Nicodemo "Little Nicky" Scarfo

Scarfo took the Philadelphia family in 1981 and ran it for a decade in which it killed more of its own members than any American family of comparable size, and at the end of which more of its members were testifying for the government than were still at liberty.

He had spent the Bruno years in Atlantic City, effectively in exile after a stabbing in a diner over a seat. When casino money arrived in the city he had been banished to, he was the man already living there.

The decade

The method was the opposite of his predecessor's in every particular. Where Bruno had avoided killing, Scarfo used it as ordinary management: for skimming, for disrespect, for being owed money, and for the suspicion of disloyalty in men who had given no sign of it.

The count over the decade is usually put at around thirty. Several of them were made members of his own family, killed by other made members of his own family on his instruction.

The witnesses

Thomas DelGiorno and Nicholas Caramandi began cooperating in 1986. Philip Leonetti, the underboss, followed in 1989. Leonetti was Scarfo's nephew and had been raised by him.

The federal racketeering trial in 1988 convicted Scarfo along with most of his leadership. He was sentenced to fifty-five years and never left custody, dying at the federal medical centre in Butner, North Carolina, in January 2017 at eighty-seven.

What he left

The family that emerged from the Scarfo decade was smaller, poorer and comprehensively penetrated. The Atlantic City fortune that his predecessor had been killed for not seizing was never seized by him either.

What he demonstrated, more clearly than any other boss in this archive, is that terror inside an organisation is not a substitute for authority over it. It is what a leadership uses when it has run out of authority.