Stanfa realized he had lost face. Adornetto couldn't be found. The bungled shooting and kidnapping had become symbols of Stanfa's ineffectiveness and had emboldened the young Merlino group.

"He took us for a bunch of cuckolds," said Tommaso Gambino in his native Sicilian.

Late in June 1993, he met with his friend Tommaso Gambino, the son of imprisoned Mafia heroin-trafficker Rosario Gambino, a longtime Stanfa associate. Stanfa had asked the younger Gambino to enlist help in New York. But Gambino told him no one was available and suggested Stanfa travel to Sicily and recruit new members there.

Stanfa said if he left, his position as boss in Philadelphia would be in jeopardy.

"I'm all alone," Stanfa said on June 22. "It's no one else. It's me. If it goes well, it's me. If it goes bad, it's me. . . . What I want to do, I have to take these two guys' head. . . . Then, whatever happens, happens."

He went on to tell Gambino: "You know what's needed here? A demolition."

Over the next three months, the Adornetto affair bedeviled Stanfa. Whatever could go wrong, did go wrong. And all the while, the FBI tapes rolled.

Stanfa had his organization frantically searching for the pizza maker, calling in help from mob sources in New York and Sicily.

"You go look for him," Stanfa beseeched Tommaso Gambino, a Sicilian acquaintance who had come to Camden from New York. "Los Angeles. Put in your mind that he's far away . . . like Los Angeles, Chicago or New York."