On February 15, 1978, Edwin Helfant, a 51-year-old lawyer and part-time judge, was seated in the cocktail lounge of the Flamingo Motel in Atlantic City with his wife and business partner. A man entered wearing a black ski mask and overcoat, carrying a snow shovel—unremarkable on a cold winter night. He set the shovel down, drew a . 22 caliber pistol, and shot Helfant five times in the face.
Helfant died at the table. His wife and partner were unharmed. The gunman walked out and drove away with a small-time mob soldier named Nicodemo Scarfo waiting in the getaway car. At the time, Scarfo was a little-known exile from the Philadelphia crime family, banished to Atlantic City years earlier by the boss who found him too violent.
The murder was a message. Helfant had taken $12,500 from Scarfo and an associate, Nicholas Virgilio, to bribe a judge for leniency in Virgilio’s murder sentencing. The bribe failed; Virgilio got the full sentence. When they demanded their money back, Helfant refused.
Scarfo ordered the hit carried out in a public place, with witnesses, so the story would travel. Scarfo was born in Brooklyn in 1929 and raised in South Philadelphia, where his uncles were mob soldiers. He was small but fiercely aggressive, training as an amateur boxer before his temper ended that path. In 1954, he was inducted into the Philadelphia crime family.
In 1963, he stabbed a man to death over a diner booth. He pleaded guilty to manslaughter and served ten months. When he returned, the family’s boss, Angelo Bruno, known for restraint and bribery over bloodshed, had no use for him. Bruno sent Scarfo to Atlantic City as a punishment.
For over a decade, Scarfo scraped by in Atlantic City, running small rackets and nursing resentments. Then, in 1976, New Jersey voters approved a referendum legalizing casino gambling in Atlantic City alone. Scarfo understood that the coming boom meant construction, and construction meant influence. He formed concrete companies and positioned himself to control who worked on the casinos.
The Flamingo Motel murder came just months before the first casino opened, and it established the terms of his new operation: you deliver what you promise, or you are killed in public. Helfant’s murder went unsolved for years. Witnesses in the lounge were unwilling to testify, and the case went cold. Helfant himself was under indictment at the time of his death for an unrelated alleged bribery scheme and died before a verdict was reached.
In 1980, Bruno was assassinated. His successor, Philip Testa, was killed by a nail bomb a year later. Through violence and miscalculation, the men above Scarfo in the family hierarchy eliminated themselves. With backing from the Genovese family, Scarfo became boss of the Philadelphia crime family in 1981.
His reign was the bloodiest in Philadelphia mob history. He imposed a street tax on every criminal operation in his territory, killing those who refused to pay. He inducted new members at an unprecedented rate, and his own hitman later described how Scarfo preferred public, daylight killings—restaurants, funeral homes—so they would be written up in the papers and put fear in people. It was the same logic as the Flamingo Motel, but now he had an entire crime family to carry it out.
Between 1980 and 1984, the Philadelphia mob averaged six murders per year. One war broke out when an aging capo refused to accept Scarfo’s authority. The gunfights happened in broad daylight on South Philadelphia streets. At the height of his power in the mid-1980s, Scarfo was making millions from casino construction alone, plus tens of thousands per month from union pension funds.
He was the most powerful mob boss Philadelphia had seen, and unlike his predecessors, he wanted everyone to know it. His reign ultimately collapsed as federal prosecutors built cases against him. Convicted and sentenced to prison, Nicodemo Scarfo died at 87 years old in federal custody, having spent his final years alone.
The rise that began with a public execution in an Atlantic City hotel lounge ended in obscurity and imprisonment.