On September 14, 1984, Salvatore “Salvie” Testa walked into a candy store on East Passyunk Avenue in South Philadelphia. He was dressed in tennis whites. He was 28 years old.
Testa was the most feared hitman in the Philadelphia mob. He had personally killed or ordered the deaths of at least 15 men. He had survived 17 documented assassination attempts, including a shotgun blast that nearly severed his left arm.
His friends called him unkillable. The FBI said he wanted to be a bad guy in the worst way. He was succeeding.
He walked into the candy store to meet his best friend, Joseph Pungitore. The two had grown up together. Testa trusted him more than anyone alive.
Inside the back room, a man named Salvatore Wayne Grande reached under a sofa cushion. He pulled out a silenced pistol and shot Testa twice in the back of the head. He then shot him several more times in the face.
Testa’s body was hog-tied, wrapped, and driven 20 miles to a dirt road in Gloucester Township, New Jersey. At 10:23 p.m., an anonymous caller reported the body.
Police found the crowned prince of the Philadelphia mob lying in the dirt, still in his tennis whites. He had been killed by his own best friend’s betrayal.
His godfather ordered the murder. That godfather was Nicodemo “Little Nicky” Scarfo.
Testa’s father, Philip Testa, had personally asked Scarfo to protect his son. Philip made Scarfo the boy’s godfather because he believed it would keep Sal safe inside whatever family came after him. Scarfo told Philip yes.
Philip Testa was wrong about only one thing in his entire career. He was wrong about Scarfo.
Philip Testa was known as the “Chicken Man.” The name came from the pock marks left by a brutal childhood case of chicken pox, though some said it came from his involvement in the poultry business.
He was not a warm or glamorous figure. He wore blue-collar clothing. Associates said he looked more like a badly dressed plumber than an old world don.
He stood 5’8” and weighed 183 pounds. He had brown hair, brown eyes, a bulbous nose, and a thick mustache worn in defiance of actual Cosa Nostra rules. His dark, emotionless eyes made press photographers physically back away from him at funerals.
Philip was the underboss under Angelo Bruno, the “docile don” who had kept Philadelphia at peace for 21 years through negotiation and restraint. When Bruno was murdered in March 1980, shot in the back of the head on his own front steps, everything that followed began.
Philip Testa became boss. He was 56 years old. His son Sal was 24.
Salvie was everything his father was not physically. Crime reporter George Anastasia of the Philadelphia Inquirer described him as a ruggedly handsome 210-pound man with hazel eyes, long lashes, and dimpled cheeks. He wore his wavy hair out over his ears in typical 1970s fashion.
He was inducted as a made man in June 1980 in a ceremony his own father conducted. He was 24 years old.
The 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.”
Philip Testa had arranged something specific for his son before his own death. He made Nicodemo Scarfo the boy’s godfather.
Scarfo was 51 years old in 1980. He was a squat, vain, intensely violent man from the Atlantic City operations. He had been exiled there years earlier after stabbing an FBI informant in a dispute over a bar stool.
Philip believed that a made man’s godfather carried a specific obligation. The word implied a second father, a protector. The man who stands for the child at the baptismal font and promises God and the family that this child will be kept safe.
Philip Testa held that belief for exactly one year and 12 days.
On March 15, 1981, Philip Testa returned to his home in South Philadelphia after a night out. As he approached his front door, a nail bomb planted beneath his porch detonated.
The bomb was rigged with roofing nails to maximize shrapnel damage to the human body. The explosion tore through him. He was rushed to the hospital and died from his wounds. He was 56 years old.
The bomb was ordered by his own underboss, Peter Casella, and his own capo, Frank “Chickie” Narducci. Senior men inside the family had decided that Bruno’s old order was preferable to the direction Philip was taking things.
Casella fled to Florida. Narducci stayed in South Philadelphia. It was the last mistake Narducci ever made.
Salvie Testa, 24 years old, buried his father and immediately began making everyone responsible for the nail bomb pay with their lives.
Scarfo, who took the boss position after Philip’s death, gave Salvie his blessing. He promoted him to capo. He gave him the specific assignment of avenging Philip Testa’s murder.
What follows is documented in extraordinary detail across Tommy DelGiorno’s federal testimony, Nicholas Caramandi’s memoir, and George Anastasia’s “Blood and Honor.”
Salvie personally shot Chickie Narducci senior 10 times in the face, neck, and chest outside his South Philadelphia home. He tracked down Rocco “Boom Boom” Marinucci, the man who physically detonated the nail bomb, exactly one year after Philip’s death. He shot him dead in a parking lot and stuffed Marinucci’s mouth with cherry bombs.
It was a specific message addressed to every man who thought about what Rocco did and did not stop it.
Over the next two years, Salvie Testa killed or personally ordered the deaths of at least 13 more men connected to his father’s murder. When Caramandi told him that Narducci was dead, Salvie responded, “I wish that [expletive] was alive so I could kill him again.”
He had no mercy on anybody. Business was business, and killing to him was business.
He survived the entire war with the Riccobene faction, a rival crew within the Philadelphia family trying to break from Scarfo’s authority. He was shot multiple times. In July 1982, he nearly lost his left arm to a shotgun blast while sitting on a wooden crate outside a South Philadelphia pizza place.
He went back to work before the wound had properly healed. He personally dismantled the Riccobene faction piece by piece.
One source documents him surviving 17 separate assassination attempts across this period. He was 26 years old.
He was simultaneously the most dangerous man in Philadelphia and the man who had done more to consolidate Scarfo’s authority than any other single person in the family.
Caramandi, who killed alongside him through all of it, 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.”
Anastasia went further. Salvatore Testa loved it all, the stalkings, the murders, even the Enrico Riccobene suicide. He was the South Philadelphia equivalent of a mainline blueblood. He was born to be a wiseguy.
The problem with being born to be a wiseguy, with being the son of the boss, the godson of the new boss, and the most celebrated enforcer in the family’s history, is that every man who looks at you eventually does the specific arithmetic of what you represent.
In 1984, Nicky Scarfo was doing that arithmetic around the clock.
By early 1984, three things had happened that pushed Scarfo past the line that separates jealousy from action.
The first was the Wall Street Journal. In the spring of 1984, the Wall Street Journal ran a front-page profile of Sal Testa, naming him the heir apparent to the top position in the Philadelphia mob.
It was not a criminal record. It was not an FBI report. It was the Wall Street Journal, read by every businessman, every public official, and every court officer in the city.
The article explicitly named Scarfo’s godson as the man waiting to replace him. Scarfo read it.
Shortly after a benefit dinner at Palumbo’s restaurant in South Philadelphia, where both men appeared, Scarfo had Testa told to sit at a different table from the boss and his inner circle. Then Scarfo did not invite Testa on his Puerto Rico trip.
These were not accidental slights. They were the specific social language of a boss communicating to his inner circle that a man’s status was changing.
The second was the engagement. Testa had been engaged to Maria Merlino, the daughter of underboss Salvatore “Chuckie” Merlino, Scarfo’s own right hand.
The engagement represented the specific dynasty logic of the mob at its most explicit. The godfather’s godson marrying the underboss’s daughter. A bloodline binding the two most powerful positions in the family together.
In 1984, Testa broke it off. The documented reason was incompatibility.
Caramandi described Maria demanding French toilets and Jacuzzis while she had the house redone. Sal, who wanted to live the way his father lived, with no use for extravagance, refused to participate in a lifestyle that felt foreign to everything Philip had modeled.
Merlino was enraged. He went to Scarfo and asked for permission to kill Testa for the insult. Scarfo gave it.
Then Merlino developed a drinking problem that made him useless, and Scarfo demoted him. But the permission had already been granted. The sentence had already been pronounced. It just needed an executor.
The third was the most dangerous of all. Nobody in the family said it out loud, but everybody understood it.
Salvie Testa had been building something. He had his own crew. He moved through the city independently. He had relationships with members of the New York families who had been paying attention to what he accomplished during the Riccobene war.
He was, in the documented assessment of every man who later testified about this period, getting too big.
DelGiorno testified at Scarfo’s federal trial. “He was forming his own crew, running around the city, doing what he wanted. He was generally getting too big.”
Caramandi said something that goes further. “Salvie was very cautious. Every time you shook his hand, he’d bring you in close with his right hand, and just pat you down with his left 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 Salvie said goodbye to the assembled mob figures outside the funeral parlor, Chuckie Merlino shook his hand, grabbed his head, and kissed him on the lips for approximately 10 seconds.
Caramandi, standing nearby, looked at the other men. They all looked at each other. He said, “We said, what the [expletive]? This guy’s nuts. Salvie’s got to know now.”
It was the kiss of death. “We looked at the expression on Salvie. He was sort of stunned. He just couldn’t figure out what the [expletive] was going on.”
But this is how crazy they were. They wanted him to know.
Scarfo knew that killing Salvie Testa was not operationally straightforward. He was the best hitman in the family. He had survived 17 attempts. He patted down every man who hugged him.
Tommy DelGiorno and Faffy Iannarella were assigned 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 that description. Joey Pungitore.
Joseph “Joey Pung” Pungitore was Salvie’s childhood friend from South Philadelphia. He was made in the same ceremony by the same boss. He had been beside him through every war, every funeral, every score.
DelGiorno found Pungitore. He told him directly, in the documented UPI trial transcript, “We are going to kill Salvie and you have to help us set him up.”
Pungitore was devastated. He told DelGiorno 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 pull the trigger. 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. His condition that he did not have to be the one to fire was met.
Salvatore Wayne Grande, who had been waiting for an opportunity like this, took the trigger assignment immediately.
The plan was constructed around a plausible meeting. Pungitore told Testa there was something to discuss at the back of the candy store on East Passyunk Avenue.
Testa, who had been feeling the bad vibes but had also spent his entire adult life 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 was sitting on the couch with the pistol hidden under the cushions beside him. Testa walked in, nodded at Grande, and turned to speak to Pungitore.
The moment his back was to Grande, Grande pulled the pistol, stood, and shot him twice in the back of the head from close range. He shot him additional times in the face.
Testa fell. The room cleaned up. 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 28 years old. He was the 23rd 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 died in 1980 before she could watch either of the men she loved most be killed by the organization they both served.