Chin

THE 1980S ARRIVED IN THE CITY OF BROTHERLY LOVE WITH A savage and unexpected spasm of violence. For more than two decades Angelo Bruno oversaw the Mafia family based in Philadelphia with a firm hand and a low-key persona, which earned him an atypical organized nom de crime: “The Docile Don.” He took over in 1959, eventually becoming the longest-serving boss in the city’s history.

Bruno was widely considered a good businessman who expanded the family’s financial interests. This was particularly true when casino gambling came to New Jersey in 1976, when he grabbed a piece of the lucrative construction work.

His preference for settling disputes was mediation over murder, and Bruno was an absolute stand-up guy: He did two years after refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating corruption in Atlantic City in 1970. His ties to the Genovese family went back decades, including a March 1963 summons for a meeting with then-acting boss Eboli.

By the time the ’80s arrived, Bruno’s laid-back style—and his reticence to approve drug dealing—created friction among the new generation of gangsters, led by Bruno’s treacherous consigliere, Antonio “Tony Bananas” Caponigro.

The sixty-nine-year-old Bruno, with his driver John Stanfa, was sitting in a car outside his home in a predominantly Italian-American neighborhood of South Philly on the night of March 21, 1980, when the bloody coup began. Two shotgun-wielding killers, one of them Caponigro, blasted away at the vehicle before disappearing into the darkness.

“The Docile Don” was dispatched in brutal style—his twenty-one-year reign ended. Stanfa survived the hit. The people deemed responsible would not. Bruno was buried after a Funeral Mass at a local church.

“Angelo had money, fame and power, and he had hundreds of loyal family and friends,” said priest John Dieckman in his eulogy. “Yet none of those were protection against the fate that awaits every man and woman.”

As it turned out, the Philly unrest actually began at the other end of the Turnpike, with the Genovese family in New York City. Chin Gigante, his power and prestige growing, would emerge as the kingmaker of the Philadelphia Mob. The Bruno assassination was eventually exposed as a carefully arranged double cross by Gigante and the rest of his family.

“For the record, the Genovese family had manipulated a Philadelphia family member, Tony Bananas, to murder Bruno,” said Gravano. “Right away, there was a commission meeting, and to cover themselves the Genovese people volunteered to track down Angelo Bruno’s killer.”

The move assured the Genovese power grab, but also gave Vincent Gigante a chance to flex his muscles against the cabal of killers. Murder of a boss without approval from the Mob’s ruling commission was the highest of the secret society’s inviolable rules—and a pet peeve of the Chin.

“When Ang was killed, Chin made it clear to everyone in La Cosa Nostra, the whole country, you can’t kill a boss without permission,” said Leonetti, whose Atlantic City crew reported to the Philly family.

The setup started in the summer of 1979, when Caponigro approached Funzi Tieri to propose Bruno’s brutal murder. The two had a history; they were on opposing sides of a previous beef over a bookie operation that each claimed as his own. The dispute went before the commission, and Caponigro was declared the winner.

Nursing a grudge, Tieri decided this was the time to show that bygones were not bygones. Funzi indicated the Bruno hit was okay with New York, but never brought the plot before the heads of the other four families. The result: the Bruno murder, unknown to Caponigro, was an unsanctioned killing.

Gigante informed the other families that the Genoveses would handle the bloody payback—done with their full knowledge. The Philadelphia regime change was a huge boost to the Genovese coffers: their pal in the Philly Mob, Nicodemo “Little Nicky” Scarfo of Atlantic City, would grab control of the unions once belonging to Bruno.

The Genovese family would also now carry the Philadelphia vote when their family was brought in for commission business. Plus Tony Banana’s lucrative North Jersey gambling and loan-sharking operations, worth millions of dollars, would fall into Genovese control. It was a clean sweep—unless your last name was Caponigro.

The Philly mobster reached out to Salerno in the aftermath of the murder, but Fat Tony made it clear that Caponigro’s future as the new boss was not his call.

“I do not want to get involved,” Salerno declared. “I do not want to hear about it. Go see Chin.”

He would. It was the last trip he made while still breathing.

Tony Bananas and his brother-in-law, Alfred “Freddie” Salerno, were summoned for an April 18 sit-down in the Triangle with the Chin. They came expecting a coronation, only to arrive for their own executions.

Vincent Gigante was seated at a table in the cramped social club, where he was joined by Fat Tony Salerno—no relation—top capo Bobby Manna and the duplicitous Tieri. Caponigro immediately recounted his conversation with Tieri, where he was told the hit was approved by the New York bosses.

Tieri looked the Philly gangster in the eye: “I told you to straighten it out, not to kill him.”

Hearing those words, the two out-of-town mobsters knew they were beyond their depth. Gigante made sure the two plotters were subjected to a brutal, slow and sadistic death.

Caponigro, sixty-seven, was shot fourteen times with five different guns. The first shots went into his elbows and arms, to keep him alive and suffering as the relentless assault continued. He was stabbed repeatedly, and savagely beaten. Salerno, sixty-four, suffered a similarly grisly fate.

Both of the tortured men were stripped naked, with $20 bills stuffed in their mouths and up their asses as a graphic reminder of their greed. The bodies were eventually discovered in the trunks of two abandoned cars left in the South Bronx.

But the Chin wasn’t done avenging the Docile Don in venomous style.

* * *

The body of plotter John “Johnny Keys” Simone, sixty-nine, was found near a Staten Island landfill on September 18, 1980. The hit was proposed by Gigante, approved by the commission and assigned to Gravano. Before a single bullet from a .357 Magnum was pumped into his skull, the doomed man unleashed his fury against Vincent.

“[Simone told] how he now knows it was the greed of the Genovese family,” Gravano recalled. “How the Chin—Vincent Gigante—had conned this Tony Bananas that the commission sanctioned the hit on Bruno. How the Chin conned the commission by volunteering to do an investigation and take out Tony.”

Simone had two final requests: He wanted to be shot by a made man. And he wanted to take off his shoes. Gravano complied with both.

There was one more body: Frank Sindone, fifty-two, was discovered behind a Philadelphia variety store, stuffed inside two green plastic garbage bags. Sindone, shot three times in the head and found on October 30, was the last of the Caponigro crew to die. Leonetti was both impressed and appalled by what happened.

“They had set it all up, and now they want everyone who had a hand in it to be killed,” said Scarfo’s nephew. “That’s how treacherous they were.”

The Chin would also pick Bruno’s successor. He was leaning toward the murderous Scarfo, who had done time with Manna in the early 1970s after both refused to testify in a New Jersey Mob probe. Scarfo demurred, preferring to take the consigliere spot. Aging mobster Philip Testa was installed, instead, by Gigante as the new head of the Philadelphia family.

“My uncle was very close to Phil Testa, who was the underboss, and my uncle told Chin, ‘I think it should be Phil Testa,’” Leonetti recounted. “I think the Chin respected that, because my uncle respected the rules of La Cosa Nostra like he did.”

Testa was now the boss. His reign was short and ended horrifically.

* * *

On March 15, 1981, the mobster known as “the Chicken Man” doubled-parked his year-old Chevy on the street outside his South Philly home. Testa was fumbling with his house keys when a massive bomb detonated on the front porch. His front door was blown thirty feet inside the house, with its doorknob finally coming to rest in its kitchen.

The explosive device was packed with thirteen sticks of dynamite, carpenter’s nails and shotgun pellets. The results were beyond gruesome. “He looked like he went through a paper shredder,” noted one local cop.

Carrying $10,000 cash in his pocket, Testa was pronounced dead two hours after the 2:55 A.M. blast. An internecine Mob war was blamed for the killing. And, once again, it was Gigante who would reassemble pieces of the shattered Philadelphia family.

If Chin’s role in resolving the Bruno murder was in some part personal, his handling of the Testa hit was all business. Testa’s underboss, Pete Casella, was summoned north to meet with Gigante at the Triangle, like Caponigro before him.

Gigante, in his bathrobe, cut quickly to the chase. Casella admitted his part in the murder plot, but the Chin spared his life. He banished the underboss to Florida and spit at the disgraced amico nostro on his way out onto Sullivan Street.

Scarfo witnessed the whole thing. He was now alone inside the Triangle, face-to-face with the Chin.

“Well, Nick, I don’t see no one else in here,” Gigante finally declared. “I guess that makes you the new boss.”

Scarfo planted a pair of kisses on Gigante’s stubbled cheeks to become the new head of the Philadelphia family. They would be aligned now for good with the people who put them in charge, the Genoveses.

* * *

Not everyone involved in the Testa hit was as fortunate as Casella, who died in Florida at age seventy-six. The Chin signed off on Scarfo’s plan to whack two of the banished gangster’s sidekicks.

Co-conspirator Frank “Chickie” Narducci, forty-nine, died in a January 7, 1982, hail of bullets in an ambush while exiting his car on South Broad Street. And Rocco Marinucci, who allegedly built and detonated the devastating bomb, was found dead in a Philadelphia parking lot. He was shot in the head, neck and chest. The message of his role in the hit was made clear by the killers: three unexploded firecrackers were stuck inside his mouth.

“Now my uncle didn’t respect anybody,” said Leonetti. “But he respected Chin, and Chin respected my uncle, because he knew my uncle was a no-nonsense guy and that my uncle was a real gangster like him.”

Though he was loyal to the Chin, Nicodemo Scarfo proved to be disastrous. The new boss emerged as a killing machine, ordering murder upon murder during a truly insane reign atop the family. Law enforcement attention inevitably followed the trail of bodies, and Scarfo just as inevitably wound up in prison as his family fell apart.

Even worse, his reckless behavior—often in direct contradiction of the “Mob rules” that he so often cited—turned his nephew against Little Nicky. “Crazy Phil” became a devastating FBI informant, as the Chin would learn down the road.

The bloodletting, while the impetus for the Philadelphia Mob’s disintegration, became songwriting fodder for others.

The Bruno murder inspired a Philadelphia-based band, Marah, to give the Docile Don a shout-out in their song “Christian Street.” More memorably, the Testa assassination led Bruce Springsteen to open his “Atlantic City” with a terse summary of the murder: Well, they blew up the Chicken Man in Philly last night/ And they blew up his house, too.