Like said above for some reason Joey had and still has a rather large group of people very loyal to him. I never fully understood why but literally a good majority of the philly guys seem to stand behind him for the last couple decades.. Especially since it seems like hes a greedy fuck as a boss and I can't see him treating the guys below him that well... Philly is really strange when it comes to lcn.. For one of the families outside my/nj they have a large amount of rather young soldiers.. The other fams outside ny literally have a few dinosaurs who make book and that's it. I mean in all the pics of Joey down in Florida he has like a 5 man crew around his restaurant with him and they're all in their 30s
young guys have always liked joey he has always attracted a big following its his personailty. He has always had core loyal group borgesi mazzone mikey chang and angelini in the 80s scarfo senior said no one was allowed to assoicate with joey merlino after chuckie got shelved marty angelni kept hanging around him when scarfo senior found out he went mad and ordered scarfo junior and tory scadfi to beat marty up with bats which they did. Guys like Marty took a beating for joey because of the loyalty
I did not include johnny chang he is not a merlino loyalist never was. During the mob war in the 90s johnny chang from prison was telling mikey chang and merlino to sit down with stanfa and joey chang johnny chang was neutral. When he got out of prison he had to choose to back joey merlino the stanfa organization were all in prison the merlino crew was on the streets he had no choice but to back merlino it was that or get killed. The merlino mob according to johnny chang himself he felt did not trust him as one of the inner circle because he had brothers on both side but he was a massive earner johnny chang
John Ciancaglini was in prison during the war, serving a sentence for an extortion conviction. He returned to South Philadelphia in 1995.
"I'm considered in the middle," he told Previte, "because I had one brother on your side and one brother on the other."
Prosecutors are using the Previte tapes, which have dominated the last week of the trial, to link the defendants through their own words to mob-controlled gambling and stolen property rings. For the first time, some of the discussions played yesterday also dealt with narcotics.
But the most personal discussions were those of John Ciancaglini.
Among other things, Ciancaglini offered Previte some advice about how to conduct himself in a world where few people can be trusted and where incompetence was the hallmark of most of the so-called leaders.
"Be the man that you are," he said. "Just make yourself a little scarce. That's what I do. I mean, I'm there if anybody needs me, but I try to be as scarce as I can. I mean, you knock 20, 30 percent of our problems out."
Ciancaglini discussed the legitimate businesses he was involved in - a construction firm, a T-shirt company, and an exterminating business - and then returned to talk of his late brother Michael.
"My brother Michael was an ace," he said. "The only thing about Michael, he had a head like a rock. . . . He didn't take no [expletive]. I told him all the time: 'Wait till I come home, Mike. I got 17 months. Wait till I come home.' "