Author: Michael Klein

At noon on a bright June Tuesday, the scene at Skinny Joey’s Cheesesteaks & Pizza on the Wildwood boardwalk felt more like a South Philly block party than a soft opening.

Joseph “Skinny Joey” Merlino worked the crowd at his new shop — hugging, shaking hands, posing for photos — moving easily among his friends and admirers. At 64, five years removed from the criminal justice system, the onetime alleged head of Philadelphia’s underworld is enjoying a second act that few could have predicted: cheesesteak entrepreneur, podcaster, and social-media personality.

Orbiting him with a phone and a grin was Joe “Lil Snuff” Perri Jr. — 30 years his junior — Skinny Joey’s collaborator and the man who helped set him up with a new career. While customers lined up out front for steaks, slices, photos, $35 hats, and $25 T-shirts, Perri was shooting clips for social media.

Their partnership has transformed Merlino from a flashy, polarizing tabloid fixture into a flashy, polarizing Instagram-age brand. Merlino provides the mythology, while Perri supplies the algorithm.

Symbiotically, they are building an unlikely enterprise. Merlino gives Perri access, credibility, and a bigger stage. Perri gives Merlino comic relief, social-media fluency, and a way to be seen as entrepreneurial rather than simply infamous as a reputed former mob boss.

“Without me, there’s no him,” Perri said. “Without him, there’s no me. It’s just a good mix.”

A ‘mob media’ moment

George Anastasia, who covered organized crime for more than 30 years at The Inquirer and now teaches an organized-crime course at Rowan University, said Merlino’s new career fits a broader moment in mob media.

Former wiseguys, associates, historians, and fans now gather in a true-crime subculture known online as “MobTube,” where the lore is packaged into YouTube shows, Patreon feeds, podcasts, clips, and merch.

Merlino has lived the story that fuels the genre. One of Philadelphia’s most recognizable organized-crime figures, Merlino was convicted in 1990 for his role in a $352,000 armored truck robbery in 1987.

In 2001, he and six co-defendants were tried on federal racketeering charges, including three counts of murder and two of attempted murder. Merlino was acquitted on those counts, but served about 12 years on other charges, including gambling and extortion. A supervised-release violation briefly returned him to prison in 2014, and a second major racketeering case ended in 2018 with a guilty plea to a single illegal-gambling charge after a mistrial. In a separate trial in 2004, he was acquitted of the 1996 killing of Joseph Sodano, an underling in North Jersey. Merlino completed federal supervision in 2021, but he’s been banned from New Jersey casinos since 1988 and from Pennsylvania casinos since a 2016 incident at the former SugarHouse Casino.

And Merlino has made it no secret that he is different from many of the former figures who populate the MobTube genre. Unlike Sammy “The Bull” Gravano, John Alito, and Jimmy Calandra, Merlino never cooperated with prosecutors.

“He saw guys who cooperated come back and become media sensations,” Anastasia said. “And I think he got [annoyed] that these are all guys who, in his view, violated the code, and now they’re making money on that old life. He did his time as a stand-up guy. ‘So [to heck with that] — I’m going to make money, too.’ And he created this brand.”

Perri helped make that legible to a younger audience.

“Lil Snuff is part sycophant and part guide,” Anastasia said. “He’s the one who, in a lot of ways, sets the flow. Joey is going to be Joey, but somebody has to keep bringing him back to the point.”

The rise of Lil Snuff

Before he was Merlino’s co-host, Perri was Lil Snuff.

The nickname came from his father: As a 10-year-old, Joe Sr. turned around when a cousin was calling for a dog named Snuffy. Boom. He was Snuff. When his son was born at Methodist Hospital in 1992, Snuff became Big Snuff.

As a teenager, Lil Snuff bussed tables at Stogie Joe’s, the Saloon, and Fitzwater Cafe. At 18, he joined the stagehands union. At 21, he got a job at Mall Chevrolet in Cherry Hill. The older salesmen had relationships and repeat customers. Perri’s mentor told him that he needed a lane.

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It was 2013, and social media was beginning to reshape promotion. Perri started making his own brassy, unscripted commercials. “Selling Chevys for less” became his tagline.

He also made videos about gambling and food, his two passions. He was not famous, but he was visible in the South Philly-to-South Jersey social media corridor where restaurants, sports, betting, family, and neighborhood identity blur into one feed.

At the same time, Perri said, he was abusing pills. In 2014, at 22, his parents found him a rehab center in South Florida. To make sure he got there safely, they called a family friend whose Italian restaurant in Boca Raton had recently opened:

Joey Merlino.

“My father grew up with his grandfather,” Merlino said, explaining the bond. “I grew up with his father. I’ve known him since he was born.”

Perri said it took several attempts before recovery stuck. He has been sober since Sept. 11, 2016. “I’m big with recovery,” he said. “That’s the main thing in my life. I put sobriety first and then everything after that.”

Merlino’s — where Merlino was maitre d’ because his legal situation then precluded ownership — closed in 2016, just before the feds arrested Merlino at his home in Boca in the lead-up to his second racketeering case. “If I didn’t have this trouble, it would still be open,” Merlino said earlier this month.

After Merlino attained freedom in July 2021, producers called with movie, television, and book deals. Merlino turned them all down. “Nothing seemed right,” Merlino said. Someone brought up the idea of a podcast.

“I didn’t even know what that was,” Merlino said.

His friend Raymond “Wags” Wagner explained the concept and suggested a loose format built around food and sports betting. Actor Kevin Connolly of Entourage fame, who was involved early as a producer, told Merlino that he needed a co-host.

“They said, ‘Who would you want?’” Perri said. “They were sending him people, and he was like, ‘I’m not doing nothing with these people.’”

Then Ray Wags suggested Perri.

“Joey was like, ‘100 percent. Get him on the phone,’” Perri said. “Kevin Connolly said, ‘Send me your videos.’ I sent him my videos, and he said, ‘You’re the guy.’ The rest was history.”

The world of ‘MobTube’

Merlino and Perri launched the video podcast in 2023. Viewers are not just watching Merlino talk about the old life. They see him bust Perri’s chops about eating too much and mock his parlays. They get gambling tips, watch them interview athletes and celebrities — all part of a South Philly generational comedy.

Perri describes it in family terms. “My dad’s my dad, but he’s also my best friend, too,” Perri said. “We gamble together. We go out together. We have fun together. So they see me and Joey as that, and they can’t figure out how we mix so good.”

“He’s good,” Merlino said. “I’m old, he’s young. He talks good, he’s funny. He’s a pain in the balls, but it’s a good fit.”

They began The Skinny podcast on YouTube, but now focus more on Patreon, where the content is unfiltered. And better monetized. Perri says The Skinny has 1,600 Patreon subscribers paying $15.95 a month. He said their social-media pages combined average 30 million views a month.

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Perri’s wife, Danielle, handles bookings and schedules. “I produce,” Perri said. “I cut the clips. I do everything. It’s me and Joey. Two-man show.”

A wider audience

When they started, Perri was still selling cars at Mall Chevrolet. But the now-shuttered dealership got tired of people showing up hoping to see Merlino instead of test-driving a Suburban.

Perri quit. The show grew. Merlino’s reinvention has coincided with a broader shift in the gambling world. Legal sportsbooks, now ubiquitous on television and online, have largely supplanted the corner bookmaker, turning an activity once associated with organized crime into a mainstream consumer business. Guests span sports, hip-hop, gambling, and entertainment, including Wallo267, Fat Joe, Ric Flair, and Bernard Hopkins.

Each booking widened his audience, and Merlino was being absorbed into a broader celebrity ecosystem.

Last October, Netflix released Mob War: Philadelphia vs. The Mafia, a docuseries revisiting the violent 1990s power struggle between John Stanfa and Merlino’s younger faction. It steered even more viewers to Merlino and Perri’s world.

‘Skinny Joey,’ wit’

Then came the cheesesteaks.

One night, Perri, Merlino, and friends were playing poker. Merlino wanted cheesesteaks. Perri said he’d make them.

“He’s like, ‘You can’t make cheesesteaks,’” Perri said. “I said, ‘Are you nuts? I’ve been making them my whole life.’”

Perri cooked some. “He was like, ‘This is the best f— cheesesteak ever,’” Perri said. “He said, ‘Let’s open up a cheesesteak place.’ I said, ‘All right. Call it Skinny Joey’s Cheesesteaks.’ And that was it.”

The first shop opened in March 2025 at 3020 S. Broad St., near the sports complex. From the start, Skinny Joey’s was more than a sandwich shop. It was a set. The shop leaned into Merlino’s notoriety; the sandwiches are wrapped in a collage of newspaper articles about his past.

Celebrities showed up: Jason Kelce, Landon Dickerson, Mack Wilson. A customer eating a cheesesteak was good content. A recognizable person eating one on camera was better.

The restaurant also became a magnet for the kind of drama that fuels digital engagement: online beef. Podcaster Gene Borrello, a former Bonnano crime family associate and Merlino antagonist, weighed in last year on an apparent feud between Skinny Joey’s camp and Frank Olivieri of Pat’s King of Steaks. Merlino and Perri had taken issue with a video posted by Olivieri — whose great-uncle invented the steak sandwich — in which he chided shops that chop the meat on the grill. Like most online food feuds, this seems to have subsided.

Then came the deal for Wildwood, where Skinny Joey’s replaced Joe’s Pizzeria, which had been on the boardwalk at Magnolia Avenue for 15 years. There, Skinny Joey’s added pizza and stromboli, which are not sold at the South Philadelphia location.

The pizza recipe comes from Vito’s on Haddonfield Berlin Road in Cherry Hill, and the stromboli from Pizza Shack at 15th and Oregon in South Philadelphia, both owned by Skinny Joey’s business partners Stephen Casasanto and John Fioravanti, whom Merlino also described as longtime friends.

More locations are planned. Perri said a Boothwyn shop is expected around Sept. 1, and several others are in the pipeline.

Bypassing the gatekeepers

Merlino is an extreme case of a recent phenomenon. People with complicated histories — criminal, scandalous, controversial, or simply overexposed — no longer need traditional gatekeepers to reintroduce themselves. They can speak directly to followers and monetize the attention.

Perri is not a journalist, of course, or a publicist, exactly. He is not merely a manager, producer, or sidekick. He is something in between — a new kind of local media operator.

He knows the scene, and how to make content feel unscripted even when the business behind it is deliberate. He is close enough to Merlino to bust his chops and deferential enough to preserve the hierarchy. He can translate Merlino to younger audiences without making him seem managed.

Perri softens Merlino without sanding him down. Merlino still curses, rants, and mocks rivals. Anyone they disagree with is a “bedbug.”

“At the end of the day, Joey isn’t going to change who he is for anybody,” Perri said. “If he can’t talk the way he wants to talk, what’s the point?”

That is part of the appeal and part of the discomfort. The audience knows Merlino’s history. They may see him as funny, defiant, loyal, misunderstood, or simply entertaining.

“There’s a segment of the American population that has always been fascinated with the outlaw: Billy the Kid, Jesse James, Don Corleone, Al Capone,” Anastasia said. “What the internet has provided is: Here are these guys in their own words. Are they being genuine? I don’t know. You can say that about any personality. But here’s a look at them without any filter.”

The filter used to be people like Anastasia.

“I was, in a lot of ways, the middleman between the people who were interested in this and the guys who were doing it,” he said. “And people who are interested in this don’t need the middleman anymore. They just go online and listen to whoever they want to listen to.”