Organized Crime: 25 Years After Valachi (1988): FBI and U.S. Attorney testimony on the Philadelphia family

Passages of the April 1988 Senate hearings in which FBI Deputy Assistant Director Anthony Daniels traced the Philadelphia LCN family from Salvatore Sabella to Nicodemo Scarfo, and U.S. Attorney Edward S. G. Dennis, Jr. described the killings after Angelo Bruno's death. Testimony, not findings.

Date

1988-04-11/1988-04-29

Kind

hearing

Source

Internet Archive, microfiche scan of the GPO print

Retrieved

2026-10-12

Docket

S. Hrg. 100-906

Rights

A work of the United States Congress. Public domain in the United States. 17 U.S.C. § 105. The scan is of a Government Printing Office microfiche; the Internet Archive lists it in its us-gpo collection.

Passages from “Organized Crime: 25 Years After Valachi,” hearings of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, April 11 to 29, 1988, printed as S. Hrg. 100-906. This archive read the OCR of the microfiche scan for printed pages 25 to 29 and 194 to 196. This page covers the Philadelphia passages only.

FBI Deputy Assistant Director Anthony E. Daniels said he had “selected the Philadelphia family” to show how a family evolved. “The family was formed by Salvatore Sabella, who had been convicted of murder in Sicily in 1905.” He said its presence “was visible in a major gang war that raged in Philadelphia from 1926 to 1928,” and that Sabella was charged with killing two men in 1929 and acquitted. He described Angelo Bruno’s rise, “Bruno’s 22-year reign,” and its end: “Angelo Bruno was shotgunned to death on March 21, 1980, as he sat in a car in front of his residence.” He said Philip Testa succeeded Bruno and that “on March 18, 1981, they succeeded in detonating a bomb on Testa’s front porch as he was returning home, and Testa was killed,” after which “the commission approved Nicodemo Scarfo as a new boss.” He noted that “In 1987 Scarfo was convicted for attempting to extort $1 million from a Philadelphia developer.”

Edward S. G. Dennis, Jr., United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, spoke of “Angelo Bruno, who was Don of the Philadelphia mob for quite a number of years,” and “who was assassinated brutally in front of his own home in South Philadelphia in 1980, and with that event touched off a series of homicides, 20 or so, that took place over the next 5 or 6 years.” His prepared statement (p. 732) was not read.

This is FBI and prosecutor testimony about the Bureau’s intelligence and about pending cases. It is not a court finding. The print includes a chart titled “Philadelphia Hierarchy (1987)” at page 760; its OCR is unreadable, and no names are taken from it.