Scenes from a Small City Mob Life, Circa 1960

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It’s February 6, 1960, about five in the afternoon. Darkness is falling. The Chevy Bel Airs and Ford Thunderbirds maneuvering their wide bodies off of Walnut Street onto Main are snapping on their headlights, making a sheen against the wet pavement. Saturday night is coming. Pippy diFalco is limping across Main Street. The weather is sleety, temperature in the high thirties.

Pippy is a small man wearing a big overcoat. He has an open face, puppyish eyes, shows lots of teeth when he smiles—kind of a goofy expression, which gives an impression of innocence. But that’s misleading. People say there was always something else going on. “Nice guy,” his onetime partner told me, “but not a nice guy.”

Pippy was what you would call a creature of habit. He left his home in the morning—he lived with his wife and infant son in an apartment in Morrellville, one of the oldest sections of town, a neighborhood of steelworkers’ houses and lots and lots of churches—and drove along the river. On his right rose a steep, wooded hill, at the top of which the town’s rich families had their homes. On his left he passed one of the four steel-mill plants that powered the town’s rise in the twentieth century. Today they are as silent as Greek ruins, but in Pippy’s time they incessantly poured smoke out of their high, skinny stacks. Every day the smoke put a fresh red-gray coat of dust on all the cars in town, which nobody minded wiping off because if the mills were churning, so was the town.

Johnstown had just peaked as a small industrial powerhouse. The population of 53,000 was already on the decline (it hit its apex of 67,000 in 1920), but good blue-collar jobs were still plentiful, and there were lots of managerial and professional types as well. Today the city is largely hollowed out, with neighborhoods of boarded-up houses and a population less than a third of what it once was. In Pippy’s time it rocked: shift workers crowding into the mill gates, the trolley cars full, housewives browsing the downtown storefronts.

He crossed the river and entered downtown. If he chose to follow Washington Street he would have driven past the public library and the big squat rectangular box of the Penn Traffic department store, its display windows showing lady mannequins stiff but elegant in sheath dresses. He found a place to park on Vine Street and limped down to the Acme supermarket on Market Street. He bought the same thing every day: a loaf of bread, a half pound of sliced bologna, a small pot of mustard. Then he headed up to Main Street, turned left, and came to a stop in front of the ticket booth of the Embassy Theater. Today the marquee said operation petticoat. The 11:45 a.m. show flickered into the mostly empty hall: Cary Grant and Tony Curtis, bright in Eastman Color, were officers on a navy sub who had to contend with “five nurses who just had to be squeezed in!” as the trailer screamed over a sexy flash from the horn section.

Sometime after the picture started, Pippy’s stomach would have been rumbling. His routine was to pull out a pocketknife, use it to spread the mustard, peel off a few slices of bologna and start eating his sandwich. He’d do the same thing later for an early dinner, watching shows in succession if it was a double bill, or, in this case, the same one over and over. Pippy wasn’t a movie buff; he was just killing time. Sometimes he had to leave the theater and walk around outside a bit, to stretch his legs, fill his lungs with air. But doing that meant he had to pay again to get back in, so he didn’t do it often; when it came to hoarding money, Pippy had great fortitude. Money was Pippy’s elixir. In his pocket as he sat in the Embassy was a thick roll of bills. Nobody knows exactly how much he carried that day, but the man who many people think killed him later that night told me with cheerful certainty that Pippy had “two pocketfuls of hundreds” on him. Pippy was famous for his cash rolls. People say he typically toted $3,000 in cash as he made his rounds, a pretty fabulous sum in 1960.

He left the theater for good around five p.m., ready to start his real day.

So here he was now, making his way across Main Street. He had taken shrapnel in the war, and ever since, despite wearing a corrective shoe, he’d had the limp, which made work not so easy, given what he did, but he did it anyway because it was what he knew, and because he relished it.

He was called Pippy from childhood: a nickname for Giuseppe, the Italian form of Joseph.

The sign on the building across the street said city cigar. Its name was both descriptive and deceptive. Cigars were nominally on offer, but its location, two doors from city hall, a handsome structure of rough-cut sandstone blocks on the corner of Main and Market, was crucial to its purpose.

My research takes us this far, brings me right to the front door of City Cigar, the headquarters of the mob back when it flourished in my hometown. But while City Cigar was an important stop on Pippy’s itinerary, I’m not entirely sure he went inside that night. Was he maybe avoiding the place just then?

If he did pull open that door, on his left would have been the shelves of cigars and cigarettes and a rack of newspapers: the Racing Form and the local daily, the Tribune-Democrat (the day’s headlines: “U.S. Answers Soviet Threat” . . . “Not Running, Johnson Says”). On the right side was a little lunch counter, run by Anthony Bongiovanni—Nino, everyone called him. Was Nino standing there, skinny guy with thick eyebrows and a shock of black hair, arms folded across his apron, looking him up and down? Nino wasn’t so fond of Pippy. Nino was thirty-one: eager, methodical, loyal. He was a cook, which was all he ever wanted to be, and this was a good gig, and he didn’t want anyone to mess it up. Pippy was forty-five, and he liked to be liked, but over the years he’d crossed a lot of people, including, lately, the two men who were both of their bosses.

One of those men might have been right there at the counter, where he liked to perch on a stool. His name was Joe Regino, but everyone called him Little Joe. You said it with respect. Little Joe ran the town. He was born fifty-three years earlier in southern Italy, emigrated with his parents, and grew up on the mean streets of Philadelphia. He got involved in the mafia before most Americans had heard the word. His first arrest, in 1928, was for armed robbery. Later he did time for counterfeiting. As the mob was expanding, he was offered control of Johnstown, with its population of hardworking, hardscrabble immigrants—German, Polish, Welsh, Irish, Italian. So he made his way across the state, married a local woman named Millie Shorto and befriended her brother, Russell or Russ, who became his closest ally. He made Johnstown his home and his world. He was a strikingly small, soft-spoken, unfailingly polite man who favored double-breasted suits and loyalty.

Little Joe was my great-uncle. I’m told I was around him somewhat when I was very young, but I don’t remember. What I’ve learned about him comes mostly from cross-referencing FBI files—which list “highway robbery” among his achievements, a crime I had thought went out with the stagecoach—with family reflections: “He had the sweetest disposition. . . . He was very quiet. . . . Uncle Joe helped everybody.”

Let’s assume that Pippy diFalco, after leaving the movie theater, had some brief interaction with Little Joe out front and then went in back. We’ll follow him, pushing open the swinging door. We’re met by smoke: a light cloud of it hovering in the center of the long room. The furniture consists of ten pool tables, one billiard table and several pinball machines. At this time of day you’d have maybe half the tables occupied: office workers, municipal employees from city hall, a few lawyers. All men, of course. Pool halls were as common as Laundromats in mid-twentieth-century America; Johnstown had half a dozen within a few blocks of City Cigar. But this one was a little different. The low rumble of the players’ chatter was spiced not only by the bright clack of ivory balls but by the constant chicka-chicka of the ticker-tape machine. It sat out right in the open, at the end of the counter that ran along the left side of the room, chucking out sports scores.

And here, in his natural environment, overseeing the landscape of green felt and blue smoke, invariably dressed in suit and tie and with a Lucky Strike in the corner of his mouth, I locate the object of my search. He was of medium height, bearish in build, and had a handsome, wide face and squinting, suspicious eyes. I’ve always thought he looked a bit like Babe Ruth. Russell Shorto went by Russ. “Hiya, Russ.” “Russ, we got a problem.” He was forty-six years old and at the height of his success—or rather, just past it. In fact, not long before, he had been cut out of the business by his brother-in-law. My grandfather was Little Joe’s second-in-command; the two men had built the mob franchise in town together; they were close. But Russ had a drinking problem, which had gotten so bad that Little Joe decided he had to let him go. Later, though, Joe had relented, given him a second chance. So Russ was now on a kind of probation. He needed to steady himself. He needed to make sure things went smoothly. 

Despite his flaws, he had a talent for organization. Russ was largely responsible for having capitalized on the little steel town’s postwar boom by building an operation that generated what one knowledgeable person estimated at $40 million over the fifteen years since the war’s end (about $370 million today), a portion of which was sent off weekly to “the boys” in Pittsburgh. From there another portion supposedly was sent on to New York.

Gambling was the heart of Russ and Little Joe’s operation. Before there were legal, state-run lotteries, when even tossing a pair of dice against a wall and betting on the numbers that came up was considered immoral and a threat to public health, gambling was what the mob was all about. It was illegal—yet, in the glow and relative prosperity of the postwar era, people were crazy for the possibilities it offered, the giddy thrill of turning a bit of pocket money into sudden wealth. Gallup surveys in the 1950s showed that more than half the country’s population gambled on a regular basis. The mob—Russ and Little Joe—provided a service; a public utility, as many saw it.

In Johnstown, City Cigar was the center of things. The place itself was a hive of legitimate commercial activity: eight-ball was in its heyday, and there was a regular ebb and flow from the lunchtime rush to late at night.

The centerpiece of the Johnstown operation was something Russ created not long after the war, a cleverly named entity called the G.I. Bank, which sounded like a bedrock institution, something that supported the returning troops, but was simply a numbers game that half the town played. Like a lot of other local books around the country, the G.I. Bank took its winners from the closing numbers of the New York Stock Exchange. That made for a virtually tamper-proof system that encouraged bettors’ trust.

There were other games. “Tip seals,” a tear-off game much like today’s scratch-off lotteries, brought in millions in revenue. There were organized card games and craps games throughout the city, some of which had pots that got into the thousands of dollars.

Then there were the legitimate, or semi-legitimate, enterprises. They owned, wholly or with partners, diners, restaurants, pool halls, and bars.

I don’t imagine for a minute that the situation in Johnstown was unique. What Little Joe and Russ created in the period from the end of the Second World War to 1960 was mirrored in smallish cities across the country. New York and Chicago drew the attention of journalists and politicians, and therefore of the public, but the mob spread itself across the map like a corporation opening branch offices. In Pennsylvania, besides big operations in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, there were Little Joes and Russes in Scranton, Reading, Braddock, New Kensington, Sharon, McKeesport, Penn Hills, Allentown, Wilkes-Barre, Greensburg, Monessen, Pittston, and Altoona. In 1957, when the FBI began to try to get a handle on the scope of things, it identified mob activity in such unlikely places as Anchorage, Alaska, and Butte, Montana. Bosses communicated, cooperated, and vied for power with one another in a continent-wide network.

In Johnstown, Russ oversaw much of the activity, but his particular area of focus was the sports book. It’s not like he was a dyed-in-the-wool fan (an old bookie set me straight on this: “Russ could give a fuck about sports”), but his way with numbers, his ability to set the odds, which required great precision, made him especially suited to sports-related gambling. He managed the bookies who took bets on baseball, football, basketball, horse-racing, and prizefights.

This is what brought Russ into regular contact with Pippy diFalco. Pippy booked sports. He had a regular route and regular customers, who knew where he would be at what time, and City Cigar was a part of that schedule. But lately Pippy had been light in his payments. Russ and Little Joe tolerated a certain amount of this. As Pippy’s onetime partner told me, “They knew that in a business full of cheats you gotta give guys some leeway.” They themselves were surely shortchanging the bosses in Pittsburgh, just as Pittsburgh was doing it to New York. Russ was something of a first-class cheat himself, especially with cards; he had probably gotten in his 10,000 hours of practice—false shuffles, second dealing, dealing from the bottom of the deck—before he was old enough to drive.

So: it took one to know one. Either Pippy had taken too much liberty this time or too many people had become aware of it. That’s why I think it’s possible that Pippy was avoiding City Cigar just then. Then again, if he had skipped his regular stop at the pool hall, wouldn’t that have sent a pretty nervy signal? He was just a guy, just a sap with a game leg and a stupid grin and a wad of bills in his pocket; he was in no position to give the mob the finger. So maybe he came in to offer an explanation of his situation.

If they talked, what did Russ say? What kind of threat might he have made? Russ carried a gun at all times, but I have no indication that he ever used it, and there didn’t seem to be a reason for anyone to fear for his life—not in Johnstown in 1960. “It was an innocent time,” more than one guy told me. But he and Little Joe knew how to use muscle. “If a bookie ran out on Little Joe, he’d call me,” one former enforcer told me from his nursing-home bed. “I’d go beat the guy up—get the money. Maybe I’d bring a .48 to scare him. Minor shit.”

So maybe we can go out on a limb and assume that Russ threatened Pippy that if he didn’t start making up for lost time, he would send somebody after him. One guy in particular they used for muscle—a guy called Rip, tall, lean and vicious, with blond hair and horn-rimmed glasses—would have been just the guy to put a healthy scare into Pippy. Once before, in a dispute over money, Rip had beat Pippy up, beat him real bad. Maybe, as that evening got under way, Pippy had the image of Rip in his mind.

Eventually, then, on this February evening in 1960, Pippy went off on his rounds. He probably headed east down Main Street, passing the one-square-block of Central Park on the left and Woolworth’s on the right, turned left at Clinton Street, past Coney Island Lunch, “world famous” (locally) for its chili dogs, and made his way to the Clinton Street Pool Room. It, too, was controlled by Little Joe and Russ. The same activities went on here, but whereas City Cigar was a leisure center favored by city officials, lawyers, and other elites, Clinton Street was a working man’s hangout. There was a counter where you placed bets, and spittoons at intervals. It was looser and louder than City Cigar.

Pippy presumably met clients that evening at the Clinton Street Pool Room. He passed a little time with Frank Filia, my mom’s cousin, the guy who got me started on this project during a four-hour chat session at his hangout, Panera Bread. By this time Frank had been working for the manager, Yank Croco, for nine years as a numbers runner and as counter man in the pool hall. Frank performed with the George Arcurio Orchestra on weekends and was building a name in town as a crooner. He was also an artist: in his spare time behind the betting counter he liked to make sketches of the regulars. When I asked, during a follow-up to our first Panera Bread session, what some of the people from his youth looked like, he picked up a stack of cocktail napkins and spontaneously re-created a few:

Click to view slideshow.

 

Frank told me he had been feeling a little uneasy around Pippy around this time. Everyone, it seemed, knew that Pippy was welching on the mob. Or maybe that’s all hindsight.

Night came on. Nowadays if you venture to downtown Johnstown on a February evening you’ll find yourself in a rustbelt ghost town, but in 1960 the streets got lively even in winter. People headed to Hilda’s Tavern, where on this night the Harmony Tones were playing. The Gautier Club, a strip joint right above the Clinton Street Pool Room, was hosting its All-Star Floor Show and Orchestra, plus comedian Allen Drew. Back at City Cigar, the place filled up with men and smoke. It got rowdy; floor men stood ready to break up fights (one told me he had kept a broken cue stick on hand, and used it frequently). Even in bad weather, the opposite corner of the street outside, called Wolves’ Corner, was alive. Guys hung out there and whistled at broads, hoping for something to happen.

Midnight came. The sleet stopped; the streets glistened. At two o’clock the bars emptied. Then it got quiet.

Two doors down from City Cigar, the top floor of a three-story building became an illegal after-hours joint on weekends called the Recreation Club. It wasn’t much: a jukebox, two sofas, a little bar with its lineup of offerings: Kessler Whiskey, Walker’s Gin, Mogen David wine. Tacked to the wall was a board listing football and basketball scores. You had to be known to get in. It was seedy, smelling of old carpet and cheap wine, but it could get packed.

Pippy showed up here sometime after two, with a woman nobody had seen before. He was a married man with a two-year-old son at home, but everyone—including his wife, Barbara—knew he had a weakness for ladies. He didn’t have much going for him in terms of natural attractions, which was a likely explanation for the otherwise unnecessarily large wad of cash. People noted it that night, the flash of the bankroll, and the grin. Making an impression. Eventually he left, with the mystery woman on his arm.

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Excerpted from Smalltime: A Story of My Family and the Mob. Copyright (c) 2021 by Russell Shorto. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

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