In February 1981, in the middle of downtown Philadelphia, a car pulled onto the sidewalk at Broad and Walnut Streets, right beside a group of police officers. The driver threw open his door and ran. In the back seat was a man named Jimmy DiGregorio, a methamphetamine cook for the Pagans motorcycle club, who for the past few minutes had been holding a .45-caliber pistol against the back of the driver's head. The driver was a man tied to the Philadelphia Mafia. DiGregorio fired at him in the street, in full view of the police. The man survived. DiGregorio was arrested on the spot.
But the shooting at Broad and Walnut did not end the conflict between the bikers and the Mob. It ignited it. A few years later, according to the commander of the police unit that monitored both sides, a group of Pagans fired more than 200 rounds into a house in South Philadelphia. The house belonged to the mother of the leader of the Philadelphia crime family.
So why would a motorcycle club declare war on the Mafia in the city where the Mafia was at its most violent? And why did the Mafia, run by the most feared boss in its history, never truly make them pay?
The version most people know says the Mafia always wins. Outsiders who get in the way of a crime family disappear. The story of the Pagans and the Philadelphia Mafia is stranger than that. It is a story about money, a chemical, and a partnership that neither side could walk away from, even while they were shooting at each other.
Start with the bikers, because they were never what the Mafia thought they were. The Pagans Motorcycle Club was 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 and had chapters in Philadelphia and South Jersey. By the late 1970s, according to one former member's account, the Pagans had a presence in the Italian Market in South Philadelphia, in the heart of the neighborhood the Mafia considered its own.
Even the club's founding stories disagree on a specific year. Some trace it to 1959. Others say the club began forming in 1957. It was a secretive organization from the start. The Pagans were not just a club for men who rode motorcycles. Federal prosecutors would later describe an organization that manufactured and sold drugs, especially methamphetamine and PCP. One Drug Enforcement Administration agent testified that in the early 1980s the Pagans produced roughly a quarter to a third of all methamphetamine in the Philadelphia area, and about 60 percent of the PCP. That made them rich. It also made them a target.
For the Mafia, 1980 and 1981 were the bloodiest years in the history of the Philadelphia family. For 20 years it had been run by Angelo Bruno, a boss known for keeping the peace and keeping the family out of the drug trade. On March 21, 1980, Bruno was shot dead in his car outside his home in South Philadelphia. The man driving him that night, a family associate named John Stanfa, was wounded. Remember that name, because it comes back.
Bruno's successor, Philip Testa, did not last a year in the job. On March 15, 1981, Testa was killed by a nail bomb planted under the porch of his home as he returned to the house. After Testa, the national Mafia commission agreed on a new boss, a short, volatile man from Atlantic City named Nicodemo Scarfo. Scarfo named Salvatore Merlino, known as "Chuckie," as the family's second-in-command.
Philadelphia under Scarfo was a completely different place than it had been under Bruno. Scarfo believed in fear and he believed in money, and he saw no reason to keep the drug trade out. The most important drug in Philadelphia was methamphetamine. The key to making it was a chemical called P2P, the precursor from which the drug is cooked. Whoever controlled the supply of that chemical controlled the entire trade.
According to the Pennsylvania Crime Commission, the Scarfo family formalized this system in 1982. It imposed a tax on P2P, initially $2,000 per gallon. By 1985, the commission reported, the family was collecting $10,000 per gallon. The commission noted that the DEA described Philadelphia as the methamphetamine capital of the world. Inside the family, this tax had its own name. It was called "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 more than $100,000. He was arrested in January 1982 along with dozens of others and sentenced to 10 years in prison. The Crime Commission said his case exposed the family's relationship with outlaw motorcycle groups and named the Pagans specifically.
The trade was deadly inside the Mafia's own circle as well. In May 1981, a Greek-American drug figure named Chelsis Bouras, known as "Steve," was shot dead while eating dinner at a restaurant at a table that included Raymond Martorano. Martorano was considered the main suspect in that killing. Methamphetamine money was worth killing for, and everyone in the business knew it.
Earlier, according to the commission, a senior family member named Harry Riccobene had worked with the Pagans, including Jimmy DiGregorio himself, in manufacturing and selling methamphetamine. So the relationship was never simple. Mobsters and bikers were suppliers, customers, partners, and competitors, often all at once.
Now the rule underneath all of this. In the Mafia, the street tax is not really about money. It is about recognition of authority. When an independent dealer pays the tax, he acknowledges that the family has authority over the area where he operates. When he refuses, he denies it. And a family that lets an outsider 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 did not fear the consequences that kept bookmakers and loan sharks in line. Most importantly, the Mafia needed them. The bikers distributed the drugs the family was taxing. Killing them would mean a war. Ignoring them would mean an insult. That was the trap.
The shooting at Broad and Walnut came out of that trap, and it was the beginning. In February 1981, according to DiGregorio's own account, the Mafia kidnapped a drug supplier linked to the Pagans. DiGregorio and his men responded by kidnapping two men from the other side. It is worth being precise about the timing, because the records indicate that February 1981 was one month before Phil Testa was killed. So the boss of the family at that moment was Testa, not Scarfo.
A later press report said the man DiGregorio shot was a personal bodyguard for Testa. Neither man's name was publicly revealed. What happened next is what DiGregorio later described in a television interview. He sat in the back seat with his pistol aimed at the driver's head and forced the two men to drive him through downtown Philadelphia. At Broad and Walnut, the driver pulled onto the sidewalk beside police officers and ran. DiGregorio shot at him. In September 1982, DiGregorio was convicted in state court of attempted murder. By his account, however, the Pagans never paid the tax.
Ask the question again now that the business picture is clear. Why would the Pagans risk a 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 too many, too dangerous, and too useful. Both sides needed the trade to continue. Neither could afford to lose it.
That tension could not hold forever. It blew up over an incident on a South Philadelphia street. From August 1982 to January 1984, Scarfo was in a federal prison in Texas on a weapons charge. During his absence, according to the Crime Commission, Chuckie Merlino agreed to extort methamphetamine dealers. The underboss was collecting the tribute himself.
Now look at that moment again, slowly. The most precise accounts came from a writer who was a member of the Pagans, relying on the head of the police unit that monitored both organizations, a Philadelphia police official named Frank Friel. The accounts of the year conflict. One places it in 1982, another in 1984, a third in 1986. But what they describe is the same.
A Pagan sits on his motorcycle outside a restaurant in South Philadelphia. A car comes down the street. The driver is Chuckie Merlino, the family's underboss. According to this account, he was drunk. His car struck the biker. The biker was taken to the hospital, and here the detail that was withheld for so long appears. When the biker's friends came to visit him, they found the police accident report. It carried the driver's name. It carried his home address.
The next night, according to this account, the Pagans fired more than 200 rounds into the house at that address. Chuckie Merlino was not inside. He never lived there. The address on his driver's license was his mother's house. His mother was not hurt.
Think about what that meant inside the Philadelphia family. The underboss of the most violent Mafia family in America had run down a biker in the street, and the bikers responded by shooting up his mother's house. By the traditional rules of that world, the response should have been a massacre. It was not.
According to Frank Friel, the incident went without retaliation. And by the same account, Scarfo's men eventually paid the bikers $5,000 for the injuries and damage. That payment and those 200 rounds rest on a single account, and it has been questioned. It cannot be treated as settled fact, but if it is true, it describes something the Mafia rarely did. It paid.
What is certain is what happened to Merlino afterward. In March 1986, Scarfo demoted Chuckie Merlino and his brother Lawrence from their positions down to the rank of ordinary soldiers. He named his nephew, Philip Leonetti, as his new underboss. The Crime Commission attributed the reasons to the Merlino brothers' alcohol problems and their run-ins with the law. The report does not mention the Pagans, and the record cannot claim the biker was the cause. What can be said is that the second-in-command who brought that embarrassment to the family was no longer in his position shortly afterward.
By then the family was coming apart for other reasons. In September 1984, Salvatore Testa, the son of the murdered boss and one of Scarfo's most feared soldiers, was shot dead after his engagement to Chuckie Merlino's daughter was broken off. 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 Chuckie Merlino himself over his incompetence. The plan was never carried out.
Meanwhile, the man who started it all, Jimmy DiGregorio, had switched sides. According to veteran Philadelphia crime reporter George Anastasia, DiGregorio 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.
DiGregorio 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 recorder. In 1985, he was the star witness in a federal racketeering trial against Pagans leaders in Philadelphia before Chief Judge Alfred Luongo. On February 15, 1985, all eight defendants were convicted, including the club's national treasurer. The biker who had shot a mobster in front of the police had become a government witness against the bikers.
Then it was the Mafia's turn. On January 8, 1987, Nicodemo Scarfo was arrested at Newark Airport in a case involving the 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. Chuckie Merlino was convicted alongside him and sentenced to 45 years.
There was more. 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 retrial in 1997 he was acquitted. By then it hardly mattered. He was already serving decades in prison on the racketeering case.
The men who brought about their downfall came from inside their own ranks. Among the witnesses who testified against the family was Philip Leonetti, Scarfo's nephew, the man who had replaced Merlino as underboss. Lawrence, Chuckie's brother, also became a cooperating witness. He died in the witness protection program in May 2001.
The family that once refused to retaliate against a motorcycle club could not even stop its own members from testifying. Chuckie Merlino died in a federal prison in Texas in October 2012. Nicodemo Scarfo died at a federal prison medical center in North Carolina on January 13, 2017, at the age of 87. The Pagans outlasted them both.
There is one final turn that closes the circle. John Stanfa, the man who had been driving Angelo Bruno's car the night Bruno was killed, became boss of the Philadelphia family in the early 1990s. His reign set off another war, this time against a group of younger mobsters led by Chuckie Merlino's son. That war ended in the mid-1990s when Stanfa and most of his supporters were arrested and the younger group took over.
In the 1990s, the Philadelphia family came under the control of a new generation led by Chuckie Merlino's son, Joseph Merlino, known as "Skinny Joey." The methamphetamine trade in the region continued, with the Mafia, the bikers, and veteran cooks still working together and the tax still being collected. According to George Anastasia's reporting, by the late 1990s the president of the Pagans' Philadelphia chapter, a former police officer named Steve Mondevergine, had allied with Joey Merlino, and the Mafia sometimes used the Pagans as muscle.
The bikers had their own enemies by then. After a series of arrests in the late 1990s that thinned 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, once again, held on. The club whose members had shot up his grandmother's house had become allies of Joey Merlino.
This is the answer to the question, and it is narrower than the myth and colder than the movies. The Pagans did not beat the Philadelphia Mafia because they were the most ruthless. They survived because the Mafia needed what they had. The family's authority rested on the methamphetamine trade, the trade rested on the tax, and the tax rested on the trade continuing. A war with the bikers would have cost the family enormous money, drawn federal attention, and threatened the one business that made Philadelphia the methamphetamine capital of the world.
So the rules bent. A 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 body. The first motive, respect, demanded retaliation. The second factor, money, made retaliation far too expensive. Money won.
That is what the myth ignores. Mafia power always looked absolute from the outside, but it always rested on something more fragile inside: the willingness of others to keep dealing with it. The men who shot at each other in the 1980s ended up in the same place. Jimmy DiGregorio became a government witness. Nicodemo Scarfo and Chuckie Merlino died in federal prisons. The Pagans who refused to pay the tax kept riding their motorcycles through South Philadelphia. A generation later, the boss's own son was calling them allies.