The Nephew

Philip Leonetti's father left when he was small. His mother's brother did not. Nicodemo Scarfo took the boy to Atlantic City, kept him close through the years when the family had sent Scarfo there to be forgotten about, and brought him up in the business as a son rather than a nephew.

When the casinos arrived and Scarfo took Philadelphia, Leonetti rose with him. He was made at twenty-eight or thereabouts and underboss of the family before he was thirty-five.

What the job was

By his own later testimony, given under oath and repeatedly, Leonetti took part in ten murders.

They were not the killings of rivals in a war. Most were of men inside the Philadelphia family or on its edges, killed for skimming, for talking, for owing money, or for the appearance of ambition. He knew almost all of them personally. Several of them were friends.

The arithmetic

The 1988 federal racketeering trial convicted Scarfo and most of his leadership. Leonetti was sentenced to forty-five years.

He was thirty-six. His uncle was fifty-nine and facing fifty-five years, which meant Scarfo would die in prison whatever anybody did next. The organisation that might once have looked after a loyal underboss's family had spent ten years demonstrating what it did with people who became inconvenient, and two of Leonetti's contemporaries had already gone to the government.

He began cooperating in 1989.

What it cost the family

Leonetti testified for four years, in Philadelphia and in New York, against his uncle and against men in other families. He was not a soldier repeating what he had heard. He was the second-ranking member of a family describing its operations from the inside, and juries found him credible.

His sentence was reduced to five years and five months and he left custody in 1992.

The part that does not resolve

Scarfo died in federal custody in 2017, twenty-eight years after his nephew sat down with prosecutors, having never been out.

There is no reconciliation at the end of this and no obvious moral. A man raised by his uncle helped to bury him, having first spent ten years killing people on his instruction. Both of those sentences are true and neither cancels the other, which is the ordinary condition of most of the material in this archive.