Am I to turn at all, or I'm good?
I start as the Mob reporter at Fox 29 in 1994,
and I spend a lot of time covering Joey Merlino.
Merlino's parole may be over,
but his days in the spotlight certainly aren't.
A member of the Merlino Mob got his hands on a stolen Lamborghini.
Merli… There's a truck. Hold it.
Joey Merlino gets a lot of headlines 'cause he's a young swashbuckler.
He dresses well. He carries himself well.
He's cocky.
Joe, how you feeling about parole being over?
-Good. We're going to Disney World. -You're going to Disney World?
When he walked in a room, he took the room.
When he went to a nightclub,
the lines parted, the velvet ropes opened,
and in went Joey Merlino.
Joey became something of a celebrity.
Joey was not afraid of a camera, wasn't afraid of a reporter.
In any give-and-take conversation, he could get the last word.
One time, I said, "Joe, we're hearing that there's a hit on your head."
The number we're hearing is half a million dollars.
And he paused for a second, and he's like…
Half a million dollars, I'd kill myself.
I mean, it's classic.
He knows how to manipulate the streets, the media,
and he's just a bright guy when it comes to being a gangster.
Ten years ago, if anybody had predicted
you were going to stand on lot the day before Thanksgiving
and give away 500 turkeys, would you have believed them?
Yeah.
The media, they love the idea of the don in the neighborhood
who's taking care of the locals.
It makes a great story that sells newspapers.
But to the FBI, he was a mobster, not a philanthropist.
And he had to be stopped.
For homeless kids, you know, they have nothing.
I always give to people. Don't make me a bad guy, does it?
I started off as a uniformed police officer
with a canine partner.
It was fun, quite frankly,
being out on the street, chasing down bad guys.
But I joined the FBI because I wanted to investigate organized crime.
After Stanfa went to jail,
there was a tremendous amount of concern
about Merlino and the young guns still being on the street.
Illegal bookmaking, illegal loan-sharking,
drug dealing, murders.
And it was down to me and my team
to make arrests and get them off the streets.
We had assets that were following Joey continuously.
Trying to get information about where Joey was going,
who he was hanging out with, and if they could,
what he was doing.
The issue was that Joey Merlino doesn't wanna go back to jail.
Nobody does.
So he's very difficult to surveil.
9-5-7.
They live with the mirrors.
Always in a back mirror,
always in a side mirror.
He's driving his car, making a radical turn.
And if you make that turn, he knows that you're on him.
Joey became very hard to catch, hard to outsmart.
Joey's always ten steps ahead of all these guys.
A lot of it's intelligence, a lot of it's luck.
But a mixture of both makes you very dangerous.
My team, we are putting together a RICO case.
We believe Merlino is involved
in a racketeering-influenced corrupt organization.
First, we have to show there's an organization.
We then prove it's corrupt because of criminal activity.
There wasn't much headway in terms of getting inside information.
The decision was made to capture on video
who was coming and going from Avenue Café.
The Avenue Café was Joey's place, his little hangout,
where he sold cigars and stuff like that.
We used to play cards or dice in the back room.
It's a place where guys break balls, tease each other.
That's what it's about.
Just because it's a hangout doesn't mean there's nefarious activity going on there.
Joey and his associates were in and out of there every day.
Angelo Lutz, Danny D'Ambrosia,
Stevie Mazzone, George Borgesi.
The list goes on and on.
The camera at the Avenue Café helped us understand
who Joey was associating with and how frequently.
For a RICO prosecution,
we have to establish there's an organization.
And showing that he's the boss
and enough people recognize and respect that
was the singular most important piece of evidence.
But we weren't getting evidence of crimes.
It was very challenging.
You got a bunch of guys that grew up together,
got punished together,
went to school together, went to dances together.
Their families had deaths in the families, and they went through all that together.
That bond was like this. The government could never break that.
Joey Merlino and his crew…
they knew what had led to other members and family members before them
going to jail.
And they learned from that.
They were very safe in how they discussed their business
and who they would talk to.
The FBI became enamored with the idea of a cooperating witness,
a mobster they were able to flip.
And I think at that point,
the FBI tries to approach Ron Previte.
Previte had worked at the casinos in Atlantic City
as a security officer.
Eventually, he got fired for stealing.
He ultimately was arrested for shaking someone down
by the New Jersey State Police.
You've described yourself as a general practitioner of crime.
Uh, what did you mean by that?
Well, I never specialize in anything, but there wasn't much that I haven't done.
We decided to try and make him a cooperating witness.
Working for the US Attorney's Office, I had no illusions about Ron Previte.
He was a flat-out criminal.
But we could use him to help get evidence against Joey Merlino.
I went to meet with Previte just outside Hammonton in South Jersey.
And I just remember thinking,
when he walked in, that he was a very large man.
Previte was rough around the edges.
He was a little tough. He was a street guy.
He was what a wise guy should be.
We decided to offer him a contract that we thought was fair,
$2,000 every week in exchange for him wearing a wire,
gathering evidence at our direction
of the different activities of the Philadelphia Mob.
His life would be in danger.
He knew that. We knew that.
But ultimately, he agreed to do it.
Why?
Because he didn't wanna go to jail, and he was all about the cash.
But the problem was that Previte and Merlino,
they just weren't that close.
Merlino was a little cautious about Previte.
There were obstacles that we had to overcome.
Joey never trusted Ron Previte. No one trusted Ron Previte.
If you ever saw a guy that you just don't trust, that's him.
But people did business with Ron Previte because they saw a way to earn.
Ron Previte, he's a hustler, he's a maneuverer.
And for Joey Merlino, everything's about the dollar bill.
The goal was to get Previte to have access to Merlino,
to win Merlino's trust through tribute and respect.
That's all that was important to Joey,
was money and "They think I'm somebody."
We gave Ron a Rolex Submariner watch
with diamonds encrusted around the face
to give to Merlino as a gift, as a show of respect.
Joey fell for the bait hook, line, and sinker.
Merlino invited Previte to talk about doing business.
It felt like, finally, we were on the right track.
And that prompted the FBI to expand the team.
I showed up in Philadelphia,
and they assigned me to the Organized Crime Squad.
I was 27 years old, my first day in the FBI,
and it felt like I'd walked into a movie.
One of the agents says to me, "We're gonna go meet Previte."
"He's meeting Joe Merlino. Let's get Ron wired up."
Titcombe was brand new.
I thought wiring Ron Previte was a great opportunity
for Titcombe to see that this isn't book learning down at the Academy.
This is what we do every day.
So I walk into his bedroom, and he's wearing a bathrobe and boxer shorts.
And he's got a jockstrap on.
Ron was about six foot, he was about 320 pounds, bald head.
He's standing there like this,
his bathrobe open, and he said, "Who's this kid?"
I put tape from his navel to his chest,
put the recorder in the jockstrap,
and I'm looking around like, "Is this for real?
"Is this how this works? Am I being punked?"
I guess this is the FBI.
Ron goes to meet with Merlino at the Avenue Café.
And they start talking business.
And whatever distrust Merlino may have had of Previte was coming down.
Previte's sitting in the meeting. He's got his feet up on a desk.
He looks down.
And he sees a piece from the recording device
dangling out of the bottom of his jeans,
where anyone who wanted to could see it.
This is incredibly risky
because if they find out that he's cooperating,
certainly they would try to kill him.
Without missing a beat,
he just crossed his legs, put his feet down on the floor,
concealing it completely.
It takes nerves of steel to do something like that.
At the end of the meeting, Merlino tells him that
they've come into a load of stolen bicycles and baby formula
and asks Previte if he thinks he can move them.
They had people who were breaking into the rail yard
down in South Philadelphia and stealing conex boxes.
They didn't know what was in the conex boxes.
They'd just hook a trailer up, drive it out.
The deal happened.
Previte goes back to Merlino with an envelope
and says, "This is your cut."
Now you've established we can do business together.
It's now Merlino directing Previte to buy stolen goods.
It's a checkmark that goes towards convicting Merlino and others
of being involved
in a racketeer-influenced corrupt organization.
It was a great result.
Previte was becoming more trusted by Merlino.
We thought it was only a matter of time until Merlino
brought something more serious to Previte.
Ron meets with Joey Merlino one day.
He comes back after the meeting,
and he tells us that Joey introduced him to "his guy" in Boston.
Bobby Luisi.
Bobby's one of the major players in the Mob.
Bobby's got a history of narcotics.
Bobby Luisi was well-known for selling drugs.
And we believed he was still selling drugs.
Why does Merlino want Previte to deal with Luisi?
'Cause he knows Luisi can move cocaine.
Why is that important? Because Merlino's gonna profit from it.
When Joey makes that introduction,
Previte, in a strategic stroke of genius,
responds to Joey,
"Well, that's great. I've got a guy in Boston too."
Thinking that that was an opportunity for us to introduce an undercover agent.
John Terry called me.
He said, "We have this golden opportunity."
"We got a chance to make a case against Luisi in Boston
and Merlino in Philadelphia."
Right away, those are two magic names to the FBI.
That adrenaline kicked in, and I was like, "Yeah."
"Where do I sign up?"
The idea is Luisi sells cocaine to Mike McGowan,
and Luisi would give the portion of the proceeds to Merlino.
So it links Merlino to the drug sale to McGowan.
The cover story was that Mike's an import-export guy,
which is code for, "I can do drugs. I can do stolen stuff."
It's tailor-made for anything you want it to be.
I have a business out at Logan Airport.
The Irish International Office.
And because I'm supposed to be involved in Irish goods,
it was packed with Irish flags, dolls, leprechauns.
I got so sick of Irish stuff.
When we were preparing for the first meeting,
the technical squad had come into my office
and wired it for audio and video,
and the camera had been placed behind the desk inside a clock.
We can capture video looking directly at the wise guys.
Very clear and easy to identify who they are.
And the audio, you just don't get opportunities like this very often.
The first meeting, that was a big day
because I was basically auditioning in front of them.
And if I had flunked the audition,
we were done in Boston in one day.
If the initial meeting is not successful,
not only is the undercover operation dead,
but there's a significant risk to Previte and Mike McGowan
of being hurt or killed.
Yeah.
You're on a tightrope, and there's no safety net.
One slip, you can get killed.
I'm trying to convince them that I worked well with Previte,
made him a lot of money in Philadelphia. I can do the same in Boston.
At that point, Luisi and Previte had asked me
to leave the room so they could talk privately.
Yeah.
I was very nervous.
There are thousands of thoughts going through your mind.
They talked for about five minutes, and then I came back in.
And then he says…
…"You're with us."
In the Mafia, "You're with us" is a very important statement.
He's saying, "You will work for me under my protection."
Inside, I was like, "Boom."
We couldn't have had a better result.
Now it's time to turn it on and set up some deals.
Mike was now on the inside, and we were making significant headway.
Eh…
We can now move to the next phase,
which is to introduce the cocaine deal.
I told Luisi the person who had given me the diamonds
wanted to exchange it not in cash but in cocaine.
-He wants to swap. -He wants to swap.
He wants three bricks for the diamonds.
Three bricks are street slang for three kilograms of cocaine.
We were in trouble.
I followed him outside down into a stairwell.
That meeting is critical,
and if it doesn't work, there's a lot at stake.
Yeah.
That was a bad day.
The deal didn't come together.
We're working hard to make this happen,
but if I can't do my job, we're done.
The cocaine deal, it's not happening.
It's a big black hole in the operation.
That's when Previte set up a three-way call
between Luisi in Boston and Merlino in Philadelphia
to try to get the deal back on track.
All the chips were pushed into the center of the table on that one meeting.
"That guy, do what you got to do for him."
"That guy" is our undercover agent, Mike McGowan.
Joey Merlino, by asking that question,
just gave approval for the drug deal to happen.
In very coded language,
but very clear language to FBI agents and mobsters,
Merlino gave the green light for the drug deal.
Joey, in his own words, is now involved.
We have that phone call on the 28th.
And on April 30th,
I'm literally sitting in my office,
and there's a knock on the door.
And there's a stranger there.
And he says he was sent by Luisi.
Hey, traffic was brutal.
I'll tell ya. Oof.
When he introduced himself, he introduced himself as Bobby Carrozza.
And I immediately recognized the name because of his father,
who was also in the Mob.
-Okay. -Okay?
-Bye. -Okay, bye.
All right.
He makes a comment about the window.
He's being careful.
And he puts the briefcase on my desk
and opens it up.
There's two packages in there, two kilos of cocaine.
They both have 215 written on them.
215 is the area code for Philadelphia.
As far as I'm concerned, as an FBI agent,
that's just like putting Joey Merlino's signature on those kilos.
Worked out well.
It's all on video.
Cocaine exchanged, deal done, deal consummated.
But, on its own, it wasn't gonna be sufficient.
That surveillance video
had the potential to be very damning evidence.
But Luisi did not handle the drugs or the money.
So there was still not enough to connect the dots.
In Philadelphia,
there were unsolved serious crimes
that we were trying to get information about…
…to see if Joey Merlino had any connection to them.
We were receiving information about his longtime Mob associate Ralph Natale…
…who was out of jail after serving 15 years on a drug conviction.
Natale and Merlino were housed together in jail.
They hatched a plan
that they were gonna ultimately take over the Philadelphia Mafia.
Joey Merlino was actually under Ralph Natale.
Ralph Natale got the kiss from the five families
to take over after Stanfa.
But Joey Merlino
was the real power.
How about Joe? Can I ask you about him?
Joe is a good, solid young man. That's all I can say.
I know if I was in trouble, or in a foxhole,
I'd like to be with Joe Merlino.
Ralph Natale is the boss, and Joey Merlino is the underboss.
But like any other puppet,
you know, Joey's pulling the strings behind Ralph's back.
And he had no loyalty to Joey.
While we're still keeping track of Merlino,
I authored 18 consecutive wiretap affidavits
to bug Ralph Natale.
As a tech agent,
you're a legalized burglar.
So if someone happens to walk in,
you never know what can happen.
The Ralph Natale apartment,
it was a high-rise building.
He was on the top floor. They called it the penthouse.
Ralph was down in Atlantic City,
and they expected him to be there all night.
Our job was to do a surreptitious entry
to put microphones into his living room area.
The lock guys, they were able to open the door.
And a cat made a beeline for the door.
At the last second,
one of the lock guys was able to block the cat.
Or we would've been chasing him all over the building.
That wouldn't have been good.
We're in there placing the microphones.
And the surveillance agent lets us know…
…"Gotta get outta here.
"Natale's heading back."
We don't have much time.
Everybody stopped and started tidying up.
Getting out of there before he made it home.
We picked up some snippets of conversation on the wiretaps.
We found out that Natale and his son-in-law
were making and selling methamphetamine.
The audio didn't implicate Merlino,
but it was a significant development.
We made a decision to arrest Natale at that point in time.
Today, the FBI announced the arrest of Philadelphia, South Jersey,
La Cosa Nostra boss, Ralph Natale,
this time for a methamphetamine sales conspiracy
involving five other reputed local gangsters.
Ralph's involvement in the methamphetamine
is a death sentence for him.
He's a convicted drug dealer.
He's going to jail longer than he'll live.
So it was a strategic decision on our part
to make sure that we plant the seeds,
that he knew if he decided he wanted to talk about any possible cooperation,
we were receptive to that.
But he had given his life to the Mafia,
and he wasn't gonna talk.
So the pressure to get to Merlino just got ratcheted up.
We felt like we wanted more, and we needed more.
So now it was all up to Mike McGowan.
The US Attorney's Office weren't satisfied
that we had tied Luisi to the cocaine deal,
even though he set it up, even though we had the phone call two days earlier.
But I also had to tell them
there was no way that Luisi was gonna physically touch the cocaine.
That's how these bosses think,
that if they don't touch it, they're okay.
And the plan at that point was if we were able to get more cocaine,
that I would try to pay Luisi directly.
That day I was in my office, and just like Carrozza in April,
there's a knock on my door.
It's Tommy Wilson, a member of Luisi's crew.
Yeah?
Wilson had a paper bag with him,
and inside, there was another kilo of cocaine.
He comes into the office, takes a kilo of cocaine out of his bag,
and then he puts it in the bag that Mike gave him.
That is beyond a reasonable doubt.
We wanted to make sure that Luisi was directly tied to that delivery.
So when Luisi calls,
I told him I didn't trust Wilson with the cash.
He would have to come meet me outside of my office.
Special Agent Robert Callen.
We are in the vicinity of 171 Milk Street,
approximately 2:05 p.m.,
videotaping an undercover agent
at the intersection of Milk and India Street,
Boston, Massachusetts.
Mike would get there early as the undercover agent.
He wants to make sure that he's comfortable.
This is an ideal location. There's people walking around.
Where no one's gonna see us.
Within the hour, Luisi came strutting down the street.
This is our one shot
to get Luisi taking drug money.
Just as I went to hand him the 24,000,
a van blocked the surveillance post.
So I pull the money back.
Once the van cleared,
I paid him.
And it's crystal clear.
Approximately 2:10 p.m.,
Bobby Luisi departs after making pickup
from undercover agent in a Dodge pickup truck.
Doesn't get any better than that. That's a home run.
We had him.
We now had Luisi on tape taking cocaine money.
The US Attorney's Office decided
that there was enough evidence to go forward.
We had evidence of serious crimes,
racketeering, drug trafficking,
and now, finally, it's time to arrest Joey Merlino.
At seven o'clock this morning,
FBI agents went to a second-floor apartment
and arrested 37-year-old Joey Merlino.
Why don't you put in your newspaper they gave me a warrant with nothing on it?
-Are you related? -I'm the mother.
-You're the mother? -Get out.
He was off the street,
as were several of his associates and members
that made up the hierarchy of the Philadelphia Mob.
We're here today to announce the arrest of 11 individuals,
including Joseph Merlino,
following long-term intensive investigations
of La Cosa Nostra activity.
It is alleged that Merlino and three others conspired
to distribute cocaine,
and the cocaine was distributed
to an individual who was, in fact, an FBI undercover agent.
The shadow of the Mob had been hanging over Philadelphia for a long, long time.
Maybe it was time to see the light.
It was a big deal.
Merlino was finally going to face justice.
After Merlino's arrest,
I was told to be over to the Camden County courthouse.
Ralph Natale was brought up into one of the witness rooms.
He said to me that he wanted to cooperate.
It was just an incredible moment.
Ralph Natale was the first sitting Mob boss
in the history of the American Mafia
to come in to cooperate.
And we accepted his cooperation.
Ralph Natale realized
that if he was convicted on this drug case,
that he would get a sentence
which would make it very difficult for him to ever get out of jail.
The fact that Natale is cooperating may be the worst-kept secret in the world.
Law-enforcement sources indicate that Natale is saying plenty.
He's talking about Mob murders and about other Mob activity.
Ralph, the rat, traitor.
It was sickening.
Thank God he wasn't involved over there with Vietnam.
He'd have gave up the whole United States, this guy.
It's beyond me.
I mean, I did 32-plus years. It never entered my mind to be a rat.
Uh, and I can't stand 'em. I can't stand 'em.
So many rats now, they all have podcasts.
Flipping Ralph helped us to add murder and attempted murder
to the charges against Merlino and his crew.
Now we have to prove what we allege they did
in front of a jury of 12 people who have no idea about any of this.
-Don't trip. -Joey, how you doing?
As big as the Stanfa trial was, this was even bigger.
Lots of media.
How are you doing today?
-Do you have anything to say? -No.
It was tough to get a seat.
Because Mob boss Ralph Natale was gonna testify
against Joey Merlino and his crew.
Ralph was brought up on the witness stand.
Now the challenge was to tape his testimony
so the jury would believe him.
Were you a member of a criminal organization?
Yes, I was.
-What was the name? -La Cosa Nostra.
And what is La Cosa Nostra?
La Cosa Nostra is a descent into hell.
And whether it was an extortion,
whether it was a beating
or a murder,
when you rise to the position of the boss,
you rule over everybody and everything.
That would be Joey Merlino.
The 65-year-old Natale admitted shooting two men to death.
He says he conspired with fellow mobsters to kill six others.
Natale even detailed his own Mob initiation ceremony.
He says it was none other than Joey Merlino
who administered the Mafia's secret oath.
Ralph Natale was one piece of a puzzle.
But you need the entire picture to convict.
With Mike's videotape
and Previte's wire,
we felt we had enough.
Now we have to wait until the jury comes back with a verdict.
It was a four-month trial,
and when the jury came back with the verdict,
I would call it surprising.
Joey Merlino, the hard-charging young Mob boss,
is headed to prison tonight but not for life.
In a stunning decision,
the jury rejected murder and drug-dealing charges
and convicted Merlino and his colleagues of racketeering.
Joey got convicted of the extortion, the loan-sharking, the gambling,
but not of the murders, attempted murders, or drugs.
The drug dealing they lost because Joey was, on tape, very vague.
Do what you gotta do for him?
You didn't know what Joey was talking about.
Where on the tape was he talking about cocaine?
Joey was able to walk away from the drug case
even though his guys in Boston were convicted.
Jurors rejected the testimony of Mob boss-turned-informant Ralph Natale
when they acquitted Merlino and his six codefendants
of 11 Mob hits or attempted murders.
Ralph was tainted by his criminal past.
He was looking at life in prison,
and I think the jury felt he would say anything to avoid that.
The verdict was indicative of that.
We were disappointed not to get the murder and drug charges.
But Joey Merlino and others received jail sentences
up to 14 years in federal prison.
And the city was definitely safer with Merlino behind bars.
Every boss is dead or in jail.
It's as simple as that, and I'm sure that will continue.
We will continue to investigate organized crime,
and we will continue to successfully prosecute.
What the feds accomplished through that period of time,
it's one after the other,
a victory for law enforcement against organized crime.
And each conviction diminishes the crime family.
Does the Mob still exist to this day? Yes, it does.
Does it have the same clout? Does it make the same money?
Do they commit the same violence and murders that they used to?
No, they do not.
In the 1990s,
the FBI took out the leadership of the Philadelphia Mob
as well as several made members and associates.
The Philadelphia Mafia was decimated and has never been the same.