Nicodemo Scarfo

When a federal judge in Philadelphia sentenced him to 55 years in prison on murder and racketeering charges in May 1989, Nicodemo “Little Nicky” Scarfo just shrugged. Just two weeks earlier, Scarfo, one-time boss of the Philadelphia-South Jersey Mafia, had been sentenced with seven others to life in prison for the 1985 slaying of bookmaker Frank “Frankie Flowers” D’Alfonso. To go with that, he was also serving a 14-year stretch he got in 1988 for extorting a developer to pay a $1 million bribe to a Philadelphia city councilman, who was to give a share of it to Scarfo. Scarfo’s life sentence in prison ended Friday, January 13 2018, when he died, reportedly of cancer, at the Federal Medical Center in North Carolina. He was 87.