Nicky Scarfo

It was suspected that Bruno’s consigliere (adviser), Antonio “Tony Bananas” Caponigro, had orchestrated the hit. Caponigro was found dead in a car boot in the Bronx a couple of weeks later, dollar bills stuffed in his mouth to symbolise greed.

Scarfo became consigliere to the new boss, Philip “The Chicken Man” Testa. Within a year, Testa was rent asunder by a nail bomb placed under his porch, and Scarfo, who had backers in New York’s crime families, took over.

The body count mounted. “Not since the late Albert Anastasia, the Mad Hatter of New York’s Murder, Inc, had a significant American mafia family been ruled by a man who gloried in such wanton, ruthless, and senseless violence,” wrote the reporter George Anastasia in his 1991 book about the Scarfo mob, Blood and Honour. “He really bought into all of that Godfather-movie stuff,” one of his former capos, Thomas DelGiorno, told The New York Times in 1997.

There were strict rules. Members — “made men”, who had proved themselves by involvement in a killing and taken a blood oath of loyalty at a ceremony — could borrow a maximum of $999 from each other; a higher sum would have to be approved by their capo.

As he expanded the group’s interests into large-scale gambling, drugs and labour unions, Scarfo was a capricious and suspicious leader whose relish for power had veteran gangsters on edge and wondering who to trust. Underworld figures worked and socialised together, all the while plotting each others’ murders as acts of self-preservation.

His top lieutenant, a ruthless killer named Salvatore Testa — Philip’s son — was dispatched because he was viewed as a potential threat. Scarfo’s underlings planned to terminate Testa at a baby shower, then at a funeral parlour, finally doing the deed in a sweet shop as the noise of a pneumatic drill outside masked the sound of the bullets. Scarfo rewarded the assassins with a buffet dinner.

Scarfo, in New York in 1982, had a liking for white shoes and senseless violence

EYEVINE

During drinking sessions Scarfo would sip watered-down whiskey while tongues loosened around him. His office was at a concrete company in Atlantic City, where he displayed images of a baseball player rounding the bases after hitting a home run — the message being “always touch base”, meaning always communicate with your boss — and a portrait of Al Capone, whose celebrity status he admired and dreamt of emulating. Scarfo had a mansion in Florida and a boat named Casablanca: Usual Suspects.

“He didn’t like walk-ins, where you take a guy in his house. He liked broad daylight, restaurants or busy street corners, anything cowboy-style,” one of his top lieutenants, Nicholas “Nicky Crow” Caramandi, told Anastasia. “He liked a lotta noise to scare people. He figured that way there would never be any witnesses because nobody would ever come forward and testify against us. And after, he liked to see a lot of publicity of the murder. Headlines and television.”

Nicodemo Domenico Scarfo was born in 1929 in Brooklyn, New York, to Italian immigrants; Philip, a labourer, and Catherine, a stay-at-home mother. An amateur boxer in his youth, he entered the mob through family connections and began as a bookmaker. He got off to a bad start when he insulted a senior mafia figure by bluntly refusing to date his daughter. Before long, mob bosses were wondering whether he should disappear on a permanent basis.

In 1963 he pleaded guilty to manslaughter after a dock worker was stabbed to death in a diner over an argument about who would sit in a booth. He was released within a year.

Considered too rash by Bruno, a low-key figure who used violence sparingly, he was banished to a modest apartment in the New Jersey resort of Atlantic City. He had a share in an adult bookshop and small-scale racketeering and bookmaking operations, collecting the proceeds of one operation from a partner while standing by his father’s coffin in a funeral parlour.

Atlantic City turned out to be an ideal location; it boomed in the late Seventies and early Eighties when gambling was legalised, attracting developers such as Donald Trump. Casinos sprouted along the boardwalk, built with Scarfo’s cement.

On one occasion in 1979, he and a couple of others had drinks with a fellow cement business owner, Vincent Falcone. As the men watched an American football game on television, Scarfo’s nephew, Philip “Crazy Phil” Leonetti, calmly took out a pistol and shot Falcone in the back of the head.

Scarfo is said to have cackled, produced a blanket and twine to tie up the body, and declared: “I love this, I love it.” The man’s mistake was to have previously criticised the nephew and to have called Scarfo crazy. The don was arrested and found not guilty of murder. “Thank God for the American jury system,” he told reporters as he left the courthouse.

Scarfo had three children: Chris, from a short-lived first marriage, who had no interest in following in his father’s footsteps and changed his last name; and Nicky Jr and Mark, both from a second wife, Domenica, an Italian immigrant. In 1988 Mark, 17 at the time, hanged himself during his father’s racketeering trial and was in a coma until his death in 2014. Nicky Jr was shot at a restaurant in 1989, but survived. In 2015 he was sentenced to 30 years in prison for a scam that siphoned millions of dollars from a bank in Texas.

Ultimately, several of Little Nicky’s associates so feared for their lives that they opted to take their chances with the federal government’s witness protection scheme, providing testimony that helped to bring down Scarfo and crumple his organisation.

Scarfo was arrested in 1987 and convicted of conspiracy to extort a property developer. The next year he and 16 others were found guilty of charges including extortion and murder. Another conviction for the murder of a man with mob links, Frank “Frankie Flowers” D’Alfonso, was quashed on appeal. At the time of his death in prison in North Carolina, reportedly from cancer, Scarfo was serving a 55-year sentence.

Nicky Scarfo, gangster, was born on March 8, 1929. He died on January 13, 2017, aged 87