In February 1981, a car pulled up to the curb at Broad and Walnut Streets in Center City Philadelphia. Police officers were standing on the sidewalk. The driver threw open his door and ran. In the back seat was Jimmy DeGregorio, a meth cook for the Pagans Motorcycle Club. He had been holding a .45-caliber pistol to the driver’s head. The driver was a man connected to the Philadelphia Mafia. DeGregorio fired at him in the street, in full view of the police. The man survived. DeGregorio was arrested on the spot.
That shooting did not end the conflict between the bikers and the mob. It ignited it. A few years later, according to the head of the police unit 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 the Philadelphia mob boss. The question is why a motorcycle gang would declare war on the Mafia in a city where the Mafia was at its most violent. And why the Mafia, run by the most feared boss in its history, did not 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 neither side could give up, even while shooting at each other.
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 with chapters in Philadelphia and South Jersey. By the late 1970s, according to one former member, the Pagans had a presence in the Italian Market in South Philadelphia, in the middle of a neighborhood the Mafia considered its own.
The Pagans were not just a club of men who rode motorcycles. Federal prosecutors would later describe an organization that manufactured and sold drugs, especially methamphetamine and the hallucinogen PCP. One DEA agent testified that the Pagans produced, in the early 1980s, nearly 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.
The years 1980 and 1981 were the bloodiest in the history of the Philadelphia crime family. For 20 years, Angelo Bruno had run it, a boss known for keeping the peace and keeping the family out of drugs. On March 21, 1980, Bruno was shot to death in his car in front of his South Philadelphia home. The man driving his car that night, a family associate named John Stanfa, was wounded. Remember that name.
Bruno’s successor, Philip Testa, lasted barely a year. On March 15, 1981, Testa was killed by a nail bomb planted under his porch as he returned home. After Testa, the National Mafia Commission approved a new boss, a short, volatile man from Atlantic City named Nicodemo Scarfo. Scarfo named Salvatore Merlino, known as “Chucky,” as his underboss.
Philadelphia under Scarfo was a different place than it had been under Bruno. Scarfo believed in fear and money, and he saw no reason to keep the family out of drugs. 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 made this system official in 1982. They imposed a tax on P2P, initially $2,000 a gallon. By 1985, the commission reported, the family was collecting $10,000 per gallon. The DEA described Philadelphia as the methamphetamine capital of the world. Inside the family, the tax had a special name. They called it 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 and sentenced to 10 years. The Crime Commission reported that his case revealed the family’s relationship with outlaw motorcycle gangs, naming the Pagans specifically.
The trade was deadly inside the Mafia itself. In May 1981, a Greek-American drug dealer 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. Meth 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 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 admits the family has power over the territory where he works. 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 guns. They did not care about Mafia rules.
More importantly, 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 shooting at Broad and Walnut came out of this trap. In February 1981, according to DeGregorio’s own account, the Mafia kidnapped a drug supplier connected 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. Neither man was publicly named.
DeGregorio later described what happened in a television interview. He sat in the back seat with his gun pointed at the driver’s head and forced the two men to drive him through Center City. At Broad and Walnut, the driver pulled onto the sidewalk next to police officers and ran. 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 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 numerous, dangerous, and useful. Both sides needed the trade to continue. Neither could afford to lose it.
That tension could not hold forever. It 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. While he was away, according to the Crime Commission, Chucky Merlino agreed to extort meth dealers. The acting boss was collecting the tribute himself.
The most detailed account came from a writer who was a Pagans member, relying on the head of the police squad monitoring both organizations, a Philadelphia police official named Frank Friel. The accounts of that year conflict. One places it in 1982, another in 1984, a third in 1986. But what they describe is the same.
A Pagans member sits on his motorcycle outside a restaurant in South Philadelphia. A car passes through the street. The driver is Chucky Merlino, the underboss. According to this account, he was drunk. His car hit the biker. The biker was taken to the hospital. When his friends came to visit him, 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 hit a biker in the street, and the bikers responded by shooting up his mother’s house. Under the traditional rules of that world, 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 taken as established fact. But if true, they describe something the Mafia rarely did. They paid money.
What is firmly established is what happened to Merlino afterward. In March 1986, Scarfo demoted Chucky Merlino and his brother Lawrence from their positions to the rank of ordinary soldiers. He named 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. What can be said is that the second-in-command who brought that embarrassment to the family was out of his position shortly afterward.
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. Chucky Merlino was convicted with him and sentenced to 45 years.
There was more. In April 1989, Merlino was sentenced to life 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 were from 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, 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 at a federal prison medical center in North Carolina on January 13, 2017, at age 87. The Pagans outlasted them both.
There is one 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 meth trade continued in the region, 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 Philadelphia Pagans’ president, a former police officer named Steve Mondevergine, had allied with Joey Merlino, and 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 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 hit nine times. The Pagans, again, held on. The gang whose members had shot up his grandmother’s house 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 meth trade, and the tax depended on the trade continuing. A war with the bikers would cost the family money, draw federal attention, and threaten the one business that made Philadelphia the meth 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 cash 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 always rested on something more fragile inside: the willingness of others to keep doing business with it. The men who traded gunfire 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 mob boss’s own son was calling them allies.