September 6, 2000

His girlfriend says Ron Previte saved her life and may have turned on the mob because he fell for her

by Kitty Caparella
Philadelphia Daily News Staff Writer

IN BED WITH a 105-degree fever and a fiercely sore throat, Kayla couldn't get up to cook the kids dinner or do much of anything.

Hard-headed, she wouldn't call the one person she knew could help.

Then, she heard the front door open, and she knew. He was there. Her son went running to him.

"Mom's real sick. I think you got to take her to the hospital," the boy said.

He found her in bed, carried her to the car and drove her to the hospital.

"I almost died," she said later. "He helped me walk. He bathed me. I saw a side of him I never saw before."

He also cooked for her kids. He stayed with her day and night until she recovered from the life-threatening abscess around one of her tonsils.

When Kayla recovered and was back to her old self, she felt "smothered" by his presence and kicked him out again.

The man in question?

Ronald Previte, 57, the former Philadelphia cop and former mob capo who turned the underworld upside down by cooperating with authorities and taking down two Mafia bosses - Ralph Natale and Joseph "Skinny Joey" Merlino - as well as 23 mob associates.

The woman he's loved for the past seven years revealed a little known side of Previte recently. She talked about their on-again, off-again relationship, the Mafia and Previte's shocking decision to cooperate with authorities.

Kayla is not her real name. The Daily News is withholding it. Federal authorities have accused Merlino of threatening to have people close to Previte and Natale, who also is cooperating with authorities, killed. Merlino vigorously denies the allegations.

Kayla is a petite and feisty 44-year-old who takes no guff from the mob, the FBI or Previte, a looming six-footer who weighs 280 pounds.

"I don't like anyone telling me what to do," she said. "If someone tells me not to do it, I'll do it, or I'll do worse.

"I'm not an easy person to scare."

Both are so strong-willed that their relationship borders on the Shakespearean, reminiscent of the stormy days of Elizabeth Taylor and the late Richard Burton.

"In our relationship, I was always in the wrong. I told him, 'You're not an easy man to be with,' " she said.

Kayla has taken extraordinary measures - filing charges against Previte or obtaining a protection order - when she's felt his jealousy has gotten out of control. Or to keep him at a distance to "prove a point."

Previte, who was a battlefield medic in Vietnam, had earned a reputation for brutality as a Philadelphia cop before he was forced to resign in 1977 after 10 years on the job. He boasted he learned how to be a crook on the police force, something that served him well scamming a million bucks from hotel guests and suppliers as a Tropicana Casino security guard until 1985.

In the mob, he became a deal broker and top moneymaker, raking in tens of thousands of dollars. He wielded control over bookmakers, mobsters and others as the intimidating head of the South Jersey illegal sports gambling business through much of the 1990s.

He knew no limits.

Until Kayla.

That's why his relationship with her represents such an incredible turnabout in his life.

"My problem is I love the guy," she said. "I'm comfortable with him."

Previte met his match.

ON FEB. 20, 1997, Previte secretly signed an agreement to tell all to the government about the Mafia.

He was disgusted with the mob life and the mob hierarchy.

On June 28, 1999, Previte shocked the underworld when his role as an informant became known. Natale and Merlino were indicted in separate federal drug conspiracies in South Jersey and Boston.

Previte had been taping and videotaping mob members' and associates' conversations from Philadelphia to Massachusetts for more than two years in drug deals, in an interstate theft ring and in other crimes. He remains in protective custody.

Infuriated mobsters quickly dubbed him "Fat Rat."

Kayla had "no idea" that Previte had been leading a double life until he confessed to her before his snitching became public.

"I didn't know what was going on for the longest time," she acknowledged.

The couple had broken up when he called and told her: "I really have to talk to you because I may not ever see you again if I don't."

Then, Previte told her that he had been cooperating, first with the New Jersey State Police, then with the FBI.

"I was shocked," she said. "For days, I walked around in shock. I'd wake up and say 'Wow.' It took me days, weeks to really understand. He was a great actor. If he could fool me. . ."

She said Previte explained: "That's why I had to do this or that. I couldn't give anything up. You had to believe I was still in it.

"See," he told her, "I'm not the bad person you think I am. I'm a good person."

THE TWO MET in 1993 through Previte's bodyguard, Carmen Perrotta, a body builder who worked out at the same gym she did.

Kayla was petite and auburn-haired, a no-nonsense and very grounded woman who was devoted to her three children, including a son who is autistic.

Previte, who has dark and piercing eyes, was viewed by his underlings as nasty and brutal.

But he was a perfect gentleman the day he was to meet Kayla's cousin on a double date with Kayla and Perrotta. Instead of her cousin, Previte fell head over heels for Kayla.

"He told me right away who he was and what he was doing at the time with [mob boss John] Stanfa," she said. But Kayla didn't know enough about what he was doing to be scared.

"Ron doesn't live extravagantly. It's not like in the movies. People think they [mobsters] have lots of money, but they don't have tons of money like people think they do.

The father of two adult daughters is divorced.

"His house in Hammonton wasn't extravagant. It was simple, a nice property. Really nice kitchen and bathrooms. Not overdone, but very comfortable," she recalled. He sold it last year after his cooperation became public.

Meanwhile, Kayla's life was in a shambles.

She was going through a difficult separation from her husband. They had lost a newly built two-story home. Her autistic son was acting out in a sometimes bizarre way, hitting people without reason.

At first, Previte didn't understand her son's behavior.

Once she explained autism - a complex disorder that affects a child's ability to communicate, socialize and behave properly - and how she was trying to mainstream her son into a regular school, Previte reached out to him.

The two males bonded, going fishing and spending days together, before Previte left the area.

Kayla saw a different side to Previte.

"He's a homebody," she said. "He just helped me and my family out."

"He doesn't go to casinos. He gambled a lot of money there. [Now] he stays away from them. I used to say 'Let's go to the casino,' but he'd say, he had his day at the casino, he didn't need that anymore."

Kayla asked him how he stopped.

"I just told myself to stop and I stopped," he told her.

ON JAN. 3, 1998, Kayla, who had broken up with Previte, was being dropped off by a date.

Previte, beside himself with jealousy, was waiting for her. He and bodyguard Perrotta allegedly tried to run into his rival's van with a car, but the man escaped.

Previte burst into Kayla's house, damaging the front door, according to court records. He frightened her daughter. Police obtained a taped telephone message he left for Kayla: "I'm going to rip your head off."

Previte and Perrotta were indicted on state charges of aggravated assault, terroristic threats, burglary and conspiracy. Previte's attorney repeatedly postponed the case.

But prosecutors were having problems: A possible illegal search and seizure and the man nearly run over refused to testify. Last Nov. 17, the charges were dismissed.

He is "like Italian men of a certain age who want everything their way," Kayla said. "A strong personality, very smart, temperamental at times, but so am I."

Kayla said she goes through times "where I don't speak to him."

"He yells and screams but doesn't hit me," she said. "He says he's never hit a woman, and I believe him . . .If he wanted to kill me, he would have done it a long time ago."

Previte quickly found out that he couldn't treat Kayla like mob underlings. She would cut him out of her life. Just like that.

Without warning, he showed up one day recently. According to court records, he walked into her home demanding to see her. She told him to leave, but he tried to break down her bedroom door, screaming, "Let me in."

"I wanted to bust on him," she said. "I wanted to make a point that he can't just walk in whenever he wanted to."

Police arrived and she filed for a restraining order.

Prohibited by a court from contacting her, Previte confided his woes to her estranged husband, whom he once considered a bitter rival.

"My ex would call and say, 'Please talk to him. I can't take it anymore.' Then, my ex's girlfriend would get on the phone and say: 'You gotta talk to him. Please.' "

Previte was moping around so much, she said, that an FBI supervisor figured they'd be better off separated and urged her to keep the restraining order.

That did it. No way was the FBI or the mob going to tell her what to do. She let the temporary order lapse.

"I'm not taking it from bosses, from the FBI, from you," she told him.

Says one investigator: "She is not co-dependent."

When she finally got Previte's attention, she said: "If you are going to say nicely, 'Maybe it should be this way,' I might change my mind."

"Here I am being mean to him, not talking to him, and if it wasn't for him, I would be dead. Did I get sick so that I found out this man would always be there for me?"

DURING THEIR seven years together, Previte and Kayla attended weddings, christenings and funerals of Mafia members and associates. But they didn't socialize with mobsters much beyond that.

"I really, really thought he liked them," she said. "It seemed like they loved him when we went out to dinner."

But the only mobster Previte ever really cared for was John Stanfa, the boss of the Philadelphia La Cosa Nostra from 1990-1994, who had inducted him into the crime family.

"Stanfa was his friend more than anyone else," she said.

Previte thought Ralph Natale knew what he was doing when he took over as boss in 1994. Natale promised him a promotion and that he'd move up within the organization.

"He seemed pretty happy about that," Kayla said.

Like Previte, Natale had a girlfriend - Ruthanne Seccio.

"Ralph fell totally for this girl and he was letting things go," Kayla said. "I guess Ralph was just lazy and wanted the money, and everyone had to do the work."

By 1998, mob business was in a shambles. With Natale arrested on parole violations, Previte had to pass up a larger percentage of the sports gambling profits to Merlino than in the past.

Previte "didn't like what [other mobsters] were doing, their robbery of other people or of each other. He just called them a 'bunch of crooks,' " she said.

He would say: "Joey was greedy."

In fact, Merlino only gave Previte's daughter a few hundred dollars at her lavish 1998 wedding. Previte expected more from the mob boss, who had brought his wife, mother and sister to the wedding.

Previte "thought [George] Borgesi was pretty cocky and he didn't really like him, especially after he beat Angelo Lutz. Angelo was a little into the business and he just wanted to be liked," Kayla said.

Borgesi, named consigliere after Natale was jailed, was "a punk doing something like that," Previte told her. "What an idiot."

Borgesi has denied he beat up Lutz, a mob associate.

Kayla doesn't believe one person or one reason caused Previte to cooperate.

"I just think he thought it was something that had to be done," she said.

Investigators had approached him, advising him: "We can help you out, if you can help us."

At one point, "He was getting money from [law enforcement] and money from the mob, so he was doing pretty good," she said.

"I asked him if he felt bad about the families, like Joey's kids," she said. But he told her: "Did Joey worry about his family when he was robbing somebody? He should have thought about it then."

When Previte saw other mobsters killed in recent years, his resolve to cooperate only intensified.

"You don't think they're going to do that to me too? I got them before they got to me," he told her.

"Everyone is a rat today. It's a totally different ballgame."

PREVITE TRIED to persuade Kayla to go with him, get married and start life anew. Still not divorced, she wasn't sure what she wanted to do.

He told her: "I did a lot for you. This is for you. I want to be with you. And that's why I agreed to do what I did."

She told him: "I've been through such a bad marriage before. I just live day by day."

Previte told her that she had been his motivation to set his life straight and now he wants to live what's left of it with her.

"We'll be together forever," he promised.

WHEN THE FBI first took Previte away, she said, "he was working nonstop day and night, from early morning to late at night. He would say 'I gotta do this, I gotta do that.' He had so much on his mind.

"People can change. He's becoming a completely different person. All of a sudden, he's communicating with me. He used to be the boss man, the power.

"I saw how hard he was in front of his friends. He said he had to be that way. He couldn't be soft in front of them.

"He's a tough guy, but he's not anything like I thought. He's using less of that language, and I use that language more. Now, I scream: 'This is the way it is.' I'm the one who says nasty things," she said.

"I see such a sensitive side to him," she said. "He's really receptive. . .[like] the first time he expressed that 'it takes two to tango.'

"He really wants to be loved. He told me: 'I really realized because of what I was, you don't think I need [love], but I do.'"

"He really wants a settled life. I'm sure that if in the end, if he's happy, he's done it for the right reason."

"I love the guy because of who he is now."

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