Last Don Standing Page 2

  The coffins were then stacked on street corners, where they were loaded in bulk on flatbed trucks and taken away.

  Josephine Ianelli Natale went first, believing that her husband, Ralph, would survive to raise their three children: twelve-year-old Michael, eight-year-old Sammy, and the baby, five-year-old Grace.

  But Ralph had already contracted the deadly disease, and he joined his immigrant wife inside the coffins on the sidewalks of South Philly. The three kids were left on their own, and life as an orphan exerted a profound effect on the eldest son, Michael.

  “My father never knew a love or kindness from a mother or a father,” Ralph recalled. “So how was he to know how to give this to a son? Not a word of kindness or a simple touch of love from either mother or father since I was old enough to remember. They were never, ‘You’re gonna be okay, this and that.’ Never once!”

  Michael Natale became known on the street as Spike. His sons Michael Jr. and Ralphy, a pair of peas from different pods, grew up in two different worlds inside the same home. Michael Jr. was artistic, sensitive. And Ralphy was becoming Ralph. “He was so different from me,” Natale said. “He really was.”

  The lack of a kind, loving home emotionally crippled young Ralph, whose moral compass went askew before puberty. He found himself devoid of good feelings, cold-blooded and predatory in his approach to life.

  “What made me this way?” he mused decades later about the arc of his life. “I never knew what love was in that house. They were always fighting, always angry. And I said, ‘Oh, that’s where it’s at. If that’s where it’s at, that’s what life’s gonna be for me. And I went that way. And I prayed for their souls, that they would be in peace.”

  Spike worked as a pickup man for the Philly mob, collecting betting slips around town from assorted Mafia-backed businesses. He collected clips left at the counters of candy stores or stuffed inside pipes in back alleys. Spike never owned a car and was seen daily making his rounds on foot through the local streets, ultimately delivering the paperwork to a pal named Sparky. Spike wound up doing a bit of time at Eastern State Penitentiary.

  His slender frame didn’t carry much weight—just 125 pounds, although he toted a .45-caliber pistol “that weighed more than he did,” Natale recalled. “But a tough guy. Tough.” Spike also ran a numbers business in the black section of South Philly, off South Street.

  The only bit of childhood bonding between father and eldest son was the day when Spike taught his boy how to fire a gun.

  “I shot his .45. He took me down on the waterfront and said, ‘Hold it with both hands,’” Natale said. “Boom! They were like cannons.”

  The first time Natale felt the homicidal rage that would become so familiar in the future came one night at age twelve, when he violated his father’s strict 9:00 p.m. curfew. The boy lost track of time and returned home to find his dad waiting at the front door. He still remembers the first words out of the old man’s mouth—and everything that followed.

  “Son of a bitch, I told you,” said Spike before planting a hard kick with the side of his foot on the youngster. Ralph’s reaction seemed to come from nowhere and consume his entire consciousness, like some long-hidden instinct just now bubbling to the surface. He went from humiliated to infuriated in seconds.

  The life-changing boot still stings all these decades later.

  “It would have been better if he smacked me or punched me in the face,” Natale remembers. “But that’s like I was scum—you kick somebody that way. I turned around, I said, ‘Don’t you ever touch me again. And don’t you ever think about doing what you just did again.’

  “I have to tell you, if I had something in my hands, I would have killed him. That’s when I knew what I was. Twelve years old. The truth, I mean it. I wouldn’t let nobody touch me like that again. Nobody. It’s there. It’s always there.”

  Outside the house, the Philly kid did his best to find a safe place. He served as the undersized-if-athletic catcher on a youth league team that won the city Police Athletic League title, where third-grader Natale was coached by a pair of Philly cops. “I was good ballplayer, and it’s not bragging,” said Natale, who played catcher when none of the other kids wanted to wear the so-called tools of ignorance.

  But it was his father’s mob cohorts who appealed to the youth, already envisioning a crooked future in grammar school. Spike provided his son’s entrée to the underworld, enlisting the preteen to handle a collection from a black bar owner named George Wallace.

  Like father, like son: Spike told Ralphy that he should travel on foot. And so the young Natale marched through the black section of the city on his mission.

  “He knew that I knew how to handle myself,” Natale recalled of his first taste of illegal business. “He told me, ‘Just be careful, and do what you gotta do, ’cause you’re walking through a tough neighborhood.’ But a lot of the black kids went to school with me. They knew who I was. They knew they might get me now—but if you did, you’d better leave your neighborhood, ’cause if I’m alive, I’m gonna come back.

  “That was the reputation I had at eleven years old.”

  The youth headed to Wallace’s home and knocked on the door of the address provided by Spike. A woman answered, looked at the little white kid, and asked what he wanted. Ralphy politely replied that his father had dispatched him to see Mr. Wallace.

  “She smiled. I was the most respectful little son of a bitch,” Natale says with a smile. “I really was. She said, ‘Okay, he’s not here. He’s at the bar over on the corner. You want to come in here and wait for him?’ I said, ‘I can’t come in.’”

  When Mrs. Wallace asked why, the boy provided a ready answer: “Your man is over there. He’s not here.”

  The adult Natale laughs in retelling the tale. “She loved that! That’s how I was when I was a boy. She sent me over to the Budweiser Bar. I opened the door, the jukebox is going, and there’s a voice: ‘What do you want here, boy? Are you Spike’s son?’

  “I said yes, and he told me to come over. I said, ‘You’re Mr. Wallace?’ He laughed: ‘Oh, you’re checking me out? Come with me.’ We went into the men’s room, and he gives me the sheet. He says, ‘How did you get up here?’ Well, I walked. He said, ‘You got a lot of balls. I’m gonna give you a lot of money, too.’”

  The diminutive bagman’s reply was succinct: “I don’t care. I’m supposed to come up and see you. I didn’t know what you were gonna give me.”

  Wallace laughed and asked if Ralphy wanted anything from the bar before the long walk home.

  “I don’t drink,” the youngster replied.

  Wallace never forget his exchange with the well-mannered boy and never failed to bring it up when they crossed paths during Ralph’s ensuing ascension to the upper echelons of organized crime.

  Just as the kick had galvanized Natale’s outlook on life, the trip cemented his plans for the future: “I was eleven years old, and I thought, ‘This is it.’ There was no hesitation. I never hesitated. I wish I had sometimes. When somebody pulled out a pistol, it didn’t bother me, ’cause that’s what you had to do at that time.

  “I learned what those kind of men said: ‘If you don’t step up, you’re gonna be left behind.’ If somebody said, ‘Let’s go,’ you’d better get up. You can’t hesitate. And to step up, I was always first.”

  Despite his troubled home life, young Ralphy excelled in school. The bright young student was quick to raise his hand in class, much to the delight of his second-grade teacher. He was particularly adept at reading comprehension, retaining details and descriptions almost instantaneously.

  The brightest students were often allowed to skip a grade, and he was moved directly from the second grade into the fourth—and then again, from the fourth to the sixth.

  Natale, in class with kids two and three years older, became less comfortable and less interested in education. A junior high school IQ test nevertheless confirmed that Ralphy was among the sharpest students in his grade, and Natal
e recalled hearing the results from a teacher—a 138, a ranking of superior intelligence.

  “Mr. Horowitz told me I had one of the highest scores that he’d ever seen,” said Natale. “According to Mr. Horowitz, I coulda been anything I wanted to be. But who’s gonna tell me about being anything else but what I was, if I’m that way already, like I was?”

  Natale was thrown out of Southern at age fourteen, the second high school to banish him. And so began the real education of Ralph Natale, with classes conducted across South Philadelphia: in the streets, in the bars, and in the humidor of Yahn & McCormick, South Philly’s biggest cigar store.

  “I love South Philly,” he recalled wistfully. “I love the people in South Philly. I love the air. I love the scent and aroma of different cooking. I see a woman, walking and pushing a cart—I enjoy that. That’s my family. That’s where I was born and raised.”

  His favorite spot was always the Italian Market, a retail center unlike any other in the city. Cheese shops stood with fruit and vegetable stores, alongside fish markets and butchers’ shops where live animals were killed and sold. The streets were filled with tantalizing scents. Passersby enjoyed free samples of the homemade cheese and Sicilian-style black olives sprinkled with red seed pepper.

  Here, amid the hustle and bustle and constant commerce, a young immigrant named Phil Testa made a living selling chickens. A strange combination of good luck and bad fortune would eventually lead him to the top position of the Philly mob—for a mere twelve months.

  3

  LOVE AND DEVOTION

  Aspiring mobster Natale was fifteen when a pal convinced him to leave the neighborhood for a Friday-night dance at a nearby church. The pair had played in a sandlot football game earlier in the day, with Natale breaking his nose while making a tackle. In addition to his one and only suit, a well-worn blue number, the teen sported a pair of nascent black eyes. The suit was so shiny from repeated trips to the dry cleaner that “it looked like it would shatter if I fell.”

  The young Romeo donned a white shirt and his lone tie for the trip, enticed by his pal Bucky’s pitch: “He said, ‘C’mon, I heard there’s pretty girls from above Broad Street.’ And those girls didn’t swear. In my neighborhood, there were nice girls, but they’d fistfight with you and call you ‘motherfucker’ this and that. I said, ‘I don’t feel like going.’

  “He finally talked me into it. And that’s where I met my wife.”

  Natale spied eighteen-year-old Lucia from across the dance floor and resolved to make his move. The nervous young suitor asked for a dance, but there was a problem: He didn’t know a single step. The beautiful older woman, who worked as a dressmaker in a South Philly business, also noticed that Ralph looked a little younger than his declared age of eighteen.

  But love won out: Ralph walked her home and asked for her phone number.

  “I never forgot it from that day: Fulton 9-4326,” he declared. “She said, ‘You gotta write that down.’ I said, ‘I don’t have to write your number down. I’ll remember.’ Oh, I came up with some lines!”

  Their courtship was quick, as the underage Natale—without a driver’s license—borrowed cars from older guys to take her on dates. Lucia finally told Ralph that she knew he was just sixteen, but they were young and in love and it didn’t much matter. On one of their dates, she broke the news to Ralphy: she was pregnant.

  He was sixteen and about to become a father. And, it turned out, a husband. Once again, he never hesitated:

  “I said, ‘Let’s get married,’ because I loved her. I loved her no matter what I did.… And I still love her deeply.”

  The teenaged couple, after welcoming their first son, found a small apartment to raise their family. Natale, despite his tender age and inexperience, was an up-and-comer in the world of the Philadelphia mob. His first concern remained constant: providing for his wife and kids, by any means necessary.

  “I would do anything. I liked to work,” Natale recalled. “We didn’t have much, but we started to move up a little bit. And I always did every little thing.”

  In the fall of 1955, Natale fenced some stolen goods, turned a quick profit, and decided it was time to go see his favorite ballplayer: New York Yankees center fielder Mickey Mantle. The Bronx Bombers were facing the Brooklyn Dodgers in the World Series, and Natale turned his cash into two tickets for Game Three at Ebbets Field.

  By then, the couple had welcomed a second son.

  “I told my wife, ‘Can your mother watch the kids?’” he remembered with a smile decades later. “I got seats out in right-center field, and we watched. I said, ‘Don’t worry—the Mick is gonna hit one out.’ The next inning, he hit a tremendous homer. What a time that was to go to New York!”

  The young couple bought a pair of souvenir minibats, each inscribed with Mantle’s name, to bring back for their boys.

  Though Natale found himself naturally attracted to the older mobsters who mentored the young thug, he still bristles at the suggestion that he was in search of a substitute father.

  “I’m far from that stereotype,” he said flatly. “That ain’t me, not in a million years. I don’t need no father. My father was a strong man. But he was not my father to me. I mean, I came from his seed. But he was not my father.

  “I am what I am. I just wanted to get ahead for my wife and children, to give them something.”

  His decision to join the Mafia came as no surprise to his large extended family, which included his mother’s nine siblings. “They were proud of me!” he declared. “They knew me since I was a boy. And they told people, ‘You fuck around in my neighborhood, I’ll call my nephew!’”

  The Natales eventually landed in Southwest Philly, a predominantly Irish neighborhood. Natale’s young family was the only Italian one on the block, and that suited him just fine. He didn’t want his own kids exposed to the toxic lures of the old neighborhood.

  “I had to move out of South Philly,” he says now. “I thought, ‘If my sons grow up to be like me, I’ll get sick. Sick.”

  Their new home came their way through the help of young Ralph’s capo, legendary local mob killer John “Skinny Razor” DiTullio, a veteran of the infamous Philly mob war with the Lanzetti brothers before Ralphy was born.

  DiTullio was one of ten kids, a typically expansive Italian brood struggling to make ends meet. Food was often leftovers or vegetables with no meat. He stuffed cardboard in the soles of his shoes to keep water from leaking through the holes. And he made his bones in the mob killing of opera great Mario Lanza’s nephew.

  His nickname came from his weapon of choice, a thin, sharp blade typically secreted in the jacket pocket of his suit. DiTullio’s mob lineage was impeccable; the old-timer once had a face-to-face meeting with Al Capone, who expressed admiration for DiTullio’s killing skills during the Philly infighting of the twenties and thirties.

  “Eighteen, nineteen years old—he already had a reputation, forget about it,” Natale says with admiration. “Capone shook his hand—he told me this, one night, over Scotch. And he told Skinny, ‘There are certain people, a year from now, they’re not gonna be around because of you.’

  “Skinny said, ‘Oh, I felt so good.’ Like he graduated summa cum laude!”

  The precocious Natale earned his own street cred before he was old enough to legally drive or buy a drink. DiTullio knew Natale’s dad, Spike, from the numbers-running job and took notice of the up-and-comer. The Razor saw a bright future for the teenage hoodlum.

  “I was starting to make a reputation as a young lad, much faster than anybody ever thought,” Natale remembered of those days. “And Skinny sent for me—I musta been maybe fourteen. There was an after-hours place on Eighth Street, right below Washington Avenue, and a lot of the made guys used to go there late at night. Skinny had me sitting down in there.

  “He gave me the look—he had a face like a Tatar, one of those old Mongolians. So I stand up, and he says, ‘Ralphy, come over here.’ I wouldn’t dare sit down. He said, ‘You
know Mr. Bruno, of course.’”

  “Hello, Mr. Bruno,” the kid replied.

  “I was gonna put my hand out, but I stopped,” Natale said of this pivotal get-together. “You learn things by being around—you don’t offer your hand to a boss. That’s crude. So I waited, and he put his hand out.”

  Then Bruno spoke: “I heard a lot of good things about you, Ralphy.”

  Natale offered a quick response: “I will never let you hear anything bad about me.”

  Natale recalled wistfully, “He liked that. He said, ‘I know your father. He’s a good man, and we expect a lot from you, and so does this man here, Skinny.”

  “Thank you,” the awestruck teen replied. “It’s an honor to meet you this way.”

  “Okay,” Bruno replied before sending the teen on his way. “We’ll talk someday.”

  Hard case DiTullio developed an instant soft spot for the young Natale, providing a master’s class in the Mafia to his young and ambitious charge. His classroom was the Friendly Tavern on South Eighth Street, where Natale proved a particularly apt pupil.

  “That was the start,” Natale says now. “He took time out of his life to teach me about what you had to be to be somebody in the family. And he knew I had it. I grew up knowing him. Skinny Razor—he helped all the people in the Italian Market. They loved him. He helped them with all their problems, any problem. You do something wrong to them, you’re gonna go. He ain’t gonna play games.”

  Natale, when not on the street, worked a few night shifts behind the stick at the Friendly. DiTullio made sure that he got paid for both.

  “There’s no training program like they do in a big company,” he explained of his on-the-job training with Skinny. “When Skinny’s there, everybody knew it in the city. That meant he condoned everything that I did before, and you’d better watch out, ’cause I had that license now. And that’s how it happened.”