Blood and Honor: Inside the Scarfo Mob, the Mafia's Most Violent Family by Anastasia George

Author:Anastasia, George [Anastasia, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philadelphia Metropolitian Area&#8212, Mafia&#8212, Pennsylvania&#8212, Case studies / Scarfo, Nicodemo Domenic, 1929&#8211
ISBN: 9781933822648
Publisher: Camino Books, Inc.
Published: 2012-03-08T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Defense attorney: If you were ordered to do violence, would you do it?

Caramandi: It was either kill or be killed.

When Scarfo was released from prison early in 1984 he was the undisputed king of the Philadelphia underworld. And Salvie Testa was the mob’s crown prince. Testa, who at twenty-eight was the youngest mob capo in America, had learned the ways of La Cosa Nostra from his father, but he had come into his own during the bloody reign of Little Nicky.

“He’d never ask you to do something he wouldn’t do himself,” Caramandi said with admiration. “He was right out there with you.”

But in 1984, after risking his life to solidify Scarfo’s hold on the underworld, Testa badly miscalculated his status within the organization. He thought he had proved himself. He figured that his loyalty was beyond question. In Bruno’s day, that certainly would have been the case. But Scarfo played by a different set of rules. The very attributes that made Salvie Testa such an asset during the Riccobene war—his leadership and his fearlessness—turned him into a threat after the war was over.

“Salvie was all for ‘this thing.’ Knew it inside out. Knew it better than guys who were sixty years old and who’d been in it for forty years. Because of his father. He’d been a good teacher. Salvie had nerve and he didn’t care who he killed. Sometimes we used to go [on a contract] and we’d come back and tell him, ‘Well, the kids were in the car, the family’s in the car.’

“‘I don’t care who’s in the car,’ he’d say. ‘Everybody goes.’ That’s the kind of guy he was.

“One Thanksgiving Day he wanted us to go into Sonny Riccobene’s house where Robert Riccobene was havin’ dinner with his family. ‘Shoot everybody in the house.’ But me and Charlie and Faffy made up some story that he didn’t show up. Just to appease Salvie. ’Cause we didn’t go for killing kids. It was something we drew a line with, but he was just so full of venom that he didn’t care.

“He was a guy made for ‘this thing.’ He loved it. He lived it. And he was very bitter about what happened to his father, about the way his father got killed, blown up with nails in him.”

Testa personally killed the two men responsible for his father’s death, Frank “Chickie” Narducci and Rocco Marinucci, and made no attempt to hide his satisfaction in those bloody acts of vengeance.

“Salvie used to say to me, ‘I wish that motherfucker was alive so I could kill him again,’ meaning Chickie Narducci,” said Caramandi. “This is how much he hated this man. He had no mercy on anybody. Business was business, and killing to him was business.”

Salvatore Testa quickly moved up the organizational ladder after the Narducci killing. He “inherited” most of his father’s business, including a loan-sharking operation in South Philadelphia. He also developed a lucrative financial arrangement with several local drug dealers, including a black organization that supplied parts of the North and West Philadelphia ghettoes.

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