He Refused Scarfo’s Bribe — They Shot Him In Front of His Wife at Dinner – HT

 

 

 

February 15th, 1978. Atlantic City, New Jersey. A cold night, snow on the ground. The Flamingo Motel cocktail lounge on Pacific Avenue, a few blocks from the ocean. Edwin Hellfont, 51 years old, was seated at his regular table with his wife Marci and his business partner Leon Stricks. He was a lawyer, a part-time judge, a part owner of the motel they were sitting in.

 He had a drink in front of him and his wife beside him and no reason to think this night was different from any other. A man came in from the cold. Black ski mask, black overcoat, carrying a snow shovel, perfect cover for a February night in Atlantic City. No one looked twice until he put the shovel down. Nicholas Villio drew a 22 caliber pistol, walked to the booth, and shot Edwin Hant five times in the face.

Hleant died where he sat. Marci was not touched. Leon Stricks was not touched. Vgillio walked out. Investigators later found a revolver in a snow drift a short distance from the motel. Waiting outside in the getaway car was a 5’5 in mob soldier named Nicodemos Scaro. The man who would one day become the most violent mafia boss in the history of Philadelphia.

 In February of 1978, he was still nobody, still banished, still small, still building. And this murder was his message to every person in Atlantic City in Philadelphia in South Jersey who needed to understand what happened when you made a deal with Nikki Scaro and did not deliver. This is the story of how a corrupt judge, a failed bribe, and a public execution in a hotel lounge set the stage for one of the bloodiest decades in American organized crime history.

 and how the man who ordered it went from a forgotten exile to a convicted boss who died alone in a federal prison at 87 years old. Here is what the rise and fall of Nicodemos Scaro actually looked like from the inside. You have to go back to South Philadelphia in the 1940s to understand what Nikki Scaro was before he was anything.

 He was born on March 8th, 1929 in Brooklyn, New York to Italian immigrant parents from Naples and Calabria. His family moved to South Philadelphia when he was 12 years old. He grew up in the neighborhood around Pacunk Avenue, the same streets where the Philadelphia mob had been rooted for generations. His father’s brothers, three uncles, all named Piccolo, were soldiers in the Philadelphia crime family.

 The mob was not something Nikki Scaro discovered. It was the furniture of his childhood. He was small, 5’5, wiry. He trained as an amateur boxer and competed in small clubs around the Philadelphia area, earning a reputation not for skill, but for sheer aggression. He could not make it as a professional. What he had instead was a temper that never fully switched off.

 In 1954, at 25 years old, he was formally inducted into the Philadelphia crime family by then boss Joseph Ida. He became a soldier. He learned the trade. He bookmarked. He lonesked. He followed orders. For nearly a decade, he moved through the organization quietly enough. Then on May 25th, 1963, Scaro walked into the Oregon Diner on South Broad Street and found someone sitting in his preferred booth.

 An argument started with a 24year-old long shoreman named William Dugan. Scaro grabbed a butter knife and stabbed him to death. He pleaded guilty to manslaughter. He served 10 months. When he came out, the boss of the Philadelphia family was Angelo Bruno, a Sicilian-B born mob leader who had run the organization since 1959 with a philosophy built entirely on restraint.

Bruno was known as the dosile Dawn and the gentle Dawn. His preference was for bribery over bullets, for profit over bloodshed, for staying invisible over making news. He had banned family involvement in narcotics trafficking. He had cultivated judges, politicians, and police captains across two states. He ran a quiet empire, and he had absolutely no use for a soldier who stabbed men to death in diners over booth seating.

 Bruno banished Scaro to Atlantic City. At the time, that was not a posting. It was a punishment. Atlantic City in the mid 1960s was an economically depressed resort town well past its prime. The boardwalk hotels were declining. The summer crowds had thinned. The organized crime money in Atlantic City was a fraction of what moved through South Philadelphia.

Bruno’s message was clear. You are an embarrassment and you are out of my sight. Scaro settled into a small apartment at 26 South Georgia Avenue in the Italian neighborhood of Ducktown, Atlantic City’s little enclave of South Philly transplants. He ran a modest bookmaking operation. He bartended. He had interests in adult bookstores.

 He scraped. For years, he was the mob equivalent of a man who had been sent to his room. But he watched and he waited. And in 1976, the entire calculation changed. On November 2nd, 1976, New Jersey voters approved a referendum legalizing casino gambling. The catch was narrow and intentional. Gambling would be permitted only in Atlantic City.

 The politicians wanted to revitalize one struggling city, not open the entire state to casinos. For Nicodemos Scaro, who had been sitting four blocks from the ocean in Ducktown for over a decade, watching the town rot and scraping money together from bookmaking, this was not a policy decision. This was a reversal of fortune.

 New Jersey Governor Brendan Burn held a ceremony on June 2nd, 1977 to announce the opening of the first casino license process. He looked directly into the cameras and said, “Keep your filthy hands off of Atlantic City.” “Keep the hell out of our state.” Scaro was watching on television four blocks away. He turned to his nephew, Phil Leonetti, and said, “What’s this guy talking about?” Because Scaro understood something Burn apparently did not.

 Every casino that was about to be built in Atlantic City needed construction. Construction needed concrete. Construction needed labor unions. And in Atlantic City, Nicodemos Scarafo was already there, already connected, already positioned. He formed a concrete contracting company called Scarf Inc. with his nephew Phil Leonetti as president.

 He formed a second company calledNatn Inc. which installed steel rods to reinforce concrete. Every casino built in Atlantic City needed both. No contractor could work the sites without Scaro’s blessing. By the mid 1980s, Scaro had made $3.5 million through at least eight casino construction projects alone, including work on Har’s Trump Plaza.

 He also controlled local 54 of the bartenders and hotel workers union and pocketed between 30,000 and $40,000 per month from that union’s pension funds. None of that money flowed yet. In February 1978, the first Atlantic City Casino, Resorts International, did not open until May of that year, but the investment was already underway. The construction contracts were already being negotiated.

 Scaro was already moving. And that context is important for understanding what the murder of Edwin Hellfant was really about. Edwin Howard Helffant was born April 12th, 1926 in Scranton, Pennsylvania. He served in the air during the Second World War, earned a degree from Temple University in 1948 and then a law degree from Rutker’s Law School.

 By the early 1960s, he was practicing law in New Jersey and had become a part-time municipal court judge in Atlantic County, first in Summers Point and later in Galloway Township. He had a nickname on the Jersey Shore, the Fining Squire. He was strict with underage drinkers using fake identification, zero tolerance. He enforced local ordinances with the kind of diligence that made him look from the outside like a by the book public servant. The inside was something else.

By the late 1960s and early 70s, Helant was a known associate of Atlantic City Criminal Circles. His law offices were in the Guarantee Trust building on Atlantic Avenue shared with a man named Herman Orman, a local fence for stolen goods known to law enforcement as a mob adjacent operator.

 Hellfont was not in the mob. He was something the mob found more useful, a lawyer and judge with connections, debts, and a willingness to be accommodating when the price was right. In 1973, a state grand jury indicted Hellfont for allegedly accepting $700 of a promised $1,500 payoff from a local man to quash an assault and battery case.

 Helant fought that indictment for years, appealing all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States. He was not convicted, but the indictment told you who he was. And by 1972, he was already in business with Nicodemos Scarafo. Here is how the scheme worked. Nicholas Villio, a South Jersey mob associate and suspected hitman, was convicted of murder in 1972.

He had killed a New Jersey brick layer. He was convicted and awaiting sentencing in the Superior Court of New Jersey. Villio needed a lighter sentence. He went to his friend and associate Scaro. Scaro went to Hellfont. The arrangement was simple. Scaro and Vgillio delivered $12,500 in cash to Edwin Helant.

 That money was supposed to be passed to the unnamed superior court judge handling Vgillio’s sentencing as a bribe in exchange for leniency. Hellfont was the conduit, the fixer, the man in the middle who knew which judges could be reached and how. The indictment later charged that Hellfont either could not or would not pass the bribe to the judge.

 Whether the target judge refused the approach or whether Hellfont simply pocketed the money and never made contact was never fully established in court. What was established beyond any dispute is the result. Vilio received a sentence of 12 to 15 years. The same sentence he would have received without paying anyone anything. $12,500.

Gone. The sentence maximum. Anyway, Vergillio did his time. He was released on parole in 1976, 4 years after his conviction. He came out of prison with nothing to show for the money except a cleared ledger of time served and a burning conviction that Edwin Hant had stolen from him. Scaro and Villio went to Hellfont.

 They demanded their money back. Every dollar Hont refused. You have to understand what that refusal meant in context. By 1976 1977, Hellfont was himself facing a bribery indictment for the Summers Point case. He was in legal trouble. He may have calculated that giving back the money would be an implicit admission that the transaction had taken place.

 He may simply have spent it. He may have believed catastrophically that Scaro and Vergillio would not push it further, given that any confrontation would expose their own role in the bribery scheme. What he did not properly calculate was what kind of man Nikki Scaro was. This was not a man who wrote off $12,500. This was not a man who accepted failure and moved on.

 This was the man who had stabbed someone to death over a diner booth, who had spent over a decade in exile, nursing resentments, who was in the early stages of building what would become the most profitable criminal empire in Atlantic City’s history, and had no intention of being seen as someone who could be cheated without consequence.

 Scaro later told associates the murder needed to be public. Not a body in a trunk somewhere, not a quiet disappearance, a restaurant, a crowded room, a man’s wife sitting right there watching. That was the point. He wanted everyone in the lounge that night to go home and describe what they had seen. He wanted the story to travel.

 He wanted every crooked lawyer, every wavering judge, every contractor or bookmaker or political fixer who was about to do business with Nikki Scaro to understand the terms. You deliver what you promised or this is what happens. February 15th, 1978. The Flamingo Motel. It was an ordinary Tuesday evening.

 Cold snow had fallen. Elephant and Marci had a habit of stopping in at the flamingo lounge. It was their place, a table they always used, comfortable, familiar. Nicholas Vigilio arrived in the parking lot with Scaro. Vigilio put on the ski mask. He grabbed the snow shovel. He walked across the lot. He pushed through the door.

 Nobody in the lounge registered alarm at a man in winter gear on a winter night. Vergillio scanned the room. He found the booth. He put the shovel down. He drew the pistol. Five shots, 22 caliber, all in the face. Edwin Hellfart was dead before anyone in the room understood what was happening. Vigilio was out the door and into Scaro’s car within seconds. They drove.

Within 2 days, the investigation had identified the shooting as a mob contract killing. Investigators found a revolver in the snowdrift outside. Within weeks, the theory had developed that it was connected to Vergilio and the failed bribe. But theories are not convictions. Witnesses in that lounge had seen a ski masked man.

 No one was ready to describe what they had actually seen to a grand jury. Atlantic City in 1978 was not a place where people volunteered detailed testimony about mob adjacent events. The case went cold. Hellf’s murder went unsolved. At the time of his death, Helant was facing his own bribery conviction in the Summers Point case.

 He died before that verdict was reached. His family was left to grieve a man whose public reputation as a strict law enforcing judge sat in grotesque contrast to what he had actually been doing. Scaro went back to Atlantic City to the construction contracts to the casino boom to the future. 1980 changed everything.

 On March 21st, 1980, Angelo Bruno was sitting in his car outside his home on Snyder Avenue in South Philadelphia after dinner. A shotgun blast through the passenger window, 69 years old, dead instantly. His driver, John Stanford, was wounded but survived. The murder had been orchestrated by Bruno’s own conciglier, Antonio Caponyro, known as Tony Bananas, who had convinced himself he had commission approval for the killing.

 He did not. Within weeks, Caponyro’s naked body was found in the trunk of a car in the Bronx, shot dozens of times. $300 in bills had been jammed into his mouth and his anus. a deliberate theatrical message from the commission about what happened to bosses who killed other bosses without authorization.

 The money was a symbol. He had acted out of greed. He died drowning in it. Bruno’s under boss, Philip Tester, took over. He appointed Scaro as his consiliera. Exactly one year later, on March 14th, 1981, a nail bomb detonated under the porch of Testor’s home on West Porter Street in South Philadelphia.

 Tester stumbled to the door, mortally wounded. He was rushed to St. Agnes Hospital one mile away. He was declared dead at 4:15 in the morning. The bomb had been built by Testor’s own under boss, Peter Cassella, as part of a power grab with Capo Frank Narduchi. It did not work out for either of them. Narduchi was gunned down. Cassella fled to Florida and was banished from the organization.

 That left Nicodemo Scaro, the man Angelo Bruno had sent to Atlantic City as a punishment. The man who was supposed to be neutralized in a dying resort town. The man who had watched Bruno, Ta, Caponigro, Narduchi, and Castella all remove themselves from the picture through violence and miscalculation with the backing of the Genevese family who had become aligned with Scaro during his years in Atlantic City when he had cultivated their consiliary Louis Mana in prison.

 Scaro was installed as boss of the Philadelphia crime family in 1981. He was 52 years old. He had waited nearly two decades for this. What followed was the bloodiest decade in Philadelphia mob history. Scaro immediately imposed a street tax on every criminal operation in the territory. Bookmakers, drug dealers, lone sharks, number runners, anyone running any racket in any neighborhood he considered his.

 The tax was not a Philadelphia tradition. Bruno had never demanded it. But Scaro needed to establish dominance quickly and completely, and money flowing up through the organization was the most visible demonstration of who was in charge. Those who refused to pay were killed. He inducted new members at a rate Philadelphia had never seen.

 New members meant new soldiers. New soldiers meant more capacity for violence. More violence meant more fear. More fear meant compliance. It was a feedback loop driven entirely by Scaro’s belief that terror was the most reliable form of management. Here is what his own hitman Nicholas Caramandi later said in a 2001 interview and I am paraphrasing because the exact phrasing is his, not mine.

Scaro was a cowboy. He did not want a man taken quietly in a house and shot in the back of the head. He wanted it outside in broad daylight with a million people around, restaurants, funeral homes, anywhere. Then it gets written up in the papers and it puts fear in people. He loved that cowboy stuff. Sound familiar? That was not a new attitude in 1981.

That was exactly what the Flamingo Motel had been in 1978. a restaurant, a crowded room, a man’s wife sitting right there. The only difference now was that Scaro had an entire crime family to deploy. Between 1980 and 1984, the Philadelphia mob averaged six murders per year. The Rickine War erupted when an aging Kappo named Harry Rickine, known as the Hunchback, refused to accept Scaro as a legitimate boss and stopped paying tribute.

Scaro prepared kill lists. Rickobine’s men were shot on the streets of South Philadelphia in broad daylight. Rickin himself survived two assassination attempts, including one where he was shot five times in the face and lived. Scaro’s conciglier, Frank Monte, was killed in the crossfire. The shooting and counter shooting went on for years.

At the peak of his power, by the mid 1980s, Scaro was pulling in $3.5 million from casino construction alone. Scarf Incorporated had laid the foundations of Harris, Trump Plaza, and multiple other casino projects. The Union control was generating $40,000 a month. On top of that, he had soldiers in every neighborhood from South Philadelphia to the Jersey Shore.

 He was the most powerful mob boss Philadelphia had seen since the Bruno era.