Nicodemo Scarfo was the head of the Philadelphia and southern New Jersey crime family for most of the 1980s. On November 19, 1988, after a ten-week trial in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, a federal jury convicted him and sixteen co-defendants of racketeering conspiracy and of substantive racketeering. By special verdict the jury found that Scarfo had committed 32 racketeering acts. Among them were the murders of Edwin Helfant, Vincent Falcone and Salvatore Testa, the attempted murder of S.V., and, with two co-defendants, the conspiracy to murder and attempted murder of J.S. He was sentenced to 55 years in prison and a fine of $50,000, and the Third Circuit affirmed the convictions in 1990.
His record in the state courts was different. A New Jersey jury acquitted him of the Falcone murder in 1980, and a Pennsylvania jury acquitted him of the Testa murder in May 1988. In 1989 he and seven others were convicted in Philadelphia of the 1985 murder of Frank D'Alfonso and received mandatory life sentences, but those convictions were overturned and all eight were acquitted at a second trial. He died in federal custody in North Carolina in January 2017, aged 87.
Scarfo was born in Brooklyn and raised in South Philadelphia. He was in his late fifties when the 1988 verdicts came in, which places his birth about 1929. He was small, about five feet five, and boxed as an amateur. He entered the organized-crime world through bookmaking and was inducted into the Philadelphia and southern New Jersey family around 1954 or 1955, in the account of state investigators, under the boss of that period.
In 1963 he pleaded guilty to manslaughter in a Philadelphia case and served six months in prison. The boss of the family, Angelo Bruno, then sent him to Atlantic City, where the gambling and loan-sharking rackets were run. State investigators place him living there from about 1964 and describe a bar business he held from about 1967 to 1970 and hidden interests in other bars into the middle 1970s. From about 1977 he was linked to control of a bartenders and hotel workers local, which they say he used to influence bar owners.
He was jailed again from 1971 to 1973 for refusing to testify before the New Jersey State Commission of Investigation, which was examining organized crime. He also spent the period from August 1982 to January 1984 in federal custody on a separate matter.
Bruno was killed on March 21, 1980. His successor, Philip Testa, who had made Scarfo his consigliere, died in March 1981, and Scarfo became boss within about a week, a position he held until his arrest. The family operated from Philadelphia into southern New Jersey, and Scarfo directed it largely from Atlantic City, where the casino boom brought new money into the unions and construction trades.
His years in charge were followed by many deaths. His war with rivals, among them Harry Riccobene, was followed by more than 20 deaths in the early 1980s, and about 25 members and associates of the organization died during his five years in power. None of these deaths is a finding against him.
State investigators have also linked him to the deaths of Dominick Caruso in Vineland in the early 1960s and Alvin Feldman in 1974. These are allegations; neither formed part of any conviction against him.
Edwin Helfant died in Atlantic City on February 15, 1978. The murder was charged as racketeering act 1 of the RICO counts, and Scarfo and a co-defendant, Nicholas Virgilio, were found guilty of it.
Vincent Falcone died in Margate, New Jersey, on December 16, 1979. His murder was charged in the federal indictment as racketeering act 3 against Scarfo and a co-defendant. Scarfo had already been tried for it in New Jersey state court and acquitted in 1980. On appeal he argued that the federal racketeering charge placed him in jeopardy twice. The Third Circuit rejected the argument, and the jury found by special verdict that Scarfo had committed the Falcone murder.
Two of the racketeering acts concerned attempts. In Wildwood Crest, New Jersey, after a relative of J.S. gave testimony in the summer of 1982, an attempt was made on his life. Scarfo, Salvatore Merlino and Phillip Narducci were found guilty of racketeering acts 7(a) and (b), conspiracy to murder and attempted murder. The attempted murder of S.V. was charged as a further racketeering act, and the jury's special verdict included it among the acts it found Scarfo had committed.
Salvatore Testa died on September 14, 1984. In May 1988 a Philadelphia jury acquitted Scarfo and eight associates of the Testa murder, conspiracy and possessing an instrument of crime. The same murder was then charged as racketeering act 12 in the federal case. Scarfo raised the state acquittal as a bar to the federal act, and the Third Circuit rejected the claim. The jury found by special verdict that he had committed the Testa murder.
Frank D'Alfonso died in 1985. The government withdrew the D'Alfonso murder as a racketeering act before the federal trial, and it was prosecuted instead in the Court of Common Pleas of Philadelphia County. Scarfo and seven co-defendants were convicted in 1989 of first-degree murder, criminal conspiracy and possession of an instrument of crime. Each received the mandatory sentence of life imprisonment. Federal officials described Scarfo as the first boss of a La Cosa Nostra family to be convicted of first-degree murder.
The convictions were later overturned on appeal, and all eight were acquitted at a second trial.
Scarfo was arrested in January 1987 on an extortion charge and remained in custody from then. The case arose from a demand for $1 million made to the developer Willard Rouse, in return for city legislation that would have allowed waterfront development. A city councilman, Leland Beloff, was convicted in the same matter. Scarfo was convicted of conspiring to extort and extorting $1 million from Rouse & Associates and received a sentence of 14 years. The Third Circuit noted that the Rouse extortion was only one of the 32 racketeering acts the later jury found against him, and it rejected his claim that the later racketeering prosecution put him in jeopardy a second time for it.
The federal indictment charged seventeen defendants with running a criminal enterprise from April 1976 through October 1987. It contained seven counts, the first two charging RICO conspiracy and substantive RICO under 18 U.S.C. 1962(d) and (c). The charges included extortion, illegal gambling, loan-sharking and drug trafficking, and the indictment accused the enterprise of killing nine people and attempting to kill four others. The prosecution relied on recorded conversations and on cooperating former members of the family. One was a former underboss who had been at Scarfo's side for about 25 years and who agreed to cooperate in 1988 to avoid a long sentence of his own; another two former members also testified.
The trial before Judge Franklin Van Antwerpen lasted ten weeks and ended on November 19, 1988. The jury convicted all seventeen defendants of RICO conspiracy and substantive RICO. The jury also found Scarfo guilty of conducting an illegal gambling business and of two counts of unlawful drug distribution. Another defendant, Joseph Pungitore, was convicted of a separate drug conspiracy. The jury answered special interrogatories on each racketeering act. The Third Circuit held that the interrogatories, which were given to jurors before they finished deliberating, were properly submitted, and it noted that the trial judge had told the jurors they had to find unanimously that a defendant personally took part in, or aided and abetted, at least two racketeering acts to convict on the substantive count. The jury found that each of the fourteen appellants, Scarfo included, had taken part in a murder, an attempted murder or a conspiracy to murder.
An assistant United States attorney said after the verdict that the convictions had taken "the guts out" of the organization. Each defendant faced a possible sentence of 40 to 55 years.
Scarfo was sentenced in 1989 to 55 years in prison and a fine of $50,000.
Fourteen defendants, Scarfo among them, appealed to the Third Circuit in consolidated appeals decided under the name United States v. Pungitore. The court heard argument on April 25, 1990, decided the case on August 1, 1990, and denied rehearing on September 10, 1990. It rejected Scarfo's challenge to the vagueness of the RICO pattern requirement, his double jeopardy claims based on the state acquittals and on the earlier Rouse extortion conviction, and his challenge to consecutive sentences for RICO conspiracy and substantive RICO. The Solicitor General opposed a petition for review by the Supreme Court in April 1991, and the court of appeals' judgment stood as affirmed.
He had recently been denied parole. He died in federal custody in North Carolina in January 2017, aged 87.
The federal Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, 18 U.S.C. 1961 to 1968, allows prosecutors to charge a pattern of racketeering acts, which can include state-law offenses such as murder, together with extortion, illegal gambling and loan-sharking, as a single offense by members of an enterprise. Section 1962(c) covers conducting the affairs of an enterprise through a pattern of racketeering, and section 1962(d) covers conspiracy to do so. A conviction on the substantive count required the jury to find that a defendant took part in at least two racketeering acts, and the Scarfo jury was asked to answer each act separately.
The two court systems explain why Scarfo faced the same deaths twice. The Third Circuit held in his appeal that the double jeopardy clause does not bar a later RICO prosecution that rests in part on predicate offenses already tried in state court. The state acquittals on the Falcone and Testa murders therefore did not prevent the jury from finding those racketeering acts, because the state courts and the federal government are separate sovereigns.
The deaths that followed his leadership of the family run well beyond those the juries found, and none of the wider totals is a verdict. The Falcone and Testa murders were found by the federal jury after state acquittals, and the D'Alfonso murder ended in an acquittal after an overturned conviction. The allegations about Caruso and Feldman were not the subject of any of his trials.
About 1954 or 1955: inducted into the Philadelphia and southern New Jersey family.
1963: pleads guilty to manslaughter; serves six months.
About 1964: settles in Atlantic City.
1971 to 1973: jailed for refusing to testify before the New Jersey State Commission of Investigation.
February 15, 1978: Edwin Helfant dies in Atlantic City.
December 16, 1979: Vincent Falcone dies in Margate.
1980: acquitted in New Jersey state court of the Falcone murder.
March 21, 1980: Angelo Bruno is killed.
March 1981: Philip Testa dies; Scarfo becomes boss.
August 1982 to January 1984: in federal custody on a separate matter.
September 14, 1984: Salvatore Testa dies.
1985: Frank D'Alfonso dies.
January 1987: arrested on an extortion charge.
May 1988: acquitted in Pennsylvania state court of the Testa murder.
November 19, 1988: convicted of RICO and RICO conspiracy in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania.
1989: sentenced to 55 years and $50,000; convicted in state court of the D'Alfonso murder with seven others and sentenced to life.
August 1, 1990: Third Circuit affirms the federal convictions.
Later: the D'Alfonso convictions are overturned; all eight are acquitted on retrial.
January 2017: dies in federal custody in North Carolina, aged 87.