Philadelphia Daily News from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania • Page 8

THE PHILADELPHIA DAILY NEWS THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 1995 PAGE 8 He quit the cushy life to work for the Lord Fainting spell fells mobster in court smile and he said, "I've got parents calling me all the time, saying, 'What's going on? I've raised this child for 12, 13 years. I know this child. What's causing this child to be accountable all of a They're actually worried about it They think there is occult stuff or something going on here. I invite them to my home so I can show them, 'See, I don't have voodoo ew, former underboss-turned-in-formant Philip Leonetti, the family was to report to Piccolo, according to court documents. After Scarfo, Leonetti and 15 others were imprisoned on federal -RICO charges in the 1980s, Piccolo was left as acting boss.

On July 29, 1990, while on federal probation for bribery, Piccolo initiated five mob members in an attempt to rejuvenate the Philadelphia La Cosa Nostra. The ceremony was recorded by inductee-informant George Fresolone. He also was present for the Mafia initiation ceremony of Thomas DelGiorno, Nicholas Caramandi, Eugene Milano and Leonetti, now. all mob informants in the witness protection program. Before Piccolo's collapse, three jurors were selected from 28 considered.

The most controversial was a grey-haired native-Italian suburban woman in her 50s, who spoke with an accent after living in the United States 33 years. The government tried to dismiss her saying she "looked scared," but defense attorney Robert Welsh objected, saying the government was excusing her because of her ethnicity. U.S. District Judge Ronald Buckwalter agreed. She was accepted as Juror No.

6. Juror No. 7 is an African-American telephone operator in her 40s, who has two nephews in jail and a brother-in-law in the Secret Service and once testified about murder weapons in a trial 30 years ago when she was a babysitter for a man accused of murder. Juror No. 8 was a white female union member in her 50s, dressed in a white knit top over a purple turtleneck and white slacks, who wore sunglasses.

Her disabled husband was a Teamster truckdriver, who was mugged and robbed 10 years ago. Rosemarie said, "My brother is not going to live to the end of the trial." Anthony Piccolo, who will be 73 on Monday, suffers from vaso depressor syncope, "a disorder in which there is nervous system imbalance and perhaps a heart rate imbalance which precipitates fainting episodes," according to a March 28, 1994, letter his cardiologist, Dr. Nicholas DePace, sent to the judge. "Stress can bring it on, stress of sitting in a courtroom, suddenly without warning," DePace wrote. Piccolo also has diabetes, sleep apnea and cardiovascular disease dating to the 1970s.

Since being imprisoned in the March 16, 1994, RICO indictment, Piccolo has fainted at least 10 times, including last Wednesday, after being transferred from federal prison in South Jersey to the city prisons, relatives said. Since 1979, Sam Piccolo said, after fainting spells, his brother "hit a parked car, he hit a tree, he fell in the house and broke his arm and he fell outside and tore his rotator cuff." Last year, Piccolo fainted several times during a weeklong trial on state RICO charges in New Jersey. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Two emergency medical technicians and two nurses took his vital signs, then sent him to see a city prison doctor, Weissbard said. In the 1980s, jailed crime boss Nicodemo "Little Nicky" Scarfo left standing orders that if anything happened to him or his neph by Kitty Caparella Daily News Staff Writer Jury selection in the federal mob trial was interrupted yesterday when Anthony "Tony Buck" Piccolo collapsed during a coughing spell in the courtroom.

Piccolo, the mob's consigliere, was grabbed on one side by Mafia boss John Stanfa and on the other by attorney Brian McMonagle to prevent him from falling. The incident startled the court and stopped jury selection at 2:40 p.m., 15 minutes after the session had resumed in the murder racketeering trial of Stanfa and seven co-defendants in Piccolo U.S. District Court. Three jurors had been selected, bringing the total to eight. "Lay him on the floor and let the blood get to his head," shouted an onlooker.

Stanfa kicked Piccolo's chair from behind him and he, McMonagle and Piccolo's attorney, Harvey Weiss-bard, lowered Piccolo to the floor. "Get back!" barked an agent. "He's my brother, I want to know how he is," said Sam Piccolo, watching from two rows away with his sister, Rosemarie. As the courtroom was cleared. 40 SQ.

YARDS AVG. LR, STAIRS or HALL DUPONTSTAINMASTER AVAIL. I MOTOROLA FLIP 000 1 PI I AS fifi riiAfaa 1 ma efore Brother Azuma became Brother Azuma, he was just plain Azuma Beckam, a women's sportswear executive with a nice house on a nice, racially diverse street in Overbrook and a late-model Lincoln Town Car. Five years ago, he was born again as a Christian. Gave up the women's sports wear and the 75 grand.

"There is not a dollar amount that would have kept me there," he says, "once God said, 'Drop it' Dedicated his life to saving at-risk young black teen-agers in his Overbrook neighborhood. Brother Azuma still has the nice house on nice, racially diverse 65th Street near Haver-ford Avenue, only now he has the Abiding Truth Ministries "Afro-bibliocentric, Charismatic Flavored, Fundamentally Sound, Christ-Centered Church" in his basement. He still has the late-model Lincoln Town Car, only now he uses it to show the at-risk kids he works with that you can acquire a late-model Lincoln Town Car without becoming a drug entrepreneur. "I'm not coming at them with holes in my sneakers and a Bible in my hand, saying, 'Give your life to Brother Azuma says. "I don't think that would work." Hoops works.

Last spring. Brother Azuma first encountered his core group of young teen-agers throwing a basketball through a plastic milk crate nailed to a telephone pole in the street behind his house. After a while, the ball put dings in the neighbors' cars, the neighbors called the city and the city took down the milk crate. End of game. Brother Azuma promised the kids they could practice at nearby Good Shepherd Presbyterian Church gym, 65th and Lans-downe, and play in a league at far off Panati Playground, 22nd and Clearfield, if they joined his youth rehab program, 42nd Generation which demands top grades, responsible behavior toward parents and siblings, black cultural awareness and the memorization of biblical scripture.

Kids who lived up to Brother Azuma's strict standards played. Kids who didn't rode the pines. Brother Azuma said his best athletes were getting splinters while "kids who were school geniuses but could hardly dribble a basketball were starting. "So," he said, "we were getting stomped. We suffered a lot of mockery and ridicule.

It made them tougher mentally. I'm not teaching them basketball. I'm teaching them the journey from Suddenly Az stern expression relaxed into a 1 15) I Brother Azuma credits his wife, Cheryl, whom he married in 1991, with supporting his "hard-core commitment to Christ" despite the material strain on her and their three daughters that his giving up $75,000 a year has caused. He is also grateful to his parents for supporting the fledgling bas ketball team. Brother Azuma's core group of eight frustrated hoopsters has grown to 22 boys, 12-15 years old.

He is encouraged by his young charges' progress, but he does not claim infallibility. "I don't have a firm grip on all of them," he said. "Some of them are loose cannons." He worries about keeping the loose cannons away from urban predators. "You don't have to be evil to end up tragically," he said. "You just have to be in the wrong place where evil exists." Three years from now.

Brother Azuma said, he expects that his group of 22 will have grown to 50. "My 12-15-year-olds will be 15 to 18 by then," he said, "capable of either destroying my community or lifting it up. By then, I want my neighbors, regardless of their race, to see three or four of my young black men walking down the street and feel good about seeing them instead of afraid." Brother Azuma hopes his boys-to-men swell the ranks of the community watchdog group that is almost as close to his heart as the kids. "This community could have been saturated with criminal activity," he said. "The word could have gotten out that we're easy pickings here.

Well, we're not. I've got 16 men in the community who are ready, willing and able to respond within a five-minute period of time. "We detain people," Brother Azuma said, "like the guy who was walking around with a paint can, knocking on doors, talking about how he wants to paint numbers on the sidewalk," but maybe he was really looking for a house with nobody home and an open window of opportunity. "We see this guy," Brother Azuma said, "and we call each other and all of a sudden he turns around and BOOM! We're there." BOOM! Story of Brother Azuma's life since he was born again and embarked on his difficult journey community young mack men with him. SHOP AT HOME SERVICE NEXT DAY INSTALLATION FREE MEASURE 5 YEAR WARRANTY DELIVERY ifiSftCS" S3 CALL ANYTIME DAY, EVE, WEEKEND 610-825-7908 Sales Representative Will Visit Your Home HUNTING PARK AVE.

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