A real life mobster talks from exile - disses and dismisses Sopranos
Larry Ingersoll
Philadelphia Inquirer investigative reporter Ralph Cipriano interviews
Gaetano "Tommy Horsehead" Scafidi, now living in exile in government
witness protection program, a few years on from testifying against
former Philadelphia mob boss (godfather) "Skinny" Joey Merlino and his
associates:
http://www.philadelphiaweekly.com/view.php?id=12330
[quote article as follows]
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Straight From the Horsehead's Mouth
Gaetano "Tommy Horsehead" Scafidi turned state's evidence against his
fellow South Philly mob associates in 2001. Though he's had enough of
the witness protection program, he can't go home again. {poster's
insert: you should have seen the look on Merlino & Company as they
looked him in the eye while he was on the witness stand - if looks
could kill, even a stare worth a thousand words, etc.)
by Ralph Cipriano
"Tommy Horsehead" is a long way from home. The turncoat South Philly
gangster has spent the last five years hiding out in nine different
states under a half-dozen aliases since testifying against his former
mobster pals in the last big Philadelphia mob trial of 2001. For the
past two years of his exile, tired of all the government regulations
controlling his life, he says he voluntarily dropped out of the federal
witness protection program. (The feds decline comment.)
Now, Gaetano "Tommy Horsehead" Scafidi Jr. is trying to be his own man,
free of the mob and the government, as he steps out of a taxi on his
way to be interviewed by a PW writer and a Fox 29 reporter.
Horsehead has $5 in his pocket and six beers in his stomach. He can't
use his real name in the red-state neighborhood where he lives, but he
still has a story he hopes to sell, a story of betrayal by the mob, and
what he says was abandonment by the feds.
The man who served nearly nine years in jail for conspiring to commit
extortion and five gangland murders has plenty to say about his old
mobster pals and the mob hits he was in on. He also wants to talk about
plots to kill other gangsters, as well as a crazy plan back in the '90s
to whack Fox TV's own Geraldo Rivera.
But first Horsehead wants to set the ground rules for the interview.
Horsehead, 41, is 5-foot-11, tan and trim, with close-cropped hair that
sets off the big head and long face that earned him his colorful
nickname. He's dressed in shorts, loafers, no socks and a long-sleeved
striped dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Horsehead has some
friendly hugs for his inquisitors, and like the four-footed animal he's
named after, he's also got a sweet tooth.
"Where's my Tastykakes?" he wants to know.
The last time he got together with his two media pals, Horsehead, a
former mob shakedown artist, scored $40 worth of Tastykakes.
Horsehead loves Tastykakes-especially blueberry and lemon pies, and the
crumb cakes too. But we've let him down this time. They no longer sell
Tastykakes at the Philadelphia International Airport.
The negotiations switch to dinner. Dave Schratwieser, Fox 29's ace mob
reporter, lobbies for dinner at the best steakhouse in town. Horsehead,
however, still smarting from the Tastykakes letdown, holds out for the
Cheesecake Factory, a chain restaurant known for desserts like banana
cream, fresh strawberry and blueberry cheesecake, all Horsehead
favorites. The former mobster gets his way, but he's still squeezing
Schratwieser.
"Listen," he says. "I got to take some desserts home for Angela. You
don't give a fuck, right?"
The party heads upstairs to a hotel suite where a cameraman is rigging
the lights. The plan is to backlight Horsehead on the interview couch,
to shoot him in silhouette so the light behind him will obliterate his
distinctive features.
Schratwieser has also brought along a pair of sunglasses and a couple
of baseball caps, but Horsehead doesn't want disguises. He also doesn't
want the sound distorted. "Don't fuck up my voice," he says. He wants
the guys in the taverns and clubhouses of South Philly to hear it
straight from the Horsehead's mouth.
"I want to set the record straight," Horsehead says when the camera
starts rolling. "I want people to know why I became a government
witness. You can call me a rat, a stool pigeon, whatever."
But Horsehead wants people to know he once was a standup guy. "I kept
my mouth shut for six and a half years in jail," he says. "I didn't rat
on anybody. I was ready to walk out the door in 2000 when people in my
family came and told me I was gonna get killed."
Horsehead says he got the word from his family a day after Christmas
1999. "My family grabbed me on the side and said, 'Listen-you can't
come back to the city,'" Horsehead says. "'[Mobsters] Stevie Mazzone
and Georgie Borgesi got it all over the street that you're not gonna
make 24 hours out of a halfway house.'"
Horsehead kept his mouth shut in jail, even though in '93 he was
ambushed by two guys in ski masks who put a bullet through the window
of his car and shattered a mirror. And then in '94, while he was
driving on the Atlantic City Expressway in his Jeep, somebody opened
fire on him with a machine gun. Horsehead escaped, but the Jeep
exploded.
At the 2001 mob trial Horsehead testified against mobsters Mazzone and
Borgesi, as well as former mob boss Joey Merlino, all of whom were once
close boyhood pals. Horsehead was, by most accounts, the star of the
trial, especially when he broke down in tears on the witness stand.
"He was one of the best witnesses I've seen because he was genuine,"
says George Anastasia, who has covered the mob full-time for The
Philadelphia Inquirer since 1990. "He really was conflicted, and that
came across."
Another veteran mob watcher, Kitty Caparella of the Philadelphia Daily
News, also gave Horsehead good reviews. "I thought he was fabulous,"
she says.
After Horsehead testified, Merlino, Borgesi and Mazzone, as well as
four other mob associates, were convicted of extortion and
racketeering, and got prison sentences ranging from six to 14 years.
The Merlino gang is still in jail. But after serving another 18 months,
Horsehead was free to go.
"I'm tired of people calling me a rat," Horsehead says. "I did it for
one reason and one reason only: They were gonna kill me."
Horsehead says the media has given people the wrong idea about the mob.
He watches The Sopranos every Sunday night, but he's no fan. "The
Sopranos is fucking down and out bullshit," he sneers. "If a guy talked
to a boss the way them idiots talk to Tony Soprano, they would've got
killed. If a boss went to a psychiatrist, he would've got killed. That
show denigrates the Italians. It really does."
He also didn't care for GoodFellas. "All Joe Pesci did was curse,"
Horsehead gripes. "We don't talk like that. I'm Italian, and I'm proud
of my heritage. We don't talk like that. Every other word isn't eff
this or eff that."
Mobsters watch so many mob movies, Horsehead says, that they act this
stuff out in real life. Like the attempted Halloween night hit back in
1989 on Nicky Scarfo Jr. at Dante and Luigi's at 10th and Catharine.
Horsehead alleges it was carried out by his old pal Joey Merlino. (No
one was charged with the attempted murder.)
"Nicky Scarfo Sr. loved The Godfather," Horsehead recalls. "At a lot of
the homicides, Nicky told them to leave the guns," as a tribute to the
scene in the first Godfather movie where Michael Corleone shoots a
crooked cop and a rival mobster in an Italian restaurant, then drops
the gun on the way out the door.
Nicky Jr. is an old friend of Horsehead's who used to sleep over
Horsehead's apartment and date the same girls Horsehead dated. That
night at Dante and Luigi's, Nicky Jr. was shot in the chest, neck and
arm by a hooded assailant who was dressed in black and wore a Halloween
mask. The assailant dropped a 9 mm machine pistol on the way out of
Dante and Luigi's.
"Joey, he left the gun there that night because he wanted to send a
message to Nicky Sr.," Horsehead says. "He left the gun to stick it up
Nicky's ass, because that's what they did in The Godfather."
Horsehead's favorite gangster flick? "A Bronx Tale was the best mob
movie ever made," he says. The 1993 film about a young boy named
Calogero who's torn between following the path of his straightlaced
father who drives a bus for a living and the flashy gangster who rules
the neighborhood.
"If I had a dollar for every time I talked about A Bronx Tale,"
Horsehead says. "Go watch the movie. That'll show you the whole tale
about the mob."
The two themes of the movie-"wasted talent" and "nobody cares"-are what
grab Horsehead. If you're in the mob, you're wasting your life, and
when it's over, Horsehead says, "nobody's gonna give two shits about
you and your family if you get killed or go to jail."
Horsehead has creative ambitions, while he works the straight life as a
cook. "I want to write a book," he says.
"It's not glamorous," Horsehead says of his former life. "It's all
smoke and mirrors. Whoever gets involved with the mob, one of three
things is gonna happen: Either you're gonna get killed, you're gonna go
to jail like a sucker for the rest of your life ... or your gonna sell
your soul to the devil, and that's the government."
He admits he wouldn't be alive today if it weren't for the government.
"Yeah, they'll save your life," he says, "but after they get done with
you, they don't give a fuck about you. If I had to do it again, I
wouldn't get involved with none of them. You don't win with the mob,
and you don't win with the government. Either way, your life as you
know it is over."
David Fritchey, the assistant U.S. attorney who sponsored Horsehead for
the witness protection program, didn't want to discuss whether
Horsehead was still in the program because "it can endanger people."
Fritchey says the program can give former mobsters like Horsehead a
fresh start in life, but whether they stay in the program is up to
them. "They have to adjust their behavior to the mores of society, and
that can be a lot more difficult for somebody of Tommy's background,
who in fact grew up in a mob family and was a fourth-generation
mobster," Fritchey says. "[Horsehead] doesn't come from an American
family where a conventional sense of responsibility was drummed into
him."
School daze: Horsehead says he had no time for homework, and bribed his
teachers for passing grades. Horsehead, who grew up at Ninth and
McKean in South Philly, always wanted to be a mobster like his older
brother Salvatore "Tory" Scafidi (who's doing 40 years), his uncles,
his grandfather and his great-grandfather.
"I started with number slips when I was 12, 13 years old," Horsehead
says. "I was carrying slips, then I went to football pools, taking
sports bets, washing made guys' cars, picking up dry cleaning, all that
fun stuff. They treated me good."
Back in the early '80s, he says, a local gambler named Johnny Cupcakes
asked Horsehead to get his car washed. Cupcakes drove a brand-new blue
Lincoln Town Car.
Horsehead cleaned the car out before he brought it to the carwash.
Under the driver's seat, he says, he discovered three bundles of cash,
each containing $10,000 wrapped in rubber bands.
Horsehead got the car washed, then drove over to see Cupcakes, who was
playing gin at a local clubhouse. "John, can I talk to you for a
second?" Horsehead says he asked.
"I took him in the back room, and asked, 'Did you leave something in
your car?'" Cupcakes said he didn't think so. Horsehead lifted his
shirt to show Cupcakes three bundles of cash totaling $30,000 that were
tucked into his waistband.
"Oh my God. I can't believe I left that in the car," Cupcakes told
Horsehead before telling him to hang around until after he was finished
playing gin. Then, Horsehead says, the gambler gave him $500. Cupcakes
drove him down the shore that night, Horsehead says, and gave him
another $1,000, which he dropped at the casinos.
"That day on, [Cupcakes] always took care of me," Horsehead says. "He
was a good guy."
(John "Johnny Cupcakes" Melilli, identified by the former Pennsylvania
Crime Commission in a 1990 annual report as a lifelong gambler, loan
shark and La Cosa Nostra associate, couldn't be reached for comment.)
>From Horsehead's perspective, gangsters ruled South Philly. "The money,
the cars, the girls always around, it was dynamite," he says.
His father didn't approve, telling Horsehead he should join the Marines
because he needed some structure in his life. But Horsehead saw both
Nicky Scarfo and his own brother beat a murder rap. To him, gangsters
seemed invincible.
In high school, at St. John Neumann, Horsehead was so wrapped up in the
gangster life he didn't bother going to class. As he tells it, it
didn't hurt his grades.
"I bribed all my teachers," he says. "I went and gave the teachers $30
or $40 bottles of wine and champagne so they'd look the other way."
He claims he passed every subject with a grade of 70. How did he get
away with it?
"They knew who my brother was. They knew who my family was," Horsehead
says. "We were treated better than Hollywood movie stars. Priests, they
wouldn't even look our way. The kids in school, they knew who we were.
Nobody bothered us. If we wanted somebody to do our homework, they'd do
it."
A former teacher at Neumann doesn't believe Horse-head's tale. "All
this is a figment of his imagination," says Walter Belovitz, director
of alumni for the Millay Club, Neumann's alumni association.
Belovitz, band director at the school that has since merged with
Goretti, has taught at Neumann since 1975, though he doesn't
specifically recall Horsehead, class of '83. "At Neumann you always had
to earn your grades," Belovitz says. "There was no way you bought a
grade."
But Horsehead says the only time he got tripped up at Neumann was when
one of his regular teachers was sick and a substitute nailed him for
cutting three classes. Horsehead says he had to go to the school with
his father for a 6 a.m. conference, where he was given detention and
warned that the next time he skipped he'd be suspended.
His father was fuming.
"Why you gotta be so stupid," Horsehead remembers his father telling
him. "You better go in the military and get some structure in your
life."
But Horsehead decided he didn't need structure. The gangster life had
better perks. On senior prom night, when he was 17, Horsehead says he
drove down the shore in a blue Fiat Spider convertible. "Johnny
Cupcakes had tickets for me for Frank Sinatra at Resorts
International," Horsehead says. He had $300 in his pocket, and he'd won
another $500 at the blackjack table. His dates were two New York girls
in their early 20s.
After the show Horsehead says he went up to Johnny Cupcakes' suite at
Resorts. Room service was on the house, and Horsehead had a threesome
with his two dates.
"What a prom night," Horsehead says, still smiling at the memory. "Who
had a prom night better than me?"
The mob calls it the arm, the shakedown or the elbow, when they collect
the street tax from all the guys out there running illegal businesses.
In the '80s Horsehead was collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars a
week. He once brought a paper bag stuffed with $80,000 in 10s and 20s
to Nicky Scarfo.
"Next time," Horsehead remembers the mob boss telling him, "bring 'em
in $100 bills."
In the '90s, even though the mob wars were on, Horsehead thought he was
hanging with the right crowd, with longtime buddies like Joey Merlino,
Michael Ciancaglini and Georgie Borgesi.
"We grew up in the same neighborhood," Horsehead says. "I'm younger
than all of them. We hung on the street together. We sat in the same
restaurants, the same clubs."
It was a rough crowd. "They used to beat up girls, they used to rob
people," Horsehead says of his old buddies. "They used to go into clubs
and start fights." But they vowed they'd "always be loyal to each
other," he says.
Like Horsehead, all the boys had relatives in the mob, and it was their
ambition to become made men too.
Horsehead was collecting the street tax every week from his own stable
of 100 gamblers, bookmakers, numbers writers, loan sharks and drug
dealers. "I knew who all the players were," he says.
But business was falling off. "Everybody paid in the early '80s," he
said. But during the mob wars of the '90s, when mobsters were getting
killed and sent to jail, a new generation of gangsters took over, and
collections lagged.
"Nobody wanted to pay Joey and Michael," Horsehead says. "'Cause they
didn't respect them because Joey was a thief. Joey robbed people. Joey
is a greedy person; Joey is for Joey."
When people didn't pay, it was Horsehead's job to change their minds.
And if that required a beating, Horsehead was the guy to do it.
His weapon of choice was an aluminum baseball bat. As he explained at
the mob trial, aluminum bats were better than wooden bats because they
didn't break.
As a mob soldier, Horsehead played a backup role at several mob hits.
But he says he never pulled the trigger. When gangster Salvatore Testa
was killed in 1984 after being set up by a longtime friend, Horsehead
was a "blocker"-meaning he used a car to block streets on Passyunk and
Moore so the killers could make a getaway. Horsehead also washed out
the bloody van that had carried Testa's body over the river before it
was dumped in Jersey.
Horsehead regrets his role in that one to this day. "Salvie was a man's
man. He was a gangster," Horsehead says. "He did all the right things.
He was a standup guy."
Still, Horsehead is able to square his deeds with his conscience. "I
believe in God," Horsehead says. "But I tell him, for what good fucking
reason did you put me on this earth? I helped a lot of people, don't
get me wrong, I hurt a lot of people too. Did the pros outweigh the
cons?"
Killing rivals in a mob war is just part of the job description, he
says. When mobster Pasquale "Pat the Cat" Spirito was shot to death in
1983, Horsehead's job was to line up witnesses to provide an alibi for
one of the killers. When gangster Robert Riccobene was gunned down in
front of his mother that same year, Horsehead's job was to clean up the
shotguns used in the hit.
The last hit Horsehead was involved in was caught on a 1993 government
surveillance tape. On the tape, played at the last mob trial, a gang of
men in black sweatsuits and ski masks are seen blasting their way
through a diner while a woman screams.
Horsehead told the jury the hit was carried out by the Merlino gang,
and that Michael "Mikey Chang" Ciancaglini forced him at gunpoint to
become part of the hit squad.
The men in ski masks severely wounded Mikey Chang's brother Joey Chang,
who was on the opposite side of the mob wars of the '90s.
It could've been worse. "We ran in real close together," Horsehead
says. He says he confronted a waitress who was screaming.
"I tell you right now I'm not shooting an innocent civilian," Horsehead
says. "That piece of shit George Borgesi was gonna shoot her. I pushed
him away. That's my voice on the tape saying, 'Move.'"
(Despite Horsehead's testimony, Merlino, Borgesi and the other mobsters
on trial back in 2001 were acquitted of murder charges.)
After the hit on Joey Chang, assassins retaliated with an ambush that
killed Mikey Chang and wounded Joey Merlino. Horsehead was summoned to
a sit-down with Skinny Joey, Georgie Borgesi, Stevie Mazzone and other
Merlino associates who were warring with the old Stanfa crew.
Horsehead says the meeting was held after the funeral of Mikey Chang in
a Camac Street catering hall. Horsehead says Merlino told him, "We got
to go get those motherfuckers." He wanted Horsehead to kill the people
who'd killed Mikey Chang and wounded Skinny Joey.
Horsehead says he was steamed because for months Merlino hadn't been
giving him his take of the street tax collections, which Horsehead says
amounted to several hundred thousand dollars.
"I want to know where all the money is," Horsehead asked Merlino. He
says Joey told him he was putting the money away in case the gang
needed lawyers and to cover the sports gambling and numbers action.
Horsehead says when he demanded his share of the cash again, Joey told
him, "We can't worry about the money now. We got to worry about getting
the greaseball," referring to Stanfa.
"I ain't doing shit," he says he told Skinny Joey, "until I get my
money." He got up to leave, he says, and as he was going down the
steps, Skinny Joey cocked his hand like a pistol, and pointed at
Horsehead. "I knew right then and there that Joey was gonna whack me,"
Horsehead says.
As far as Horsehead is concerned, Skinny Joey is a fraud. "What the
fuck, youse made Joey Merlino a fucking movie star," he yells at
Schratwieser. "He loved it because Joey wanted to be John Gotti and
Nicky Scarfo. Joey used to say we need the media. It generates
publicity. But youse made him, you, George Anastasia, Bill Baldini.
Joey ain't nothing without youse."
("It takes a lot of balls to say that from a protected location, with
your face blacked out on TV," says Christopher Warren, Joey Merlino's
lawyer. "And he's calling my client gutless?")
Horsehead remembers nights out on the town at Rock Lobster and other
places where people flocked to Skinny Joey. "We went out with lawyers,
with hockey players, Lindros," he says. "They all loved to be around
Joey. He was a magnet."
But without the media and his bodyguards, "Joey's lost, Joey's a punk,"
Horsehead fumes. "Joey is a dog. Absolutely. He was paying off Mexican
gangs" that controlled the Beaumont, Texas, prison he was in, Horsehead
says. "Joey Merlino was wearing newspapers and magazines [under his
clothes] because he was afraid of getting stuck in the yard."
After he got chiseled out of his collection money, Horsehead switched
sides in the mob war, deserting the Merlino gang for John Stanfa's
crew. It was Stanfa, Horsehead says, who "straightened me out,"
initiating him into the mob during a secret ceremony.
At the mob trial Horsehead told the jury how he'd held his hand over an
open flame as he recited the oath of omerta: "I should burn like this
part of my hand," he said, if he ever broke the code of silence.
"Everything I believed in," he told the jury, "I threw out the window,"
he said before he began to sob. He had to wipe his eyes and drink some
water before he could go on.
His mobster pals laughed at Horsehead during the trial and said he'd
faked the tears. No way, Horsehead says.
"Listen," Horsehead says, "it broke my heart that I had to do that to
those people." Even though he'd been betrayed by his boyhood pals, he
says he knew he was also betraying himself by going against his mobster
oath. That's why at the mob trial, "I didn't wear my glasses because I
didn't want to see those people's families."
"I'm not proud of what I did," he says. "There's days I still can't
look at myself in the mirror and believe what I did." He says it was
tough to adjust to the life of a stoolie, dealing with the government,
and now, the media.
"I hated reporters," he says. "I hated cops."
The camera's off. Horsehead and Schratwieser are staring at each other
at close range. "I don't know you from a can of paint," Horsehead tells
the TV reporter.
"I'm a straight-shooter dude," Schratwieser says.
It was during the mob wars of the '90s when Horsehead says he was
ordered to kill TV reporter Geraldo Rivera by former mob boss John
Stanfa, who's now serving a life sentence.
Stanfa had just made the papers as the acting mob boss. Rivera had
decided to ambush Stanfa at his warehouse to ask if it was really true.
Rivera and a camera crew stormed the warehouse and got into an
obscenity-laced confrontation with Stanfa.
"Get out of here," Stanfa yelled at the TV reporter on tape. Horsehead
says a furious Stanfa later ordered him to kill Rivera, who couldn't be
reached for comment for this story.
"Geraldo Rivera, I saved your life, and I almost got killed for it,"
Horsehead says. He says that if Rivera had returned to Philadelphia,
"You and your cameraman would've never left that city alive. I'm not
gonna go into detail about that, but he was going to kill you and two
other reporters from Philadelphia."
The other reporters Stanfa wanted to whack, Horsehead says, were George
Anastasia of the Inquirer and Kitty Caparella of the Daily News.
Horsehead says the angry mob boss told him in broken English, "If that
spic ever comes back, we're gonna make sure he never leaves this town
alive."
Stanfa then explained to Horsehead that he wanted the job done like mob
hits are carried out in Italy: by gunmen on motorcycles.
Horsehead said he had to tell the mob boss, "This isn't Italy. With all
due respect, we can't kill reporters."
Stanfa's response, says Horsehead, was, "I don't give a fuck."
The plot to kill Anastasia by throwing a grenade through the window of
his house was previously disclosed by other mob informants. Any plot to
kill Caparella is news to her.
"I wasn't informed," she says.
The Rivera allegation is also new. Asked about alleged mob plots to
kill the three reporters, David Fritchey of the U.S. attorney's office
says, "I really have no knowledge about any of those matters."
Horsehead's father was right about one thing: Horsehead needed
structure in his life. He found it in jail, where he had plenty of time
to work out, improve his eating habits and play lots of pinochle.
Horsehead went to jail weighing 230 pounds, and came out 50 pounds
lighter. He also didn't age much. "I tell 'em I'm 40," he says, and
people tell him, "You don't look 40."
On jail, he says, "It's like you're in purgatory. You're like in
limbo." It's a tough setting to see your family for visits.
Horsehead has a son. "The hardest part of jail is when your family
leaves the visiting room," he says. After his jail term was up, it was
off to the witness protection program.
"When I walked out of jail, I didn't have my name. All I had was a
cosmetics bag," he says. "They gave me $2,000. Two marshals picked me
up. They flew me to the middle of the United States, and they gave me
an 800 number." The government made promises, he says, but when he
needed help, they dropped him like yesterday's news.
"I ruined my name, my family's suffering. My name, Gaetano Scafidi
Jr.," he says, he can't even use it, "'cause I signed a deal with the
devil."
Assistant U.S. attorney David Fritchey says he's sorry to hear about
Horsehead's troubles. "I'm sorry that his road has been as bumpy as it
has been, and I wish it was otherwise. I always thought [Horsehead] had
the capacity to succeed and go straight, even though I knew and he knew
and everybody associated with this case knew it wouldn't be without its
challenges."
The real problem, Fritchey says, is that mobsters like Horsehead have a
distorted view of life. "Mobsters come to believe they have a
scholarship to life," Fritchey says. "They go through life and
everybody defers to them, people fawn over them, people comp them,
people can't give them enough, and [mob members] come to expect that
life is a never-ending series of freebies," he says. "They take
whatever they want, and when it comes to a halt, it's a real shock to
live like a real American."
Horsehead knows what Fritchey is talking about. Free on the streets of
fly-over country, Horsehead says he felt like he was "in the twilight
zone." Besides the wide-open spaces, the city boy also had a hard time
adapting to new technology.
When he went to jail, "there were beepers," Horsehead says. "When I
came out there was cell phones. I didn't know how to use the cell
phone."
There were other shocks. "I walked into a Wal-Mart store in Alabama,"
he says, "and after 10 minutes, I ran out of there. I was so
overwhelmed. My brain couldn't process what I was witnessing."
But life out of jail wasn't all bad. With his new trim body and
preserved looks, Horsehead discovered he was a big hit with the
ladies-even women half his age. "When I was in Iowa, I had girls all
over me," he says. He was living in places where they don't have too
many Italians. The girls always asked him, "What are you doing here?"
He knows he can't go back home to South Philly. "I'm not a sucker," he
says. "I'm not gonna go back. I'm not gonna give those guys a free
ticket to clip me walking out of my mother's house. I wouldn't give
them guys the satisfaction of killing me."
Besides, he says, from what he's heard, his old South Philly
neighborhood has gone to the dogs. On the streets of his old
neighborhood, he says, and right around the corner from his mother's
house, there are "hookers, junkies selling drugs, meth labs, ecstasy
labs."
For a traditional-values guy like Horsehead, it's hard to take. He
laments, "There's no respect for the mob in that city anymore."
.....................................................................................................................................
Ralph Cipriano (edit...@philadelphiaweekly.com) wrote about his past
dealings with Brian Tierney, new CEO of the Inquirer and Daily News, in
last week's issue.
[end quote]
supplied for your reading pleasure
Larry Ingersoll
P No Gree G O
Dram Booey
Oh---Woe is me!