Thomas Pitilli
"I copyrighted this thing called The Cheesesteak Theater," George Martorano tells me during a conversation frequently interrupted by a succinct and monotone recording: "This call is from a federal prison."
"I write the plays," George continues. "They buy a ticket and get a free cheesesteak."
I'm speaking on a borrowed BlackBerry, and George gets only 300 minutes on the phone each month, so I make plans to follow up later by email. The phone gets passed down an eager line of family, neighbors and former schoolmates from St. Mary Magdalen de Pazzi, most catching a smoke break on the sidewalk outside La Locanda Restaurant, which is tucked into a strip mall so indistinguishable from its neighbors that I drove past it twice down a highway in the South Jersey suburb of Voorhees.
Inside, a well-dressed crowd is gathered for a fundraiser to support George, who is serving a sentence of life without parole for drug trafficking. Although subject to the brutal uniformity of a Florida federal prison, he has remained a committed Philadelphian — and become a prolific author and playwright. He is the son of mobster Raymond "Long John" Martorano, but he was never accused of a violent crime and, by all accounts, was never a member of the mob. Now 60, George has been inside a prison cell since age 32, when he pled guilty to trafficking heroin, cocaine, methaqualone and marijuana. His supporters contend he received his harsh sentence as punishment for his father's sins, and for refusing to tell prosecutors things, back in an era of rampant gangland bloodletting, that he says he did not know.
George now teaches writing to fellow prisoners and counsels those on suicide watch. The dinner fundraiser is for George's legal defense and also for an organization to promote literacy that he founded. Men in Hawaiian shirts with smoothly gelled hair chat with women with dyed-black hair, curled. Stephen Ritrovato, whose business card identifies him as a "vocalist/personality," has donated his time to sing lounge anthems, Sinatra included, over a synthesized beat. The South Philly accents have stuck despite a neighborhood diaspora that stretches from South Jersey to South Florida.
A large photograph of George, dressed in his dull-olive prison uniform, is displayed at the front of the busy restaurant. In a more recent photo on the program's cover, George looks older, with grayer hair and a face creased with wrinkles. Friends tell stories to animate the still images: George down the Shore, in the neighborhood, at school. George exists in many points of memory. But not here.
"He's serving this time for things in Philadelphia that George had nothing to do with," says John Flahive, one of George's brothers-in-law. "I hope you focus on who George is today. All of that Philadelphia shit, that doesn't have anything to do with it."
No one here wants to dwell on the Philly underworld. When my questions stray toward the Mafia, faces tense up: Please don't write a Mafia story. And yet that world casts an inescapably long shadow. Even the walls of the restaurant, which has donated the fundraiser's food, are lined with posters for The Godfather and other mob films — a reference to Italian-American pop culture that strikes me as curious but which most guests don't seem to notice.
"If I believed for one second," says Flahive, "that if George were out today that he would do anything ..."
"He's his own man," interjects Deborah Scarpa, a Miami transplant from South Jersey and a dedicated "Free George" activist. "And his own story."
George's elderly mother, Evelyn, does not care for storytelling. "I don't talk to no reporters," she says, turning away, but not before recounting that she once threw Inquirer mob reporter George Anastasia out of a restaurant (an incident Anastasia does not recall). And even Anastasia sympathizes with George's plight.
"Long John Martorano was a major player in the underworld, and made a lot of money in the underworld doing things that were illegal," says Anastasia, the undisputed dean of Philly mob watchers. "Whether it was loan sharking, extortion, illegal gambling or drug dealing. He paid a price for that, and so did members of his family."
After years of dead-end appeals, George's supporters are eager to tell the story of a man whom one of his lawyers, Ted Simon, believes to be "the longest-serving first-time offender for a nonviolent federal offense in the U.S." While they seek to win over the court of public opinion, his lawyers have the much tougher job of winning over a three-judge panel on the Third Circuit Court of Appeals. This will probably be the last attempt to set George free.
To make his final push for freedom, George retained new and rather high-powered attorneys in 2010. Simon is a Philadelphia lawyer who represented Amanda Knox, the American student convicted and then this month acquitted on appeal for a salacious murder in Italy. Miami lawyer Roy Black has defended Rush Limbaugh against drug charges, Kelsey Grammer against statutory rape accusations, and represented William Kennedy Smith in his notorious 1991 rape trial.
This star legal team is pursuing what they say are two brand-new arguments, which rest on complicated points of sentencing law. But to understand George's case, and to understand George, one must dig into the equally murky South Philadelphia of the early 1980s, a bloody period in an underworld that stretched from Oregon Avenue to Atlantic City and South Florida.
PERIOD PIECE: George in 1980, in a photo supplied by his family.
The stable and insular world of the South Philly mob unraveled the night of March 21, 1980, when a man with a 12-gauge shotgun walked up to a parked car at 934 Snyder Ave. and blasted a hole into the side of Angelo Bruno's head. Bruno, known as the "Gentle Don," ruled a mob that put a premium on discretion and used violence sparingly. Bruno's day job was as a commissioned salesman for Raymond Martorano's vending business. Though Bruno reported an income of $50,000, according to Anastasia, he died a millionaire. Nearly a year later, on March 15, 1981, a bomb ripped through the porch of Philip "Chicken Man" Testa, killing Bruno's successor and creating a chaotic power vacuum.
Seizing the opportunity was a man named Nicodemo "Little Nicky" Scarfo, who took control. Scarfo loved the spotlight and flaunted his riches, keeping a photograph of Al Capone — whose flamboyant style was diametrically opposed to Bruno's — hanging in his office. The angry man whom Bruno had sidelined to Atlantic City in 1964 went on to unleash a wave of terror that lasted from 1981 until his 1987 arrest, and later conviction, for murder and other charges.
Scarfo took the close ties that bound the South Philly mob together like family and remade them into a noose. Twenty-one mob murders took place from 1980 to 1985, full of jealous double crosses and betrayals. Scarfo's penchant for brutality and unbridled greed left the organization wide open to government informants who would have failed to penetrate the Bruno mob.
It was during this period that George's father, Raymond, a convicted drug dealer long suspected to be a mob associate, became a made member after allegedly orchestrating the murder of roofers' union president John McCullough. The conviction was overturned 15 years later due to prosecutorial misconduct.
With his father behind bars for drug charges, George and his partners worked together to fly a planeload of marijuana from Jamaica to Florida. But when he pulled a Winnebago full of pot into a Philadelphia garage in late 1982, George and a number of accomplices were arrested. One of his partners, it turned out, was a federal agent.
George was represented at his 1984 trial by Bobby Simone, a second-generation Italian-American born in South Philly. Simone was the lead attorney for whichever local don happened to be in charge. But he became Scarfo's close friend, and more (he was later sentenced to four years for racketeering, accused of being the Philly mob's "unofficial consigliere").
That George was a drug dealer was not, by and large, in dispute, so Simone advised him to strike a deal and plead guilty. Simone, says George, told him that he would face 10 years. Maximum. It turned out to be a plea without a bargain: Judge John B. Hannum sentenced George to the maximum of life without parole.
