The mob, meanwhile, came to town in the person of Little Joe, my great-uncle. He was born in Reggio di Calabria, just across the strait from Antonino Sciotto’s hometown—the province forms the toe of the boot that is giving Sicily a kick. His infant lungs filled with sea air as his parents made their passage in 1910. The family stayed long enough in their first American home, Philadelphia, to become comfortable with it, so that they would later choose to return. But not too long after their arrival Little Joe’s father, Mario Regino, or sometimes the last name appears as Regina, got work in a coal mine a few miles north of Johnstown and lugged everyone across the state and into the wooded hills.
I don’t know which of the companies in the area lured Senore Regino, but there were four: the Conemaugh Smokeless Coal Company, the Cramer Coal, Coke & Stone Company, Lackawanna Coal & Coke, and Baker Furnace. Each was located in a company town, with names like Boltz, Claghorn, and Smokeless. All were small operations, employing between twenty and fifty men, so these were tiny fiefdoms in the wilderness, in which every aspect of immigrant life was controlled by the company. The sensory impressions that defined the boy’s life and his notion of the world as he grew included: flimsy worker housing; marching to the company store for your household needs; soot-flecked air; the low surrounding mountains bristling with forest; the glow of the charcoal pits; the high totem-like stack of the furnace. Italian and Polish men, with baggy clothes and hard-set faces, working their eternal, grinding shifts, then returning to the four cheap walls within which each family strived to maintain its Old World ways. And all the while the gossip from nearby mines forming an incessant stream: of accidents, deaths, explosions, lies, cover-ups, abuse. Worker grievances building to occasional defiant strikes. Mounted police thundering in to keep peace. Power manifesting itself in guns and horses. A crack of gunfire or a whip. Then back to work.
As Joe grew and internalized the truth of power, he eventually discovered he wasn’t going to do too much of it—growing, that is. He stayed short, and it contributed to his toughening. Johnstown, the big city, was twelve or so twisty miles from the company towns. He shows up in 1928, aged twenty-one, getting the hell out of the hellish setting in which his parents had raised him.
The town must have seemed like Philly in miniature. It had a wealthy class of men—company vice presidents, department-store general managers, office managers, doctors and lawyers—lording through the streets in herringbone suits and homburgs. And the women at their sides looked even classier than them. They would have shone like diamonds, these couples. Marks, targets. But even the working-class people here had money compared to the mining towns. Joe quickly got busy distancing himself from the mole-like existence his father had been forced into. He set himself up on a career path, shoving a gun in people’s faces and getting them to cough up their dough.
Then before you know it he’s busted, charged with “pointing firearms, stick-up, and assault and battery.”
For whatever reason, maybe to get out of the mines, maybe to try to extricate their oldest son from his bad influences, his parents pulled up stakes soon after this and returned to Philadelphia. And there they all are in the 1930 census, living in a tidy-enough little shack, at 1003 McKean Street: Mario and Virginia, their son Joe, who has gotten a job as a truck driver, and Joe’s four younger siblings.
But if his parents thought they were keeping him out of trouble, in reality they transferred their boy from the bush leagues to the majors. The neighborhood they had moved into—logically, because it was packed with Italian immigrants—was the home of the nascent South Philadelphia mob. Passyunk Avenue, ten blocks from the Regino residence, formed the central thoroughfare in the territory of John “Nozzone” (Big Nose) Avena, who molded the city’s Prohibition-era bootlegging gangs into a professional gambling operation centered around the numbers—that is, into the Philly mob.
Avena (whose nose wasn’t so big) cut a figure: posing for a mug shot in a three-piece suit, striped tie, and straw-boater, he would have been a natural role model for a toughened kid—certainly a more manly one than Joe’s father, who went from digging in a hole underground to selling flowers on the street. I don’t know what Joe’s relationship was to Avena, whether he became an acolyte or right-hand man, whether he hung around him or admired him from a distance, but considering how faithfully he would later copy the features of Avena’s organization, transplanting Philadelphia’s mob template to Johnstown, he got close enough for it to matter.
As soon as the kid hit the streets he was embedded in Avena’s operation. The family moved to Philly in 1930, or maybe in 1929; by 1932 he had been arrested for “suspicion of highway robbery” as well as “larceny of auto” and “larceny by trick and fraud.” The latter is such a resonant phrase to someone not versed in criminology that I had to dwell on it, and spent a few hours’ worth of pleasant googling. The more familiar part of the phrase, “larceny,” is (in the words of A First-Year Course in Criminal Law by Daniel Yeager) “non-forcible” theft: in other words, stealing without a struggle. It involves acquiring property from its rightful owner without resistance but also “non-permissively.” Pickpocketing is an example. The trick-and-fraud part translates as “by false pretenses.” “By trick and fraud” lifts the theft in question onto a higher plane. You’re working creatively, fabricating an illusion, scamming. Young Joe was learning how to con.
Not long after, Joe returned to Johnstown for a visit. I don’t know what his motivation was, but I have a feeling it had to do with a place called the Dew Drop Inn on Main Street. It was a funny little makeshift building with a corrugated roof at the corner of Central Park; you bought popcorn and candy there then sat on a bench and fed the pigeons. I think Joe had met the girl behind the counter before he went to Philly and couldn’t get her out of his head. Carmella Shorto—she went by Millie—was a raven-haired seventeen-year-old who had the self-possession of a woman in her twenties. Joe fell into a routine: he would wander into the Dew Drop, linger, buy a drink from her, wrack his brain for some small talk, then come back in a while and do it again. “I never had so many sodas in my life,” he would tell her later, in their married years. She was below the age of consent in Pennsylvania, so they ran off to Cumberland, Maryland, just across the state line, where they found a preacher willing to marry them.
Then he brought her back to Philly. She didn’t like it there—too big, too noisy and dirty—but she had hitched herself to him and Philly was where his business lay. There were some bumps in the road. In 1933 he was arrested for “conspiracy” and “narcotics—suspicious person” as well as for “maintaining a gambling house.” But that came with the territory. He was getting the hang of things. He started using an alias, and took a liking to WASPish-sounding alter-egos. He was a great admirer of America’s rapacious style of capitalism, and everyone knew that Forbes magazine was its bible. Joseph Forbes had a very nice ring to it. Sometimes he altered it to Joseph Ford. Nothing said American business more than Ford.
Joe and Millie conducted their courtship in the early days of the Great Depression. By now half the banks in Philadelphia had closed their doors. Some of the boys apparently saw this as an opportunity akin to Prohibition. They set up a counterfeiting ring, of which Joe was a part. The FBI had reorganized in its modern guise only a year before; agents were alert for just such activity. In November 1936 they busted the ring. Joe was hit hard: an eighteen-month prison sentence.
He refused to name his principal accomplice in court, and he held his silence in prison. When he got out he was rewarded for his trustworthiness in a manner that tracked broader changes that were taking place. In the aftermath of Prohibition, the mob was reorganizing on a national scale. According to some accounts, the leaders of crime syndicates in big cities like New York and Chicago were enamored of U.S. corporations, with their efficiency, their ability to game the system and their naked lunges for money. They had the idea to copy the mechanisms by which corporations spread. Throughout the 1930s the heads of the to
p crime organizations held a series of meetings in Chicago, Kansas City, and New York at which they divided the country into regional territories. Each then began sending out branch managers to set up regional offices.
The man Regino had shielded was a rising force named John LaRocca, who was at that moment becoming a power in Pittsburgh. I’m imagining a meeting in which LaRocca, appreciative of the younger man’s coglioni, wanted to express his gratitude. They had a lot in common. Both had been born in Italy and spent their youth in western Pennsylvania, where LaRocca had worked in the mines starting at age fourteen. LaRocca had a string of convictions—assault, larceny, receiving stolen property, running a lottery—that closely matched Regino’s.
But he was developing a sense of savvy that set him apart from the previous generation. As in other cities, Prohibition-era Pittsburgh had been a free-for-all of mob violence. The first acknowledged boss of the city was shot and killed in 1929; the next, Giuseppe Siragusa, aka “the yeast baron of Allegheny County” (he supplied the ingredients for illegal brewers) was gunned down after only two years on top, but his was the reign during which nationwide consolidation began, when, in New York, Salvatore Maranzano created the Five Families and declared himself “boss of all bosses.” Siragusa started sending tribute payments to Maranzano, a system that outlived the two men (who were both killed in 1931). The next man to take control in Pittsburgh, John Bazzano, lasted only a year. But John LaRocca in Pittsburgh and Little Joe Regino in Johnstown would bring in a new, quieter, more businesslike era. The two men would stay on top in their respective territories into the 1980s.
Maybe in those meetings in the late 1930s Regino talked up Johnstown and the money the steel mills were producing there. Johnstown, and Cambria County, was within the orbit that LaRocca was in the process of dominating. The two men liked each other, trusted each other. They could work together.
So, after dutifully waiting out her husband’s prison term, Millie got her way—she got to go back home.
Russ was waiting for them. Joe had met Russ, Millie’s brother, a few years before, not long after Joe began hanging around the Dew Drop Inn. While Joe and Millie were in Philadelphia, and as Joe was detouring to experience the federal penitentiary at Lewisburg, Russ had been building a home and a business. One day in 1937 he went to the Central Cafe, the swankiest restaurant in town, the kind of place that featured lobsters on ice in the front window. Mary was working as hostess. People say he was wowed by her, just knocked off his feet. She was attractive, but in addition she had something that, given his limited experience of the world, he’d never encountered before. She had it. She was poised, sophisticated, worldly. She knew how to handle herself.
The it was very hard-won. My grandmother’s was one of those grindingly painful early lives that so many first-generation Americans of the era endured. She was the eldest of eleven children who grew up packed with their parents into a small company house—no electricity, heat, or running water—in a little coal-mining community called Newtown in the hills above Johnstown. Her mother, Angeline, had emigrated from Poland, and not long after arriving had a child with a Croatian coal miner named Greganof. That child was Mary, my grandmother. Later her mother married a Serbian named Marco Yasika and they proceeded to have a slew of children. Marco worked in the mine; Angeline farmed the vacant lot next to their house and took care of the children. Mary was the anomaly: she was the oldest of the brood and the only one with a different father. When my sister Gina interviewed the youngest of her half-siblings, my great-aunt Vera—this was long after Mary’s death—Vera broke down in tears as she struggled with her memories of her sister’s life. Jeddo, as they all referred to her father and Mary’s stepfather, routinely abused Mary, beating her with a belt, treating her like a servant over whom he had absolute power.
When she turned sixteen Mary got the hell out, bought a one-way train ticket to New York City. She got a job waitressing at a Childs Restaurant in Manhattan (one of America’s first chain restaurants), and for the next ten years she wired money home. As some of her siblings got old enough she sent for them, got them jobs. When she moved back to Johnstown, circa 1936, she was an utterly different kind of woman from the miners’ wives and daughters. She draped her tall frame in fashionable dresses and favored feathered hats and fur collars. She talked fast and with assurance. Her body language served notice: nobody was going to fuck with her ever again.
And what did Russ have to offer? He was a man on the make. He had opened a billiards room in the borough of Franklin. It was a couple of miles out of town, but only a few steps from the big metal gate that gave entrance to the mill where Bethlehem Steel fashioned railroad cars. When Russ brought her to his pool hall she must have been impressed by his upwardly mobile ambition and his smarts in choosing the location: workers came off their shifts and made straight for the tables. Plus, he was a bad boy, and that had its charm.
It was unusual in those days of ethnic enclaves for a Sicilian to court a non-Italian, but they fell for each other hard. He became a fixture at her mother’s dinner table, got used to haluski and halupki, and to the smell of cooked cabbage penetrating his clothes. He’d toss out a Sicilian expression or two and make her brothers and sisters laugh.
Russ as a young mobster.
Russ and Mary were married by the time Joe was out of prison and he and Millie returned to Johnstown. They were brothers-in-law now, family, and Joe was coming back to Johnstown with a plan, an imprimatur: to start a gambling franchise. Russ knew the town from precisely that angle. They joined forces. The outfit had come to town.
AND THE PLACE was dripping with potential. The Great Depression had lifted. Joe and Russ formed their alliance right about the time Germany invaded Poland. War was on in Europe, and within a short while the steel plants in town were hiring everyone they could. The Franklin plant, outside the door of Russ’s pool hall, took a single order for 2,800 railcars. All of a sudden all the sidewalks in downtown Johnstown were packed. No, the people weren’t rich, but that was just it. All these recent immigrants, or children of, these Azars and Babyaks, Espositos and Furnaris, Gomulkas and Haselrigs and Kohuths and Vitales and Vitkos and Yankos and Yarinas and Zapolas and Zarubas and Zieglers were working their hearts out, tramping day after day into the mills and the factories spread all over town. They were longing for the bigtime, or at least for something a little bigger and better than what they had.
And how did you get that? The mob had an answer for you. With 50-to-1 odds on a bet, somebody had to be the 1, right? It only cost a dime. Or you could shoot for something riskier—600-to-1, say—and if you hit, you were rich. There were so many ways you could win. Winning. America, as everybody knew, was for winners; that was practically written into the Constitution. Think of how much of a winner you were already just by being here. Your parents had come from some shithole in Latvia or Kilkenny, from hardship and disease and turmoil, getting pissed on by higher-ups, their faces streaked with dirt, their infants clotted with feces, sweating blood and nothing to show for it; oh the stories they told. Then there were all the stories that were too ugly for them to tell but that were written on their faces, that glowed deep within their eyes: the pogroms, the incest, the beatings, the children who bled, the heated prayers to the blessed Virgin for deliverance. And now what were you? A man with a house and a wife he had a full right to come home to, proffering a bag of knobby pork sparkling with fat and a big ripe onion for her to cook up; but wait, there’s the mattress, let’s get busy, let’s do what this instant of joy in our veins impels us to do. You were truly a king of your castle, proud of your home and hearth. Your wife had babies who were born with expectations—which you have given them. You glowed with pride at this. All you needed to do was give them a little bit more. Running water, say.
That’s what I imagine Russ and Joe talking about as they schemed to provide a comprehensive service package for the town. They were in the business of dreams. That plus shaking down the honchos when they got a chance, the
men who ran the coal mines and the U.S. Steel and Bethlehem Steel plants, and the Griffith-Custer Steel Company and the Albright Equipment Company and the National Radiator Company, bigshots in their monstrous houses up on the hill in Westmont, who deserved to have their pockets picked.
The start was modest. Joe joined Russ at the Franklin Billiards Parlor. Besides the tables, they were running a few games: craps, some cards, and Joe, working with the boys in Pittsburgh, might have introduced tip seals. Then, on October 13, 1939—Friday the thirteenth, wouldn’t you know—the cops showed up. As the mills had revived with the economy—employment at Bethlehem Steel alone soared to 12,000 this same month—gambling enterprises had sprung up all over town, like a sudden infestation of weeds, and the same local leaders who had ardently backed Prohibition, and were annoyed at its repeal, wanted the authorities to do something about it. So, a crackdown; Joe was busted and locked up. The subpoena shows he already had his nickname: Commonwealth of Pennsylvania v. John Doe—“Little Joe”—Joseph Regino. Russ had to put up $1,000 bail, a large sum for such an offense. It was meant as a serious warning.
They took the hint and shut down the gambling operation, but only to regroup. An odd little drama then played out, which maybe defined this transitional era. Russ went back to what he had been doing before, running games out of the trunk of his car. And a Cambria County detective, a tall, heavyset, black-haired, blue-eyed fellow named John Carroll, was waiting for him. Carroll was fifty-three. He was a native of Johnstown who, after briefly working as a motorman on a streetcar in his youth, joined the police force, and had been at it now for more than twenty years. He took his job seriously. He was used to punks, who vanished once you taught them a lesson, and that was the logic he employed now. On February 5, 1941, a Wednesday night, he spied a group of men gathered around the back of Russ’s car and moved in. He arrested Russ for “having in his possession, maintaining and setting up a Gaming and Gambling Device,” which probably meant a portable craps table. Officer Carroll took him in, booked him, filled out the paperwork. As with Joe a couple of years earlier, the $1,000 bail was meant as a serious warning, an amount that was intended to stop the kinds of hooligans Officer Carroll had dealt with in the past. Russ pleaded guilty and called a friend named Antonio Pantana, who showed up a little while later with the thousand bucks. Carroll released him.
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