Salvie Shotgun is Chapter 3 of a crime novel that I’m working on.
The story appeared originally in American Crime Magazine.
You can read chapters 1, 2 and 4 via the links below:
Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Fiction: 'The Rigano Murders'
Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Fiction: 'From South Philly To Sicily'
Paul Davis On Crime: My Crime Fiction: 'Nick The Broker'
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. In the 1960s, when I was a teenager, I hung on the street corners with them, and I went to school with them. In the 1970s, when I was in my 20s, I hung out with them in South Philly’s mob-owned bars and nightclubs. And as a writer, I’ve interviewed a good number of them since those early 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 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 respond to 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
Note: You can read my crime fiction stories via the link below:
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