Record
Court opinion
1990-08-01
CourtListener (Free Law Project), text of the opinion
United States v. Pungitore, 910 F.2d 1084 (3d Cir. 1990)
Third Circuit opinion of August 1, 1990 affirming the RICO convictions of Nicodemo Scarfo and thirteen co-defendants from the 1988 Philadelphia trial, with the court's account of the family's succession from Angelo Bruno to Philip Testa to Scarfo.
- Date
- 1990-08-01
- Kind
- court-opinion
- Retrieved
- 2026-10-12
- Docket
- Nos. 89-1371, 89-1372, 89-1393, 89-1395, 89-1396, 89-1397, 89-1400, 89-1401, 89-1402, 89-1403, 89-1404, 89-1409, 89-1446, 89-1448
- Rights
- Opinion of a United States court. Works of the federal judiciary are in the public domain in the United States. The text was read on CourtListener.
United States Court of Appeals, Third Circuit, August 1, 1990 (Greenberg, J.), on consolidated appeals. “Following a ten week trial which concluded on November 19, 1988, in the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, appellants, all members of the Nicodemo Scarfo crime family, were found guilty of conspiring to participate and participating in the affairs of an enterprise through a pattern of racketeering activity.” The district court’s own opinion gives November 17 as the last day of trial (711 F. Supp. 1315); each date is the court’s own.
The facts section, drawn from trial testimony, states: “It is clear, however, that Angelo Bruno served as boss from approximately 1960 until his murder in 1980, when he was succeeded by Phillip Testa. Appellant Nicodemo Scarfo functioned as consigliere under Testa and became boss after Testa was murdered by being blown up in his house in early 1981.” A footnote adds: “After Bruno was killed, his consigliere Antonio Caponigro, known as Tony Bananas, also was killed.” The court says the conspiracy charged ran “from April, 1976 through October, 1987,” and that the family’s activities “included nine murders,” numbers and sports-betting businesses, and extortion of bookmakers and drug dealers.
The opinion recounts the killings that the jury heard about in detail. This page does not repeat them, beyond the places the court names for two of them: the 1978 killing of a former municipal court judge “in the Flamingo Bar and Restaurant in Atlantic City,” and the December 1979 killing of a contractor at “an apartment in Margate, New Jersey.” Before the federal trial, Scarfo had been acquitted in state courts of two of those killings; the court held that double jeopardy did not bar charging them as racketeering acts. The court rejected the defendants’ other constitutional, sentencing and evidentiary challenges.
These are the appeals court’s statements of the trial record. They are quoted on the person pages for Bruno, Philip Testa and Scarfo and are not copied onto a family chart.