The Philadelphia Family

For twenty-one years the Philadelphia family was the quietest organisation in American organised crime, and for the twenty years after that it was the most violent. The same city, largely the same men, and one funeral in between.

The organisation goes back to Salvatore Sabella in 1911 and passed through several hands before Angelo Bruno took it in 1959. What Bruno built is the part worth understanding, because the collapse only makes sense against it.

The Bruno arrangement

Bruno ran gambling and loansharking, stayed out of narcotics, kept his crews small and his own name out of the papers, and shared the Atlantic City coast with New York rather than fighting over it.

The result was two decades in which Philadelphia produced almost no bodies and a great deal of money. His own people called it caution. Some of them called it weakness, which is a distinction that only matters once somebody acts on it.

What replaced it

Bruno was shot dead in his car in March 1980 by an arrangement his own consigliere made without the Commission's approval. Antonio Caponigro was dead within a month, and the family never recovered its balance.

Philip Testa succeeded him and was killed by a bomb packed with nails under his porch eleven months later. Nicodemo Scarfo took the family in 1981 and ran it through a decade in which the count of murders reached roughly thirty and the count of men prepared to testify grew to match.

The cooperation era

What finished Scarfo was not a conviction. It was that his own underboss, who was also his nephew, and a series of men he had personally promoted took the stand.

The pattern held afterwards. John Stanfa fought a street war with a younger crew around Joseph Merlino in 1993 and went to prison. Ralph Natale, who followed him, became the first American boss to testify for the government. Merlino was prosecuted on Natale's evidence in 2001, acquitted of the murders and convicted of racketeering.

The family still exists. It has spent forty years demonstrating that the quiet version was the profitable one.

Where it stands

Joseph Merlino was released in 2020 after serving two years for an illegal gambling charge he pleaded guilty to in a federal case in New York. Federal filings in the family's more recent prosecutions continue to describe him as its boss.

The family is smaller than it was under Angelo Bruno and has never recovered the Atlantic City position that his consigliere killed him over. It is still charged, still in the filings, and still the organisation that demonstrated more clearly than any other in this archive what happens when the quiet arrangement is broken by people who think quiet means weak.