The story of what happened next came to me from Cindy Shorto, my father’s cousin’s wife, who got it from my father’s aunts: “He was leaving, so he took everybody out to dinner. When it was time to pay, these two guys saw his money belt, how thick it was. Later they got hold of him and kicked and stabbed him. He lived for three weeks and then he died.” He was killed for his newfound wealth.
For all his American inclinations, then, Antonino Sciotto’s story would end in Sicily, violently and abruptly, at the age of forty-four. He left two families on two continents. A little irony to end this anecdote: his mother, whose impending death had precipitated his visit, lived on for years after.
Antonino Sciotto.
I imagine news of this magnitude would have been sent by cable, but that supposes that someone in the village knew that the orphan girl Annamaria Previte was living in Pennsylvania as Antonino’s wife and the mother of his children. So maybe not. Maybe it came slowly, haphazardly, eventually reaching her in her home on Church Avenue in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a whisper or a letter conveying the information that a brief act of violence on an island in the middle of the Mediterranean Ocean had transformed her world. There’s an odd story that has survived in my family, which holds that two men showed up at her home in Pennsylvania one day, presenting themselves as relatives of the person or persons who had killed her husband. The story goes that they had come to apologize. It’s strange enough that it might be true. Maybe they were the ones who broke the news to her that her husband was dead.
What could she do now? She was an unskilled mother of nine, alone in America, whose English was restricted to a few phrases (example: my father remembers her anger coming out in a homemade locution of “summon-a-bitch!”). She had her boarders, who provided a little income. She had her children, the oldest of whom, Anna and Perina, were fourteen and thirteen, respectively, and could work, probably already were working. She had also brought her Sicilian hill-country survival strategies with her. She had the children set traps around the yard for sparrows and robins, which she would fry up; she gathered dandelions and wild mushrooms from the woods.
Russ was six when his father died. His childhood would come to be governed by his mother’s peasant wisdom. If a cut became infected, she packed it with cow manure. Come down with intestinal pain and you received the bonus unpleasantness of an egg-white enema. The smallest of the children were sent off along the railroad tracks to gather chunks of coal that flew off the trains. When they got meat they ate the whole animal—brains, lungs. Mary herself hardened and toughened as time went by. She was known to open a bottle with her teeth.
The house was pretty rough too. Grandchildren who eventually came along remember it being infested with rats and cockroaches; she kept chickens in the backyard, a pig kept under the porch (which eventually grew so big they had to dismantle the porch to get it out) and a goat for milk in the basement. The goat surfaces in one of the family stories about the period, which people point to as an early indication of Russ’s resourcefulness. One of the girls was struck by appendicitis, which forced Mary to rush her to the hospital, leaving the other children alone. Soon the baby started crying in hunger. In her panic, Mary hadn’t thought of this. It was Russ who had the answer. He and his sisters descended to the basement, he held the goat’s hind legs, one of the girls introduced the baby to the teat, and the problem was solved.
DESPITE A WORLD of hardships, Mary had a sliver of luck in the timing of Antonino’s death, for it coincided with the start of Prohibition. The thumbnail understanding of Prohibition—the way I saw it until I began researching—holds that it was a movement in which militant church ladies pushed for a ban on alcohol in order to improve the morals of their menfolk. That notion turns out to be so simplistic as to be almost a lie.
Take a step back. What was America like in the 1920s? It was roaring, right? There was a party going on. Jazz, flappers, Hollywood: it was all new, all being invented, furious and delirious and sequined. Theaters, whose sculpted grandeur had been meant to evoke ancient Greece, were suddenly being repurposed, Vaudevillians shouldered aside by the jaw-dropping high tech of the moving picture. Babe Ruth was revolutionizing baseball, and there he was, ghostily inhabiting your local venue, the Sultan of Swat swinging for the fences in newsreel footage. People were going out and doing something crazy-new and liberating: buying themselves a car. Then thundering off under their own steam like lunatics across the landscape, racing and weaving and crashing and bursting into flames. And if they survived, doing it all over again. Radio, too, was relatively new—the eerie magic of being connected to a mass culture only really became a thing in the 1920s. I can imagine Russ and his siblings bending over a box to hear the reedy, hissy sounds of the world out there. And to those first listeners the buzzings and cracklings weren’t just interference but part of the experience, part of the deep interconnectedness, for you were swimming in the world of physics, surfing the electromagnetic waves along with the rest of humanity, all together in this act of discovery.
But while you are imagining America in the 1920s as this mass hoopla, you also have to picture the place seething with a hundred hatreds. Because this jazz party was being foisted onto a country that until a minute before had thought of itself as overwhelmingly and decisively comprised of white Christian farm folk. Think of the couple in “American Gothic” suddenly finding their pious little house on the prairie invaded by cocktail-swizzling Charleston enthusiasts. Great swarms of immigrants were pouring into the country’s ports; new fashions, technologies, and innovations were changing life at the speed of light. For many, it was too much. Someone had to pay.
In fact, researching Prohibition is like reading the backstory to recent history. Yes, per capita alcohol consumption in the early twentieth century was considerably higher than today: the nation had a drinking problem, and targeting it was a motivation for temperance leaders. But the ban was also in a very real sense an effort to preserve “American values” by lashing out at people who were seen as threatening. The targeted groups were basically two: urban elites and recent immigrants. White Americans throughout the country’s heartland were alarmed at the sudden influx of millions of immigrants, who were widely believed to be of a lower order of humanity, who were thought incapable of self-control and prone to violence and rape. That alcohol, which weakened morals, was important to their cultures—the Germans had their beer halls, the Italians their wine, the Irish their whiskey—was proof that the newcomers constituted an anti-American invasion. From the perspective of Prohibition leaders like Carrie Nation, who became famous for barging into saloons swinging a hatchet, America’s cities were filled with nightclubs where elites developed perversions like homosexuality, and with hordes of immigrants who got sozzled in beer halls then rampaged through the streets. Beneath Prohibition’s Christian morality flowed a current of racism. It wasn’t coincidental that one of the forces behind it was the Ku Klux Klan, or that the Klan—a post–Civil War phenomenon that had long since faded—reemerged as an element in American life right at the time Prohibition went into effect.
In Johnstown, Prohibition was presaged by a weeklong revival led by one of the nation’s leading temperance champions, a former baseball star for the Chicago White Stockings known as Billy Sunday. He had made a second career out of railing religiously against every human manifestation of wickedness: drinking, dancing, gambling, theatre, the teaching of evolution. (Baseball, however, was OK.) Groups like the Anti-Saloon League hadn’t yet made much of an impact in the town, perhaps due to its sizable immigrant population, but Mr. Sunday’s event (which began and ended on a Sunday) changed that. The newspaper reported that 24,500 people showed up on the first day alone. People must have come from miles around to take in the show, for total attendance for the week supposedly topped half a million, in a town whose population was less than 60,000. And it was an all-out spectacle. Sunday’s performance was built around his athleticism. He writhed and flung himself across the stage, executing a k
ind of three-act battle with Satan for his own soul and the eternal salvation of those watching in stunned attention.
After Sunday wrapped things up with a parade down Main Street, the newspaper chronicled the change: “One week of Billy Sunday and the old town has been turned topsy-turvy.” Prohibition became wildly popular among the city’s white Protestant majority. Many of the leading citizens—the mayor, city councilmen, the heads of the Cambria Steel Company—jumped on the bandwagon.
Italians and other minorities pushed back. Western Pennsylvania had become known as “the wettest spot in the United States,” in part because of the concentration of minorities whose cultures involved alcohol—and this in turn probably led a couple of decades later to the particularly strong small-town mob presence in the same part of the country. The tension between them and the white Protestants increased. Many of the town’s able-bodied white men had been shipped overseas to fight in the World War, and Cambria Steel began recruiting Black replacements from the South. As had happened ten years earlier, when Tony and Mary Shorto arrived during a strike and Tony got work for a time in the mill, white workers railed against Blacks and, as they said, other “undesirables” taking their jobs.
Anger led to action. By January 1922 “a large class of prominent men in town” had joined the Ku Klux Klan, according to the newspaper. Soon after, the Klan staged a series of publicity stunts around town. After giving advance notice so as to gather a crowd, a group of men in white robes with hoods would file into a public building, such as the YWCA on Somerset Street, as if for a business meeting. They handed the clerk behind the desk literature describing their aims, as well as an envelope containing cash, in an effort to build goodwill.
The Klan in Johnstown seems to have had about 1,700 members at its height—a large number for a small city, surely because of the presence of industry and thus the threatening influx of immigrants and Blacks. The Klan was anti-Black, of course, but more to the point Klansmen considered themselves “pro-American,” meaning in favor of a white Protestant vision of America. According to KKK logic, only that slice of the racio-religio-ethnic pie could be considered as comprising the true descendants of the pioneers who had wobbled across the continent in their Conestoga wagons. Some of Johnstown’s leading citizens fell in with Klan teaching, believing that they and their fellow white-robed ones were pure stock, “the vanishing Americans,” being drowned in a sea of newcomers. Immigration was making the country, in the stirring words of William Joseph Simmons, the Grand Wizard who had resurrected the Klan in 1915, “a garbage can.”
Italians in town felt the rush of WASP purity like a slap and wanted to slap back. One of my elderly informants, relying on his father’s recollections, described the mood and the bitter logic in the Italian community: “Back then the people who ran the town would say, ‘My ancestors were on the Mayflower with the Pilgrims.’ And my dad would say, ‘Oh yeah? Well, who the fuck were the Pilgrims? Thieves, jailbreakers, and whores. And England put them on a boat and shipped them here. So the fuck what?’ ”
The nativist wave reached a haunting crest in Johnstown in August 1923. Newspapers as far away as Indianapolis reported on a lurid spectacle in the little steel town in western Pennsylvania. The ethnic mix of working-class folk whose homes were nestled in the town’s valleys gazed up in silent wonder one warm evening as, in the words of the mayor, Joseph Cauffiel, “No less than a dozen flaming crosses were burned on the hilltops around the city.” White-robed men with their faces hooded flanked the crosses like sentries. The mayor was horrified at the spectacle and the violence that erupted in the following days, in which two policemen were killed, and acted promptly. He did not, however, take the step of seeking out the identities of the hooded intimidators, but rather ordered a mass removal of “all negroes who have resided in that city for less than seven years,” which he said was for their own protection.
Blacks weren’t the only targets. The building resentment toward Italian immigrants was sharpened in 1920, just as Prohibition went into force, when two Italians, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were accused of murdering two security guards in a botched robbery in Massachusetts. The story riveted the nation, and the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti became a fault line separating two Americas: one that feared the changes that had swept in, the other that wanted to find ways to make immigrants into Americans and help the country to adapt to the modern world.
Those in the first camp saw Sacco and Vanzetti as representatives of their “race”: murderous, addicted to alcohol, unable to control themselves, and above all vehicles by which the dreaded Catholic Church was infiltrating the body politic. Klan leader Hiram Evans characterized the view with language that was almost contractual. Catholics had to be opposed because the Church was “fundamentally and irredeemably, in its leadership, in politics, in thought, and largely in membership, actually and actively alien, un-American, and usually anti-American.”
You don’t read much about the KKK in accounts of how the mob got its start during Prohibition. I think that may be because most such accounts focus on the big cities, and the Klan had the greatest impact in smaller places like Johnstown. But its fury was bound up with, and became part of the force behind, the passage of the Volstead Act, which outlawed intoxicating beverages. The law went into effect in January 1920. Johnstown had six very active breweries. Like others all over the country, they halted production.
Has there ever been another law that generated such a tidal wave of unintended consequences? The Volstead Act created a nation of lawbreakers. Speakeasies sprang up in cities around the country. Doctors essentially became bartenders, prescribing whiskey to treat medical conditions. Most consequentially, Prohibition ushered in the era of organized crime. It gave Italian immigrants in particular—who had been marginalized by native-born white Americans, pushed into the lowest and most dangerous jobs, humiliated—a new role, one of power and respect.
Somehow I had gotten through life without ever reading a textbook on “organized crime,” which turns out to be a surprisingly loaded concept. Digging into my grandfather’s story meant trying to understand what the mafia was. The obvious path to studying the mafia—the one I traveled down first—involves looking into its beginnings in Sicily, how it was tied into the island’s twisted history, and how it made the jump to America. But the less obvious line of research takes you to places you never thought to associate directly with the likes of Lucky Luciano.
The standard textbook on the subject, Organized Crime, by Howard Abadinsky, begins its historical analysis with, of all things, a section devoted to the careers of John Jacob Astor, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and John D. Rockefeller. What could the legendary founders of modern American capitalism have to do with the mob? Those men have been dubbed robber barons for a reason. With their “rampant—that is, uncontrolled—capitalism,” Abadinsky explains, which involved violence, fraud, bribery, and intimidation on a national and sometimes global scale, these men not only built empires so colossal they became too big to fail, they provided striving newcomers models for success American-style.
Vanderbilt manipulated entire Central American nations, the U.S. State Department, and the Marine Corps to get his way in shipping. Astor built his fur empire by systematically swindling native Americans, and got rich as well as by smuggling opium. And they were not imprisoned for crimes but lionized as the great visionary leaders of their day. They defined American success. As Abadinsky says, “While contemporary organized crime has its roots in Prohibition, unscrupulous American business entrepreneurs, such as Astor, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Drew, Gould, Sage, Rockefeller, Stanford and Morgan, provided role models and created a climate conducive to its growth.”§
Imagine yourself one of the turn-of-the-century immigrants who arrived in vast numbers while these titans of industry were having their way with the continent, its natural resources, the American people, and the nation’s laws. You sweated in your lowly job and came home after twelve or fifteen hours of work to your family hu
ddled in a cheap cold-water flat while the great men built castles for themselves. But you didn’t begrudge them—you admired them. They were showing the way things were done. In the land of opportunity, you saw, the idea was to take what you could get. Those striving newcomers kept their eyes open for a rung, a way up.
Prohibition provided it. Suddenly there was a runaway consumer demand—on every block of every street in every town—waiting to be filled. The illegality of the product must have seemed charming to recent immigrants. It was like declaring it against the law to breathe oxygen. Everyone knew that people were going to continue to drink. But astoundingly, the Volstead Act hamstrung the entire industry involved in the production and sale of alcohol, leaving the field wide open.
The term “organized crime,” I learned, came into being in part as a way to use ethnicity as a dividing line. The Irish, Jewish, and Italian mobs that grew up around the business of providing alcohol during Prohibition, and the American mafia that was weaned to maturity on it, were not so different in their tactics from Astor and Vanderbilt. But the label put them in a different category. There’s a suggestion, among scholars of the field, that, as with the impetus behind Prohibition, the concept itself was a kind of official complement to the uncouth work of the KKK—it was invented as a way to separate “real” Americans from the ethnic gangs of newcomers.
SO THEN, RUSS SHORTO, my grandfather, enters the scene here, in the same way that thousands of others did. “This is where they lived. Uncle Tribby, my parents. All those families packed into one house. Animals in the backyard. The pig under the porch.” I’m sitting with my parents in the car outside a row of houses on a steep hill in the Conemaugh Borough section of Johnstown. My dad is riffling through memories, his own colliding with things his parents told him about life here before he was born; it’s a four-generation pileup of ruminations. “Baba had a still down there. That’s how she supported the family.”
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