Ciancaglini, 30, was pronounced dead at Thomas Jefferson University Hospital, killed by a single bullet that entered his arm and traveled to his heart.
Merlino, 31, was luckier. Shot in the buttocks and leg, he was listed in stable condition last night at Pennsylvania Hospital, where he was admitted under police guard. Detectives said Merlino refused to talk to them about the shooting.
Police said the killers drove off and abandoned their car about 35 blocks away, deeper in South Philadelphia, setting it on fire in an apparent bid to render it useless to investigators.
The car was gutted. A Hammonton, N.J., auto dealer reported it was stolen yesterday morning from outside a Glassboro, N.J., home whose residents had rented it.
The violence seemed one more sign that Philadelphia's La Cosa Nostra has plunged into another internal power struggle like the one that put more than two dozen members into graves in the early 1980s.
And it reached into the second generation of two families who have provided a steady stream of foot soldiers and leaders for the mob - and who have paid a price for that. Ciancaglini's father and Merlino's father are serving long prison terms for mob activities, as are Ciancaglini's brother and Merlino's uncle.
Ciancaglini was the fourth organized-crime figure murdered in the Philadelphia area this year.
"The information we have is that they were both mob targets," said Chief Inspector Richard A. Zappile, who directed operations yesterday at the scene. He called the shootings "one in a series" related to "a continuing mob war."
The turmoil now underway may have pitted Michael Ciancaglini against an older brother, Joseph Ciancaglini, who himself was wounded last March in the city's Grays Ferry section. A masked gunman pumped five shots into his body, but he lived.
