PHILADELPHIA — The Philadelphia mob’s bloody 1990s power struggle will be back in the spotlight next month, courtesy of a new docuseries from Netflix.

Dubbed "Mob War: Philadelphia vs. The Mafia," the series covers a chaotic period for Philly’s mob following the arrest of former boss Nicodermo Scarfo, who was convicted on a litany of charges in 1988, and died in prison in 2017. Scarfo’s downfall, the story goes, kicked off a war for power in the early 1990s between two factions in the Philadelphia mob — those backing John Stanfa, and those supporting Joseph “Skinny Joey” Merlino.

Merlino, who opened Skinny Joey’s Cheesesteaks on South Broad this year, has long denied having been behind a faction of the city’s mob.

“I wasn’t an altar boy,” Merlino told The Inquirer in March. “Did I gamble? Yeah. Did I receive stolen property? Yeah, we did s— like that. But all the major crimes they said we did, we didn’t do them.”

Either way, the 1990s were a violent time in Philly mobland through the middle of the decade. As one voice-over in the "Mob War" trailer puts it, “bodies were flying everywhere,” and continued to do so until Stanfa’s life sentence was handed down in 1996.

Netflix’s trailer for the series appears to primarily feature John Veasey, a hit man-turned-government informant who contributed to the fall of Stanfa and a number of other mafia members. Veasey is also a central figure in the violent time period on which the docuseries focuses, having participated in multiple high-profile murders and attempted murders of the era.

Among them was an August 1993 ambush in which Merlino was injured, and Michael Ciancaglini, another mobster, was killed. That incident, Netflix says, marked the eruption of “long-simmering tensions within Philadelphia’s underworld.”

Veasey went on to spend nearly 11 years in prison on murder-racketeering charges as part of a plea agreement, and was released in 2005. Years later, in 2012, Veasey revealed his story in detail in "The Hit Man: A True Story of Murder, Redemption and the Melrose Diner," a book by former Inquirer reporter Ralph Cipriano. By that time, Veasey was working as a car salesman at an undisclosed location in the Midwest, and claimed to have turned over a new leaf.

“I did a lot of bad things; now I’m doing a lot of good,” he told The Inquirer in a 2012 interview.

Veasey appeared to exhibit a similar attitude in the trailer for "Mob War," expressing regret about having been involved with the Philadelphia mob.

“I made a lot of bad decisions in my life,” he says in the clip. “But the worst decision was joining the mafia.”

"Mob War: Philadelphia vs. The Mafia" premieres Oct. 22 on Netflix.

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