The next day there was a knock on the door of the house of Mr. and Mrs. Gulino in Conemaugh. Mr. Esposito, who acted as the neighborhood MD despite his lack of formal medical training, asked to see their son, Mike. Jack Ragno wants to talk to you. Jack Ragno was the top black-hander in the area—in other words, the community leader. Mike was scared—lighting a fire on the tracks had been his idea—but he went to see him. Ragno was an old man who only spoke Sicilian, but Mike had grown up with the language. I like what you did. Mike shook his head: I didn’t do nothin’. Ragno grinned. Listen, the railroad cops are lookin’ for you. They don’t know it’s a kid that was behind the business with the coal. But I put the word out: nobody talks. Then the old man changed the subject: I understand you like gambling.
Jack Ragno figured he’d help the kid, give him a leg up. He sent him to Philip Verone, the same man who, eight years before, had taught Russ. Verone taught him to skeech dice. Once Mike was able to throw a seven or a pair of sixes at will, Verone introduced a banking board, complicating the throw, and they started all over again. Then Ragno sent him to study cards with a guy in Hornerstown. He was still in his teens, but he was already a pro.
Russ took an immediate liking to the kid. Russ was building something; he could use an assistant. Plus, while he knew half the town, all his friends were adults. He must have figured it would be handy to have somebody in touch with the younger crowd. In a short time, he formed a strong bond with Mike Gulino, stronger than he ever had with any of his three children.
The recurring theme of my early research into Russ and his world, the thing that stumped me, was the imponderability of my subject. All the early stories I’d culled featured him prominently but as an opaque center. I couldn’t get a fix on him. Taking a historical approach, backing up to his parents and their migration to America, filling in the background, had yielded some fruit. I was developing a bit of … sympathy for the guy. But I couldn’t say I felt I knew who he was—or that anyone I’d talked to who had known him knew who he was.
I was still meeting regularly with Frank Filia, my mother’s cousin, who had pushed me onto this path. Sometimes we’d get together at Panera Bread, other times I’d go see him play the Thursday lunch set at the Holiday Inn downtown. John Pencola on piano and Frank on bass and vocals, making small talk with the customers enjoying the all-you-can-eat pasta buffet, then launching into “My Funny Valentine.” When Frank took a break he’d come and sit with me. Often several of the guys from the old days would be there too. I had mentioned three or four times now how frustrated I was in trying to pierce the mystery of Russ. Before, Frank had shrugged, said something about how Russ was a quiet guy. Once he said, “Your dad once told me, ‘Frank,’ he said, ‘I hardly knew my father.’ ” This time when I started to complain to Frank about Russ, he was nodding. “I know what you said, I get it. Listen, I been talkin’ to somebody. He wasn’t sure at first. But he’s ready now. And believe me, nobody knew Russ like Mike.”
I had never even heard Mike Gulino’s name before. Somehow he was going to be the key to unlock the safe? Frank pulled out his flip phone and called him—“Remember who I told you wanted to talk to you?”—and we got an instant audience. “You won’t believe this,” he kept saying to me as the car swept past the concrete-reinforced banks of the river and wound up the hill.
Johnstown is such a small place, it turned out Mike lived less than half a mile from my parents. We pulled up next to an old frame house covered in brown shingles sitting next to a gravel-strewn lot. His wife, Eleanor, opened the door and ushered us in. “I know your parents … I knew your grandparents …” We walked through a living room covered in wall-to-wall beige shag carpet, with brown, 1970s-era furniture. Mike, the old man who’d once been the kid attracting Russ’s notice with his dice play, was in the kitchen. He wasn’t exactly a large man, but he had the presence of a giant. He was in his mid-eighties, needed a chair-lift to get up the stairs, was hooked up to oxygen, and was half-blind. His glasses made his eyes bulge. But sitting there at the kitchen table, with a Formica backdrop and an antipasto platter that Eleanor had laid out in the foreground, he seemed like some kind of king. Maybe he was hard of hearing; anyway, his voice thundered. And these were the first words he boomed at me:
“Everything you heard about your grandfather, just put it in the ashcan! Because I know you heard a lot of negative things, see? Nobody knew Russ! Not like I knew him!”
Mike had had a storied career. The first part of it was as Russ’s right-hand man: “Everything I learned, I learned from Russ!” Later on, he had an operation that stretched from Florida to Las Vegas. He’d known Lucky Luciano, the man who invented the American mafia, and he once had Dean Martin sitting on his lap in a Vegas casino, crying over the death of his son. He was a powerful bookmaker in his time, active up and down the East Coast. But as he told me in a later interview—I ended up sitting down with Mike eleven times in all, not to mention spending a great deal of time corroborating his information—he didn’t see himself as a bookie or a mobster: “I’m a con man. That’s all I am.” But he went on to say that he had lived by a personal code, which had formed in the rough old days of class and ethnic warfare. “I fucked a lot of people in my life,” he told me. “But I only fucked people with money, greedy people, people that wanted to be fucked. I never fucked the workingman. I beat banks. I beat corporations. Fuckin’ bastards deserved it.”
An hour or so into our first meeting, Mike gave me what he believed was Russ’s philosophy. He unspooled it carefully, in a way that made me think it was memorized. “You gotta understand that Russ was my mentor. I soaked up everything he said. And Russ once told me, ‘Mike,’ he says, ‘there’s two different kinds of people. With the first, you throw a handful of shit in a guy’s face and he knows it’s shit. You forget about that guy—you can’t make money off him. But with the other kind, you tell him the shit you’re feeding him is ice cream … and he’ll believe it. You let him think that—you get him to love the taste of it. And then you take every fuckin’ dime he’s got.’ ”
We were silent then in the kitchen, Mike, me, Frank, I not knowing quite how he expected me to react. It felt almost like he thought of himself as a spiritual leader to whom I had come for wisdom, and he had given it to me, but in the form of a riddle, and he was testing, waiting to see how I responded. I think eventually I nodded. Then he leaned in, breathing salami and with his big, bulbous, rheumy eyes up close, and he said, very seriously, “That’s one of the most important things Russ ever told me.”
At the end of our first interview Mike said something I didn’t quite get. “I also knew your father very well when we were young. Maybe, because of Russ, some things were tough for your father.” I didn’t really know where to go with this. I was already standing, ready to leave. He waved it off. “But I’m glad we’re having this conversation,” he said. “I’ve had this on my mind for years and years.”
SO: THE LATE ’40s. Clark Gable and Rita Hayworth. Pontiac Chieftains and Plymouth Club Coupes. The suburbs rising. Big bands starting to seem a bit stale and flabby while the arresting drama of the solo voice—Bing! Frank!—is suddenly and utterly vital to quelling the existential angst and swelling the passions of the returning troops and their ardent lovers. And then, of course, came all the booming that made the baby boom. Guys I interviewed who came of age in that era could get pretty worked up thinking back on it. “We’re talkin’ pre-Elvis, pre–sexual revolution. There was no porn. Everything was hush-hush and mysterious. The first time I took a girl to a motel, Jesus, I can’t describe how exciting. Of course, I lasted about a minute.”
Johnstown’s mills and plants were at full production by 1947—people were calling the place Little Chicago—and a textile industry took off as well, with a focus on bras and dresses. Workers had a little spare change, even after buying the wife a new Speed Queen washer. Russ wasn’t swaggering around town—he wasn’t like that. But he was on the move. He and Joe assembled the pieces of their e
mpire deliberately and fairly rapidly.
A big part of the business plan involved the numbers. The numbers racket had originated in Harlem in the 1920s (an outgrowth of a nineteenth-century game called “policy”). Then, post-Prohibition, proto-mobster Dutch Schultz forced his way in by making the Black bankers who ran the game in their various neighborhoods “partners,” and eventually squeezed them out. It was a sweet, simple game: pick three numbers and depending on the combination you could win up to six hundred times the amount you bet. It quickly spread around the country as a mafia staple, eventually to be replaced by state-run lotteries.
There’d been a numbers racket in Johnstown for a while now. It was run by Charlie Catillo. Charlie was an old friend of Russ’s. But Joe told Russ they were going to do to him what Dutch Schultz and Lucky Luciano had done to onetime legendary Harlem bankers like Alex Pompez and Stephanie Saint-Clair (aka Madame Queen): give him a percentage in exchange for handing over his business. Joe was calling the shots on this, maybe under LaRocca’s guidance. We’re takin’ that business over. You tell Charlie we’re gonna take care of him. But we’re takin’ that business.
Russ told Charlie. And within a year Charlie was working for them, and the G.I. Bank was born. Russ built it into a citywide bank, and gave it the spiffy postwar rebranding, a name that blended the patriotic energy of the returning troops with the solidity of a financial institution. The numbers may have originated in Harlem, but everything about the game suggested a different neighborhood of New York City, one to which the rising Italian immigrants aspired: Wall Street. Wall Street was, of course, the money establishment. It was largely closed to Italians, just as other arenas of the American establishment were. An Italian had about as much chance of becoming a stockbroker as of being elected president. So, piece by piece, they created their own version of the establishment world. And since, given the illegal nature of it, they couldn’t rely on the authorities to settle disputes between various parties, they had to do it themselves. That’s one way of looking at the American mob.
What Russ and Joe were building in Johnstown—what Joe had taken part in in Philly, what guys like Lucky Luciano and Frank Costello and Salvatore Maranzano had created in New York—was a mirror of American capitalism. They took to the ruthlessness of that system, its rapaciousness, but also maintained the awareness that you couldn’t just take without giving something back. You were selling a product. Booze was the first product. Then, after Prohibition, in prudish mid-twentieth-century America, the vehemence with which gambling was denounced and criminalized precisely angled it for these men as the next income generator. The general public’s deep longing for it (there were an estimated 50 million American gamblers in the early ’50s), combined with the puritanical forces that outlawed it, made for a sellers’ market.
The numbers was different from other forms of gambling in a way that made it particularly appealing. Its very language mimicked Wall Street. In the lingo of the numbers, men like Russ and Joe were “bankers.” Early players in Harlem talked not about placing bets but “making an investment.” The authors of Playing the Numbers: Gambling in Harlem Between the Wars suggest that Black New Yorkers turned to the numbers in the 1920s in part because they were shut out from most banking activities. Sure, banks were happy to take their money and let them open savings accounts, but “borrowing money to open or expand a business, or indeed for any purpose, was almost an impossibility for African Americans.” There was no such thing as a Black person getting a mortgage to buy a house, for instance. Blacks couldn’t even work as bank tellers. Thinking of the nickels and dimes you gave to your bookie as an investment, therefore, gave you a feeling of legitimacy, of buying a stake in your future. Many looked at it as being as certain an investment as any other. By playing the same number every day, you were putting money into a kind of account; you believed that one day your number would hit and you would get back your original stake, plus interest.
The Italian men of Russ’s generation, who wanted to be players in the American game as much as their WASP counterparts did, saw bookmaking as akin to running an investment firm. You were providing a financial service. Yes, you stood to make a fairly staggering profit—around 40 percent on every bet—but so did the titans of the legit financial industry. Joe knew the essential thing was to establish a system that had the regularity and convenience of a bank. His goal was to create something his customers trusted. He wanted it to be a bedrock institution in the community. I don’t know if he achieved that, but everyone over a certain age I talked with in Johnstown saw the G.I. Bank as a kind of service, one that offered an attractive product and that was reliable. Trust began with the fact that you could look up the winning numbers yourself, Monday through Friday, in the black and white of the Tribune. They were the closing numbers of the New York Stock Exchange.
And for Joe and Russ, it was self-evident that you linked to the community by being in the community. You wanted to be as much a part of residents’ lives as the post office was. So you made your product available wherever people gathered. At barber shops, like Angelo’s in the Johnstown Bank & Trust Building, Harry’s on Fourth Avenue, or Coppola’s in Conemaugh. Your bookies stopped in at the bowling alleys, at the American-Slovak Social Club and the Polish National Alliance Club. They took customers’ loose change over the counter at candy stores, like Kels Konfectionary Korner, and at novelty shops, hardware stores, and even in law offices. When people stopped in for a bowl of chili or a couple of hot dogs for lunch—at the Corner Inn, Franklin Lunch, Coney Island Hot Dogs, or in the Glosser Brothers Department Store cafeteria—the G.I. Bank was there. When you moseyed up to the bar for a beer after work, at the Hill Top Tavern, Jim Dandy’s, the Essex House, the Four Leaf Clover, the Steel Bar, or the Terminal Café; at Lill’s, Marie’s, Mike’s, Steve’s, Angie’s, Bertha’s, Tony’s, or Zip’s, there was someone—maybe the bartender, maybe your wife’s kid brother—able to take your ten cents or your four bits and record your favorite numbers. By many estimates, more than half the town played the G.I. Bank at its height.
Money poured into the office above City Cigar. Once a week Joe would call LaRocca, make an appointment, and get a driver to take him to Pittsburgh. In the trunk (I assume it was in the trunk: nobody I talked to could answer this question) was LaRocca’s cut. As for the rest, Russ and Joe needed to launder it. I don’t think, ultimately, they were in the business of crime per se. It was business qua business that they were after; criminal activity happened to be the ignition. So they surveyed the town for further opportunities. Joe and Millie weren’t big on making the scene, but Russ and Mary liked to dress up and live a little, which gave them a perspective. They went to fancy supper clubs in Pittsburgh, and occasionally in Atlantic City. (I have a photograph of the two of them, smiling and looking sharp, Mary’s neck and ears adorned with pearls, enjoying the show at Club Harlem, Atlantic City’s world-renowned Black nightclub, which hosted the likes of Ella Fitzgerald and Cab Calloway.) With wartime restrictions at an end and locals having so much more spending money, wasn’t it about time Johnstown had a high-class entertainment option?
I don’t know what deal Joe and Russ struck with Chris Contakos, the owner of the building on Franklin Street that housed the Central Cafe, where Mary had worked and where she and Russ met, but they took it over one floor at a time. The top floor became a boxing gym; the one below it they turned into Capitol Bowling Lanes, where Tony remembers working as a pin setter when he was a kid. But their pride and joy was the Melodee Lounge, on the second floor, above Central Cafe. They threw a mort of cash into creating a lavish interior that made you feel like you weren’t in the middle of some western Pennsylvania steel town but rather on East Sixtieth Street in New York, at the Copacabana. They hired a chef for the place who could do a two-inch steak that sizzled as it was laid before you and a bar manager who understood the importance of pushing not just top-shelf liquors but colorful drinks to appeal to the ladies: Grasshoppers, “Punch Romaine,” and the Million
aire. They hired a booking agent out of Pittsburgh who started lining up rising stars like Sammy Davis Jr. and the Will Mastin Trio. Russ understood that white Americans were drawn to Black entertainers—their shows were hipper, and the integrated atmosphere gave the place an edgy, urban vibe—so he made that a specialty. “Now presenting the finest sepia attraction in the entertainment business” went one of his ads. Among the first groups he booked was the Four Blues, who’d just had a hit with “It Takes a Long Tall Brownskin Gal (to Make a Preacher Lay His Bible Down).” But while things were changing fast in the postwar era, with Italians now being accepted as “white,” the wall was still in place with regard to Blacks. Black performers couldn’t sit in the audience after their set but had to retire to their dressing room.
Not long after, Joe and Russ opened a second club two blocks down the street. Just as Russ had done with his Franklin Pool Room, which he positioned right outside the mill gate in that borough, they placed the Gautier Club across from the main gate to the Gautier Division of the Bethlehem Steel plant. It was the mirror opposite of the Melodee Lounge in terms of demographics of both the clientele and the acts. Gautier was essentially a strip club for mill workers, a place where after eight hours as steel pourer or stove tender guys could let loose and down a few boilermakers while roaring at ladies like Christie Doll, who was billed as a “top-notch terpsichorean artist,” and “lovely dancer Mignon.” There was an ex-vaudevillian who emceed the shows, and an old lady accompanying the acts on piano. The club was on the second floor. Right below it they opened the Clinton Street Pool Room, which was likewise a proletariat version of City Cigar.
Russ’s friends, guys he’d grown up with, run card games with, been busted alongside—guys like Sam Polina, Johnny DiFalco, Pete Pagano, Tommy Croco, Charlie Torcia, Buster Tanase, Joe Picklo, Joe Bruno—all assumed roles in the rapidly expanding operation. So did Russ’s brother Tony, and some of his sisters’ husbands. Writing numbers. Taking phone bets. Running craps games. Managing the pool hall or the bowling alley. Keeping the customers off the ladies working the stage at the Gautier Club.
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