genovese and Gambino crime families in New York stopped invading the City of Brotherly Love and knocking off the native mafiosi. Scarfo must be given credit for knowing how to count. There was no way he could match the soldiers the Genoveses and Gambinos could trot out from New York to back up their claims to the illicit business flowing from the Atlantic City casino industry.
Angelo Bruno, the "Gentle Don," who had ruled the Philadelphia mafiosi for two decades in relative peace, died because he could not count as well as Little Nicky. He thought he had the answer to the New York mobs' superior numbers in the rules of the Mafia. Atlantic City was long recognized as part of Philadelphia's territory, so Bruno, at times a member of the national Mafia commission, informed New York he stood by his rights under the bylaws of the Honored Society. No outside family could come in without being invited by the host Mafia and Bruno wasn't inviting.
However, there were megamillions involved in controlling restaurants, bars, beer distributorships, laundry, vending machines and other businesses, to say nothing of rights to run gambling junkets and more direct connections with the casinos. The only one interested in Mafia rules was Bruno, and when a gunshot tore a gaping hole in his head in March 1980, his objections became moot. His successor, Chicken Man Testa, was blasted away by a remote-control bomb. Then Scarfo took over and he cut his deal. If you can't beat your foes in a Mafia war, he reasoned, the next best thing is to join them. The pie was enormous in Atlantic City and Little Nicky settled for a healthy slice instead of trying the impossible and the suicidal by attempting to keep the whole bag.
Ironically, it was Angelo Bruno who set Scarfo up to take control in Philadelphia. He had been displeased with Little Nicky's violent ways way back in 1963 when the hoodlum got a prison term for manslaughter after stabbing a longshoreman to death in an argument about a seat in a restaurant. Bruno looked for the worst place to send Scarfo when he got out and decided on Atlantic City, which, in the mid-1960s, was a stagnant, depressed area. Ten years later the plush casinos were licensed and Little Nicky, in mob vernacular, "had really stepped in it." He was on the scene, had the connections with the power structure and suddenly was a big man in the mobunder Bruno and Testa, but coming on.
There were those seeking to unseat Little Nicky even after he apparently solved the New York rampage. The forces of Harry Riccobene, a diminutive man with a flowing white beard and a mean disposition, put up a stiff battle against Little Nicky. However, they did not give as good as they got (although they did kill Salvatore Testa, the 28-year-old son of the slain Chicken Man Testa, regarded as a real comer in the mob). Still the Scarfo men, sharing their leader's reputation for ruthlessness, drew more blood. Riccobene's nephew, Enrico, actually committed suicide when he learned that three of Little Nicky's boys were laying for him outside his Sansom Street jewelry store. And one of Riccobene's half brothers, Robert, was shot dead about the same time by a Scarfo supporter in a jogging suit. By the end of 1984 the 74-year-old Riccobene was almost certainly permanently removed from the crime picture when he was convicted in the murder of Frank Monte, a Scarfo loyalist.
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Little Nicky Scarfo (right) and his nephew Phil Leonetti raise their hands
in thankful prayer after they and a third defendant are acquitted of murder.
Later Leonetti avoided further charges by turning on his uncle as a federal witness,
dooming Scarfo to spend the rest of his days behind bars.
Scarfo was definitely on top. Some called it dumb and murderous luck and predicted he would fall. They were right. Scarfo had too suspicious a nature and he soon turned to ordering the deaths of loyal followers, starting with Salvatore Testa, his most competent hit man, because he feared he would make a play for his position as family boss. For a time Scarfo wanted to kill two of his own cousins out of the same fear, but others talked him out of it. According to informer Phil Leonetti, Little Nicky even considered having his wife murdered because he felt she had "little by little" robbed him of "around $400,000." She was gambling at the Trump Plaza in Atlantic City.
As the body count mounted, many younger wise guys realized they could be the next victim of the mad boss's wrath, and they started defecting to the FBI. Scarfo, Leonetti and 15 others were convicted in 1988 on murder and racketeering charges. While they waited sentencing, there were further defections from among those convicted, the most important being Leonetti, who was Scarfo's "beloved"to use Little Nicky's wordnephew and recently appointed underboss. Leonetti became a very important federal witness and guaranteed enough evidence against Scarfo that he would never be a free man again.
Scarfo ended up in Marion Penitentiary doing life in a maximum security cell where later John Gotti would also be lodged. Scarfo was known to refer to Phil as "my faggot nephew."
See also:
Riccobene, Harry; Testa, Salvatore
.
Scarne, John (19031985): Gambling expert and mob consultant
An internationally recognized authority on gambling, John Scarne was perhaps closer than he ever admitted to the forces in the national crime syndicate. That he met many of them in the capacity of gambling expert and helped them set up casinos that were cheat-proofby the customerswas readily understandable. Scarne had great value to the gambling interests. His oft-proclaimed statementthat because of his skills he was barred from gambling in Las Vegasmade him the perfect shill, inferring to the public that the casinos could be beaten. But above all, Scarne clearly was himself fascinated by his contacts with mobstersa fascination that has befallen many others.
Through the years, Scarne was acquainted with the likes of Arnold Rothstein, Frank Costello, Meyer Lansky, Joe Adonis, Bugsy Siegel, Frank Erickson, Albert Anastasia, Willie Moretti, Jake Lansky, Abe Reles, Santo Trafficante and countless others. And he was forever denying there was anything called the Mafia and the national crime syndicate. In a curious book he wrote in 1976,
The Mafia Conspiracy
, Scarne expounded his thesis that attacks on any Italian organized crime figure were nothing more than anti-Italian-American Mafia frameups by the federal government, determined to deprive the ethnic group of its civil rights.
Despite his track record as a best-selling author with some 18 books to his credit, Scarne could get no publisher to handle
The Mafia Conspiracy
, in which crime family boss Joseph Colombo was characterized as "the great Italian-American Civil Rights leader." Scarne claimed he had put up $50,000 of his own money to publish the book, but there were those who saw it as a mob apology, something the mob would gladly have financed.
The book is a bizarre document, clearly demonstrating Scarne's respect foror awe ofMeyer Lansky, yet at the same time revealing a certain ethnic frustration, recognition of the fact that the Jewish elements within organized crime constituted the dominant factor in bigtime gambling, whether in Las Vegas, Cuba, Florida or upstate New York. Scarne noted that Tampa, Florida, crime boss Santo Trafficante was merely a part owner in some gambling enterprises in Cuba and that the
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Hotel Capri Casino was "the only one of the nineteen Havana casinos operated by an Italian-American group." In his desire to clear the Mafia of importance in Cuba, Scarne ignored the fact that Meyer Lansky allowed many Mafia families to have pieces of his many enterprises.
In his book Scarne defended Lansky from charges made by the government, especially those made by informer Vinnie Teresa that Lansky was involved in gambling casinos in England and the paymaster to various mafiosi running lucrative gambling junkets. A cynic might suspect that Lansky may well have aided in the book's publication. Lansky was a realist who understood the value of denouncing harassment of the mobs in terms of bigotry. Men like Lansky and Moe Dalitz could claim they were victims of anti-Semitism, so why not offer the Mafia the same sort of defense? And Lansky would have been shrewd enough to tolerate even an outburst or two from Scarne.
Thus Scarne identified Ohio's ruling gambling syndicate as the "Jewish Mob," headed by the likes of "morris Kleinman, Moe Dalitz, Louis Rothkopf, Samuel Tucker and Thomas J. McGintyall non-Italians." Scarne carried his conspiracy theory further, declaring: "It's my judgement that Senator McClellan and Senator Lausche introduced the Senate bill to outlaw the mythical Mafia simply as a diversionary tactic to protect the non-Italian mobsters operating in their home states of Arkansas and Ohio."
Scarne's book is not without value as a sociological documents. Scarne would not have written it in the 1940s or 1950s or even the 1960s; by the mid-1970s he could because of the ethnic succession taking place in organized crime (although it is not the ethnic succession spoken of by such observers as Daniel Bell). When the national crime syndicate was formed in the early 1930s it was predominantly a mixture of two ethnic groups (and of course remains so to some extent today), the Italians and Jews, and the Jewish gangsters may have been more dominant than the Mafia. The ethnic Succession that arose was simply an aging process, as the Jewish gangsters accumulated wealth but saw no need for establishing a succession to their empire. Of Moe Dalitz it was said by crime expert Hank Messick, " Moe thinks you can never get enough." Lansky also believed in the "more" philosophy, actively raking in crime profits into his late 70s.
However, the Jewish mobsters neither established nor wanted a structured empire. As Jewish ranks thinnedby the ravages of age rather than bulletsthe Mafia, with its structured organization, with positions to be filled, simply moved into the vacuum, so that the Mafia influence in organized crime expanded. As the mafioso influence grew, Scarne was ever safer expounding his "there ain't no Mafia" line and citing what was now rapidly becoming the ghost of Jewish gangsterism.
Schultz, Dutch (19021935): Underworld leader
It happened at an important meet of mob leaders in the mid-1920s before the syndicate was formed. In the midst of serious discussions of criminal matters, Dutch Schultz, one of the flakiest of the big gang leaders, couldn't resist sticking it to Joe Adonis, a gangster always vain and proud of his good looks and star quality. Schultz, at the time, had the flu and had been ordered by his doctor to stay in bed, but he showed up at the meet. When Adonis dropped a cute remark in the discussion, Schultz, looking to top him, suddenly pounced on him with a hammerlock and breathed right in his face, saying, "Now, you fucking star, you have my germs." As it happened Adonis did indeed catch Dutch's flu, and for a week, his voice hoarse, he kept telephoning Lucky Luciano to see that Schultz stayed out of his way. It was hardly a matter of epic import, but it illustrates the problems the world of organized crime would face with the unpredictable, "unorganizable" Dutchman.
If organized crime connotes anything it is that the rackets have to operate by some universally accepted rules. For Schultz there were no rulesother than those he liked or made. Those who broke
his
rules ended up dead; not only was he the flakiest of the bosses, he was also the most cold-blooded. In the end, he had to be "blown away" himself because he threatened the delicate balance between the syndicate and the authorities, and organized crime demands a certain respect for law and order.
Schultz, whose real name was Arthur Flegenheimer, was born in the Bronx, New York City. He had a minor record until the 1920s when he blossomed out as one of the many protégés of early criminal mastermind Arnold Rothstein. Schultz soon ran a gang that took over much of the beer trade in the Bronx. He was already flaky but also tough and mean, and he actually may have had a keener sense for potential sources of new racket revenues than even Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano. It is difficult now to determine whether it was Lansky or Schultz who first saw the enormous potential offered by penny-ante numbers in Harlem. In any event if was Schultz who moved in aggressively on the independent black operators there and with unremitting violence turned them into his agents in a new multimillion-dollar racket. Through a mathematical genius named Otto "Abbadabba" Berman, he figured out a way to doctor the results of the numbers game so that the smallest possible payout was made.

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