Philip Testa - Relationship With Salvie

Relationship With Salvie

His son Salvatore had a close relationship with his father and became involved with him in the rackets of drug trafficking, loansharking and extortion.

Salvie was all for 'this thing'. Knew it inside out. Knew it better than guys who were sixty years old and who'd been in it for forty years. Because of his father. He'd been a good teacher. Salvie had nerve and he didn't care who he killed. Sometimes we used to go and we'd come back and tell him, "Well, the kids were in the car, the family's in the car.' "I don't care whose in the car', he'd say. 'Everybody goes.' That's the kind of guy he was. One Thanksgiving Day he wanted us to go into Sonny Riccobene's house where Robert Riccobene was havin' dinner with his family. 'Shoot everybody in the house'. But he and Charlie Iannece and Faffy made up some story that he didn't show up. Just to appease Salvie. 'Cause we didn't go for killing kids. It was something we drew a line with, but he (Testa) was just so full of venom that he didn't care. He was a guy made for 'this thing.' He loved it. He lived it. And he was very bitter about what happened to his father (Philip), about the way his father got killed, blown up with nails in him.

After murdered Frank (Chickie) Narducci Sr., the mobster that orchestrated his father's death and headed the coup of the Scarfo crime family, Nicholas Caramandi said, "Salvie used to say to me, 'I wish that motherfucker was alive so I could kill him again.' This is how much he hated this man. He had no mercy on anybody. Business was business, and killing to him was business." Philadelphia Inquirer reporter George Anastasia wrote, "Salvatore Testa loved it all, the stalkings, the murders, even the Enrico Riccobene suicide. He was the South Philadelphia equivalent of a Main Line blue blood. He was born to be a wiseguy." Mobster-turned-informant Nicholas Caramandi spoke about Salvatore's upbringing by his father and his son Salvatore's brief courtship of Maria Merlino, the daughter of Salvatore Merlino, Nicky Scarfo's underboss and Testa's godfather,

He (Salvatore) gets into a beef with Maria. She's telling him, "My father (Merlino) bought me all this jewelry", stuff like that… While they were waiting to get married, Maria's having the fucking house redone with French toilets and Jacuzzis. And even though it was sort an old fashioned, that's the way Salvie wanted to live. He wanted to live in his father's footsteps. He didn't like all this fancy stuff.

When Philip was murdered Salvatore was very angered and personally hunted down and sought to seek out revenge on his father's murderers. Exactly one year after his father's bombing, Rocco Marinucci, the man who waited outside their household and detonated the bomb, was found in a parking lot in South Philadelphia, with cherry bombs from Salvatore stuffed down his throat and shot to death. He also wanted to personally shoot Frank Narducci Sr. for his involvement and waited so that he could see Narducci's expression on his face, before pulling the trigger. Philip's wife of over twenty-five years Alfia died of natural causes in 1980, in that same year, in March, longtime family boss Angelo Bruno would be murdered, and Testa's father became boss of the family. He was known to wear, on occasion, ten-gallon cowboy hats and cowboy boots, which his son Salvatore would later adopt into his own fashion wardrobe. His son and apparent successor to his criminal empire was Salvatore Testa was twenty-five years old when Philip was murdered in a bomb blast at his family's home located at 2117 Porter Street in South Philadelphia. When Philip died he left his son an estate worth $800,000 that included a run-down bar in Atlantic City on a site where Donald Trump decided to build the Trump Plaza (Atlantic City). Trump paid Testa $1.1 million for the right to tear the bar down.