Last Don Standing Read online

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  For the McShane family: Margie, Megan, Joseph, and Stacey.

  For Dan, the 11-year-old homeless boy, alone and sleeping inside an abandoned car in East New York. Dreams do come true.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  FROM LARRY McSHANE: First and foremost, thanks to Ralph Natale for his generosity of time and unflinching honesty during our many conversations. Special thanks also to his wife, Lucia, and the entire Natale family. Thanks to my parents, the late Nora and the still-kicking Jack McShane. Thanks to my agent, Frank Weimann, and my collaborator Dan Pearson. And thanks to those responsible for the soundtrack to this book, Philadelphia’s most dynamic musical duos: Kenny Gamble & Leon Huff, Daryl Hall & John Oates, David & Serge Bielanko.

  FROM DAN PEARSON: I would like to thank the people who helped shape the man Dan Pearson is today. My parents, Helene and Dan Casella, who provided a lost and tortured child with a vision for the future. Lawrence (Tumbler) Davis, who picked up the mantle and taught me how to be a man. My children, Daniel and Kristian. Daniel confirms my views that challenges can be great and that greatness can be achieved. Kristian, when I think of you, as your father, I just smile. Ms. Donna Hylton, the sweetest toughest lady that I know. To know her is to love her. Mr. Thomas C. Harris, my right hand, and Mr. Dustin Edelhertz, my left hand. Without these people there would be no Dan Pearson!!!

  Max Zampieri, dude you are so appreciated.

  Thanks especially to Ralph Natale, a complex man. A man of conviction, loyalty and love of family. Ralph peeled back the onion of an America that I did not know existed. It was not for me to judge Ralph, but to listen and gather the information for his story. His family is like any other loving clan, and I’d like to thank them for providing unfettered access to Ralph and his relatives. I don’t agree with all that he’s done. But I came to understand why the man is the man that he is, right or wrong. Ralph Natale is Ralph Natale.

  Last but never least, I would like to thank Larry McShane. What can I say, just a helluva writer!

  A very special thank you to Frank Weimann who is more than just my agent but a real friend!

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  A QUICK GUIDE TO THE PHILADELPHIA LA COSA NOSTRA

  RALPH NATALE: Killer, union leader and organizer, head of the family from 1994–98.

  ANGELO BRUNO: Family boss known as “The Docile Don,” ruled peacefully for more than two decades. Murdered.

  PHIL TESTA: AKA the “Chicken Man,” succeeded Bruno as family boss. Murdered.

  JOHN “SKINNY RAZOR” DITULLIO: Legendary mob captain and Natale’s Mafia mentor.

  NICKY SCARFO: Atlantic City-based Mafioso who took over the family following Testa.

  JOE MCGREAL: Mobbed-up South Jersey union leader. Murdered.

  SALVIE TESTA: Son of Phil Testa, and widely considered the brightest star of the Philly mob’s next generation. Murdered.

  FRANK VADINO: Ralph’s driver and right-hand man.

  RONNIE TURCHI: A valued member of Ralph’s crew and eventually his consigliere. Murdered.

  BLINKY PALERMO: With New York mobster Frankie Carbo, he served as the mob’s fixer of fights for professional boxing. A close friend and advisor for Ralph.

  JOSEPH “SKINNY JOEY” MERLINO: Second-generation gangster who served as Ralph’s underboss when Natale returned to Philadelphia.

  MICHAEL “MIKEY CHANG” CIANCAGLINI: A member of Merlino’s crew with a fearsome reputation—Ralph’s favorite of the crew he assembled in Philly during the ’90s. Murdered.

  RAYMOND “LONG JOHN” MARTORANO: Drug dealer and partner of Angelo Bruno, eventually became a made member of the Mafia family. Murdered.

  JOHN STANFA: The driver who set up Bruno for assassination, later ousted by Natale from the top of the Philly family.

  CHARLIE ALLEN: Blinky Palermo’s nephew, a mob hanger-on, and a federal informant.

  RAYMOND BERNARD: Ralph’s cousin, drug dealer—and another federal informant.

  ANTHONY “TONY BANANAS” CAPONIGRO: Newark-based family consigliere under Bruno, and instigator of the plot to kill the boss. Murdered.

  PETE CASELLA: Traitorous underboss who plotted against Testa.

  Any man who tries to be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number who are not good.

  —Niccolò Machiavelli

  Any man can take a life. But only a king can spare one.

  —an old Sicilian proverb

  PROLOGUE

  CHRISTMAS DAY 1973

  The gifts were unwrapped and the dishes from a sumptuous holiday dinner put away at the suburban New Jersey home, a two-story colonial right off the Cooper River in Pennsauken. As the Natale family settled in front of their television to watch a yuletide special, their patriarch’s mind focused on a task that was far removed from peace on earth or goodwill toward men.

  Especially if that man was Joe McGreal.

  Ralph Natale donned a three-quarter-length leather jacket before stepping into the darkness and heading alone toward the garage in the waning hours of Christmas Day. He marched through the breezeway toward his waiting car. He had a moment of discomfort as he pondered the task ahead on this holiest of holy days. For a minute, he thought about turning around, spending the rest of the night with his family.

  Instead, he stood alone, engulfed in the solitary silence.

  “For a moment,” he later recalled, “I felt like I was the only human being on earth.”

  Natale kept walking, kept thinking, as he headed toward the garage where his Buick Electra was parked. His mind cleared as he finally reached his destination. Natale pushed aside a fake wall to find the weapons secreted behind it and removed a pair of .38-caliber snub-nosed revolvers.

  Next, he grabbed a box of hollow-point bullets and carefully loaded both weapons. One revolver went into a holster on his right ankle, the other into a deep inside pocket of his stylish coat. He opened the garage door and climbed inside the car.

  He backed the Buick into the driveway, then climbed out to carefully close the garage door—intent on not disturbing his happy family. Natale reached down to touch his ankle holster, then felt for the weapon in his coat.

  It was an old habit, and old habits die hard.

  He put the car in gear and headed toward a cocktail lounge in the Holiday Inn opposite the racetrack in Cherry Hill. Waiting there was McGreal, a once-trusted associate in the world of La Cosa Nostra. The two were partners in the Mafia’s takeover of Local 170 of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees International Union. Natale, for most of his life, valued loyalty above all else. And Joe McGreal had betrayed him.

  The pretense for the meeting was a Christmas shakedown of a new restaurant on the White Horse Pike in Camden County. Ralph arrived at the bar first, taking a seat with the manager, Franny McDonnel—an old friend whose presence was meant to assure McGreal this ni
ght was business as usual. Drinks were served, and drinks were downed. Then it was time for work, with Natale inviting McDonnel along for the ride.

  McGreal was eager to get going: “Come on, Franny. We’ll have a few drinks on the house at the new joint.” As the three men walked toward McGreal’s Eldorado in the lot outside, Natale noted the bulge in the right-hand pocket of the Irishman’s dark cashmere overcoat. The gun bounced slightly with each stride by McGreal.

  McGreal opened the driver’s-side door and popped the car’s locks. Natale slipped into the backseat, staking out his turf, in the spot directly behind McGreal. The bar manager grabbed the shotgun seat. They drove for twenty minutes along the Black Horse Pike toward the eatery.

  As McGreal turned into the restaurant’s parking lot, he sensed something wasn’t right. None of the lights were on inside. “Hey, it’s dark over here. What’s up, Ralph?”

  “Here’s what’s up, my friend,” Natale replied.

  Ralph already had one of the .38s in his right hand, and he fired directly into the back of McGreal’s head. In a cruel twist apropos to the holiday, the Eldorado was a gift to the dead man just months earlier—from Ralph Natale.

  1

  A SIT-DOWN WITH THE BOSS

  The last legitimate don of the Philadelphia family of La Cosa Nostra sits alone at a long table in a quiet room.

  Ralph Natale, an integral cog in the city’s organized crime scene since his teens, still exudes a bit of genial menace. Now into his eighties, he sports a runner’s physique—the result of a daily morning jog, followed by a weight-lifting session. His salt-and-pepper goatee is neatly trimmed. His eyesight is failing, but his mind remains sharp as a stiletto. Dates and details spill forth as he sits beneath a knit cap, a reminder of his prison days, when Natale struggled to keep his bald head warm inside a chilly cell.

  He’s now four years out of prison—his second bid (mob speak for a prison sentence), thirteen years on a drug rap. The earlier stay cost Natale sixteen years, and a large chunk of his five children’s lives: Lost birthdays, graduations, weddings. It was his choice: Natale could have walked free if only he chose to rat out associates such as revered Philly mob boss Angelo “the Docile Don” Bruno, his mentor and friend; legendary Chicago boss Anthony Accardo; and mob-connected union boss Ed Hanley.

  He kept his mouth shut and did the time. It was the code that he’d learned and lived on the streets of South Philly. Ralph Natale was the ultimate stand-up guy, right up until the moment he sat down in a witness chair as a government witness in 2000. At that time, he became the highest-ranking Mafia member in history to turn federal witness.

  The years in lockup still affect Natale in other ways. He has trouble sleeping in a bed—many nights, he leaves his wife, Lucia, alone to make himself comfortable on the couch. It feels more familiar, reminiscent of his jailhouse lodgings, as he drifts off to sleep. His bottom teeth are gone, lost to lousy prison dentistry—inmate Natale once yanked an achy tooth himself with a strand of dental floss rather than wait for a dental appointment.

  And he’s uncomfortable in crowds, with an hour in a room full of strangers leaving Natale disoriented after nearly three decades in the company of nobody but inmates and prison guards.

  “It’s what my life was,” he explained. “Even before all that, I watched myself on the street. I was very wary. I watched everything and everyone. I don’t like people behind me. I got threatened every day of my life. I told people, ‘You know where I am. My car is parked outside. Bring it on.’ Every morning I drove away from my house and I looked back in the rearview mirror. Then I made the sign of the cross.

  “So far, it’s worked. Look how lucky I was, to end up here.”

  He doesn’t reflect much on his old days and his old ways, the days at the track and the nights at the bars, his days as a union boss hobnobbing with Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters hierarchy, the times when he had to pull the trigger or give an order to take a life.

  Natale’s voice turns deep and raspy as he growls about his time as a killer, when his preferred tool was a .38-caliber revolver filled with hollow-point bullets.

  “Men that can kill without hesitation and it doesn’t bother you, you think, ‘What the hell is wrong?’” he murmurs. “But I did it. It’s just some people are made that way. Not serial killers—they have no reason. If you have a reason, you get it done with, fuck it. Go have a drink somewhere. Maybe today brings something else.”

  He would eventually confess to killing McGreal and another man and acknowledge his role in six more murders during a bloody Philadelphia mob war involving his long-shot ascension to head of the local Mafia family—the apex of a five-decade run in “The Life.” But word on the South Philly streets linked Natale to mob murder and menace far beyond those eight deaths.

  He shrugs when recalling those days.

  “When McGreal got killed, the next morning—‘It was Ralphy!’” he said. “Somebody got killed in Detroit—that was Ralphy. Meanwhile, I was in Philadelphia. I used to laugh. But it was good for the reputation.”

  Even now, he takes pride in his efficient lethal work and shows no remorse for anything.

  “It’s not that I take pleasure in it,” he explains. “I never take pleasure in killing anybody. I tell you, when it comes to that there, I kill ’em so fast they don’t even know they’re dead. I shoot ’em. Right in the face.”

  But his rise from a kid shuffling betting slips in South Philly bars in the 1940s to point man for the mob’s infiltration of Atlantic City in the sixties and seventies to the don of the Philadelphia mob in the 1990s was defined as much by the men he spared as those he killed. Natale’s decisions to let mob associates Charlie Allen and Ron Previte keep breathing—made nearly two decades apart—twice landed him behind bars for double-digit jail terms. And a direct order from boss Angelo Bruno stopped him from killing the treacherous and bloodthirsty Atlantic City mobster Nicky Scarfo, a choice that proved disastrous for the entire Philadelphia mob family after decades of peace and prosperity under Natale’s friend the Docile Don.

  “Pinpoints in time,” he now observes with the detachment of hindsight. Life is often about karma and the ever-widening ripples set in motion by a single choice, an ill-chosen word, or the holstering of a handgun. Death can come from a simple hand gesture, a nod of the head, a roll of the eyes.

  “No matter how insignificant they appear at the time they occur, these things can determine a man’s life until there is no more,” Natale says.

  Atlantic City—viewed as a Garden of Eden for greedy Philadelphia mobsters once gambling was legalized—became a recurring theme that ran through much of his life. Natale was there for the mob’s initial plans to seize control of the casino unions. He stewed behind bars as mob rival “Little Nicky” Scarfo ruined the Philly family and threatened to interrupt the flow of cash from the Jersey Shore. And Natale returned to his hometown from jail determined to reclaim the prize.

  Ralph Natale spent twenty-nine years of his adult life in jail. The first stretch was a direct result of another Natale decision: he was no rat. Promises of early parole, lonely years apart from his wife and growing family, a poisonous anger that grew as he felt the betrayal of his fellow mafiosi—nothing could convince Natale to flip and work for the feds.

  Until he finally did.

  There are things he misses about the mob life, the pumping adrenaline and the high-wire tension of day-to-day life outside the law. It was a man’s world: good men and bad men, killers and thieves, bosses and capos. At one time, men of honor and respect. Later, men considered punks and pretenders by Natale.

  This was his world for most of five decades.

  “You walk into a room, and you know something’s gonna happen,” he says of those days. “What I see in somebody’s face, what they see and what they’re looking at. Or you’re walking with somebody, and you know in your heart of hearts he wants to kill you. And you’re thinking, ‘I’m gonna kill him as soon as I can.’

  “I want
you to understand I’m not a maniac or a mob serial killer. I never touched an innocent person in my life. I never touched a woman, or a child. Or a man trying to make a living for his family. I can say that ’cause that’s what I am. But you fuck with me, you’re gonna have a problem.

  “Some men are that way. I was that way. That’s what it is.”

  Natale explains what he means with a pop culture reference, quoting from a Quentin Tarantino movie.

  “Did you ever see the movie Kill Bill, when David Carradine and Uma Thurman are fighting at the end, and he shoots her with the truth serum, and they’re talking? He says, ‘You know, you’re a born killer, and that’s what you’ll always be.’

  “And I’m a killer, too.”

  Natale is adamant about one other thing: his story is the one true tale of the rise and fall of the family that he twice swore an oath of lifelong loyalty and silence to serve and protect.

  “It’s the real Mafia story—no bullshit,” he declares. “When that guy Mario Puzo wrote The Godfather, he had a lot of friends in different families. They told him little episodes. He wasn’t there, but he finally put it all together.”

  And then Ralph Natale starts to speak.

  2

  KIDS IN PHILLY

  Ralph Natale was born hard.

  The son of the unforgiving South Philadelphia streets arrived on March 6, 1935, brought home by a tough-guy father and a mother with few maternal instincts in the hard times of the Great Depression. Ralph was the older of two sons born five years apart; his parents were the first generation of their families born in the United States after his four grandparents had emigrated from Italy to the City of Brotherly Love.

  His paternal grandparents died two weeks apart during the 1918 flu pandemic that ravaged the city’s Italian neighborhood. An estimated 30 million people died worldwide, with twelve thousand killed in Philadelphia as its tiny morgue was overrun with corpses. People struck by the killer bug were moved from their beds into wooden coffins even before taking their last breaths as the disease spread.