Looking back on the Halloween 1989 assassination attempt on Nicodemo Scarfo Jr.

On Halloween night in 1989, a popular South Philadelphia restaurant became the site of a brazen Mafia shooting that shocked the city — and hinted at the brewing mob war that would play out through much of the coming decade.

The victim was Nicodemo Scarfo Jr., the 24-year-old son of feared former mob boss Nicodemo “Little Nicky” Scarfo, who himself was then imprisoned after five bloody years at the top of the local La Cosa Nostra. The restaurant, Dante & Luigi’s, still stands at 10th and Catharine Streets in Bella Vista, serving up bowls of escarole soup and plates of seafood cioppino.

Like Dante & Luigi’s, Scarfo survived the shooting — though he’s now in a federal prison in New Jersey on a 2014 conviction in a corporate scam case, awaiting his scheduled release in the mid-2030s. Thirty-six years later, no one has been charged with his attempted assassination.

The attempt on Scarfo’s life has become the stuff of Philly Mafia lore, up there with the assassination of former mob boss Angelo Bruno near 10th and Snyder in 1980, and the attempted killing of John Stanfa on the Schuylkill Expressway in 1993. But the night it happened, the shooting was one brutal incident in a long line of shootings and killings that dominated the local mob throughout the 1980s.

It also, investigators said at the time, signaled that another internecine mob war could be on the horizon — and they were right. The Philly mob again went to battle with itself in the ’90s, resulting in a period of brutality now being chronicled in Netflix’s Mob War: Philadelphia vs. The Mafia.

Scarfo’s shooting, however, didn’t make the documentary’s cut. Here is how The Inquirer and Daily News covered it:

By Halloween 1989, Scarfo, who lived in Margate, had not been seen in Philadelphia for several months, according to reports from the time. Sources told The Inquirer that Scarfo may have been aware he could be the target of a hit, and had been avoiding going out in public alone.

His visit to Dante & Luigi’s seemed to follow that logic. On the night he was shot, Scarfo had dinner there with his cousin John Parisi and reputed longtime mob associate John Palumbo.

Just after 7 p.m., a man wearing a Halloween mask entered the restaurant, approached Scarfo’s table, and shot him point-blank several times. Some reports said the mask depicted Batman’s face, but Inquirer and Daily News stories from the time make no reference to that DC Comics superhero — instead, they describe it as being a “yellow mask.”

The shooter, who witnesses said was a “thin, wiry man” standing about 5-foot-8 and wearing dark clothing, fled. Scarfo, meanwhile, was left “groaning for help on the white tile floor, his blood mingling with spilled tomato sauce,” the Daily News reported.

“I was buttering my bread when all of a sudden I heard noises [and] Nicky was laying on the floor beside me,” Palumbo reportedly later told police. Parisi said he didn’t see anything, and Scarfo refused to talk to police.

The shooting sent customers into a panic, causing a stampede into the main dining area. And as news spread throughout the neighborhood, residents — some in Halloween costumes — arrived to watch police and TV reporters at the scene.

Scarfo was transported to Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, where he was treated for gunshot wounds to his head, neck, arm, and chest. He was “lucky to be alive,” a doctor who treated him said.

“Any one of those wounds could have been fatal” had they landed slightly differently, the doctor added.

Initially, police believed the shooting was done at the direction of New York’s Gambino crime family, which they suspected was unhappy with the mob’s dealings in Philadelphia following years of internal strife. But as the investigation wore on, the attempted hit began to look more and more amateurish — and, therefore, more and more local.

Take, for example, the gun. It was, police said, a MAC-10 pistol fitted with a silencer, assembled from a number of different weapons. The weapon, which the gunman accidentally dropped outside the restaurant, was an inexpensive “piece of junk,” weapons experts told the Daily News.

“It’s a stupid gun for a hitman to use … sloppy, inaccurate, too heavy, and cheap,” said Greg Isabella, owner of the Firing Line gun range.

Then there was the fact that Scarfo survived. The bullets, a doctor said, were “jacketed” rounds and not hollow points, which prevented them from mushrooming out in Scarfo’s body and causing more devastating damage, the Daily News reported.

And, of course, there was the timing. Scarfo, after all, had largely sequestered himself from Philadelphia, and his attempted killing during one of his infrequent appearances in town raised suspicions.

“The first day he’s back in the city, he’s hit,” one detective told The Inquirer. “It had to be local.”

Several months after the shooting, Scarfo left the Philadelphia area and hid out in North Jersey. Authorities continued investigating, and some set their sights on a suspect early: Joseph “Skinny Joey” Merlino.

At the time, Merlino was allegedly involved with a group of so-called “Young Turks” who would go on to take over the local Mafia following a mob war in the ’90s. He later was the purported boss of the local mob.

Merlino, for his part, has long denied involvement with the Mafia — and with the Scarfo shooting specifically — and has never been convicted of mob-related violence.

But during a racketeering trial in 2001, two former mobsters fingered him as the culprit in the Scarfo shooting: ex-mob boss Ralph Natale and onetime soldier Gaetano “Tommy Horsehead” Scafidi, Inquirer and Daily News reports from the time indicate.

Natale claimed that when the two were in prison together in 1990, Merlino admitted he was the shooter. Natale said Merlino “hated” Scarfo. Scafidi, meanwhile, implied during his testimony that the shooting was carried out by Merlino and Michael Ciancaglini, who was also considered a member of the Young Turks faction. The pair, he alleged, tried to recruit him to set Scarfo up, but he declined to participate.

“[Scarfo] might have deserved to get beat up,” Scafidi testified. “But he didn’t deserve to be killed.”