Excerpt from a old news article I stumbled on today:

Investigators were watching Aug. 9 when Ralph Perna and his son, Joseph, met at a diner in the Bronx with DiNapoli.

And authorities were listening minutes later when Joseph called his brother John to tell him that their father had been tapped to replace Scarfo as head of the New Jersey branch of the crime family.

"He's the new captain," Joseph Perna told his brother, adding, "Tomorrow I'm going down to tell the other kid he's demoted."

John, laughing, said, "I bet you're all broken up about that."

The brothers then referred to media reports raising the possibility that Scarfo Jr. might make a move against those controlling the Philadelphia crime family his father Nicodemo once headed.

That was part of the reason he was being demoted, they said.

Two days later, investigators used the GPS hidden in Joseph Perna's Infiniti to track him to a meeting on the Garden State Parkway with Scarfo Jr.


"I die outside; I die in jail. It don't matter to me," -John Franzese