March 4-10, 2004

city beat

Billy's Back in Town

An out-of-town mob honcho meets with the Philly don.

by Brendan McGarvey

Late last week, organized-crime investigators followed reputed Scranton-Wilkes-Barre Mafia boss Billy D’Elia through Center City. At 6-foot-4, 240 pounds, he couldn’t have been hard to trail.

A well-dressed man in his 50s, D'Elia sauntered along Jewelers Row for a few minutes before turning off the street and ducking into a store where he allegedly met with reputed Philly kingpin Joseph "Uncle Joe" Ligambi. Details of that meeting aren't exactly known, but investigators say they're suspicious.

"We know that [they] have business to discuss," a law enforcement source tells City Paper. "And the best way to do that is face to face. No phones. No intermediaries. No witnesses."

Mob watchers have long been fascinated by the connections between the Scranton and the Philly crime families, and D'Elia's history runs deep. He allegedly runs Pennsylvania's oldest crime family; it was founded in the 1880s by two Sicilian immigrants. Its power once stretched from the Poconos to upstate New York, with soldiers and associates in Long Island, New York City, New Jersey and Philadelphia.

The Scranton mob gained underworld infamy for hosting the Apalachin, N.Y., Mafia convention in 1957. More than 100 Italian-American racketeers from across the country gathered at Scranton mob boss Joseph M. Barbara's upstate New York farm to discuss international heroin trafficking, the recent murder of New York mob boss Albert Anastasia by Carlo Gambino, and a decision to "close the books," or not recruit new members for the time being. But the New York State Police noticed an unusual number of out-of-state license plates, so they raided the meeting and arrested 60 high-level hoodlums from New York, New Orleans, Tampa, Detroit, Chicago, Boston, Denver, Buffalo, Newark and Philadelphia. Another 50 mobsters escaped through the woods by climbing over fences and wading through muddy cow pastures in their expensive suits and black fedoras.

In the late '50s, around the same time that Angelo Bruno became the top Philadelphia Mafiosi, Russell Bufalino took over the Scranton Mafia, which he ran until his death in 1990. (Bufalino is buried in a Catholic cemetery in Conshohocken.) One of his sisters maintained a small estate just off City Line Avenue in Merion and a condo -- under another name -- in Society Hill where, according to Scranton mob associates, Bufalino held meetings. In case of an emergency or mob war, it would double as a hideaway. Bufalino was quite close with Bruno, and so were their families. In one instance, the mob leaders even split up two brothers, allowing one to join the Philly mob and one to sign on in Scranton.

All of which brings us back to last week, as D'Elia was once Bufalino's driver. In 1986, D'Elia held a no-show job at the Philadelphia Industrial Correctional Center construction site. Asked by the Pennsylvania Crime Commission how he got the job, he refused to testify -- twice. Three years later, Harold Kaufman, a former union official turned government witness, told the commission that D'Elia was a mob power broker in the solid-waste landfill industry in upstate Pennsylvania. A 1992 commission report claimed that D'Elia was turning trash into cash for various Mafia crime families. When John Stanfa ran the Philly mob in the early '90s, he met often with D'Elia, sometimes at a mob-run Italian restaurant in Northeast Philadelphia. Sergio Battaglia, a Stanfa soldier turned federal witness, later testified that Stanfa wanted to kill his own hit men and have the Scranton Mafia dispose of the bodies. Stanfa was furious with John Veasey and Philip Colletti because they failed to kill Joey Merlino and left behind evidence -- a leased car --after the slaying of Michael Ciancaglini. If lured to Wilkes-Barre, the two would've been buried in a hole already dug by D'Elia.

FBI wiretaps recorded D'Elia conversing with a Stanfa attorney about Mafia involvement in the trash-for-cash business and D'Elia's relationship with reputed New York mobster Salvatore J. Profaci. When Ralph Natale became the local don, it was D'Elia who introduced him to the leaders of the Colombo crime family in Brooklyn in 1996. (Around the same time, police sources claim that D'Elia became the acting boss of the Poconos mob.) Even though D'Elia sided with Stanfa during the Stanfa-Merlino mob war, he was such good friends with the Skinny one by November 1996 that he attended the christening party for Merlino's daughter. Two years later, D'Elia was at Gianna's restaurant in South Philly, where the FBI recorded Natale chairing a mob meeting. Later that evening, 40 mobsters arrived to celebrate Merlino's birthday. In February 2003, the New Jersey Casino Control Commission banned D'Elia from Atlantic City casinos for life. He was placed on the exclusion list after the commission examined information from federal and state investigators and the court testimony of boss-turned-rat Natale, who testified that D'Elia has "criminal contacts all over the country." Looking at the history, it makes perfect sense that investigators are now trying to figure out the nature of D'Elia's recent visit.

"They're both bosses. So what are they meeting about? Money. It's always about money. Making lots of money doing something bad together," says an investigator. "I guarantee you, Billy D'Elia isn't driving down the Northeast Extension of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, two hours one way, just to say, "How ya doing, Joe?' It's business. It's always about business. Mob business."

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