On the night of February 15, 1978, Edwin Helfant sat at his regular table in the cocktail lounge of the Flamingo Motel in Atlantic City, New Jersey. Snow covered the ground outside, and the cold had driven most people indoors. Helfant, a 51-year-old lawyer and part-time judge who co-owned the motel, was with his wife, Marcy, and his business partner, Leon Strix. He had a drink in front of him and no reason to believe the evening would end any differently than countless others before it.
A man entered from the cold, wearing a black ski mask and a black overcoat, and carrying a snow shovel. On a February night in Atlantic City, the disguise was perfect. No one paid him any attention until he set the shovel down. Drawing a .
22 caliber pistol, Nicholas Virgilio walked to the booth and fired five shots into Helfant’s face. The judge died where he sat. His wife and business partner were not touched. Virgilio walked out, and investigators later found a revolver abandoned in a snowdrift nearby.
Waiting in the getaway car was a five-foot-five mob soldier named Nicodemo Scarfo, a man who would one day rule the Philadelphia crime family through a decade of bloodshed. In 1978, however, he was still an exile, a nobody in the eyes of the mob establishment, a man nursing a grudge and building something quietly. The murder of Edwin Helfant was his message to every lawyer, judge, contractor, and fixer who might consider doing business with him: deliver what you promise, or this is what happens. To understand how a public execution in a motel lounge set the stage for one of the most violent eras in American organized crime, one must go back to the streets of South Philadelphia in the 1940s.
Scarfo was born in Brooklyn on March 8, 1929, to Italian immigrant parents from Naples and Calabria. When he was twelve, his family moved to South Philadelphia, settling in the neighborhood around Passyunk Avenue, where the local mob had been entrenched for generations. Three of his uncles were soldiers in the Philadelphia crime family, and the organization was not something Scarfo discovered; it was the furniture of his childhood. Small and wiry, he trained as an amateur boxer, earning a reputation for raw aggression rather than skill.
He could not make it as a professional, but he found another path. In 1954, at age twenty-five, he was formally inducted into the Philadelphia crime family under boss Joseph Ida. He became a soldier, working as a bookmaker and loan shark, moving quietly through the ranks for nearly a decade. That changed on May 25, 1963, when Scarfo walked into the Oregon Diner on South Broad Street and found someone sitting in his preferred booth.
An argument erupted with a twenty-four-year-old longshoreman named William Dugan. Scarfo grabbed a butter knife and stabbed the man to death. He pleaded guilty to manslaughter and served ten months. When he was released, the Philadelphia family was under the control of Angelo Bruno, a Sicilian-born boss who had led the organization since 1959.
Known as the Docile Don, Bruno favored bribery over bullets and profit over bloodshed. He kept a low profile, cultivated judges and politicians, and banned family involvement in narcotics. He had no use for a soldier who stabbed men to death over seating arrangements. As punishment, Bruno banished Scarfo to Atlantic City, a dying resort town well past its prime, where organized crime money was a fraction of what flowed through South Philadelphia.
The message was clear: you are an embarrassment, and I do not want to see you. Scarfo settled into a small apartment in Ducktown, Atlantic City’s Italian enclave, and scraped by with a modest bookmaking operation and interests in adult bookstores. For years, he was the mob equivalent of a man sent to his room, watching and waiting. Then, in November 1976, everything changed.
New Jersey voters approved a referendum legalizing casino gambling, and the catch was intentional: the casinos could only be built in Atlantic City. The politicians wanted to revive one struggling city, not open the state to gambling. For Scarfo, who had been sitting four blocks from the ocean watching the town rot for over a decade, this was a reversal of fortune. New Jersey Governor Brendan Byrne held a ceremony in June 1977 to open the casino license process and looked into the cameras, declaring, “Keep your filthy hands off of Atlantic City.
Keep the hell out of our state. ” Scarfo watched on television four blocks away and turned to his nephew, Phil Leonetti, asking, “What’s this guy talking about? ” He understood something the governor apparently did not. Every casino to be built needed construction, and construction needed concrete and labor unions.
Scarfo was already there, already connected. He formed a concrete contracting company called Scarf Inc. , with his nephew as president, and a second company, Nat Nat Inc. , that installed steel reinforcing rods.
Every casino built in Atlantic City needed both, and no contractor could work without his blessing. By the mid-1980s, Scarfo would make $3. 5 million from at least eight casino construction projects, including work on Harrah’s and Trump Plaza, and he controlled Local 54 of the Bartenders and Hotel Workers Union, pocketing tens of thousands of dollars a month from its pension funds. But none of that money flowed yet in early 1978.
The first casino, Resorts International, would not open until May. The construction contracts were still being negotiated, and Scarfo was already moving. This was the context behind the murder of Edwin Helfant. Born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1926, Helfant served in the Air Corps during the Second World War, earned a law degree from Rutgers, and by the early 1960s had become a part-time municipal court judge in Atlantic County.
He was known on the Jersey Shore as the “fining squire” for his strict treatment of underage drinkers using fake identification. On the surface, he appeared to be a by-the-book public servant. The surface was a lie. By the late 1960s, Helfant was a known associate of Atlantic City criminal circles, sharing his law office with a local fence for stolen goods.
He was not in the mob, but he was the kind of lawyer and judge the mob found useful: connected, indebted, and willing to be accommodating when the price was right. In 1973, a state grand jury indicted him for accepting a payoff to quash an assault case, an indictment he fought for years, appealing all the way to the Supreme Court. He was never convicted, but the indictment revealed who he truly was. By 1972, he was already doing business with Scarfo.
The scheme was straightforward. In 1972, Nicholas Virgilio, a South Jersey mob associate, was convicted of murdering a bricklayer and awaited sentencing. He went to Scarfo, who went to Helfant. The arrangement called for $12,500 in cash to be delivered to Helfant, who was supposed to pass it to the Superior Court judge handling Virgilio’s case as a bribe for leniency.
Whether the judge refused the approach or Helfant simply pocketed the money was never established, but the result was beyond dispute. Virgilio received a sentence of twelve to fifteen years, the same sentence he would have gotten without paying anyone anything. The money was gone, and the sentence was maximum. Virgilio was released on parole in 1976, four years after his conviction, and he came out with a burning conviction that Helfant had stolen from him.
Scarfo and Virgilio went to the judge and demanded their money back. Helfant refused. He may have calculated that returning the money would be an admission the transaction had occurred. He may have spent it.
He may have believed Scarfo would not push the matter because any confrontation would expose his own role in the bribery scheme. What he failed to calculate was the kind of man he was dealing with. Scarfo was not a man who wrote off $12,500. He was the man who had stabbed someone to death over a diner booth, who had spent over a decade in exile nursing resentments, and who was building a criminal empire he intended to be seen as one that could not be cheated without consequence.
He later told associates that the murder needed to be public, not a body in a trunk, not a quiet disappearance, but a crowded room with a man’s wife sitting right there watching. He wanted everyone in that lounge to go home and describe what they had seen, so that every crooked lawyer, every wavering judge, and every contractor about to do business with him would understand the terms. On that cold Tuesday evening in February 1978, Helfant and his wife stopped at the Flamingo Lounge, their usual place. Virgilio arrived in the parking lot with Scarfo, put on the ski mask, grabbed the snow shovel, and walked inside.
No one registered alarm at a man in winter gear on a winter night. He found the booth, set the shovel down, drew the pistol, and fired five shots. Helfant was dead before anyone understood what was happening. Within two days, investigators identified the shooting as a mob contract killing, and within weeks, the theory developed that it was connected to Virgilio and the failed bribe.
But theories are not convictions, and witnesses were not eager to testify before a grand jury. The case went cold, and Helfant’s murder went unsolved. He died before his own bribery verdict was reached, leaving his family to grieve a man whose public reputation as a strict judge stood in grotesque contrast to what he had actually been doing. Scarfo returned to the construction contracts and the casino boom.
Then, in 1980, the world shifted. On March 21, Angelo Bruno was shot to death in his car outside his home in South Philadelphia, killed by his own consigliere, Antonio Caponigro, who had convinced himself he had commission approval for the killing. He did not, and his naked body was later found in the trunk of a car in the Bronx, shot dozens of times, with $300 in bills jammed into his mouth and anus, a message about bosses who killed bosses without authorization. Bruno’s underboss, Philip Testa, took over and appointed Scarfo as his consigliere.
Exactly one year later, a nail bomb detonated under Testa’s porch, killing him. The bomb had been built by his own underboss as part of a power grab, and neither plotter survived long. That left Nicodemo Scarfo, the man Angelo Bruno had banished to Atlantic City as a punishment, standing as the last viable candidate. In 1981, with the backing of the Genovese family, he was installed as boss of the Philadelphia crime family.
He was fifty-two years old, and he had waited nearly two decades. What followed was the bloodiest decade in Philadelphia mob history. Scarfo imposed a street tax on every criminal operation in his territory, bookmakers, drug dealers, loan sharks, and number runners, and those who refused to pay were killed. He inducted new members at a rate the city had never seen, more soldiers meant more violence, more violence meant more fear, and more fear meant compliance.
His own hitman later described him as a cowboy, preferring hits in broad daylight, in restaurants, outside funeral homes, anywhere crowded, so the story would get in the papers and put fear in people. That was not a new attitude in 1981; it was exactly what the Flamingo Motel had been in 1978. The only difference was that now, Scarfo had an entire crime family to deploy. Between 1980 and 1984, the Philadelphia mob averaged six murders per year, as an aging capo named Harry Riccobene, known as the Hunchback, refused to accept Scarfo’s authority and triggered a war fought in the streets of South Philadelphia.
Riccobene survived two assassination attempts, including one where he was shot five times in the face and lived, but the shooting and counter-shooting went on for years. At the peak of his power in the mid-1980s, Scarfo was pulling in millions from casino construction alone, controlled the union funds, and 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, and unlike Bruno, he wanted everyone to know it. The rise had begun with a public execution in a motel lounge, a corrupt judge who made the wrong deal, and a bribe that was never delivered.
The consequences would define a decade.
