Johnstown in its heyday, with steel mills at full capacity.
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 5 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.
Main Street in Johnstown in 1962. City Cigar was in the building beside the “Democrat Club.”
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.”
So Joe Regino, the little guy who was the big guy in town. Who was on equally intimate terms with both the local Democratic Party boss and his Republican opposite. Who hobnobbed with judges, who had the governor over for dinner. He hung out at Nino’s lunch counter, which occupied the space in front of City Cigar, because he liked to keep an eye on things. He could swivel from watching the street to checking on what was going on in the back room. There was a little slot in the wall behind him, which he could slide open.
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 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.
From hundreds of hours of interviews with family and acquaintances, I’ve gleaned four distinguishing traits about Russ. The first, truly an ace-in-the-hole for a gambler and hustler, was math: people told me they watched him cast his eye down a column of three- and four-digit figures and matter-of-factly record the sum. Never mind that he was an eighth-grade dropout; running the odds on a horse or a starting pitcher apparently came with the same easy satisfaction as drawing a breath of air.
Two: he was very quiet. You asked him a question, you probably got a muttered syllable in reply. Some say they believe this was really a manifestation of pathological shyness, and that it was the effort to break this grip that led to his third distinguishing characteristic. He was an exemplar of a particular category of true drunk, who might go for months without touching a drop then launch into a bender that would last for days. The fifths of whiskey were medicine to thaw the emotions. “When he was sober he was like ice, but when he was drinking he would hug everybody,” his niece, Minnie Bermosk, who did the bookkeeping for City Cigar, told me. “A few drinks, and suddenly he was a lover. And a crier! He got sad. He’d call me sobbing and say, ‘Minnie, you’ve got to come here.’ And I’d say, ‘I know—you’re drunk.’ ”
Drinking, because it opened him up, giving him access to his feelings, probably connected to a fourth defining trait: he was a serial philanderer. It was his affairs, more than the mob, more than the threat of p
rison or the FBI pounding on the door, that caused the greatest havoc in his family.
Despite these outsized flaws, he had a talent for organization. He basically ran the operation—that’s what the old guys told me. When I asked one of Russ’s disciples why Little Joe gave him so much latitude, he said, “Because Russ was smarter than Little Joe, and Little Joe knew it. Russ could take a fuckin’ dead cow and make it give milk.”
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. Sometimes Russ booked special events, bringing in a nationally known sharpshooter, like the world billiards champ Willie Hoppe, to put on an exhibition. The tables generated income. But, as Minnie said to me, looking back sixty years, as if the realization was just then dawning on her, “I guess you could say City Cigar was a front.” (Minnie worked in a little office just behind the pool tables, where she was in charge of paying the staff—“always cash, never checks.”) Gambling was the real revenue stream. And just like state-run lotteries today, the mob offered customers a variety of ways to lose their money.
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. It was a labor-intensive operation. Maybe a hundred people were employed by Russ and Little Joe in the G.I. Bank. There were people who booked on the side—bartenders, deli clerks, and waitresses—and people for whom the numbers was a living. Runners fanned out through the neighborhoods—Conemaugh, Moxham, Woodvale, the West End—and on the floors of the steel mills, collecting bets and betting slips, then bringing the take back. In the office above City Cigar people registered the numbers played and the money. A player won by hitting three numbers; you could play them straight or in combination. 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. Little Joe also owned two vending-machine companies. Keystone Sales supplied cigarette machines to bars, cafés, and diners around the city. P and C Amusements distributed pinball machines and jukeboxes. It’s hard to appreciate how big a thing pinball was in mid-twentieth-century America, but here’s one way to get at it: according to the Pacific Pinball Museum, from the late 1930s, when the first electric machines appeared, into the 1960s, Americans spent more money on pinball than on movies. The attraction came from the fact that while the machines were labeled FOR AMUSEMENT ONLY they were actually gambling devices, and especially after 1947, when the innovation of flippers gave the player a feeling of control, they were everywhere.
In fact, the story of pinball machines tracks the phenomenal rise and steady drop in fortune of the small-town mob. The machines’ popularity through the 1940s and 1950s was related to the limitations of home entertainment. In 1950, only 9 percent of American families owned a television; people went out for a little fun, and the mob was on hand with its amusement services. By 1960, 90 percent of households had a TV, and the boys were already seeing a decline in people who wanted to spend their nickels on pinball.
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.
It took me a while to appreciate that Little Joe and Russ did not run all the gambling activities in town themselves. Bookmakers were essentially self-employed. But they worked within a system that Little Joe and Russ oversaw. The bribes that the operators of City Cigar paid, to everyone from the district attorney to beat cops, formed a protective shield around all bookies in the area. Little Joe and Russ also provided the odds that sports books needed. And they functioned as a bank: an individual bookie could lay off large bets with them to avoid being hit with a win he couldn’t cover. In exchange for all of these services, bookies paid a portion of their earnings to City Cigar.
Russ oversaw much of this 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? People tell me 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 of their former enforcers 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, with clients like Johnny Atlantic, a flamboyant drunk who talked with exaggerated professorial diction: “Please re-frain from ex-pectorating in the re-ceptacle!” Everyone knew that Red Picklo, a slow-witted regular who acted as a bouncer, a man with a bulbous nose who looked like W. C. Fields, was a softhearted lunk, but fancied himself a gangster. He’d work himself into a rage over word that the boys from New Kensington were muscling in on the Johnstown rackets and bellow empty threats: “I’ll get a machine gun and wipe out all them motherfuckers!” Red worked for the city sanitation department. He had a big Packard but didn’t drive. Instead, somewhat madly, he had a chauffeur, a Black man named King Lemore, whose stock phrase was “Long live the King!” He would shout it from the doorway to whoever was inside, and someone would shout back, with a mixture of humor and scorn, “Fuck the King!” He waited outside because the color barrier was in effect; “coloreds” had their own gambling places.
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