Free Mafia Prince: Inside America's Most Violent Crime Family by Phil Leonetti, Scott Burnstein, Christopher Graziano Page A

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.”
    Four days later on July 3, 1977, Pepe Leva was found shot to death with the remnants of four .32 caliber slugs in his head. His body was found near a landfill in the Farmington section of Egg Harbor Township, less than ten miles from the Georgia Avenue apartment building where Nicky Scarfo and Philip Leonetti lived.
                  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.
    Nicky Scarfo’s gang had all participated in murders, which ingratiated them to the bloodthirsty Scarfo and to the mob leaders in Philadelphia—men like Angelo Bruno, Philip Testa, and Frank “Chickie” Narducci—and would one day make them eligible for initiation into La Cosa Nostra.
                  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 Atlantic County Prosecutors Office knew that Nicky Scarfo and his gang were serious and charged Philip Leonetti with the murder of Pepe Leva.
                  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