In February 1981, a Pagans Motorcycle Club member named Jimmy DeGregorio was sitting in the back seat of a car in downtown Philadelphia. The driver was a man connected to the Philadelphia Mafia. DeGregorio, a methamphetamine cook for the Pagans, had a .45 caliber pistol aimed at the driver’s head.
At the intersection of Broad and Walnut Streets, the driver pulled onto the sidewalk next to police officers and fled on foot. DeGregorio shot him in the street in full view of the police. The man survived. DeGregorio was arrested on the spot.
But the shooting did not end the conflict between the bikers and the Mafia. It ignited it. A few years later, according to the head of the police squad monitoring both groups, a group of Pagans fired more than 200 rounds into a house in South Philadelphia. The house belonged to the mother of a Philadelphia crime family boss.
The Pagans were founded in the late 1950s in Prince George’s County, Maryland, by a man named Lou Dobkin. By the 1970s, the club had spread along the East Coast with chapters in Philadelphia and South Jersey. By the late 1970s, they had a presence in the Italian Market area of South Philadelphia, a neighborhood the Mafia considered its own.
The Pagans were not just a motorcycle club. Federal prosecutors would later describe an organization that manufactured and sold drugs, particularly methamphetamine and the hallucinogen PCP. A DEA agent testified that the Pagans produced nearly a quarter to a third of all methamphetamine in the Philadelphia area in the early 1980s, along with about 60 percent of the PCP. That made them wealthy. It also made them a target.
The Mafia, meanwhile, was in its bloodiest period. For 20 years, Angelo Bruno had run the Philadelphia family, keeping peace and steering the family away from drugs. On March 21, 1980, Bruno was shot to death in his car outside his South Philadelphia home. The man driving his car that night, an associate named John Stanfa, was wounded.
Bruno’s successor, Philip Testa, lasted just over a year. On March 15, 1981, Testa was killed by a nail bomb planted under his porch. After Testa, the national Mafia commission approved a new boss: Nicodemo Scarfo, a short, volatile man from Atlantic City. Scarfo appointed Salvatore Merlino, known as “Chucky,” as his underboss.
Under Scarfo, Philadelphia was a different place. He believed in fear and money, and he saw no reason to stop the drug trade. The most important drug in Philadelphia was methamphetamine. The key to manufacturing it was a chemical called P2P, the precursor from which the drug is cooked. Whoever controlled the supply of that chemical controlled the trade.
In 1982, the Scarfo family made this system official. They imposed a tax on P2P, initially $2,000 per gallon. By 1985, the family was reportedly collecting $10,000 per gallon. The DEA described Philadelphia as the methamphetamine capital of the world. Inside the family, the tax had a specific name: “the tribute.”
The Mafia was not just taxing the trade. It was part of it. In 1981, a Philadelphia mobster named Raymond Martorano bought 52 gallons of P2P for over $100,000. He was arrested in January 1982 and sentenced to 10 years in prison. The Pennsylvania Crime Commission reported that his case exposed the family’s relationship with outlaw motorcycle gangs, naming the Pagans.
The trade was deadly inside the Mafia itself. In May 1981, a Greek-American drug trafficker named Chelsais Bouras, known as “Steve,” was shot to death while eating dinner at a restaurant at a table that included Raymond Martorano. Martorano was considered the main suspect.
Earlier, according to the Crime Commission, a senior family member named Harry Riccobene had worked with the Pagans, including DeGregorio himself, in manufacturing and selling methamphetamine. The relationship was never simple. Mobsters and bikers were suppliers, customers, partners, and competitors, often at the same time.
In the Mafia, the street tax is not really about money. It is about recognizing authority. When an independent dealer pays the tax, he acknowledges the family’s power over the area. When he refuses, he denies it. A family that allows an outsider to refuse will soon find that no one pays.
The usual response to refusal is violence. But the Pagans were not ordinary independent dealers. They had numbers. They had weapons. They did not care about Mafia rules. And crucially, the Mafia needed them. The bikers distributed the drugs the family taxed. Killing them would mean war. Ignoring them would mean insult. That was the trap.
The Broad and Walnut shooting came out of this trap. In February 1981, according to DeGregorio’s own account, the Mafia kidnapped a drug supplier linked to the Pagans. DeGregorio and his men responded by kidnapping two men from the other side. A later press report said the man DeGregorio shot was a bodyguard for Testa. The names of the men were never publicly revealed.
DeGregorio forced the two men to drive him through downtown Philadelphia. At Broad and Walnut, the driver pulled onto the sidewalk beside police officers and fled. DeGregorio shot him. In September 1982, DeGregorio was convicted of attempted murder. Still, according to his account, the Pagans never paid the tax.
Why would the Pagans risk war with the Mafia? Because paying the tax meant admitting that their most profitable activity partly belonged to someone else. And why did the Mafia not simply wipe them out? Because the bikers were numerous, dangerous, and useful. Both sides needed the trade to continue. Neither could afford to lose it.
That tension eventually exploded over an incident on a South Philadelphia street. From August 1982 until January 1984, Scarfo was in a federal prison in Texas on a weapons charge. In his absence, according to the Crime Commission, Chucky Merlino agreed to extort methamphetamine dealers. The underboss was collecting the tribute himself.
The most detailed account came from a writer who was a Pagans member, relying on a Philadelphia police captain named Frank Friel who monitored both organizations. Accounts of the year conflict. One places it in 1982, another in 1984, another in 1986. But what they describe is the same.
A Pagans member was sitting on his motorcycle outside a restaurant in South Philadelphia. A car drove past. The driver was Chucky Merlino. According to the account, he was drunk. His car struck the biker. The biker was taken to the hospital. When his friends came to visit, they found the police accident report. It had the driver’s name. It also had his home address.
The next night, according to this account, the Pagans fired more than 200 rounds into the house at that address. Chucky Merlino was not inside. He had never lived there. The address on his driver’s license was his mother’s house. She was not hurt.
Think about what that meant inside the Philadelphia family. The underboss of the most violent Mafia family in America had run over a biker in the street, and the bikers responded by shooting up his mother’s house. By traditional rules, the response should have been a massacre. It did not happen. According to Frank Friel, the incident went unavenged. According to the same account, Scarfo’s men eventually paid the bikers $5,000 for the injuries and damages.
That payment and those 200 rounds rest on a single account and have been questioned. They cannot be treated as established fact. But if true, they describe something the Mafia rarely did. They paid.
What is established is what happened to Merlino afterward. In March 1986, Scarfo demoted Chucky Merlino and his brother Lawrence from their positions to ordinary soldiers. He appointed his nephew, Philip Leonetti, as the new underboss. The Crime Commission attributed the reasons to the Merlino brothers’ problems with alcohol and their encounters with the law. The report does not mention the Pagans.
By that time, the family was tearing itself apart for other reasons. In September 1984, Salvatore Testa, son of the murdered boss and one of Scarfo’s most feared soldiers, was shot to death after breaking off his engagement to Chucky Merlino’s daughter. In 1985, a man named Frank D’Alfonso was killed on a South Philadelphia street. According to the Crime Commission, Scarfo later planned to kill Chucky Merlino himself for incompetence. The plan was never carried out.
Meanwhile, the man who started it all, Jimmy DeGregorio, had switched sides. According to veteran Philadelphia crime reporter George Anastasia, DeGregorio learned that several Pagans had conspired with the Mafia to kill him. The two organizations that had been shooting at each other had found something they agreed on: getting rid of him.
DeGregorio turned to the government. In January 1983, according to federal court records, he was temporarily released from prison to work with federal agents. At a Holiday Inn in Essington, Pennsylvania, near the airport, he sold 20 pounds of fake methamphetamine to Pagans members. He was wearing a recording device. In 1985, he was a key prosecution witness in a federal racketeering trial against Pagans leaders in Philadelphia. On February 15, 1985, all eight defendants were convicted, including the club’s national treasurer.
The biker who shot a mobster in front of police had become a government witness against the bikers. The Mafia came next. On January 8, 1987, Nicodemo Scarfo was arrested at Newark Airport in a case involving extortion of a real estate developer. On November 19, 1988, a federal jury in Philadelphia convicted Scarfo and 16 of his men on racketeering charges. He was sentenced to 55 years in prison. Chucky Merlino was convicted with him and sentenced to 45 years.
In April 1989, Merlino was sentenced to life in prison for the murder of Frank D’Alfonso. That conviction was later overturned, and at a new trial in 1997, he was acquitted. By then, it hardly mattered. He was already serving decades for the racketeering case.
The men who brought them down came from inside their own ranks. Among the witnesses who testified against the family was Philip Leonetti, Scarfo’s nephew, the man who replaced Merlino as underboss. Lawrence, Chucky’s brother, also became a cooperating witness. He died in the witness protection program in 2001. The family that once refused to retaliate against a motorcycle gang could not even stop its own members from testifying.
Chucky Merlino died in a federal prison in Texas in October 2012. Nicodemo Scarfo died in a federal prison medical center in North Carolina on January 13, 2017, at age 87. The Pagans outlasted them both.
There is a final turn that closes the circle. John Stanfa, the man driving Angelo Bruno’s car the night he was killed, became boss of the Philadelphia family in the early 1990s. His rule sparked another war, this time against a group of younger mobsters led by Chucky Merlino’s son. That war ended in the mid-1990s when Stanfa and most of his supporters were arrested and the young group took over.
In the 1990s, the Philadelphia family came under the control of a new generation led by Chucky Merlino’s son, Joseph Merlino, known as “Skinny Joey.” The methamphetamine trade continued in the area, with the Mafia, the bikers, and veteran cooks still working together, and the tax still being collected.
According to George Anastasia’s reports, by the late 1990s, the head of the Pagans’ Philadelphia chapter, a former police officer named Steve Mondevergine, had allied with Joey Merlino. The Mafia sometimes used the Pagans as a strike force. The bikers had their own enemies by then. After a series of arrests in the late 1990s weakened the Pagans’ Philadelphia leadership, the Hells Angels moved to take over their territory. According to later reports, Mondevergine survived an assassination attempt in which he was shot nine times. The Pagans, again, endured.
The gang whose members shot up the house of a mobster’s grandmother became allies of Joey Merlino. That is the answer to the question, and it is narrower than the myth and colder than what we see in the movies. The Pagans did not defeat the Philadelphia Mafia because they were the most ruthless. They survived because the Mafia needed what they had.
The family’s authority depended on the methamphetamine trade, and the trade depended on the tax. The tax depended on the trade continuing. A war with the bikers would cost the family enormous money, attract federal attention, and threaten the one business that made Philadelphia the methamphetamine capital of the world. So the rules bent. The refusal to pay went unpunished. According to one account, an attack on the underboss’s family was answered with an envelope of money instead of a corpse.
The first motive, respect, demanded revenge. The second motive, money, made revenge too expensive. Money won. That is what the myth ignores. Mafia power always looked absolute from the outside, but it was always based on something more fragile inside: the willingness of others to keep doing business with it.
The men who shot at each other in the 1980s ended up in the same place. Jimmy DeGregorio became a government witness. Nicodemo Scarfo and Chucky Merlino died in federal prisons. The Pagans who refused to pay the tax kept riding their motorcycles through South Philadelphia. And a full generation later, the boss’s own son was calling them allies.