In the fall of 2017, a small team of American special operations soldiers pushed through the Syrian desert east of the Euphrates River. They were advising Kurdish fighters from the Syrian Democratic Forces moving against the last pockets of ISIS territory. Less than 30 mi away, Russian Spettznas operators were on the ground doing something similar.

Different side, different allies, same desert. The standing order for every American operator in that theater was clear. Do not engage Russian forces directly under any circumstances. Not even if they shot first. That order was never published in a press release. It was never announced in a Pentagon briefing. But it was real.

And [music] every special operation soldier who rotated through Syria knew it. The reason behind that order reveals something about how close the United States and Russia came to direct military conflicts during the Syrian civil war and why both sides were working extremely hard to make sure nobody found out just how close it actually got.

To understand why that rule existed, you need to understand what Serbia looked like in late 2015. By September of 2015, Bashar al-Assad’s government was losing. The Syrian Arab army had been ground down by four years of civil war. ISIS controlled a territory roughly the size of the United Kingdom across eastern Syria and northern Iraq.

Various rebel factions held large sections of western and northern Syria. Assad was running out of room. That’s when Vladimir Putin made a decision that changed the entire trajectory of the war. On September 30th, 2015, Russia launched his first AR strikes in Syria operating out of Kumim air base in Latakia province on Syria’s Mediterranean coast.

Russian Sue 24 and Sue 34 jets began striking targets across the country within 24 hours of the announcement. The stated mission was fighting terrorism. The actual mission was keeping Assad alive. But here’s the problem. American special operations forces were already in Syria. They had been there quietly for over a year, embedded with Kurdish Peshmerga fighters and later with the Syrian Democratic Forces in the country’s northeast.

Small teams of Delta Force operators, Army Special Forces soldiers, and CIA paramilitary officers were operating throughout the country with no formal announcement and no public acknowledgement from Washington. Now, suddenly, Russian attack aircraft were flying combat missions in the same airspace.

[music] Russian ground forces were beginning to deploy alongside Syrian army units. And Spettznaz, [music] Russia’s special operations arm, was not far behind. Two nuclear armed superpowers were now operating inside the borders of a collapsing country with no unified command structure, no shared communications, [music] and no formal agreement about who was allowed to be where.

The potential for a catastrophic accident or a catastrophic decision was obvious to everyone involved. [music] The Pentagon and the Russian Ministry of Defense established what became known as a deconliction channel, a dedicated communications line between US Central Command in Tampa, Florida, and Russian military counterparts in Moscow.

The channel operated daily. Officers from both sides would go over planned operations, geographic boundaries, and flight corridors to ensure that American and Russian forces did not end up shooting at the same position from opposite directions. In theory, this system [music] worked. In practice, it was one of the most tense and fragile arrangements in modern military history.

There were incidents. Russian aircraft crossed into zones that US planners had identified as American operating areas. Americanbacked Kurdish fighters in the city of Mombage came into contact with Russian military police who had moved into the same district. On multiple occasions, convoys from both sides ended up on the same road heading in opposite directions.

Officers would get on the phone, figure out what had happened, and both sides would back off. The standing rule for American operators was built around one core reality. A direct firefight between US special forces and Russian Spettznaz would not just be a skirmish. It would be an international incident with no clean off-ramp.

The domestic political pressure in both countries would be enormous. The escalation ladder going from proxy conflict to direct confrontation to something far worse would suddenly become very short. So the rule was simple. Avoid contact. If contact was unavoidable, break contact. Do not initiate. Do not escalate.

But then came February 7th, 2018. On the eastern bank of the Euphrates River near a small town called Kasham in Dar Ezor province, a mixed force of Syrian government fighters and Russian mercenaries crossed the river toward an outpost held by American special operations soldiers and their Syrian Democratic Forces partners.

The attacking force was roughly 500 men backed by artillery, tanks, and armored vehicles. The American position had fewer than 50 US personnel. What made this incident different from every other close call in Syria was who the attackers were. They were not ISIS fighters. They were not Syrian rebels. Significant elements of the attacking force were members of the Vagner Group, a private Russian military company that had been operating in Syria since 2016.

Wagner fighters were not officially Russian military, which gave the Kremlin plausible deniability. Their leadership was former Spettznaz. Their training was Russian military doctrine, and many of their personnel were veterans of Russian special operations units. The American commander on the ground called up the deconliction hotline and warned the Russian side that a force was approaching the US position.

The Russian officer on the line, according to multiple accounts, denied any knowledge of the advancing column and denied that Russian forces were involved. The column kept advancing. American forces requested AIR support. Over the next 4 hours, United States Air Force F-15E Strike Eagles, AC-130 gunships, and B-52 bombers flying from Aluded Air Base in Qatar struck the advancing column repeatedly.

Apache attack helicopters from the US Army joined the engagement. Marine Corps artillery fired from positions across the river. When it was over, approximately 100 members of the Wagner group were dead. Some estimates put the number higher. Dozens more were wounded. The attacking force collapsed and retreated back across the Euphrates.

No American personnel were killed. The Kremlin’s official response was that no Russian citizens had died in dear Eszor that night. Wagner group officially did not exist as far as Moscow was concerned. Russian state media ran no coverage. The Russian families of the men who died were in many cases warned not to speak publicly about where their sons and husbands had gone.

The official silence was deliberate because if Russia acknowledged that its fighters had attacked a US position and been destroyed, it would have to respond. And responding meant escalation. Escalation in a theater where both sides had nuclear weapons in the background of every decision was something neither government actually wanted.

The ban on direct engagement with Spettznaz was not weakness. It was an acknowledgement of something that military planners understand and that most news coverage never explains. When two nuclear powers share a battlefield, every tactical decision carries strategic weight. The American operators who had to stand down were not doing so because their commanders did not trust their training.

They were doing so because a firefight between Delta Force and Spettznaz in some eastern Syrian village had the potential to end with a phone call between two presidents, not two colonels. Deconliction, for all its tension and all its near misses, worked for the specific reason it was designed to work.

It gave both sides a way to back away from incidents without anyone losing face publicly. The Wagner attack in February 2018 tested that system harder than anything else that happened in Syria. Even then, both governments found a way to absorb what happened without letting it become something larger.

What Spettznaz was actually doing in Syria during this period went well beyond guarding Russian bases. Russian special operations soldiers from the 346th Spettznaz brigade and other units were documented operating in Palmyra after the city was recaptured from ISIS in March 2016.

Russian military advisers embedded with Syrian Arab Army units helped plan and execute the battle for Aleppo in late 2016. Russian forward air controllers were operating close to the front lines in multiple provinces, directing Russian aircraft onto targets in coordination with Syrian ground forces.

In several cases, these spets elements were operating in areas where Americanbacked Kurdish forces were also present. The deconliction hotline was used on at least a dozen documented occasions to prevent those overlapping operations from turning into direct confrontations. [music] The Syria deconliction model has since become something of a case study and how great powers can manage proxy conflicts without letting them spiral.

It wasn’t elegant. It wasn’t comfortable. There were moments when a single wrong decision by a single operator could have changed everything. But it held. The ban on engaging Spettznaz directly was never about doubting what American special operations soldiers could do in a fight. Anyone who knows the history of Delta Force, Seal Team 6, or Army Special Forces understands that question has a pretty clear answer.

The ban existed because the people making decisions at the highest levels of the American military understood that winning a firefight and [music] winning a war are two completely different things. And in Syria, in a desert valley along the Euphrates River with two nuclear arsenals sitting somewhere in the background. The math was simple.

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Nobody in the FBI surveillance team watching the Warfield restaurant that morning expected what they were about to record. They had the camera positioned on the exterior of the building for weeks. They had the audio bug planted inside. They were watching for John Stanfa, the Sicilianborn Philadelphia mob boss who owned the building and stopped in most mornings before heading to his warehouse on Washington Avenue.

What they got instead was something they had no protocol for. Something that had no real precedent in the documented history of American organized crime. A mob hit beginning to end, captured on both audio and video simultaneously in which the man giving the order to shoot was the victim’s own younger brother.

The FBI watched it happen. They recorded every second of it and they could not stop any of it. What you are about to hear is not a story about a mob war between two rival factions. It is a story about what a mob war does to a family when that family is the fault line the war runs through.

It is a story about three brothers, one-inch prison, one on each side of a shooting, and a father in a federal cell who watched both sons he could still reach get destroyed before the year was out. The Canian Kaglini family, South Philadelphia, 1993. Here is everything. There is a conversation documented in federal testimony that tells you exactly where this story goes before you know a single name involved.

Tommy Horseheads Scapiti, a Philadelphia mob associate who eventually became a government witness, is sitting with Michael Chianka Gleini in the months before March 1993. Michael is 29 years old, lean, serious, with his father’s South Philadelphia bearing and his childhood friend Joey Merino’s recklessness bred into everything he does.

He looks at Scapiti and says the following words documented verbatim in his federal testimony. We’re going to go kill that grease ball and we’re going to go kill my brother. If you don’t want to do it, I’m going to kill you right here, right now. Scapiti freezes, not because of the threat to himself, because of the seven words in the middle of that sentence.

We’re going to go kill my brother. His brother is Joseph Joey Chang Chianka Gleini Junior, 34 years old, dark-haired, handsome, the underboss of the Philadelphia crime family. The man sitting in the back room of the Warfield Breakfast Restaurant on East Pacunk Avenue every morning at 5:58 a.m. preparing for another workday.

The man who taught Michael everything he knows about how this world operates. The man whose father is the same father. That documented sentence spoken casually as if announcing a schedule is the beginning, the middle, and the end of the Chian Kaglini story compressed into one breath.

Everything before it is context. Everything after it is consequence. Joseph Chicky Chiian Kagalini senior built his reputation in South Philadelphia across three decades as a feared capo in the Lucesi Allied Philadelphia crime family. He was not glamorous. He was not the kind of figure who ended up on magazine covers or talked to reporters.

He was the kind of man who made things happen quietly, accumulated power without attracting unnecessary attention, and produced three sons, John, Joseph Jr., and Michael, who inherited his neighborhood, his connections, and the specific weight of a name that meant something in South Philadelphia before any of them were old enough to understand what it meant.

When the FBI finished with Chicky Chunka Glennini in the mid 1980s, they had built a case strong enough for a 30year sentence. He went in. His boys were left to navigate what came after. John, the oldest, was arrested in 1988 and sentenced to 9 years for extortion. Joseph was in his late 20s trying to find his position in a family that had just lost Nikki Scaro to a five-year federal sentence and was waiting to see what came next.

Michael, the youngest of the three, had found his position already. He had found it in a grade school in Point Breeze, sitting next to a boy named Joseph Salvatore Merino Joey, the son of former under boss Chucky Merino, who was going to grow into the most flamboyant and dangerous figure in the Philadelphia family’s modern history.

Michael and Joey were inseparable. They were arrested together. They were convicted together. They built their rebellion together. And this is what John Stanfo walked into when the New York families installed him as Philadelphia boss in 1991. Not a unified family waiting for direction. A family with a fault line running directly through its most prominent bloodline.

Stanfa’s calculation was logical on paper. He looked at the chunkagini name, respected, feared, multigenerational, and saw a bridge. If he took Joseph, the middle brother, made him under boss, gave him the title and the authority. Joseph’s presence inside the administration would theoretically anchor the young Turks who were already murmuring about Stanfa’s legitimacy.

Joseph was not Michael. He was not connected to Merino’s rebellion. He was the steady one, the practical one, the one who opened a restaurant and ran it honestly alongside his mob work, who moved through the neighborhood without the specific recklessness that was going to get his brother killed.

What Stanford did not fully calculate or perhaps calculated and dismissed was the specific position he was creating for Joseph. Not a bridge, a target. a man whose boss needed him to control his own brother while his own brother was actively planning to destroy that boss. Every day Joseph Chiankini went to work as under boss of the Philadelphia family was a day he was positioned directly between two men who were moving toward each other with weapons.

The first shot in the Chonkaglini war is fired not in 1993 but a full year earlier. The 3rd of March, 1992. Michael Chiian Kaglini comes home from a basketball game and approaches his South Philadelphia house. Two men are waiting. They have shotguns. They open fire. Michael dives inside and takes cover. He survives.

He lies on the floor of his house in the dark and processes what just happened. Then he goes through the specific inventory of detail that a man raised in this world performs automatically the build, the walk, the way the shooter moved. He has known that walk his entire life. His brother Joseph was behind one of those guns, acting on Stanfa’s orders.

Michael gets up off the floor. He calls Joey Merino. He tells him what he now knows. From this moment, the Chanka family ceases to exist as a family in any meaningful sense. What remains is a father in federal prison, two brothers at war, and a clock running toward the 2nd of March, 1993. Stanfa attempts a ceasefire.

That September, he convenes a formal induction ceremony and makes both Merino and Michael Chianka Glein as official members of the Philadelphia crime family. He extends the ultimate institutional gesture, the ceremony that is supposed to mean loyalty, obligation, protection to the two men who are actively planning to end his tenure and kill his underboss.

Merino accepts the honors. Michael accepts the honors. Neither one of them slows down. The Warfield is the mechanism they choose. Joseph Chian Kaglini owns and operates the Warfield Breakfast and Lunch Restaurant on East Pion Avenue. He opens it every morning before 6:00 a.m. His routine is fixed, predictable, documented.

He is there every day. The FBI knows this, which is why they have a camera on the building’s exterior and an audio bug on the inside. Stanford knows this, which is why he goes there most mornings to talk before heading to his warehouse. Michael and Merino know this because Joseph is their brother and their underboss and they have known his schedule for years.

The original plan targets two men simultaneously. Joseph Chianagini is one. John Stanfa is the other. If both men die at the warfield on the same morning, the Philadelphia mob has no boss and no underboss before breakfast. What stops the plan from achieving its full design is something the hit team cannot control.

Stanfa does not come that morning. For reasons that are never clearly documented, Stanfa skips his usual visit to the warfield on the morning of the 2nd of March 1993. The hit team goes in anyway. 5:58 a.m. The FBI camera captures the station wagon at 5 hours 58 minutes and 18 seconds, driving right to left past the Warfield’s exterior.

22 seconds later, at 5 hours 58 minutes and 40 seconds, the figures come running from the direction of the station wagon. Three or four men masked, moving fast. They burst through the front door. The audio bug inside the warfield captures what the camera cannot see. Susan Lucabello, the waitress who rode to work with her boss that morning, who has set up the front of house and is waiting for the day to begin screams.

There are rapid footfalls a door. The storage room in the back of the building where Joseph Chian Kagini is working. He is shot three times in the head. Once in the foot, once in the shoulder. The men exit. The station wagon is gone. South Philadelphia is quiet again. The entire documented sequence from the station wagon’s first appearance to the exit of the last shooter is captured on both video and audio, making the Warfield shooting one of the only mob hits in American history, preserved completely in real time on government surveillance. Joseph Siani survives biologically. His heart keeps beating. His body continues to function in the most basic sense. He never speaks again. He never walks again. He never recovers any meaningful neurological function. He spends the rest of his life in a permanent vegetative state, neither dead nor alive

in any way that the man who walked into the warfield that morning would recognize as living. His brother, Michael, when told that Joseph survived the shooting, is documented to have expressed his frustration not at his brother’s survival, but at Stanfa’s absence. The man he wanted most was not in the building. Five months.

That is how long the distance between the two remaining acts of this story takes to close. The 5th of August, 1993. A sunny afternoon on the 600 block of Katherine Street, South Philadelphia. Joey Merino and Michael Chunkaglini are walking together outside their social club. Stanford’s gunman John VC and Philip Kleti are in a Ford Taurus circling waiting for this exact configuration of circumstances.

VC is in the back seat with a 9 mm. Kleti has a 45 in the front. They circle the block once to clear a bystander, V’s own brother, Billy, a childhood friend of Merinos, and then Kleti pulls alongside the two men on the sidewalk. Both men fire simultaneously. Michael Chiankini is hit in the arm and chest. He goes down. He tries to get up.

He falls again. He dies on the Catherine Street sidewalk. He is 30 years old. Joey Merino takes bullets in the leg and buttocks. He goes to the hospital of the University of Pennsylvania in stable condition. He survives. Michael does not. The Ford Taurus is found 35 blocks away, burned to the frame.

Hundreds attend Michael’s viewing at the Cartau Funeral Home. A neighbor interviewed by the Inquirer says, “Why’d he get killed? Look at the life he lived.” In a federal prison somewhere in the United States, Chicky Siani receives the second piece of news in 5 months. Joseph is in a hospital bed, permanently vegetative, destroyed by three bullets from men his brother sent.

Michael is dead on a South Philadelphia sidewalk, destroyed by bullets from a boss he spent two years trying to kill first. The father who gave his sons his name and his neighborhood and the specific inheritance of a family that had been inside the Philadelphia mob for 30 years is sitting in a cell having lost both sons he could still reach before the summer of 1993 is over.

John Stanfa is arrested on March 17, 1994 along with 23 of his associates on 31 racketeering charges. The mechanism of his fall is specific and documented. John Vzy, the gunman who killed Michael Chian Kaglini on Katherine Street, is lured to a second floor apartment above a meat store in January 1994 by Stanford’s own underboss, Frank Martins, who shoots him four times in the head and chest.

VC, who is by every account genuinely too tough to die, wrestles a knife from Martine’s partner, slashes Martines across the eye, and escapes down the stairs and onto the street. He goes to the FBI within days. His testimony, combined with what the FBI has already documented across years of surveillance, produces the indictment.

Stanfa is convicted in November 1995 and sentenced to life in 1996. Joey Merino takes control of what remains. He wins the war that Michael Chiian Kaglini died fighting. He is convicted of raketeering in 2001, serves 14 years, and remains the documented dominant figure in the Philadelphia family into the 2020s.

John Shankagini, the eldest Chang brother, who spent the entire war serving his own federal sentence, is eventually released. He rises to consiglier of the Philadelphia family. He is charged with simple assault following a brawl at Chicks and Pete sports bar in South Philadelphia in August 2024.

When reached by a reporter and asked about his history, he says, “No sir, don’t believe everything you read.” Chicky Sian Gleiny Joseph Senior, the feared Cappo, the man whose name built everything and whose sentence left his sons to navigate it alone, is released from federal prison. He never cooperates with federal authorities across decades of prosecution and every pressure applied to him.

He dies on March 6th, 2023 at age 88 at a facility in Philadelphia. Mob Talk Sitdown describes him as an ultimate standup guy. He dies having outlived two of his three sons, having watched both of them taken by the same war, having never spoken publicly about any of it from the moment he went in to the moment he died.

Joseph Joey Chang Chiian Kaglini Jr. is never charged, never prosecuted. The FBI tape of his own shooting plays at multiple trials. He is a victim. He remains in the condition produced by three bullets in the back of a South Philadelphia restaurant until his death. The man who walked into the warfield that mo

rning at 5:58 a.m. Dark-haired, handsome, the underboss of the Philadelphia crime family, the middle son of Chicky Siana Gleini, the brother standing between two sides of a war, does not come back from that storage room. And somewhere in the documented federal testimony that dismantled everything, Tommy Horseheads Scapiti’s words sit in the court record exactly as Michael Chiian Kaglini spoke them.

We’re going to go kill that [ __ ] and we’re going to go kill my brother. The matterof fact delivery. The casual inclusion of his own blood in the same sentence as his enemy. The specific thing that happens to a family when a mob war decides it has no use for the distinction between the two. The FBI tape is still in the evidence archive.

Susan Lucabelloo’s scream is still on it. The timestamp still reads 5 hours 58 minutes and 40 seconds. And three sons of a South Philadelphia Kappo are either dead, paralyzed, or old and charged with brawling in a sports bar. And the only man from that generation who died in his own bed was the one who went to prison first and missed the entire