George Anastasia - The Last Gangster

the last
GANGSTER

From Cop to Wiseguy to FBI Informant:
Big Ron Previte and the Fall of the American Mob

George Anastasia

For Angela, Michelle, and Nina.
Luck be a lady.

Contents

Three principal figures emerge from this case. Combined, their lives explain how and why La Cosa Nostra, the once-monolithic and seemingly impenetrable criminal organization, has come apart at the seams.

There is Joseph Skinny Joey Merlino, a second-generation South Philadelphia wiseguy, an MTV mobster whose style and flair were overshadowed only by his insatiable desire for money.

There is Ralph Natale, the sixty-going-on-thirty Mafia don living thirty years in the past, who became the first sitting mob boss ever to cooperate with the Feds.

And there is Ron Previte himself: an under-world mercenarya cold, calculating, one-of-a-kind mobster whose only loyalty was to the man staring back at him in the mirror.

One of them is
THE LAST GANGSTER

You decide.

They sat in a booth in a South Philadelphia diner in the fall of 1998 discussing life in the underworldthe scams, the shakedowns, the money made, and the money lost. The key, Johnny Ciancaglini said, was to keep a low profile.

Just make yourself a little scarce. Thats what I do. I mean, Im there if anybody needs me, but I try to be as scarce as I can. I mean, youll knock twenty, thirty percent of your problems out.

Ron Previte nodded in agreement.

They had been talking for about twenty minutes, ironing out a problem that went back five years, to the day when Previte and another wiseguy had taken ten grand from a bookmaker who was with Ciancaglini. Johnny Chang, as Ciancaglini was known in certain circles, was in jail at the time, doing seven years on an extortion rap. The bookmaker, and the action he had on the street, had been Changs sole source of income, and the shakedown had a direct impact on him.

After he gave you the ten, he folded up, Chang said. My income was dead out.... He folded up and went to Florida.... I mean, that hurt me big time because that let all my income go.

They were drinking coffee. Sitting in a booth in the Oregon Diner, a popular no-frills veal-parmigiana-with-soup-and-salad kind of joint that has been operating on the corner of Third Street and Oregon Avenue for as long as anyone can remember.

John Ciancaglini was a South Philly guy. He was forty-four at the time, and was making a comeback after his stint in prison. Solidly built, with thick black hair and rugged good looks, he had both the pedigree and the background to be a player. His father, Joseph Chickie Ciancaglini, was a mob capo doing thirty-five years on a racketeering conviction. Johnny also had two brothers who had given blood for the organization. One was dead. The other was crippled.

Considered both street-smart and intelligent, John Ciancaglini knew how to make money. More important, he knew how to survive.

So did the guy sitting across from him in the Oregon Diner.

Big Ron Previte, a six-foot, three-hundred-pound wiseguy, could grind it out with the best of themhad been doing it for years. An ex-cop and one-time casino security worker, Previte, who was fifty-five, had made several million dollars even before he was formally initiated into the organization. Drugs, prostitution, extortion, gambling, loan-sharking: you name it, he did it. He knew the business of the underworld inside out.

In fact, there were many who believed that the only reason Previte was still alive was because of his uncanny ability to come up with cash. And anyone who looked at things realistically would have agreed. The fact of the matter was that on November 2, 1998the day he was sitting in the Oregon Diner drinking coffee with John CiancagliniRon Previte should have been dead. Or in jail. Logic and common sense told you as much.

But logic and common sense were in very short supply in the Philadelphia underworld at that time.

Previte had been a soldier under mob boss John Stanfa during the bloody war that rocked the Philadelphia underworld in the early 1990s. The Stanfa organization clashed with a group of young mobsters headed by Joseph Skinny Joey Merlino and Michael Mikey Chang Ciancaglini, John Ciancaglinis youngest brother.

Adding another twist to the story was the fact that Stanfas underboss was Joseph Ciancaglini Jr. Joey Chang was the middle brother in the family. From 1992 to 1994 the streets of South Philadelphia were a battleground, as teams of hit men stalked one another in a struggle for control of the organization.

The battle lines were both cultural and generational. Stanfa, who was in his fifties, was an old-school, Sicilian-born mob boss who was more at home on the streets of Palermo than in South Philadelphia. Merlino and Mike Ciancaglini, both in their early thirties, were flamboyant young wiseguys, street-corner gangsters. The war ended with a half-dozen people dead and with Stanfa and most of his top associates in jail.

By the time Previte met with Johnny Chang at the Oregon Diner in 1998, though, that was all in the past. Now it was time to mend fences. The sit-down was arranged to smooth over any hard feelings Johnny Chang still harbored after the shakedown of Changs bookie.

Bygones were bygones, Merlino had said when he set up the meeting.

Previte, who had been with Stanfa during the war, was now with Skinny Joey.

Or so everyone thought. Through it all, in fact, Ron Previte had been with the FBI. A confidential informant of the highest order, he was wearing a body wire as he sat in the diner that afternoon. The conversation with Johnny Chang was one of more than four hundred he recorded during a two-year period that began in February 1997 and ended in June 1999.

There has never been a gangster like Ron Previte. This is his story, told in part through his own words and in part through the voluminous law enforcement files that outline the governments multipronged but flawed case against Joey Merlino and the Philadelphia mob.

Three principal figures emerge from that case.

Each is a unique example of the American underworld at the turn of the century. Combined, their lives explain how and why La Cosa Nostra, the once monolithic and seemingly impenetrable criminal organization, has come apart at the seams.

One of them is the last gangster.

You decide.

There is Joseph Skinny Joey Merlino, a second-generation South Philadelphia wiseguy, an MTV mobster whose style and flair were overshadowed only by his insatiable desire for money. Handsome, charismatic, and deadly, Merlino gave a face and a personality to a mob family that for years had lived in the shadows of its bigger, bolder, and more infamous New York brethren.

There is Ralph Natale, a sixty-going-on-thirty Mafia don who was living twenty years in the past as the underworld in which he operated rushed toward the twenty-first century. Constantly boasting that he was a mans man, Natale crumbled, like so many of the rats and informants he claimed to disdain, when he was faced with a narcotics conviction that could have sent him back to prison for the rest of his life. He became the first sitting American mob boss to cooperate with the feds, a distinction that adds to the ever-expanding underworld infamy of the Philadelphia crime family.

Finally, there is Previte, an underworld mercenary, a one-of-a-kind mobster whose only loyalty was to the person he saw staring back at him in the mirror each morning. Cold, calculating, and completely amoral when it came to making money, he put his life on the line each day he worked for the FBI.

Unlike Natale, who claimed to have had an epiphany that led him to renounce La Cosa Nostra after being charged with the narcotics rap, Previte doesnt claim that God, morality, or a sense of righteousness led him to do what he did.