April 12–19, 2001

city beat

The Natale Monologues

Pal Joey: Reputed mob boss Joey Merlino and crew listen to Natale testify against them. illustration: William Ternay

Ralph Natale always liked to talk. And he had a story for every audience.

by Jim Barry

In mid-November 1995, before most people in the Delaware Valley knew there was a new boss in town — John Stanfa and seven of his henchmen were on trial for racketeering and would be convicted the following week— I went looking for Ralph Natale. At the time I was a producer for a tabloid TV news show, and with local FOX-TV cameraman Brad Nau in tow I headed for The Pub restaurant in Pennsauken, NJ, an old Camden County eatery on a very seedy Admiral Wilson Boulevard.

We found Natale ensconced in The Pub’s cocktail lounge. Dressed casually, he was seated with his wife Lucy and another elderly woman. At first glance, they looked like a couple of well-to-do retirees waiting for their table.

That evening, behind the bar, Natale’s cousin poured the drinks. The police claimed that when Natale was still in prison, he tried to back his cousin for office in Local 54 of the Hotel Employees and Restaurant Employees Union, but the bid failed. So now his cousin tended bar at The Pub.

I marched across the room toward Natale, who saw me immediately. He rose from his barstool and placed himself in front of his wife to block my path. From somewhere back in the restaurant materialized a hulking, surly, middle-aged man — well over 6 feet tall and of Irish or German descent, not Italian. He was Natale’s bodyguard, and he looked very pissed off.

"Good evening Mr. Natale, I’m from A Current Affair, the magazine program, and we’re doing a story about the mob and we’d love to talk to you for a second."

Natale reached out to shake my hand and didn’t let go. With his free hand, he reached around my waist as though to hug me but actually patted me down for a weapon. This all happened in a matter of seconds as I continued to speak to him.

"And this is my cameraman," I explained. "His camera is still out in the car."

Natale nodded vigorously at the bodyguard as he guided me away from the bar toward the table and chairs on the opposite side.

Natale’s wife, Lucy, had overheard me. She glared at these intruders with a mixture of fear, suspicion and anger, but said nothing.

"We’d love to talk to you for a second about the story we’re doing," I went on. "Nothing official yet. In fact we’re just here to introduce ourselves and talk. You probably won’t be interested in doing an interview but it’s only fair we give you the courtesy of asking you."

Natale wasn’t perturbed in the least. He still smiled as he walked me to the other table — his grip was quite strong. Natale spoke to the bodyguard.

"It’s fine, fine, okay. I got it." And the bodyguard frowned at the two strangers and melted away. Lucy went back to her drink and to her friend. She pretended to ignore her husband and the two younger men.

Satisfied that I was unarmed, Natale then shook hands with the TV cameraman and the three of us sat down. He was dressed in a comfortable sweater and his bald head glistened under the ceiling lights — he looked like Hollywood’s version of everybody’s favorite uncle.

"The police say you’re the new boss after John Stanfa," I explained. "I guess you’ve heard that?"

Natale smiled and responded in an amiable tone. " I don’t know anything about that, naturally," he said. "But those people who say that are crazy. People say anything. The only thing I’m boss of, fellas, is my home. And sometimes not even that," he said and nodded toward his wife and then laughed. We laughed with him.

We were both struck by how polished Natale seemed. He was completely different from the angry, thick-accented John Stanfa who grumbled and swore at reporters and forever seemed on the verge of punching someone.

Natale’s manner was confident and amiable. He was articulate, smooth and savvy, his gruff demeanor more like that of an ex-military officer or street-smart CEO than gangland boss.

"Ah-huh. I can’t really talk to you on TV, fellas. Naturally I don’t know about those things," Natale said. He shrugged.

"We didn’t think so," I said, "but of course, we have to ask, you know? We have to try."

Then we informed Natale that Joey Merlino was also being profiled on A Current Affair because it was a report about the new generation of the American Mafia’s "yuppie mobsters."

"Ah-huh. Of course I don’t know anything about that, fellas. But I am a friend of Joey Merlino’s," Natale said. "He’s a wonderful, wonderful young man. If you met Joey, you’d like him. He’s about the same age as you. Good guy, Joey. Loves his neighborhood. Loves sports. The Eagles, the Flyers. A regular guy."

"But the police say he’s a powerful leader in the mob. And they say you and Joey run the mob now that Stanfa’s going to jail," I said. "So Merlino is one of the guys that’s going to be profiled in the story."

Natale thought about that a moment. "Where are you from? Are you a neighborhood guy, Jimmie?" he asked me.

"Yeah, I live in Roxborough," I answered. Natale’s face lit up. Ralph Natale was so excited he smiled a genuine smile. "Right. Roxborough. I know some good people from there, good friends. I grew up in South Philadelphia. Same as Joey Merlino. So you can understand this. Joey is just a neighborhood guy. A good kid, really. What he does is try to take care of his neighborhood, that’s all. Watch out for it. Like you probably would in Roxborough. You know? If somebody came in and tried to make trouble, tried to do something wrong there, you’d watch out and make sure there wasn’t any trouble. That’s what Joey does."

The conversation veered away from Merlino to sports, and when Natale discovered that Nau was a former college quarterback, Natale began to brag about his son’s superior coaching skills at Bartram High School. Then he regaled the two TV guys with tales about the athletic prowess of one of his grandsons. At that moment Natale reminded us of nothing so much as a proud grandpa who buttonholes an acquaintance to show off photos of his exceptional grandkids.

To his audience in The Pub that night, Natale talked about his own family, not his crime family. But it was just one of the standard monologues he trotted out — depending on his audience.

There were many versions of these monologues:

At home Natale would remind his wife and friends, over and over again, about how a government informant had tricked him into a drug deal in Florida and cost him 16 years in jail. His own family believed Natale was innocent. Of course, nobody at home ever mentioned that dear old dad had fathered a stepdaughter with another woman; it just didn’t fit their father’s version of how much he loved them all. That was a different story, one which didn’t fit into Natale’s family-values monologue.

Sometimes, Natale would call his 27-year-old girlfriend, Ruthann Seccio, from the bedroom of his penthouse apartment in Pennsauken. If his wife Lucy happened to walk into the room when he was chatting Ruth up, Natale would chase Lucy away by boldly pointing out to Lucy that he was "very busy right now."

Sometimes, when Natale was out on the town partying with Seccio, Natale would run into his daughter Vanessa. Vanessa Natale was a friend of Seccio’s and had introduced Ruthann to dad. But those out-on-the-town moments weren’t as awkward because wife Lucy, back at home, didn’t know.

So Natale, his daughter Vanessa and Ruthann would all have a friendly drink together and then, "out of respect for his family," Seccio told her friends, she and Ralph would go elsewhere to dine.

During their five-year love affair, Natale constantly told Seccio he loved her and wanted to marry her someday, and when Seccio asked, "What about your wife, Lucy?" Natale answered, "I love Lucy for standing by me all those years when I was in prison, but I’m not in love with her. I’m in love with you." Natale also told Seccio he wanted to move to the Jersey shore with her, have children, get a second home in Florida and "get out of this business." Also, he told Seccio, Lucy was quite sick and could die at any time. That was the story, according to Seccio, he told his young lover.

To his fellow mobsters, who gathered around Ralph Natale at the bar in the Garden State Race Track in Cherry Hill, NJ, almost every day, he bragged of his prison exploits, and about the good old days when super mob boss Angelo Bruno ran things and Natale helped him to take over Atlantic City and its casino-related unions for the Mafia. "More than a few of us left there shaking our heads," recalled one former Natale associate. "Because we’d never heard those stories about how important Natale was when Bruno was boss and we thought we knew everything about those days."

On one unforgettable visit to the race track, a former Natale associate recalled Natale’s boast that casino mogul Steve Wynn had recently come to see him to "get permission from me, Ralph Natale, to come into Atlantic City to open a new casino." The associate remembered being more than a little skeptical. "Like Steve Wynn would even know who Natale was."

But those were the versions the boss told "the boys," and nobody was going to question the word of their Godfather.

As for the older generation of Mafia guys Natale often visited in New York City, he repeatedly bored them with details of his planned retirement to Palm Springs, CA. Natale said he knew a lot of old gangsters who lived in Palm Springs. "That’s where the real mob guys retired to," Natale assured them, although none of the New York guys could figure out who Natale was talking about unless these were some low-level guys from Vegas and Chicago. But nobody wanted to question the mob boss from Philly too closely.

So in November 1995, Ralph Natale, Cosa Nostra kingpin, was at the height of his power. And he was very chatty. Natale told wonderful stories, and on this particular night, in The Pub, as he and Brad Nau bonded over sports, the mob boss continued to ignore the quizzical looks his wife gave him and the worried glances from his cousin, the bartender. For the moment, Natale had a new audience, and as they all knew, Ralph Natale loved to talk.

When Nau and I left the Pub an hour later, we were enthralled. "I’d love to get him talking about 1 percent of that stuff he told us on camera," I said. "Right," Nau skeptically reminded me. "He’s a great storyteller, but the minute we turn the camera on he’s gonna’ shut up and walk off. He’s a down-to-earth guy, but he’s also the new boss of the Mafia, so I don’t see him giving interviews. In fact, guys like that never talk in public. Ever."

More than five years later, Ralph Natale, now a government witness, is telling his story to a federal jury in Philadelphia. And the defense attorneys for Joey Merlino and the other six men on trial for racketeering are hammering Natale during a blistering cross-examination in an effort to prove to the jury that all of Ralph Natale’s stories have more than one version.

Read our ongoing coverage of the Mob Trials.