On September 14, 1984, Salvatore “Salvie” Testa walked out of his South Philadelphia home dressed in tennis whites. He was twenty-eight years old, six feet tall, two hundred ten pounds, with hazel eyes and dimpled cheeks, the most feared hitman in the Philadelphia mob. He had personally killed or ordered the deaths of at least fifteen men. He had survived seventeen documented assassination attempts, including a shotgun blast that nearly severed his left arm.

His friends called him unkillable. The FBI described him as a man who wanted to be a bad guy in the worst way, and he was succeeding. Testa was the crowned prince of the Philadelphia underworld. Within six months, the Wall Street Journal would name him the heir to the top job in a front-page profile that the entire family had already read.

That morning, he walked into a candy store on East Passyunk Avenue to meet his best friend in the world, Joseph Pungitore, the man he grew up with, the man he trusted above anyone alive. Joey Pung was sitting in the back room. Testa walked in, turned to speak to him. Behind him, a man named Salvatore Wayne Grande reached under a sofa cushion, pulled out a silenced pistol, and shot Testa twice in the back of the head.

He stood over him and fired several more rounds into his face to make certain. The body was hog-tied, wrapped, and driven twenty miles to a dirt road in Gloucester Township, New Jersey, where it was dumped. At 10:23 p. m.

, an anonymous caller reported a body. Police found the crowned prince of the Philadelphia mob lying in the dirt, still in his tennis whites, shot to pieces by his best friend’s betrayal. His godfather had ordered the murder. That godfather was Nicodemo “Little Nicky” Scarfo, the same man Testa’s father, Philip, had personally asked with his dying breath to protect his son.

Philip had made Scarfo the boy’s godfather specifically because he believed the title carried a sacred obligation, a second father, a protector. Philip Testa had been wrong about only one thing in his career. He was wrong about Scarfo. Philip Testa, known as “the Chicken Man” for the pockmarks that never healed from a childhood case of chicken pox, was not a glamorous figure.

He stood five foot eight, weighed one hundred eighty-three pounds, wore blue-collar clothes, and looked more like a badly dressed plumber than an old-world don. He had been underboss to Angelo Bruno, the “Docile Don,” who had kept Philadelphia at peace for twenty-one years through negotiation and restraint. When Bruno was murdered in March 1980, shot in the back of the head on his own front steps, Philip Testa became boss. He was fifty-six.

His son Salvie was twenty-four. Salvie was everything his father was not. He had been inducted as a made man in June 1980 in a ceremony his own father conducted. An FBI agent who observed him wrote, “He has the breeding for criminal life and he wants to be a bad guy in the worst way.

”

Before his death, Philip Testa made Scarfo his son’s godfather. Scarfo was a squat, vain, intensely violent man who had been exiled to Atlantic City years earlier after stabbing an FBI informant in a dispute over a bar stool. Philip believed a godfather would protect his son. He held that belief for exactly one year and twelve days.

On March 15, 1981, Philip Testa returned home after a night out. As he touched his front door, a nail bomb planted beneath his porch detonated, torn through him with roofing nails designed to maximize shrapnel damage. He died at the hospital. The bomb had been ordered by his own underboss, Peter Casella, and his own capo, Frank “Chickie” Narducci, senior men who preferred the old order.

Casella fled to Florida. Narducci stayed in South Philadelphia. It was the last mistake he ever made. Salvie Testa buried his father and immediately set out to make everyone responsible pay.

Scarfo, who took over as boss, gave Salvie his blessing, promoted him to capo, and assigned him to avenge Philip’s murder. What followed is documented in extraordinary detail across federal testimony and memoirs from men who killed beside him. Salvie personally shot Chickie Narducci senior ten times outside his home. He tracked down Rocco “Boom Boom” Marinuchi, the man who had physically detonated the bomb, and shot him dead in a parking lot exactly one year after Philip’s death, stuffing the corpse’s mouth with cherry bombs as a message.

Over the next two years, Salvie killed or ordered the deaths of at least thirteen more men connected to his father’s murder. When told Narducci was dead, he replied, “I wish that bastard was alive so I could kill him again. ”

He survived the war with the Riccobene faction, a rival crew trying to break from Scarfo’s authority. In July 1982, he nearly lost his left arm to a shotgun blast outside a South Philadelphia pizza place.

He went back to work before the wound healed and dismantled the faction piece by piece. A source documents him surviving seventeen separate assassination attempts across this period. He was twenty-six years old, the most dangerous man in Philadelphia, and the man who had done more to consolidate Scarfo’s authority than anyone else in the family. Nicholas Caramandi, who killed alongside him, said, “He’d never ask you to do something he wouldn’t do himself.

He was right out there with you on murder contracts. He was a guy made for this thing. He loved it. He lived it.

” Crime reporter George Anastasia of the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote that Salvie loved it all, the stalkings, the murders, even the Riccobene suicide. He was born to be a wiseguy. The problem with being born to be a wiseguy, with being the son of the boss and the celebrated enforcer of the family’s history, is that every man who looks at you eventually does the arithmetic of what you represent. By early 1984, Nicky Scarfo was doing that arithmetic around the clock.

Three things pushed him past the line that separates jealousy from action. First, the Wall Street Journal ran a front-page profile of Salvie Testa, naming him the heir apparent to the top position in the Philadelphia mob. It was read by every businessman and official in the city. Scarfo read it too.

Shortly after, at a benefit dinner at Palumbo’s restaurant, Scarfo had Testa told to sit at a different table from the boss and his inner circle. Then Scarfo did not invite him on a trip to Puerto Rico. These were the specific social signals of a boss communicating that a man’s status was changing. Second was the engagement.

Testa had been engaged to Maria Merlino, daughter of underboss Salvatore “Chuckie” Merlino, Scarfo’s right hand. The engagement represented mob dynasty logic at its most explicit, the godfather’s godson marrying the underboss’s daughter. In 1984, Testa broke it off. The documented reason was incompatibility.

Merlino was enraged. He went to Scarfo and asked permission to kill Testa for the insult. Scarfo gave it. Merlino then developed a drinking problem that made him useless, and Scarfo demoted him, but the permission had already been granted.

The sentence had been pronounced. It just needed an executor. Third, and most dangerous, was that Testa was getting too big. He had his own crew.

He moved through the city independently. He had relationships with New York families who had noticed his work during the Riccobene war. Tommy DelGiorno testified at Scarfo’s trial, “He was forming his own crew, running around the city, doing what he wanted. He was generally getting too big.

”

Caramandi described how Salvie was always cautious. “Every time you shook his hand, he’d bring you in close, and just pat you down with his left hand from behind to see if you were carrying a gun. He felt bad vibes. He just couldn’t figure out what was going on.

”

The kiss told him. At a funeral in South Philadelphia, as Testa said goodbye to assembled mob figures outside the funeral parlor, Chuckie Merlino shook his hand, grabbed his head, and kissed him on the lips for about ten seconds. Caramandi, standing nearby, looked at the other men. They all looked at each other.

“We said, what the hell? This guy’s nuts. Salvie’s got to know now. ” It was the kiss of death.

Testa looked stunned. But that was how crazy they were. They wanted him to know. Killing Salvie Testa was not operationally straightforward.

He was the best hitman in the family, had survived seventeen attempts, and patted down every man who hugged him. Tommy DelGiorno and Faffy Iannarella were given the contract first. They brought in Caramandi and Charlie Iannessa as shooters. The job seemed impossible.

Testa was too careful, too aware, too professionally calibrated to be caught in a conventional setup. DelGiorno and Iannarella went back to Scarfo. They needed someone Testa would not check for a weapon, someone Testa would walk toward with his back exposed, someone Testa trusted completely. There was only one name that fit.

Joey Pungitore. Salvie’s childhood friend, made in the same ceremony, the man who had been beside him through every war, every funeral, every score. DelGiorno found Pungitore and told him directly, “We are going to kill Salvie and you have to help us set him up. ” Pungitore was devastated.

He said he thought everything was settled and all right. DelGiorno said, “Obviously, everything is not all right. ” Pungitore said he would not pull the trigger. DelGiorno said he did not have to.

He just had to put Salvie in the room. If he refused, DelGiorno told him his father and his two brothers would be killed. Pungitore agreed. Salvatore Wayne Grande, waiting for an opportunity like this, took the trigger assignment immediately.

Pungitore told Testa there was something to discuss at the back of the candy store on East Passyunk Avenue. Testa, feeling the bad vibes but trusting Joey Pung above every other man alive, went. He was dressed for tennis. He was in his own neighborhood.

He walked into the back room. Grande sat on the couch, the pistol hidden under the cushions. Testa walked in, nodded at Grande, and turned to speak to Pungitore. The moment his back was turned, Grande pulled the pistol, stood, and shot him twice in the back of the head.

He shot him additional times in the face. Testa fell. The room was cleaned. The body was hog-tied, transported to New Jersey, and left on a dirt road.

At 10:23 p. m. , the anonymous call came in. Police found him still in his tennis whites.

He was twenty-eight years old. He was the twenty-third victim of Philadelphia’s mob war since Angelo Bruno was shot on his front steps in 1980. He was buried at Holy Cross Cemetery in Yeadon, Pennsylvania, beside his father Philip and his mother Alfia, who had died in 1980 before she could watch either of the men she loved most be killed by the organization they both served.