Mafia Prince: Inside America's Most Violent Crime Family (9 page)

             
Chickie Narducci came down to see us, to thank us for what we had done. My uncle was ecstatic. The killing had enhanced not only his reputation within the mob, but mine as well. The guys in Philly knew what we were about, that we were killers, real gangsters. It’s what my uncle always wanted, ever since he was around Skinny Razor.

             
We needed $12,000 to buy equipment so we could start our own concrete company. I had been working with Alfredo, but I told my uncle I wanted to do my own thing and he agreed, so I went into a business with a friend of mine from the neighborhood. My partner Vince Bancheri burned his house down and we used the insurance money to start our company. So one night, me and Vince go out and we stop by the Flamingo Motel on Pacific Avenue; they had a lounge that a lot of people liked to go to. Judge Helfant, the guy that had double-crossed the Blade, owned it. My uncle still wanted to kill him, but the Blade was still in jail, so we put killing him on the back burner for the time being. My uncle would say, “Let it simmer; let it be until our friend comes home.”

             
So when we go in to the lounge, we see this kid named Pepe Leva who was a bookmaker who hung around Judge Helfant and the Flamingo. Vince had loaned him $3,000, and Pepe Leva was talking bad about Vince, like threatening him to people around Atlantic City saying he wasn’t going to pay him back. So Vince tells me about it and I called Pepe Leva over and asked him to step outside, I told him that I wanted to speak with him. So we go outside and I tell him, “You really shouldn’t be threatening people.” I tell him that Vince is my friend and I said, “You owe him the money; do the right thing and pay him.” I’m talking to him like a gentleman, that’s how I talked to people. I never came off like a tough guy unless I had to and usually at that point it wasn’t me, it was the gun doing the talking.

             
Well this Pepe Leva starts talking sideways to me and I don’t go for that, so I punched him right in the mouth and knocked his tooth out. There was no more talking nice to him. This is in the parking lot right in front of the Flamingo. Judge Helfant comes running out
and he is going nuts, yelling and screaming. He has no idea that we are going to kill him when the Blade gets out of jail. He thinks we don’t we know that he kept the $6,000 for himself. He just sees me punch this Pepe Leva and he goes crazy. So me and Vince leave.

             
The next day, Judge Helfant makes an appointment to see my uncle. I think they went to the Lido restaurant. Judge Helfant says to my uncle, “Nick, your nephew hit this kid and he wants to press charges.” My uncle is placating him, telling him to relax. He says, “Take it easy, we’re all friends. Tell the kid to relax and not to press charges, and we will straighten it all out.”

             
So, what we did was, my uncle worked it out through one of his lawyers Harold Garber and Judge Helfant that me and Pepe Leva were going to meet and we were going to shake hands and bury the hatchet between us.

             
So the next day, Pepe Leva and I meet up at the My Way Lounge, which was Saul Kane’s place, and my uncle makes us shake hands. He tells him, “We’re all Italian. We need to stick together.” My uncle tells him to go to the court and to drop the charges and to come back around the next day. So Pepe Leva comes back around the next day and tells me and my uncle that he dropped the charges and that he doesn’t want any problems with us. My uncle put his arm around him and said, “We have no problem with you. You’re a friend of Judge Helfant’s. We’re all friends.” So as Pepe Leva is leaving he apologizes again and shakes hands with my uncle, and then he shakes my hand. My uncle says, “See, it’s all over; we shake hands like gentlemen and that’s the end of it.”

             
Right after this Leva kid filed the charges against me, my uncle went to Philadelphia and got the okay from Angelo Bruno and Phil Testa to pop him, to kill him. This guy was going to testify against me and I might go to jail. My uncle wanted him dead even if that wasn’t gonna happen because he had dropped the charges.

             
To my uncle it was a mortal sin that anyone would raise their hands to us or treat us with anything other than respect. That’s why he wanted me and Lawrence to shoot the guy from the motorcycle gang and that’s why he wanted Pepe Leva dead. He wanted to send a message to everyone that we weren’t fuckin around. So he got permission to whack him out. That was another one of the rules—you always had to clear a murder with the boss or you might be the next one to get killed.

             
I was present when my uncle orderd the hit on Pepe Leva. A guy in our crew asked Pepe for a ride home from the city. On the way home, he said to Pepe, “Pull over, I gotta take a piss.”

             
They got out to take a piss, and that’s when he shot Pepe in the head. They had pulled into a trash dump, a landfill. He emptied his gun into Pepe and then finished taking his piss.

             
He then walked several miles through the woods to his home in the middle of the night. When we saw him a few days later, he was all cut up from the bushes. My uncle said to him, “Jesus Christ, what the fuck happened to you?” When he told my uncle what had happened and how he ran through the woods to get home, my uncle said, “Why didn’t you take the fuckin’ car; it was right there?” He tried to explain himself, but my uncle just shook his head and walked away. That’s how he was. Nothing was ever good enough for him.

             
Chuckie was with my uncle on the Reds Caruso hit; the Blade was in jail for murder; me and Vince Falcone had killed Louie DeMarco; Lawrence had shot the motorcycle guy; and now Pepe Leva was dead. My uncle loved it; he loved the killings. He used to
say, “Do it cowboy style—bang ’em right out in the street in broad daylight.” He wanted people to know that we were serious, that we weren’t playing games.

             
The detectives knew I didn’t kill Pepe Leva because they had me under surveillance the night that he got killed. I was in a bar the whole night and they were in there watching me the whole time, those motherfuckers, but they tried to pin it on me anyway. They got a guy who worked at the trash dump where we did the killing to give a statement and identify me as the shooter. A couple weeks later the owner of the trash dump’s wife called Harold Garber, who was one of our lawyers and told him what had happened and that the cops had made the guy say that it was me and that he wanted to set the record straight and tell the truth that it wasn’t me. My uncle always hated the police, he called them all “no good dirty cocksuckers.”

             
Now this woman used to hang out at the old Penguin Club that my uncle owned with Tommy Butch. So Harold has her bring the guy to Vince Sausto’s insurance office and he takes a statement from him where he says is wasn’t me who did the killing, which it wasn’t. Now at the time the witness was being watched by two detectives from the prosecutors office who were protecting him from us. They were convinced that me and my uncle were going to kill this guy so he wouldn’t be able to testify against me. The cops thought he was going to do some insurance business with Vince, so they waited outside. They had no idea that Harold was inside the office and that the guy was coming to give a statement that would ultimately kill their case against me. The guy turned out to be a stand-up guy and just wanted to tell the truth.

             
Back in 1972, when my uncle was in Yardville and he found out what Judge Helfant and Alvin Feldman did to the Blade, he went nuts. He was furious. I’d never seen him this angry. Adding to that, my uncle believed that Judge Helfant gave testimony to the SCI—the same commission my uncle, Angelo Bruno, Jerry Catena, Bobby Manna, and those guys refused to testify in front of—and that he had talked about my uncle and Ange to the SCI. My uncle
also believed that Judge Helfant was talking to the FBI. He would say, “This guy is a double agent. He’s no fuckin good.”

             
This Alvin Feldman was no fuckin’ good. He called himself the King of the Jews. He had a couple of dirty book stores with my uncle, and the word going around Atlantic City was that Alvin Feldman was going to kill my uncle by putting a bomb in his car. In addition, my uncle knew that he was ripping him off, skimming money from the businesses. This was going on before my uncle went to prison. My uncle used to say he was a “backstabbing cocksucker” but my uncle couldn’t get the okay to kill him because, at the time, Alvin Feldman owed $60,000 to Pappy Ippolito, who was one of Ange’s top guys. Ange told my uncle that once Pappy got his money back, my uncle could have him killed. I remember my uncle saying to me, “I wish I had the $60,000. I’d pay the Jew’s debt to Pappy myself, that’s how bad I want to whack this motherfucker.”

             
So one day my uncle approached Ange in Yardville and told him he wanted to kill three people. He told him he wanted to kill his two partners in Atlantic City—Tommy Butch and Alvin Feldman—and that he wanted to kill Judge Helfant. After my uncle gave his reasoning for each of the killings and told Ange that he knew Pappy Ippolito had gotten his money back from Alvin Feldman, Ange gave him the okay to kill all three.

             
The Penguin Club was a dump, but my uncle was making money there. My uncle was loaning money and making book out of there, but when my uncle went to jail, Tommy Butch stopped paying off the cops and eventually the place got shut down. This made my uncle furious and this is why he wanted to kill Tommy Butch.
He would say, “If this cheap motherfucker didn’t stop paying those no-good greedy cocksuckers, I’d still be making money over there.”