You may not know Johnny Cooper as readily as the names David Stirling, Paddy Mayne, or other names linked to the early SAS, but he belonged to a small group of men who helped define the regiment in its formative years. He entered the war young, restless, and eager for something more demanding than conventional service, and he found it in the world of raiding forces, desert patrols, and special operations.

From the North African campaign to occupied France, and later the jungles of Malaya, the covert war in Arabia. His career followed the changing shape of British special forces across several decades. He became one of the originals in the fullest sense, not simply because he joined early, but because he helped establish the habits of endurance, improvisation, and aggression that became central to the regiment’s identity.

I don’t think I’ve been requested something so much as I’ve been requested to make this video, and I just want to say thank you so much for the support on all the videos, and especially the Rogue Heroes series, as you guys have been so desperate for it. I feel like it’s only right to give back to you guys. So, here we go.

This is the story of Johnny Murdoch Cooper, one of the many rogue heroes. Now, before we get into the video, 99% of you who watch these videos are not subscribed. Now, if you enjoy this video or my content, then please consider leaving a like on this video and subscribing. It really helps me out, and it lets you stay up-to-date with my channel.

Johnny Murdoch Cooper was born on the 6th of June 1922, and grew up in Oadby, near Leicester. His family lived on Stalton Road, and he attended Wyggeston Grammar School for Boys. At school, he showed confidence and a strong personality. One of his classmates was the future actor Richard Attenborough. The school had an active dramatic society, and both the boys appeared in productions.

Attenborough often played female roles, while Cooper usually took the main lead. He came from an educated Midlands middle-class background, and enjoyed sports and physical activity, developing a reputation for determination and competitiveness. That background sometimes set him apart from other wartime soldiers, and later contributed to an early tension with Reg Seekings, another founding member of the SAS, who came from a very different world.

If you’d like to learn more about Reg Seekings, see the video linked in the description. At 17, Cooper lied about his age to join the British Army. He enlisted in the Scots Guards, a regiment known for strict discipline and high standards. During the early years of the Second World War, when special operation units were beginning to form, he quickly looked for opportunities beyond conventional infantry duties.

He volunteered for eight Guards Commando, one of the raiding units created to strike Axis positions. Training emphasized endurance, navigation, demolitions, and small unit tactics. Cooper adapted well, and gained a reputation for enthusiasm and reliability. In 1941, he traveled to the Middle East as part of the Commando effort in North Africa.

There, he encountered David Stirling, who was developing the idea of the Special Air Service. Stirling believed small teams could move deep behind enemy lines and destroy aircraft on the ground. Cooper volunteered for the new unit, and joined the SAS at 19, becoming the youngest member of the original formation.

The early SAS was tiny and depended on volunteers willing to attempt difficult operations far behind enemy lines. Cooper trained as a navigator for raiding patrols, a role that required expert use of compasses, maps, and the stars across featureless desert. He often guided Stirling’s patrols over long night journeys in trucks and jeeps towards Axis airfields.

His concentration and skill made him exceptionally valuable. One of the things we do see in the show is a mission in Tunisia in January 1943. David Stirling is captured by German forces. Cooper was on the patrol, and escaped with Mike Sadler and Freddy Taxus. The group walked more than 100 miles across the desert while avoiding capture before being found by soldiers of the French Foreign Legion and American 26th Infantry Regiment.

See more about Mike Sadler’s story in the link below. During the early SAS period, Cooper also formed an important relationship with Reg Seekings. Their first meeting was hostile. Seekings came from a working-class background, and had been a boxer, while Cooper carried the confidence of a grammar school education. They almost fought.

Yet, during their first combat operation together, each recognized the courage and determination of the other under fire. Hostility turned into respect, and then into a close friendship that lasted the rest of their lives. Many veterans later described them as inseparable. By 1943, Cooper was selected for officer cadet training, and returned to England.

After completing the course, he was commissioned, and returned to the SAS as a lieutenant. As the regiment expanded in preparation for the invasion of Western Europe, he became a troop commander in A Squadron, and helped train new recruits. The SAS planned to parachute small teams into France to disrupt German communications and delay reinforcements moving towards Normandy.

Cooper was dropped into France, and established a base in the Morvan region, between the Loire Valley and Dijon. From there, the SAS worked closely with the French Resistance. Cooper and his men trained the fighters, supplied weapons, and organized sabotages against railways, telephone lines, bridges, and convoys.

The work depended on cooperation with civilians, who faced severe punishment if discovered. As Allied forces advanced across Europe, Cooper’s unit moved forward as well. He later witnessed the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, an experience that shocked many Allied soldiers, and exposed the scale of Nazi atrocities.

Over 10,000 bodies were laid out in the open across the camp. Cooper was deeply affected by the liberation. After the war, Cooper remained in the army, and continued serving in special forces. During the Malayan Emergency, he joined the Malayan Scouts, which later became 22 SAS. This campaign demanded jungle warfare against communist insurgents operating from remote forest bases.

The conditions were completely different from anything he’d fought in before. Thick vegetation, heavy rain, insects, and intense humidity. Cooper led long-range patrols to locate and disrupt enemy forces. One operation lasted 122 days in the jungle, and for his service, he was awarded the MBE. In 1958, he commanded A Squadron of 22 SAS when the regiment was sent to Oman to support the Sultan against rebels in the Jebel Akhdar Mountains.

The campaign involved difficult mountain warfare and the training of local forces. Cooper worked closely with Colonel David Smiley, who commanded the Sultan’s Armed Forces. At one point, Cooper disappeared from Oman without explanation. British officials thought he might have gone home, but in fact, he traveled secretly to Yemen.

There, he worked with David Smiley to assist royalist forces fighting Egyptian-backed rebels in the North Yemen Civil War. The operation involved supplying arms and organizing resistance groups in the mountains. Some of the weapons came from Israel, and British involvement remained secret for years.

Cooper spent many months in the mountains wearing Arab clothes and assisting the royalists. The conflict involved small battles, covert supply flights, and the threat of chemical weapons used by the Egyptian forces. After these operations, he returned to Oman, where he commanded the training regiment, and later became head of the national police force during the 1970s.

He also developed an interest in amateur radio, and founded the Omani Amateur Radio Society in 1971. Through this hobby, he communicated with operators around the world, including King Hussein of Jordan. Eventually, Cooper retired with the rank of lieutenant colonel, and settled in the Algarve in Portugal.

Not a bad place to spend your retirement. In 1991, he published his autobiography, One of the Originals: The Story of a Founding Member of the SAS, one of the earliest personal accounts of the regiment’s creation. The same year, he appeared on This Is Your Life, bringing his story to a wider audience.

He continued writing for the SAS Regimental Magazine, and remained closely connected to former members of the unit. John Murdoch Cooper died on the 12th of July, 2002, after a career that stretched from early desert raids of the Second World War to later special operations in Asia and the Middle East. Within the regiment, he was remembered as one of the originals, a man whose life reflected the spirit of the SAS motto, Who dares wins.

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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