Joseph "Skinny Joey" Merlino

Everything on this page comes from the public record. Joseph Merlino is alive, he has been tried in open court more than once, and this archive goes no further than charges, verdicts and sworn testimony.

He is the last figure in the Philadelphia sequence that began with Angelo Bruno's murder, and the only one of the men who came out of the 1990s still at liberty.

The 1993 war

Merlino came up in the wreckage Scarfo left. When John Stanfa was installed as boss in 1991, a younger South Philadelphia crew around Merlino refused the arrangement, and the two sides spent 1993 shooting at each other in public.

Merlino was wounded. Stanfa survived an ambush on the Schuylkill Expressway. Federal prosecutors, who had a listening device in Stanfa's lawyer's office, convicted Stanfa in 1995 and removed one side of the argument.

The prosecutions

Ralph Natale, who held the family after Stanfa, became a government witness in 1999 and testified against Merlino in 2001.

The jury acquitted Merlino of the murder counts and convicted him of racketeering, receiving stolen property and running an illegal gambling business. He was sentenced to fourteen years and released in 2011.

After

In 2016 he was among more than forty people charged in a federal case in New York covering gambling, extortion and fraud across several east coast families. The racketeering counts against him ended in a mistrial. In 2018 he pleaded guilty to a single illegal gambling charge and served two years.

He was released in 2020. Federal filings in the Philadelphia family's more recent prosecutions continue to describe him as its boss.