Musings of a Mob Man With a Price on His Head

A quarter-century after mobsters enhanced their self-esteem by studying the ''Godfather'' movies for tips on fashion, attitude and tribal mythology, the Mafia is in such sorry shape that the Federal Witness Protection Program looks like Central Casting.

Recently, we saw Salvatore (Sammy the Bull) Gravano batting eyelashes with Diane Sawyer on television. Mr. Gravano, former sidekick of the celebrity gangster John Gotti, had turned on his former boss in exchange for leniency on the 19 murders he admits to. The mythology says this means the Bull should have traded in his identity for a new one as, say, a Ford salesman in Tulsa.

Instead, Sammy the Bull tours the publicity stops like he'd won the Masters. In fact, the mob-informant lecture circuit is so crowded now that the guy who ratted out John Gotti can't even wangle a feature movie. All the Bull gets is a made-for-television deal.

No sooner does the Bull fade from the screen than we encounter one Henry Hill, granting interviews in New Jersey, describing himself as an alcoholic and ''recovering sociopath'' after being arrested on a parole violation in a Newark motel. According to the 1990 movie, ''Goodfellas,'' which romanticized his saga as a mob informant, Mr. Hill was sentenced to a life of grim anonymity.

''I heard him on the Stern show a few days before he got popped in Newark,'' one major mob informant who is still in hiding, Thomas DelGiorno, said with wonder the other day.

Mr. DelGiorno was once a capo in the vicious Philadelphia-South Jersey family led by Nicodemo (Nicky) Scarfo, and admits to taking part in six mob murders during the Scarfo family's reign of terror in the 1980's. Since getting out of prison in 1990, he has been living under a new identity in a Southern city. He said he is astonished to see people like Sammy the Bull and Henry Hill lunging for publicity, even if most mob families have been decimated.

''I'm amazed they get away with it,'' he said.

Mr. DelGiorno, 56, served less than half of the five-year sentence he received in exchange for testimony that put away Nicky Scarfo and the rest of the leadership of the Philadelphia-South Jersey mob -- a group so violent they made the New York families look like a bowling league by comparison.

Mr. DelGiorno turned in 1986, when he fell out of favor with Mr. Scarfo, who had prevailed in a bloody South Philadelphia mob war and ran the family from his home in Atlantic City. In dozens of trials over the years, testimony by Mr. DelGiorno and a fellow capo, Nicholas (Nicky Crow) Caramandi, helped Federal prosecutors dismantle the Scarfo family -- and perfect the informant-based strategy later used to topple John Gotti and other New York mafiosi.

''We began the domino effect,'' Mr. DelGiorno said in a telephone interview from his home, where he lives comfortably -- but not securely, he stressed. He most recently testified in January. The audacity of Sammy the Bull and Henry Hill amazes him. ''I'd get killed if I went back,'' he said. ''South Philly? Forget it. Even Jersey, it's not that big. They'd find you in Jersey. I'm happy where I am.''

Mr. DelGiorno has settled into retirement -- his neighbors think he is a retired government worker -- harboring no romantic illusions about mob life.

''The mob was never like the movies portrayed it,'' said Mr. DelGiorno. ''It wasn't sophisticated at all. In the 1950's, you were talking about people with a fourth-grade education; by the 1980's, maybe a 10th-grade education. In the movies, they're criminal geniuses.''

His former boss, Mr. Scarfo (now serving a life sentence), ''really bought into all of that Godfather-movie stuff,'' said Mr. DelGiorno, who recalled being ''made'' as a Mafia member in Turnersville, the South Jersey town where a number of Scarfo associates moved from South Philadelphia in the 1980's.

''Scarfo had to have a big show, catered, with all these made guys fussing over you,'' he recalled. ''It was held at this club. Nine of us got made that day. They put us in a room and brought us out one at a time for this ceremony. Scarfo had a knife and a gun on the table. You had to say you would use this knife and gun to help your friends. Then he had you burn a piece of paper and repeat that mumbo-jumbo from the movies about burning in hell if you betray your friends. Then he kissed you on both cheeks. I thought it was comical, but of course I didn't laugh.''

Today's mob, though fractured into loosely organized gangs, is still dangerous enough to keep him down South, he said. ''They're all young kids now, with no training, looking to make a name. They shoot from cars, like Al Capone in the movies,'' said Mr. DelGiorno, who maintains that for a man with a contract on his head, the best policy is still to keep that head down.