Monday, May 5, 2025

Admiral McCain

 One of the good things about working in the Communications Radio Division aboard an aircraft carrier during the Vietnam War was that radiomen were the first to know about everything. 

For example, when fleet headquarters ordered the carrier to leave “Yankee Station” off the coast of North Vietnam and sail towards Subic Bay on such and such a date, the word spread quickly among the radio division. The radiomen in turn told their friends in other divisions aboard the ship the good news about heading to Subic Bay and the great wide-open liberty town of Olongapo. 

The Kitty Hawk’s captain often complained that the entire ship’s crew and air wing knew about the order to proceed to Subic Bay before he did. 

While on watch in the Message Processing Center one evening in 1971 during our final Yankee Station line period, I saw a copy of a classified CIA report that was sent to the Task Force 77 admiral and the Kitty Hawk captain. 

The report announced the capture of a North Vietnamese spy in Manila. The spy, named Thanh Ban, was the subject of a nation-wide manhunt in the Philippines. He had been posing in Olongapo as a Filipino Chinese merchant named Shi Chen as he spied on the massive Subic Bay U.S. naval base. But after an assassination plot had been uncovered, Ban fled to Manila and was hidden by the New People’s Army (NPA), the communist guerrillas at war with the Philippine government. 

An elite Filipino police unit, accompanied and assisted by an unnamed CIA officer, raided a NPA hideout in Manila. Four Filipino NPA Communist guerrillas were killed in the shootout with the elite unit. One NPA officer and Ban were captured.

The report noted that although Ban was a dedicated Communist, he did not relish being executed by the Filipinos or spending many years in an awful Filipino prison, so he confessed to the commander of the elite unit and the CIA officer. 

Ban told of the plan to execute Admiral John S. McCain aboard the USS Kitty Hawk while the aircraft carrier was off the coast of North Vietnam.  


On our very first line period on Yankee Station in December of 1970, Admiral John S. McCain, the Commander-in-Chief, Pacific Command, known as CINCPAC, flew aboard. As CINPAC, Admiral McCain was the commander of all American forces in the Vietnam War.  

I was working in the Message Processing Center when I heard a commotion.

Admiral McCain, escorted by the Task Force admiral, the ship’s captain and other ranking officers, entered the center for a brief tour. I stood at attention like the other sailors in the center and heard McCain yell “At ease.” 

The admiral, a short, thin and wizened officer, with a cigar as big as a pony’s leg, walked by me and other sailors on watch. He stopped, looked me in the eye, and said in a gruff voice, “Get a haircut, sailor!” 

“Yes, Sir,” I replied. 

The admiral and his entourage all laughed. 

As they were passing by, I heard the admiral ask what movie was showing on our closed-circuit television on that evening. An aide responded that MASH was scheduled to air three times for the ship’s three different watches on their down time.   

I saw the admiral grimace and say that we should be watching the movie Patton with the great actor George C. Scott, and not some anti-war crap. 

I liked both films, but the good admiral did not ask me for my opinion. 

After Patton showed in the early evening, McCain appeared on our closed-circuit TV. Noted for his profane language, the admiral opened with, "Good goddamn evening.” He went on to give a rousing and profane speech about our mission to contain the Vietnamese Communists in Vietnam. He praised our Navy commanders on the carrier as well as the young crew. 

He ended his speech by stating, “The hippies back home say ‘make love not war.” I say if you’re man enough, you can do both.” 

There were both cheers and groans from the more than 5,000 sailors and airmen about the ship. 

“Cut him some slack,” I told a friend who had groaned loudly next to me. 

“Do you know his son, a Navy carrier pilot, is a POW in North Vietnam? How would you like to be the top officer in the war while the enemy is holding your son? And you don’t know if he is being tortured because of you?” 

Admiral McCain’s son was U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander John S. McCain III. The future U.S. Senator and presidential candidate was then a prisoner of war being held in North Vietnam having been shot down in 1967. The admiral said little about his POW son, and I can only imagine how he suffered in silence.

 

Later, reading messages to and from the Subic Bay naval station and our message center, I learned about the plot to assassinate Admiral McCain aboard the Kitty Hawk. 

Lieutenant Colonel Cesar Rosa of the Olongapo City Police was a short and thin officer, but he was wiry and hard, and he had a stern face and cruel dark eyes that frightened the people that he investigated and subsequently arrested. He also had a reputation for being relentless and ruthless. 

Luz dela Cruz was an unattractive older woman with a skeletal body, a taunt face and protruding buck teeth. Still, she had her customers in The Ritz, an Olongapo bar that catered to American sailors. Most of her customers who bought her drinks were “Cherry Boy” young virgins and older American sailors that were not too fussy about looks. 

She also had customers she sold shabu crystal meth to at the bar. Luz dela Cruz was her own best customer. When a young sailor went wild on shabu and took on two American Marines in The Ritz, the Olongapo police arrested the sailor. 

Prior to handing over the young sailor to the American Shore patrol, he was questioned by Rosa. 

"Where did you get the shabu?"

The sailor, who was still jumpy from the drug, replied, "I bought the meth from Luz."

He said that he had never taken the drug before and he had never felt so strong and invincible.  

"So why did those two Marines I picked a fight with beat the living shit out of me?" 

After turning over the sailor to the Shore Patrol, Rosa and Mario Dizon, his huge sergeant, drove to The Ritz and arrested dela Cruz. Back at the police station, the scared and desperate bar girl quickly gave up her shabu supplier. As a bonus, she confessed to collecting information about U.S. 7th Fleet ships from the drunk and high sailors and passed on the information on to an NPA agent. 

Rosa and Dizon headed out to arrest the NPA spy. Fernado Diaz, a muscular and seasoned warrior, fought the two Filipino police officers when they tried to arrest him. Diaz swung punches widely and tried to pull a knife from his pants pocket, but Dizon pinned the spy's arms and Rosa punched Diaz repeatedly in the face. Dizon took Diaz to the ground and placed handcuffs on him. 

Diaz was taken to the police station. Rosa called Boone Cantrell, a Naval Investigative Service special agent who worked at the Subic Bay naval base. 

Diaz, bruised by his fight with the Filipino police officers, was quiet as he sat in a chair and faced Cantrell, who was tall and Lincolnesque, and the much shorter Rosa. 

Worried about what Rosa and the American agent might do to him, he confessed to being an NPA spy. He asked for a deal. He would not only confess to passing on intelligence tidbits to his NPA superior in Manila, he would also confess to working with a North Vietnamese spy. Rosa and Cantrell looked at each other in amazement. Rosa agreed to a deal. 

To their amazement, Diaz told them that the NPA had a spy aboard the USS Kitty Hawk. The spy, Roberto Santos, was a Filipino serving in the U.S. Navy as a disbursing clerk aboard the aircraft carrier. Santos was ordered to meet with Diaz whenever the ship visited Olongapo. Santos, the son of an NPA guerrilla, had been ordered to join the American Navy. Although as a disbursing clerk, he did not have access to classified information, he was useful to a point. 

During the Kitty Hawks first port of call to Subic Bay for the 1970-1971 combat cruise, Diaz and the North Vietnamese spy, called Shi Chen, spoke about Santos. Chen said that Santos should be assigned to assassinate Admiral McCain when he visited the aircraft carrier later that month. 

Diaz objected and told his Vietnamese Communist brother-in-arms that Santos was not trained for assassinations, but the North Vietnamese spy said that it did not matter. Even if the assassination failed, it would be a psychological victory for the Communists. 

Since Diaz’s orders were to assist Chen in any matter, he met Santos at an Olongapo hotel and handed him a .25 semi-automatic pistol. Santos cried and pleaded with Diaz. He had never killed anyone, he said. He was also concerned with his own safety. What will happen to him after he shot the famous admiral?  

Diaz was adamant. Santos will follow his orders. 

After listening to Diaz’s confession, Cantrell rushed back to his Subic Bay NIS office and sent an urgent message to the USS Kitty Hawk. 


Aboard the Kitty Hawk, the message was received and distributed quickly. The admiral appeared unconcerned when told of the assassination plot. Two Marines armed with .45’s were added to the admiral’s group, and the Marine Division’s captain and two enlisted Marines armed with M-16 rifles rushed to Santos’ berthing compartment. 

Santos raised his hands in surrender and told the Marines that the pistol was in his locker. He seemed almost relieved to be arrested and therefore he would not have to shoot the admiral.

Admiral McCain later flew off the carrier. His son, John McCain, a 31-year-old Navy lieutenant commander, was held as a POW for five and a half years. He was finally released on March 14, 1973.

And looking back, I didn’t get a haircut after being ordered to do so by Admiral McCain. 

I’m proud, somewhat perversely, of the fact that I disobeyed a direct order from a four-star admiral.




Tuesday, April 29, 2025

Crime Fiction: 'Murder By Fire'

Murder By Fire

By Paul Davis

I was sitting at my desk in the Radio Communications Division's Message Processing Center aboard the USS Kitty Hawk in 1971 as the aircraft carrier was on “Yankee Station” in the Gulf of Tonkin, launching aircraft that flew combat sorties against the North Vietnamese, when I came across a copy of a message for the ship’s captain.  

My small desk was located in a cubbyhole partially hidden by a series of pneumatic tubes, which we called “Bunny Tubes.” We used pneumatic power to shoot high priority messages, such as the message I was reading, in a two-foot-long missile-like container to the captain’s office and to other senior officers aboard the ship. 

As I was responsible for the administrative security of messages that were distributed, filed and eventually destroyed, a copy of the message landed on my desk. The message informed the captain that former Engineman 3rd Class Robert Bean, a former sailor assigned to the Kitty Hawk, had died in prison.    

I remembered Bean as I attended a U.S Navy firefighting school in 1970 with him prior to our setting sail to Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War.

After the deadly fire that killed 134 sailors and injured many more on the aircraft carrier USS Forrestal in 1967, all carrier sailors were ordered to attend firefighting schools. After all, one can't call the fire department while at sea. We were the fire department. 

As the USS Forrestal was conducting combat operations on Yankee Station, a fire erupted on July 29, 1967. An electrical failure caused a Zuni rocket attached to an F-4 Phantom to launch as the jet fighter was sitting on the flight deck. The rocket struck another aircraft on the flight deck, an A-4 Skyhawk. The aircraft’s highly flammable jet fuel spread quickly across the flight deck, which ignited a series of explosions that blew sailors and aircraft apart.

At the school, we sat through flight deck footage of the Forrestal fire and watched bombs, missiles and jet fuel ignite, and we saw sailors die from the fire and explosions. I still recall the gruesome images to this day. 

I liked that officers, chiefs and other senior enlisted people trained alongside junior teenage seamen like me at the firefighting school. At one point, all of us were assigned a part of the long hose and told that we had a certain number of seconds to put it together before the instructor turned on the water. The first two attempts failed, and we all were soaked and knocked down by the great force of the water. Laughing together, we were successful on the third attempt. We were wet but happy to have worked successfully as a team.   

I was 18 years old at the time, and Bean was a couple of years older. He was squat with dirty blonde hair and a pimply face. I recall that he was surly and inattentive. More than once, the instructors screamed at him to get him to focus. He was also chewed out by a Kitty Hawk senior chief who was also taking the firefighting course.

“Son, you’re not taking this training seriously. This course can not only save your worthless fuckin' life, but it can also save the lives of your shipmates should there be a fire on the ship,” the crusty chief said in a gruff voice. “So get your head outta your ass and get with the program.”     

Bean stayed to himself that week and he didn’t join the camaraderie of his fellow sailors. He was not much of a team player, although the course stressed teamwork.    

“Always keep the hose’s stream of water between the fire and you,” I recall one of the Navy fire instructors telling us, "If you let the flames get around you, they'll reach out and hit you like a boxer's jab."

And that’s what happened to me.

We were crowded into a square cement structure that simulated a ship’s compartment. I held the nozzle of the long hose, and I began to wave the hose in short left to right movements. As I waved the hose too sharply to the left, I allowed the fire to slip past me on my right. The flicker of flame seemed almost human - perhaps even supernaturally evil - as it lashed out like a whip and struck my right arm.

The pain and shock of getting burned and seeing my arm on fire caused me to drop the hose’s nozzle and jump back. Fortunately, the instructor grabbed the discarded nozzle quickly and he ordered me out of the burning structure. To my further embarrassment, the heavy smoke and the hood of my poncho impaired my vision and I hit my head on the oval hatchway as I was exiting the structure. The other instructors and medical corpsmen rushed to me, as they believed I was seriously injured.

As it turned out, my burns were superficial and the head injury was only a bump, but my pride received some serious blows that day. I returned to the fire and completed the course without further incidents.

After graduating from firefighting school, I went on to serve on a Damage Control Team aboard the carrier and fought some real fires, but thankfully those fires were nothing along the lines of the horrendous and deadly fire on the USS Forrestal. With an abundance of bombs, missiles and JP jet fuel onboard, even a small fire on a carrier can escalate and become a major catastrophe, as it did on the USS Forrestal.

 

I later learned that Bean, who never had a girlfriend until he joined the Navy and met a portly and exuberant college student in San Diego, did not want to leave her when the aircraft carrier departed San Diego on route to Hawaii, then the Philippines, and lastly, to the Gulf of Tonkin off the coast of North Vietnam. 

After the aircraft carrier made a port of call to Hawaii, Bean was so angry and heartbroken that he became drunk in a Honolulu bar just off Waikiki Beach. 

When the bar closed, Bean took a cab back to the aircraft carrier at the Pearl Harbor naval base and he staggered aboard and leaned against bulkheads in the passageways as he traveled to his workstation below decks to an engine room compartment. The compartment space had three sailors on watch, and they told Bean to go to his rack and sleep it off as he was annoying them with his sad sack love story. Bean sat in a chair and appeared to pass out, so the enginemen on duty ignored him. 

When one of the enginemen left the compartment to go to the head, and the other two were talking to each other with their backs to him, Bean in his drunken state had an idea to punish his uncaring shipmates and cripple the carrier so it would head back to San Diego for repairs rather than go on to Southeast Asia. 

Angry at the enginemen, as well as with the entire U.S. Navy, Bean took out his lighter and reached into a trash can filled with paper. He lit a piece of paper and dropped it back in the trash can, which quickly set fire to the other papers. Bean then lifted the trash can and tossed it into a corner near a supply cabinet and ran out of the engine room compartment. 

The trash can fire ignited some stored flammable material, and the compartment was quickly engulfed with fire and smoke. The two enginemen tried to contain the fire with fire extinguishers, but they were soon overcome with smoke, fell to the deck, and died. The engineman who had gone to the head raised the alarm.   

The fire was extinguished by a Damage Control Team that came on the scene in less than a minute. Although there was severe damage to the compartment, there was not enough damage to prevent the aircraft carrier from departing Pearl Harbor later that week and sailing towards the Philippines. 

After a brief investigation, Bean was arrested, court-martialed and sentenced to prison for arson and murder. He never saw his girlfriend again.

 

The message to the captain that I read at my desk reported that Bean, who was left unattended in a prison kitchen for only a moment, died of self-immolation, having doused himself in cooking oil and then set himself on fire. He died horribly as he was engulfed in searing flames as he fell to the floor.  

Some thought it was a fitting death for a man who had committed murder by fire.   

© 2024 By Paul Davis 



 

Sunday, March 30, 2025

Nick The Broker


 Nick the Broker 

By Paul Davis 

Over a second cup of coffee in the kitchen of his grandmother’s South Philadelphia rowhouse, former Cosa Nostra capo and government cooperating witness Salvatore “Salvie Shotgun” Stillitano launched into telling me stories about his life and his late father's life. 

As a writer, I found his stories to be interesting, and my tape recorder was running to capture them. He spoke in a fast clip with a dramatic flair as he told me about his great-grandfather and namesake, Salvatore Stillitano, his grandfather Lorenzo and his father Nunzio.  

While living and traveling with his late father as a teenager, Nick Stillitano regaled his son with stories of their Cosa Nostra tradition of crime.      

According to his father, the elder Salvatore was a “Man of Honor” and boss in the Fortuna clan in the Province of Palermo in Sicily. Life was good for Stillitano and the clan, but the old mafioso was wise enough to know that America was the future for Cosa Nostra, so he sent his second oldest son Lorenzo to South Philadelphia where he had cousins. His oldest son remained with him in Sicily. 

Lorenzo Stillitano grew up in South Philly and had charm and movie star good looks. He was outgoing, engaging and a good earner for the Philadelphia Cosa Nostra organized crime family.

Lorenzo was a bootlegger and gambler, and with approval from the boss, Angelo Bruno, he used his Sicilian family contacts to foster overseas business. Bruno loaned Lorenzo Stillitano and his overseas connections to the Bonfiglio crime family, cementing Bruno’s relationship with Lupo Bonfiglio.  

Lorenzo’s son Nunzio, known as Nick, was born and raised in South Philadelphia. He followed Lorenzo and became a soldier in The Philadelphia Cosa Nostra organized crime family. He dressed conservatively and he was a handsome man in a quiet way with dark wavey hair. He became a gambler, a local fixer and a good earner. Nick Stillitano was good with his fists and a knife, but he was also business-like, level-headed, reserved, organized, and very smart.

Nick Stillitano was a natural leader among his young, hot-tempered and violent cohorts. Angelo Bruno, the then-boss of the Philadelphia and South Jersey crime family, respected Lorenzo and saw Nick’s qualities.  

In those early days Nick Stillitano shined as an organizer and negotiator, but he also still had a reputation of being a ruthless enforcer when he absolutely needed to be one, often using a knife, hence the early nickname “Nick Stiletto.” He later became a boxing manager and promoter and was involved in illegal gambling and numerous money-making schemes. He also used some of his former boxers to do his rough work, such as Anthony “Tony Ball-Peen” Gina.

Gina was Stillitano’s longtime number two. One might not expect that a thin, 5’5 man would be the crew’s chief enforcer, but Gina was a lean and muscular former welterweight boxer who loved to knock out bigger men.

He was called “Tony Ball-Peen” in his boxing days because he was said to hit like a ball-peen hammer, but Gina also used the real thing on a good number of people outside of the ring. 

In the late 1960s Nick Stillitano and Tony Gina went to a South Philly bar to have a couple of drinks. Stillitano frowned when he saw Rocco Stucci, a fighter he once managed and then handed him over to another manager when Angelo Bruno ordered him to do so.

Stucci, an up-and-coming heavyweight, disliked Stillitano. Stucci drank and when he was drunk, he was mean and dirty. From the bar, Stucci began to insult Stillitano, calling him a crook and a faggot. Gina walked over and tried to calm down the drunken boxer, telling him that Stillitano was a made man, but Stucci brushed off Gina, calling him a “washed-up welterweight.”

Nick Stillitano did not respond to Stucci’s insults and got up calmly to leave the bar. Stucci rushed up to Stillitano and hit him in the face with a swift and hard left jab that sent Stillitano crashing into the table and chairs. Gina pulled out a short, leather-bound metal sap and began to slap the bigger boxer across the back of his head as Stucci tried to pull up Stillitano from the floor.

When Stucci got Stillitano to his feet, he felt a pain in his stomach, as Stillitano had pulled out his stiletto knife and plunged the sharp blade into Stucci’s middle. The boxer became enraged, and he tossed Stillitano across the room, all the while receiving numerous blows on his head from Gina’s sap.

Stucci shoved off the men who tried to restrain him and he threw a wild swing at Gina, who slipped the punch and stepped back. Finally, Stucci collapsed to the floor. The owner of the bar rushed Stillitano and Gina into the bar’s kitchen and out the back door before the police and an ambulance arrived.   

 

Angelo Bruno was not happy. Although he respected Nick Stillitano and he admired his late father Lorenzo, Stucci was a mob fighter, and he had made the wiseguys in Philadelphia and New York a lot of money. He called in Stillitano and Gina for a "sitdown" meeting.  

Stillitano and Gina reported to a small bar after it was closed. Bruno sat alone at a table. Bruno motioned for Stillitano and Gina to sit across from him. He said he had heard about the bar altercation from others who were there that night.

“This is not like you, Nick,” Bruno said, shaking his head sadly.

Stillitano apologized and said he was afraid the drunken boxer was going to beat him to death. 

Bruno said that they had Stucci in a private room at a hospital in New Jersey and they put out the story that that the fighter had been hit by a car. The fight he was scheduled for that month had to be postponed.

As for Nick, Bruno said he had to get out of South Philly as reporters and the local cops were asking questions.

Bruno said he arranged for Stillitano to be taken in by Bruno’s capo of the crew in Wildwood, New Jersey. He informed Stillitano that while he operated from the New Jersey shore resort town, he would still report directly to Bruno. And he would continue to promote fights for Bruno and Luigi “Lupo” Bonfiglio, the boss of the Bonfiglio Cosa Nostra organized crime family in New York, and Bruno’s friend on the commission.

The two mob bosses wanted Stillitano to continue to promote boxing matches and arrange crooked fights up and down the east coast, as well as out west. Stillitano was told to give the Wildwood capo a small taste of the profits.    

“Take Tony with you to Wildwood,” Bruno said.

Stillitano and Gina, pleased not to have been “whacked,” thanked the boss.

As Stillitano and Gina were leaving the bar, Bruno told the two men that the Wildwood crew had a problem, and he wanted them to handle it.  

“Washed up welterweight, am I?” Gina said to Stillitano as they stepped into the street. “I knocked out that big heavyweight bum, didn’t I?” 

Stucci later died from his bar fight injuries.      

 

Late that week, Stillitano and Gina drove to Wildwood and met with the capo, “Johnny Rose,” Rosetti, who was known locally as “Johnny Gavone” as he was a huge fat man, and he ate and dressed like a slob.

Rosetti welcomed Stillitano, as he knew his father and he heard that he was a big earner. But some in his Wildwood crew were resentful. Mob associates in the crew like Thomas “Tommy Tomatoes” Biondo disliked the two South Philly mobsters. Called “Tomatoes” due to his father owning a large tomato farm, he complained about the newcomers to his fellow mob associates.

The problem Bruno spoke of was the first order of business.

Rosetti instructed Stillitano and Gina to take care of Roman Santini, a former associate of Rosetti’s who was on a robbery spree and was knocking over dice and card games run by the Rosetti crew as well as games run by New York mobsters.

Santini, a slim, rat-faced 30-year-old, was a violent killer and a fearless and crazy gunman who killed a New York made guy in one of his robberies. The New Yorkers told Rosetti to take care of “business,” or they would come in and kill Santini themselves.

This was a great loss of face for Rosetti, whose men could not, or would not, take out the killer.

Stillitano and Gina quickly met with a former pal of Romeo Santini and asked the hood to pass on an offer. Stillitano told the friend to tell Santini that he would give the killer an all-expenses paid vacation to Sicily. Stillitano would then set Santini up in Sicily and he would become a Sicilian boss.

Santini’s greed and ego made him accept the offer. Stillitano and Gina flew to Las Vegas, where Santini was living it up with a beautiful blonde and gambling away the money he robbed.

Stillitano and Gina met Santini in a hotel room on the Strip. Santini said he liked the deal and would move to Sicily. Gina got up and said he had to go to the bathroom to take a piss. As Santini was refilling their glasses, Gina came up behind Santini and threw piano wire around the killer's neck. As Santini was being strangled brutally, Stillitano stepped in and stabbed Santini in the heart.

Stillitano then called the telephone number he had been given and asked that someone come get the body and dispose of it.

The murder gained Stillitano and Gina a lot of respect in Philadelphia and New York.

But the local Wildwood crew, who loved Santini, were angry with the two South Philly mobsters.

Stillitano later returned to South Philly and told Bruno that the Santini pal told him that Santini was doing the bidding of Carmine “Big Carmine” Polina, the boss of the New York Gambone Cosa Nostra crime family, and a crime commission member. Known derisively as “The Face” for his large head, nose and ears, the greedy and violent New York boss coveted Bruno’s gambling operations in New Jersey. He was using Santini to cause dissention in the crime families. 

 Bruno told Stillitano to keep the news under his hat.

 

New Jersey is the only state in America that has several different Cosa Nostra families operating there. There were the five New York families, the DeCavalcante New Jersey crime family, and the Philadelphia crime family.  

Due to his diplomatic and business qualities, Bruno made Stillitano the capo of the Wildwood crew when Rosetti died of natural causes. Prior to Stillitano taking over, the crew members under Rosetti had numerous territorial disputes with the New York crime families. Bruno ordered Stillitano to resolve the disputes. 

Stillitano met with the New York and DeCavalcante capos and worked out deals that satisfied everyone, even Carmine Polino, although “The Face” secretly planned to outsmart Stillitano and take over Bruno’s New Jersey operations.

Due to Stillitano’s skills, Bruno, who was a member of the national crime commission, often used Stillitano as a Commission representative with foreign crime organizations, government officials and businessmen. In addition to his boxing matches, “Nick the Broker” Stillitano also organized gambling junkets overseas and looked after Bruno’s overseas interests, as well as those of Lupo Bonfiglio and the other New York members of the national commission.

Stillitano was Bruno's representative of the Philadelphia and New York families’ interests in Las Vegas, the Caribbean, London, Italy, and other places around the world. Those interests included illegal gambling, extortion and murder.

All was well for Nick Stillitano until Angelo Bruno ordered him to travel to Palmero, Sicily and broker a deal between waring Sicilian Cosa Nostra clans over drug trafficking.

Note: You can read the first three chapters via the links below:        

Wednesday, March 26, 2025

'Salvie Shotgun'

 Salvie Shotgun is Chapter 3 of a crime novel that I’m working on. 

Salvie Shotgun

By Paul Davis

Salvatore Stillitano’s lawyer reached out to me and asked if I would be interested in meeting and interviewing the former Philadelphia Cosa Nostra caporegime. 

I said yes. 

As a newspaper crime reporter and columnist, I’d covered organized crime for many years. As a kid growing up in South Philly in the 1960s, I was aware of the Cosa Nostra culture early on. I lived around the corner from Angelo Bruno, the then-boss of the Philadelphia Cosa Nostra organized crime family. 

I had childhood friends who went from being street corner hoodlums to being mob guys. I hung on the street corners with them and I went to school with them in the 1960s, I hung out with them in South Philly’s mob-owned bars and nightclubs in the 1970s, and as a writer, I’ve interviewed a good number of them since those days. 

Although Salvatore Stillitano and I were roughly the same age and we were two old school South Philly street guys, I had never met him. I knew about him as far back as the 1980s, when he made newspaper headlines and was the lead TV news story due to his becoming a cooperating government witness. 

In the press at the time, Salvatore “Salvie Shotgun” Stillitano was called a “Mafia Prince,” as he was a fourth-generation member of Cosa Nostra, his lineage reaching way back to Sicily. He violated his Cosa Nostra vow of Omerta by testifying in federal court against his one-time criminal partners, bosses and underlings. He helped put away several top mobsters from South Philadelphia, New Jersey and New York.  

After serving a brief sentence in a federal prison, Stillitano was placed in the federal witness protection system in the mid-1980s. He, his wife and his infant daughter were shipped off somewhere out west. Back home in Philadelphia, the mob had put out a $200,000 contract on his life. 

So, I was surprised that the lawyer invited me to go to Stillitano’s late grandmother’s home in South Philadelphia and meet him. 

I ventured to the small rowhouse in South Philadelphia to meet Salvatore Stillitano, the famous – or infamous - former Philadelphia Cosa Nostra organized crime family caporegime-turned cooperating government witness. 

Stillitano answered the door and shook my hand. He was gray-haired, tall and muscular with a slight beer-belly. He was wearing a blue tracksuit with white sneakers. What stood out immediately to me was that although he lacked his late father’s classical good looks, he had his father’s large, protruding, cold black eyes. 

After we sat down at his late grandmother’s kitchen table and Stillitano poured us both a cup of coffee. I smelled the delectable aroma of a pot of old-fashioned “gravy,” as Italian Americans called red sauce in South Philly. 

I complemented him on the gravy’s smell, and he offered me a plate of rigatoni and meatballs, but I declined, wanting to get on with the initial interview. 

I asked him if he was concerned about being murdered by one of his former criminal associates. 

“Nah,” he replied. “Who’s around from my day that’s willing to try. There’s no money in it anymore.” 

Stillitano told me he wanted me to write his life story. As I was half-Italian on my late mother’s side, and I was born and raised in South Philadelphia, he thought that I would understand his life better than most writers. 

He said that he read my column in the local paper about my meeting his late father in in 1975 in Sicily, and he read my interviews with other former Cosa Nostra figures, including former Philadelphia Cosa Nostra boss Ralph Natale, former Philadelphia Cosa Nostra underboss Philip Leonetti, and former New York Cosa Nostra Columbo captain Michael Franzese. 

I told him that I would like to tell his story first in a series of my columns in the local paper, and later compiling the columns into a book. 

“Sounds good,” he said.     

He told me that he had been given an oral history of Cosa Nostra while living and working with his late father over the years. Thankfully for me and for my readers, he had a fine memory. 

Stillitano told me that his namesake great-grandfather back in Sicily was “in the tradition,” as he referred to Cosa Nostra just as his father had when I spoke to him in Sicily. His grandfather, Lorenzo Stillitano, left Sicily and came to South Philadelphia as a young boy. He was later inducted into the Philadelphia Cosa Nostra organized crime family. His father, Nunzio Stillitano, once known as “Nick Stiletto,” and later known as “Nick the Broker,” was born and raised in South Philadelphia. Like his father Lorenzo, he too became a Cosa Nostra member in the Philadelphia crime family. 

Salvatore Stillitano said he wanted to tell his story and his father’s story, as he believed the tale had great historical importance. He also lamented the decline of his tradition, and he no longer felt any loyalty to Cosa Nostra. 

I took out my pen and notebook and my tape recorder and placed them on the kitchen table.   

“I was raised in the tradition,” Stillitano said. “Although my father never spoke publicly about our tradition, he had for many years schooled me about his history in Cosa Nostra with the notion that I would in turn tell my future son when his grandson became the fifth generation to become a member of the Cosa Nostra.”   

His father called him Salvatore, named after his Sicilian great-grandfather, but the young guys in South Philly called him “Salvie Shotgun.” 

“Not because of my use of the weapon,” Stillitano said with a smile. “I was called “Salvie Shotgun” back in the day because of my threat to use one. I’ll put a shotgun up his ass, was how I’d answer a threat or an insult.” 

But years later, he confessed, he would in fact use a shotgun to commit a murder and become a “made man” in the Philadelphia Cosa Nostra organized crime family. And he admitted to using a shotgun several other times in his criminal career. 

He said he was raised principally by his grandmother in the 1950s and the 1960s in South Philadelphia after his mother died when he was a toddler. As a teenager, he spent summers and holidays with his father in Wildwood, New Jersey, where his Cosa Nostra education began. His father wanted his son to go to college and become a legitimate professional of some sort, but his son hated school, and he wanted to join the family tradition. His father relented and then began to train his son. He eventually sponsored him as a member of the Philadelphia Cosa Nostra crime family.     

Salvatore Stillitano rose from a soldier under his father to replacing him as the caporegime, or captain, of the Philadelphia crime family’s crew in Wildwood, New Jersey. 

Stillitano told me he was a faithful Cosa Nostra member for many years until the day the FBI came to him and played a wiretapped recording of two older men and former partners of his late father’s. The tape revealed that the two men were planning his murder. 

“I grew up around these old bastards,” Stillitano said. “They were both close to my father, and I thought of them as my uncles. I couldn’t believe these greedy, evil old men wanted me dead.” 

After the FBI special agent left him, Stillitano grabbed his hidden money and moved his wife and baby daughter back to South Philadelphia, where he turned himself into the FBI. For the promise of protection for him and his family, and a reduced sentence for his admitted crimes, he agreed to become a cooperating witness against the two older Cosa Nostra members. 

Over the course of many taped interviews, Stillitano told me his story and his father’s story of their tradition of crime.

© 2025 Paul Davis  


Monday, March 17, 2025

A Look Back At Life Aboard An Aircraft Carrier During The Vietnam War: 'The Compartment Cleaner'

The story below is Chapter 20 of Olongapo, a crime novel I hope to soon publish. 

The Compartment Cleaner 

By Paul Davis 

Back in 1969, I was 16 years old and working full time as a messenger for an office supply company after dropping out of South Philadelphia High School, or Southern, as we called it. 

The job did not pay well, but I didn’t care as I was just waiting until I turned 17 so I could then join the Navy. I liked delivering office supplies to the offices in Center City Philadelphia, the city’s business hub. I handed over the office supplies to the receptionists and secretaries, who were mostly young pretty girls. I always stayed there a bit and flirted with the young girls. 

For a girl-crazy young man like me, this was a dream job. The job ended for me when the owner of the company informed me that the messengers took turns cleaning the company’s bathroom. I was a proud kid, and as I was dressed in an expensive Italian knit shirt and dress slacks, I told the owner that I didn’t clean toilets. 

Astonished that a teenager would talk to him in this manner, the owner said, “I don’t know what to say, except finish the day…” 

“I quit right now,” I said, and I walked out the door. “I don’t clean fucking toilets.” 

Well, I later turned 17 and joined the Navy. And guess what my first job was in Boot Camp? Yeah, cleaning toilets. 

During my time in the Navy, I often told other sailors that I joined the Navy because I liked the idea of clean ships. And then I found out I had to clean them.

That old joke always got a laugh. 

When Lorino and I first reported aboard the Kitty Hawk in Bremerton, Washington in 1970 we were lucky to escape pulling a three-month stint as mess cooks, like all the other seamen new to the carrier. We dodged that drudgery, as the petty officer in the ship’s personnel office was from Philadelphia. He said he didn’t want to assign his “homeboys” to the tough and thankless duty of cleaning up the galley around the clock and being ordered about by the cooks who prepared the crew’s meals. 

Instead, he assigned us to three months with Special Services, where manpower was required to install the new shipboard close-circuit TV/Radio cable throughout the length of the ship. The Kitty Hawk was the first warship to have close-circuit TV and radio stations. We also performed a variety of other tasks in Special Services. 

Having attended two firefighting schools, I was also assigned to a Damage Control Team, which was called out to fight fires and other emergencies. A fire aboard an aircraft carrier could turn into a truly deadly affair, as the warship carried massive amounts of bombs, missiles and JP5 jet fuel.    

After I mentioned that I was an aspiring writer to the Special Services Officer, LTJG Parker, a journalism university graduate, he assigned me to write three feature articles for the ship's newspaper, which were my first published pieces. 

At the end of our three month-detail, I was reassigned to the Communications Radio Division and Lorino was reassigned to the Deck Department. It had been a good three months in Special Services for me and having witnessed the tired and miserable mess cooks swabbing decks, wiping down counters and bulkheads, and scrubbing pots and pans, I was thankful that I had “skated” on that cleaning assignment.   

But imagine my disappointment when after I reported to the radio division, I was immediately assigned as the division compartment cleaner. I was informed that I would be the compartment cleaner for a two-month period. I was unhappy, but there was nothing I could do. 

The job, however, turned out to be quite easy. Each day I cleaned the head, which had about a dozen toilets, sinks and shower stalls, and I sweep, swabbed, waxed and buffed the tiled deck with an electric buffer. While the rest of the sailors in the division were working long hours in the message processing center during our sea trials, drills and flight operations off the coast of Southern California prior to the aircraft carrier heading to Southeast Asia, my job took only about two hours in the morning. I also had to sweep the compartment’s deck and empty the ash trays at night after the crew watched the daily movie on our close-circuit TV. I was largely unsupervised, which suited me. 

Despite the relative ease of the job, I was pleased when a chief assigned me to the message processing center as we were heading towards Southeast Asia and the Vietnam War. The chief reassigned a seaman who screwed up in the message center to be the new compartment cleaner. 

My replacement was Donald Harris, a sailor from Seattle, Washington. A short, 25-year-old with reddish-blonde hair and a full curly beard, Harris was adamantly opposed to the Vietnam War. Thrown out of college for his antics in a violent and destructive anti-war protest on campus, he tried to avoid the draft by stating that he was a conscientious objector. When that didn’t work, he joined the Navy, thinking that serving on a destroyer or submarine in Europe was preferable to participating in the Vietnam War. 

He was crushed when he received orders to the USS Kitty Hawk, which he knew would be operating off the coast of Vietnam. Reporting aboard the aircraft carrier, he was assigned to the Communications Radio Division. Even before he unpacked his sea bag, Harris began offering his anti-war opinions to the other sailors in the division. Due to his overwrought and theatrical delivery, no one paid much attention to him. Most of the sailors thought he was a kook. 

“Opinions are like assholes,” one old chief told Harris after one of his anti-war rants. “Everyone has one – and they all stink.” 

Harris was generally tolerated, but he went over the line on one watch when he stood up on his soapbox – in this case a desk in the message center - and yelled out that the carrier’s crew and air wing were conducting an illegal and evil war and killing innocent women and children. 

Commander Olson came out of his small office and ordered one of the chiefs to throw Harris out of the message center. 

Harris was assigned as the compartment cleaner for the rest of his time on the Kitty Hawk. 


One night on Yankee Station in the Tonkin Gulf off the coast of Vietnam in 1971, after one of my "eight on/eight off" watches, I was lying in my rack after the late showing of the daily movie on our shipboard TV station. I couldn’t sleep, so I was reading one of the dozen books I had on the metal shelf in my rack. I was a huge admirer of Ernest Hemingway’s novels, short stories and nonfiction books, and I was trying to read the late, great writer’s posthumous novel, Islands in the Stream. 

But I had to put the book down as I could not concentrate on the novel while Harris was filibustering below. I got out of my rack in a t-shirt and skivvies (shorts), slipped on my flip-flop shower shoes, and sat in a chair by Trent as Harris was sweeping up and pontificating about the Vietnam War. 

Harris was on a roll, bending Trent’s ear and the ear of a seaman named Mike Topher. Trent was a Texan who didn’t say much. He was only sitting out in the berthing compartment as he was smoking a cigarette. He planned to “hit the rack,” as we used to say, after his cigarette. Topher, a 26-year-old black sailor from Detroit, was also a quiet guy who was sitting there in silence drinking a coke and smoking a cigarette. 

When I sat down, Harris figured he had a live one to debate. Like Harris, I was a voracious reader of books, magazines, newspapers and message traffic. And like Harris, I had a keen interest in the war, although we held differing views of the conflict, much like the people back home. 

At sea aboard the aircraft carrier, we read in the Defense Department’s newspaper, Stars and Stripes and the newspapers we received from home about how the Vietnam War was continuing to divide a deeply contentious public back in the states. Anti-war protests and riots were covered prominently on the newspapers’ front pages. There were also newspaper stories about counter demonstrations from construction workers and others who supported the American involvement in the Vietnam War.    

Harris wanted to be back in the USA in the throes of the anti-war protests and not on a warship actively engaged in the war. Frustrated and angry, he aimed his speech about an illegal and evil war at me. He also stated that we were dropping bombs on an innocent and defenseless country. 

“Well, you know the North Vietnamese invaded South Vietnam, not the other way around,” I said. “And the North is not exactly defenseless. They have one of the largest armies in the world, trained and supplied by the Soviets and the Communist Chinese.” 

I also noted that the North Vietnamese surface to air missiles, called SAMs, which were aimed at our pilots, were state-of-the-art thanks to the Soviets. 

“We’re not just fighting pajama-wearing Viet Cong guerrillas.” I added.   

Harris did not bother to respond to my comments. 

 “I can’t stand to be complicit in this illegal war,” Harris said, his voice rising. “Every time a plane launches from the flight deck, I feel like a baby killer!” 

 “Shut the fuck up!” yelled someone who was trying to sleep. 

“Swabbing the deck and picking up soda pop cans and cigarette butts don’t exactly make you a warrior or a baby killer,” Trent said softly. 

“But I’m here and I’m a part of this massive killing machine.” 

Trent and I looked at each other and shook our heads. 

At that point, seemingly out of nowhere, Topher stood up, grabbed his crotch, and yelled out, “I gots to stick my dick in something!” 

Trent and I laughed at Topher’s vocal expression of sexual frustration. As young men who spent months at sea, we all shared that frustration, even if we didn’t blurt it out like Topher. Harris, who no doubt did not appreciate the change in the course of the conversation, stormed into the head.  

There were some war hawks in the division and there were some doves as well. Some sailors had no view of the war, or they chose not to express their view. The doves believed we should not be involved in the Vietnam conflict, and the hawks believed that the president and the Pentagon should remove the war-fighting limitations and restrictive rules of engagement against the enemy and allow the American military to win the war outright. 

I leaned towards the view that a Kitty Hawk F-4 Phantom jet pilot expressed to me in an Olongapo restaurant. He said that many of his fellow combat pilots believed we should use our massive air power to go all out and defeat the North Vietnamese rather than fight a protracted and limited war to contain the North Vietnamese Communists. 

He said that American politicians and the general public were fast tiring of a prolonged war of attrition, featured live and bloody on TV. 

“We’re losing the opinion war,” the pilot told me. “Even though we’ve won every single battle in Vietnam over company strength.”    

Harris, of course, did not subscribe to this view. He was certainly entitled to his opinion, and he was certainly not alone in his thinking, but he expressed those opinions ad nauseum and in an overdramatic fashion. Harris alienated even those who agreed with his views. 

After we docked at Subic Bay, Harris went alone into Olongapo to, as he put it, “drown his sorrows.” He began drinking at a bar and was soon joined by a hostess. Harris bought drinks for the two of them, but he was depressed and found no joy in the cold beer or the pretty girl next to him. 

Harris asked the girl if she could obtain some “Red Devils” for him, thinking the barbiturates would dull his internal pain and guilt. He handed the girl some money and she got up from the table and sought out one of the band members who took the cash and handed her some pills. She returned to Harris’ table and gave him five capsules. Harris swallowed all five capsules with gulps of beer. 

Quality control was not a strong point in the producing of Red Devils in Olongapo. The capsules were unevenly produced. One could take eight capsules and feel little, or one could take two capsules and die from an overdose. 

Harris’ five Red Devils caused him to collapse as he was trying to leave the bar. He fell on the floor and foamed at the mouth. A Filipino waiter rushed out onto the street and flagged down a Navy Shore Patrol jeep. 

Harris regained consciousness in the Subic Bay hospital. After he recovered, he was put on report for taking drugs and told that if he signed a confession, he would be given a general discharge. The general discharge stated that he was unfit for naval service. Harris saw this as a way out of the war. He signed the confession and was promptly discharged from the U.S. Navy and flown home. 

When we left Subic Bay and headed back to Yankee Station, some other poor slob was assigned as the compartment cleaner. 

© 2025 By Paul Davis 

Note: You can read other chapters from Olongapo via the links below:

Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Fiction: 'Butterfly'

Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Fiction: 'Salvatore Lorino'

Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Fiction: The Old Huk

Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Fiction: Join The Navy And See Olongapo

Paul Davis On Crime: Boots On The Ground

Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Fiction: 'The 30-Day Detail'

Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Fiction: 'Cat Street'

Paul Davis On Crime: Chapter 12: On Yankee Station

Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Fiction: 'The Cherry Boy'

Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Fiction: 'The Hit'

Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Fiction: Welcome To Japan, Davis-San