But the following Monday the selfsame scenario played out: Detective Carroll, sensing something suspicious, tailed Russ, spotted him running a craps game out of his car, collared him, hauled him in, and sat him down on a long wooden bench while he laboriously pounded out the arrest report on a typewriter. Once again Russ pleaded guilty on the spot and blithely called another friend, Michael Graziano, who arrived with the $1,000 bail.
Was Detective Carroll beginning to think that something new was afoot? Was Russ intending to signal something—thumbing his nose at the cops? Or did he just figure that this was the price of doing business? I’d love to know what words they exchanged, but all I have are the pieces of paper that my dad and I requested one afternoon at the county courthouse in Ebensburg. I instantly understood Tony’s reaction as the woman behind the counter handed over the thick stack of his father’s arrests and indictments: “Well, I’ll be a son of a bitch!” Here was cold documentary corroboration of so much of what he’d observed during his childhood. The stack reinforced his memories in complicated ways, reduced them to the humdrum level of bureaucracy but also elevated them, put an official stamp on them. We looked at each other, father and son, over the pile of our forebear’s deeds, and silently exchanged a raft of feelings that are hard to put into words. Maybe we were thinking: Somehow, this is who we are.
Then, that Friday night, Russ upped the ante, so to speak. He put out the word that he was hosting a major poker event at his pool hall. Detective Carroll heard about it—surely Russ knew he would—and got a search warrant. He marched into the poolroom, past the tables, straight to the room in back where they were gathered, and busted him for the third time in nine days. Yet another colleague of Russ’s, a guy named Nunzio Ziancola, arrived with the thousand bucks. Now it was clear: it was a little power struggle my dad and I were witnessing as we pored over the documents on my parents’ dining-room table later that day, while my mom heated up leftover spaghetti and meatballs.* The detective was endeavoring to maintain the status quo. Russ was pushing toward something new.
Whatever Joe and Russ were building toward, the news that came over the local radio station, WJAC, on December 7, of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, interrupted it. Over the next week a thousand local men signed up for the armed services. The draft had been in effect for the past year; both Joe and Russ had registered. Russ took a job working at the Franklin plant, which, because it was directly supporting the war effort, got him out of military service. Joe was drafted and prepared to head off to Camp Livingston, Louisiana.
They sketched out a plan for the future before he left town. Joe had brought with him to Johnstown a kind of playbook. Over the next few years he would painstakingly, item by item, put in place the features of the organization that John Avena, the boss of the Philadelphia mob (who had been gunned down on the street in 1936), had developed. There would be a numbers racket and a sports book: in other words, mass-marketing your product. And Joe would offer as well something for his elite customers, in the form of a couple of high-stakes gambling games at regular locations. He also adopted the same manner of dealing with problems: handling them himself rather than passing them on. “I like to settle these things myself” was a motto of Avena’s. For the old boys in Johnstown, Joe’s most defining trait was his silent assumption of authority.
Most important, there would be a new strategy for dealing with the authorities. No longer would Russ and Joe hide out in a little borough on the outskirts, working out of a car and ducking the cops like neighborhood scamps. That was Prohibition-era behavior. It was the 1940s now; this was the modern world. They were grown men and they would comport themselves the same way outfits in bigger cities had been doing for some time. Rather than run from the system, they would become part of it.
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* This is my family’s elemental dish, the food equivalent of DNA. My mother learned it from Mary, my grandmother, who in turn got it from Russ’s sisters. My aunts make it; so do I. In one pan, brown country pork ribs and chicken pieces. In another, brown chopped onions and celery in olive oil; add garlic. Add tomato sauce, tomato puree, tomato paste, basil, oregano, parsley, salt and pepper to the meat. Add the vegetables to the meat. Add a green pepper and let stew. Remove the pepper. The meatballs: ground pork, ground beef, ground veal, stale bread, Romano cheese, chopped onion, celery, parsley, raw egg, salt and pepper. Fry the meatballs, add some to the sauce and keep some separate.
7
The Organization
RUSS AND MARY’S first child, born three days after Christmas in 1938, was a boy. Russ might have considered himself fully American, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t also honor Sicilian tradition and his own (distant) memory of his father—Antonino, the immigrant, who had died when he was six—by naming the boy after him. Tony’s earliest memories were of life during wartime. The little family was living in Franklin Borough, two miles from downtown Johnstown and one steep block up the hill from the Franklin mill gate. My dad and I sat there idling in the car one afternoon about seventy-five years after the fact as he recounted what might have been his earliest memory: walking down the precipitously sloping street in winter, his mother holding his hand in one of hers and carrying a black metal lunch pail in the other. They were on their daily mission, to deliver Russ his lunch. Where all the other mill workers brought sandwiches with them at the start of their shift, Mary delivered Russ a hot meal. “She’d pile spaghetti in one side, and there’d be something like a breaded pork chop, and a salad,” another family member told me. “The other workers couldn’t get over it.”
Tony remembered this particular day because of what happened: Mary slipped on the ice and they both went careering down the hill. They slid all the way to where the guard was stationed, by the gate. (The fact that the town’s steel plants had armed guards spoke to their importance. Fiorello La Guardia, New York’s mayor, who served during the war as director of civil defense, said as much to a reporter when he was in town in 1942: “The Germans are pretty aware of Johnstown and its steel mills. It would probably be one of the central targets in an attack.”)
The war years were a bad time to start a new venture. Everyone had a job, but there wasn’t much to buy. Everything from meat to sugar to gasoline to alcohol was being rationed. No new cars were being produced; if you drove your car for anything but work or medical reasons, you got fined. All new construction was halted.
But Joe and Russ had ideas. Before Joe headed off for basic training in Louisiana they made an investment in the future. As I say, I believe Joe modeled the small-town mob setup they eventually created on that of John Avena’s Philadelphia operation. Most of those features were part of the general mob template, but Joe copied something else that was particular to Avena. Avena was big on having a legitimate business as a front, and his, at the intersection of Twelfth and Webster Streets in Philadelphia, was a cigar store. Just before Joe headed for Louisiana, he and Russ opened a business on Main Street in Johnstown, two doors from city hall. They called it City Cigar. It was right there in the open, right in the middle of town, and it was going to be the center of everything.
They brought in a partner on City Cigar. John Strank was Czech, not Italian, but he was a good friend and he came with advantages. He was a neighbor of Russ and Mary’s in Franklin. In his youth he had been imprisoned for robbery; it’s possible either Russ or Joe did time with him in the Pennsylvania Industrial Reformatory in Huntingdon. Both men knew him well and trusted him. And there was something more. In the years following his youthful indiscretion Strank had joined the police force, and rose to become chief of police of the little borough of Franklin. As such, he knew everyone on the Johnstown police force. That would be useful.
They rode out the war in this fashion. Joe was away in the service for a couple of years (at the military base down South—he never saw action), then back just as the war ended. Russ stayed employed at the mill and worked part-time at the cigar store, which really was a cigar store at first,
to which they slowly added nine pool tables in the vast room in the rear, with one billiards table front and center. Strank, a tall, lumbering man with a kindly face, oversaw the place.
A lot of their friends were overseas, fighting in Europe or the Pacific. One day the hard news came in that John Strank’s nephew Michael, who was five years younger than Russ and had grown up with him in Franklin, had been killed in action on a little island in the Pacific called Iwo Jima. At about the same time a photo appeared in the paper showing six Marines raising an American flag on a mountaintop on the island. It was Mike’s company in the picture—that was him in the middle of the group, hands gripping the flagpole. He’d been the sergeant tasked with planting the flag, the leader of the squadron, and now he was part of this new symbol of American pride. He died a week later on the island. The guys at City Cigar were sad and at the same time proud as hell: would-be mobsters with a hero in the family. For the rest of their lives, as that photo went around and around the world and became perhaps the most iconic image of the whole war, they would talk reverently about Mike’s achievement.
Less than three months later the Johnstown Tribune ran the largest, inkiest headline of its history: V-E DAY PROCLAIMED. People were happy that fighting was over in Europe, but the mood was oddly subdued—after all, local boys were still dying in the Pacific. By contrast, on August 13, V-J Day, when victory over Japan became official, downtown erupted in a madhouse of confetti and honking horns. Picture red-white-and-blue bunting, streamers shimmering down from rooftops. Picture Russ standing outside City Cigar, cigarette dangling from his lips and hands in his pockets, as thousands of people lined the sidewalk on Main Street, men in their baggy pants, jacketless in the heat, women in summer dresses, standing in the bright sunlight cheering at the marching bands and horse-drawn wagons separated by boxy DeSotos, Packards, and Pontiacs.
Tony was there, too, a few blocks away, age six, holding his mother’s hand, gawping. Afterward, a big treat, they walked to the restaurant where Mary worked and he was allowed to order an open-faced sandwich.
I feel like these were pretty good times in that family of three. Russ, just past thirty, was feeling strong, like he was getting a foothold. He was still behaving himself at this point, as far as I can tell. He and Mary loved each other in the way that results when there’s a strong physical attraction combined with genuine admiration of the other person’s most prominent traits. She had squinty eyes; he called her Chinky. He meant it affectionately. She may not have told Russ yet as she sat watching Tony eat his celebratory meal, but Chinky was nearly two months pregnant with their second child.
Other elements in Russ’s world were growing too. He began the gambling operation out of City Cigar almost immediately after President Truman announced the end of fighting in Europe, even before Joe got back to town. And as was happening in other small cities around the country, he started making payoffs to local officials around the same time. Russ and Joe were lucky in that they began their enterprise at a time when the municipal government was weakening. In the earlier part of the century Johnstown’s mayor and council had been activists, laying out and then putting into effect large civic-improvement projects: building an airport, new schools, and a sports stadium. Since the Depression, local leaders had shifted into a laissez-faire mode of governing, doing little more than collecting taxes and providing basic services. Without a proactive system of oversight, officials had latitude to define their jobs, and to profit from them, as they saw fit.
The first mayor elected in the postwar period was from an old Johnstown family and had been educated at no less a place than the Wharton School before coming back home to enter politics. He was affable, cultured, smart, but he had his predilections. Ned Rose—people called him Red Nose because of his taste for strong spirits—became a regular at City Cigar, walking the thirty or forty paces from his office at city hall for a chat or a game of cards, and presumably left with an envelope in his pocket.
Despite a general feeling of relief that the war was over, it was a hectic and confused time in Johnstown, as in the country as a whole. No one knew what to expect in the near future, for nobody had been through anything like the circumstances of the past several years. Troops were streaming back home even as other men were signing up and leaving town for military stints. Some factories went out of business. The Sylvania plant, in which 850 workers made radar equipment and components for antiaircraft shells for the army, closed down the minute the war ended.
But after a period of adjustment Johnstown, along with other manufacturing centers in the region, from Cumberland, Maryland, to Wheeling, West Virginia, shifted onto an upward trajectory. Cambria County was a place where people made things, hard things, and that output—bricks, ceramics, radiators, sheet metal—was in greater demand than ever before. A year after the war’s end Bethlehem Steel, now the biggest employer in town, poured more than $100 million into modernizing its Johnstown facility.
Russ and Joe were investing in their business as well. But there were kinks to be worked out. On June 2, 1945, three weeks after VE Day, with downtown still glowing in the expectation that all fighting would soon be over and as City Cigar was alive with the clack of balls, crowded with bettors and pool players, a familiar, hulking form darkened the doorway. Detective Carroll strutted in, holding aloft a search warrant in which he had earlier asserted to the presiding alderman that he had “reasonable cause to believe and he verily does believe that gambling equipment is illegally possessed and used and gambling is permitted at the City Cigar Store at 411 Main St, in the City of Johnstown, Cambria County, Pennsylvania, all of which is contrary to the Act of Assembly, and all of which your affiant expects to be able to prove.” He inspected the premises, saw what he expected to see, collared Russ, and brought him in.
Russ hadn’t perfected the payoff system, apparently. Detective Carroll surely knew what was afoot, but he was determined that the rule of law would prevail. He busted Russ five times at City Cigar between June 1945 and September 1946.
Then something changed in the two-man power struggle. Someone above him either explained things to Detective Carroll or had him transferred. Russ was never arrested again. The organization was in place.
LATE 1945. RUSS is walking down the street in Conemaugh Borough when he passes a group of guys shooting craps against the side of a building. Something about the kid with the dice makes him stop. Russ had a wry little twist of a smile he would whip out when something interested him. He looks down at the kid. I know who taught you. They start talking. The kid acknowledges that, yes, Philip Verone, the same diminutive black-hander who taught Russ how to skeech, was his mentor.
What’s your name?
Mike Gulino.
Russ’s eyebrows shoot up. The coal kid?
Everybody in town knew the coal story. The backdrop to it was a massive strike in 1937 involving coal miners, workers on the rail lines that supplied coal to the steel mills, and the mill workers. As such groups of workers nationally came to realize they were allies in a struggle against rapacious industrialists, and began to unionize, the mill and mine owners in Cambria County resisted forcefully. There were confrontations in front of the mill gate that summer, and a near riot downtown that included cars overturned, organized brick attacks, and a young scab being stripped naked by the strikers and paraded through the streets. A rumor went around that forty thousand coal miners from all around western Pennsylvania were going to invade Johnstown. Governor George Earle declared martial law and sent in the state police; on top of which three hundred and fifty “special deputies” were appointed, each receiving a helmet and a stick. With industry leaders calling the strikers things like “racketeers” and “Communists,” it was a serious-enough instance of class warfare to make the New York Times.
Eventually the strike ended, but the situation remained tense over the next couple of years. The big newspapers proclaimed that the Depression was over, but nobody in neighborhoods like Woodvale and Conemaugh noticed. Peop
le were still struggling in the most basic ways—with hunger and cold. And every afternoon, at about four o’clock, a big old train loaded with coal trundled right past people’s houses and came to a stop inside the Bethlehem Steel plant. Sure, they needed it to make steel, but what about basic human existence? The animosity, the class tension between hordes of impoverished locals and the men who ran the big steel and coal companies, had hardened. One winter day a gang of men—Italian, Black, Mexican—doused the railroad ties with gasoline and ignited it as the train was approaching. As it came screeching to a halt they rushed out, opened the hoppers, and half the neighborhood emerged from the alley behind Maple Avenue with buckets, tubs, anything that would hold coal to warm their homes.
Smalltime Page 9
