Salvatore La Russa

Salvatore "Sam the Barber" LaRussa (1938 to August 18, 1996) was a Philadelphia barber, bar owner and restaurateur known, in the words of his Inquirer obituary, as "a restaurateur and associate of local mobsters," chiefly through his friendship with the boss Nicodemo Scarfo. R.C. Horsch said that most of the budget of his 1973 pornographic feature The Erotic Memoirs of a Male Chauvinist Pig came from LaRussa.¹²³

Locust Street and South Street

LaRussa was born in "Campobella dell Gatto, near Palermo," in Sicily, as the Daily News gave it, the eldest of five children, and emigrated to Philadelphia in the early 1950s, living on Sheridan Street near Porter in South Philadelphia. He left home at 19 to become a barber and cut hair at the Camac Baths. In the early 1960s he opened what became known as "bust-out bars," among them the Phone Booth, the HMS Pinafore and the ZuZu Club, featuring strippers in the red-light district around 13th and Locust Streets; he was arrested several times for liquor-code violations. In the early 1970s he bought the Piccadilly Club on South Street near Front, reopened it as Scruples and later Christine's, and next door opened La Cucina Ristorante, which became a gathering place for members and associates of the Scarfo family. In the 1990s he built and operated clubs on the Delaware waterfront, among them Club Vegas, the South Beach Club and the Aztec Club.²

Scarfo

LaRussa said under oath that he had first met Scarfo as a teenager around 11th and Carpenter Streets. In the mid-1980s Scarfo and his senior associates were frequent customers at La Cucina, and a Christmas party Scarfo held there in 1985 drew intense police surveillance. The mob informants Nicholas Caramandi and Thomas DelGiorno testified that LaRussa had allowed Scarfo to use his house in Whitemarsh Township for initiation ceremonies; Caramandi said that he and two others were "made" there one afternoon after LaRussa had left. Questioned by a federal grand jury in 1987, LaRussa said he had been called away to work that day, that he was a frequent guest at Scarfo's waterfront house in Fort Lauderdale and had supervised construction work there, and that he knew nothing of Scarfo's criminal activities: "I never ask him any questions. We go out. We have dinner. We eat. We drink. We laugh. Christmas, we exchange gifts."¹²

The 1973 Film

Horsch said in a 2013 interview that 60 to 70 percent of the roughly 20,000 dollar budget of The Erotic Memoirs of a Male Chauvinist Pig came from LaRussa, who ran the Bag of Nails bar at 13th and Locust Streets, from "money that he had laying around in a shoebox behind the bar. We're talking about organized crime," and that LaRussa arranged the film's distribution through Philadelphia organized crime to Sam Lake. No other source ties LaRussa to the film; his obituaries do not mention it.¹²³

Death

LaRussa had undergone three open-heart operations and was awaiting a heart transplant, according to his godson. He died of a heart attack at Chestnut Hill Hospital on August 18, 1996, at 58, and was buried at Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in Cheltenham after a Mass at Epiphany of Our Lord Church.¹²