He ran down the list of his physical problems and how they had worsened dramatically since I’d last seen him. Before, when I was meeting with him regularly, his wife took him every day to the YMCA to go swimming. But that was over. “I just sit here all fuckin’ day.” He was indeed blind. And probably his ability to recall the recent past had suffered, but he was still tuned in to the era of zoot suits and Studebakers. I lobbed a question and he started talking. One thing led to another and soon he was going on about being in the army in Italy in 1952, running cons and making deals as he traveled. He said he made $50,000 selling flint in Sicily, and that he brought a trick top with him that he carried around to army bases. He’d sit down at a bar and challenge soldiers to spin it and bet on the number that came up: “The worst I could do was a tie.” He went into some stream-of-consciousness name-dropping about those days. “I’m driving from Palermo to Messina on the intercoastal road, and who do I see but Tallulah Bankhead. She had a wine bath. We became friends. I knew Mario Puzo, knew him pretty well. His secretary had a deep voice, like a man’s. I talked to her on the phone one time and thought it was him. She laughed. Only true thing in The Godfather was when he said the higher up you go, no matter what the business, the bigger the thieves. Even in the Catholic Church. Especially in the Catholic Church. I met Charlie Luciano in Naples. He started the mafia. He says what’s your name. I says Michael Gulino, Johnstown, Pennsylvania. He had a place called the Snake Pit. He had guy whores in the place. That’s the first time I ever heard of a guy whore. All these women came from the Netherlands to be with them. I stayed at the Excelsior Hotel in Naples. Twenty bucks a night, best hotel in Italy. They had a barber would come up to your room and shave you. I met Luciano through a friend, who said if you ever go to Naples look him up. So I go to his club. He had a great big pit there with nothing but snakes in it. I asked the waiter: Is Mr. Luciano in? I gave him my friend’s name, a friend from Detroit. Charlie comes down. He says, ‘Anything you want, any broad you want.’ And every time I got to Naples I’d go see him. Jesus, it’s good to talk about this stuff.”
He was silent for a while. Then he looked at me. His eyes were different than before, seeming desperate to find something to grab on to. “How many people did you have to talk to until you started to realize that your grandfather wasn’t such a bad guy?” he asked.
I stopped myself from saying that that was a leading question, the premise of which I didn’t necessarily agree with. “You were the first,” I said. Then, nudging him in another direction, I added, “Back then, men didn’t explore their feelings. Maybe that’s the essence of the relationship he had with his son—my dad.”
He talked a little bit about his later career. In the ’70s and ’80s he built a huge sports book, which spanned the eastern part of the continent, from Toronto to Miami. That crashed and burned in 1985, when the FBI collared him. He was convicted, and served eighteen months in prison. What annoyed him about it, he said, was the way events had overtaken him. Here he was, running a gambling operation and getting busted for it while state lotteries—legalized gambling—had become the norm. “What a sap I was.”
As I got ready to go, he tossed out one more memory of my grandfather, in which, again, he had an active role and Tony had a passive one.
“You know, a lotta times I brought Russ home,” he said, “and we were arm in arm, because he was dead drunk. I’d bring him into the living room. Mary would be there, and your dad too. I’d lay Russ down on the couch. I knew it was hard on all of them. Russ used to lecture me, tell me to keep away from the whiskey. ‘This stuff ain’t holy water.’ ”
I told Mike I’d come back soon to see him.
IN OUR MOST recent conversation, my dad had applied a phrase to his teenage years, one that he’d used in the past: misspent youth. A wistful and a poetic phrase. And a vague one. It stuck with me over the next week or so. I went back through my interview notes. There was something Frank Filia had mentioned in one of our early sessions. Something about cats? I found it: cat gang. Only a mention, with a knowing smile. “Ask your dad about it.” I didn’t want to. Instead, I went to the Cambria County Library and the Johnstown Area Heritage Association and began paging through newspapers from the ’50s.
Even without an index, it wasn’t hard to find the cache of stories on the topic. “We read where some juveniles robbed a number of local business places and broke open safes …” “The Cats are again at work.” “The Cats are breaking open safes, and entering locked doors …” “All the members of the cat gang from our district, and the other hoodlums who have been arrested many times, are back in school and are posing as heroes …” “Some boys boast that they are the kings of the Cats.”
In the mid-’50s, the town was plagued by a gang of marauding teenagers wielding guns and knives. One account called it “a real reign of terror.” The next time I was at my parents’ house I prepped myself to ask my dad about it. But I didn’t have to. The subject just came up. Tony was slightly different in this conversation than he’d ever been. Things were changing in some way. I guess the stint in the nursing home had done it. We had arrived at new territory, which apparently could be explored without drama. He was open, which was not in itself unusual—he took pride in following his “you’re only as sick as your secrets” mantra. But now he was not just answering questions but reaching, offering connections. As we started talking, for example, he volunteered that his father had openly favored his brother over him.
“So when you were in your teens, you were never close to your father?”
“Never. I don’t remember hugging him ever. I remember him showing my brother more affection than he did me. He would come home and give him baseballs and stuff.”
“Why the difference?”
“I was older and I understood what was happening with him and my mother.”
“Did you ever stand up for her?”
“Yeah. But it wasn’t really necessary. He ran. He would never stick around and fight. She never let up on him.”
“As a teenager, you were being a badass around town.”
“Exactly. That pissed him off.”
Then he told me about a couple of times, with his parents fighting and his father rejecting him, when he had bolted. “At fourteen years old I ran away to Florida. Me and Moose Eliot. And I ran away to Ohio, me and Joe Esposito and George Lopez. We went to Cleveland. Later when I was back home the FBI came to the house looking for Tony Morello!” His mood had lightened suddenly; he was laughing at his young self as he said this.
I was confused. “What? The FBI? Who was Tony Morello?”
“Me. That was the alias I made up when we ran off. I was traveling under an assumed name! I don’t know how they connected it with me. Man, did my dad get pissed off at that!”
This was when my mother, who I think was thinking of the names of the kids he had run away with and their association with him, suddenly volunteered the information. “He was in a gang called the cat gang.”
“That’s where I met Rip,” Tony said. “We were in jail together.”
“For what?”
“Armed robbery. And five or six burglaries.”
“What, you had a gun?”
“Yeah. In one of the first burglaries, we took about twenty guns from a sports store on Washington Street. We used them in the other ones. I did three months up in Ebensburg Juvenile Detention. I was fifteen.”
What I didn’t say, but might have, was something like I know why you did it. But I didn’t know then. I was just trying to absorb this new information, which suddenly both of my parents were offering matter-of-factly. I hadn’t yet put any puzzle pieces together. And while it was a surprise to hear of my dad as a teenage gun wielder, a prisoner because he couldn’t become a mobster, at the same time it wasn’t a surprise. Somehow, I had known this. I just hadn’t heard it until now.
____________
* Looking at me in the mirror.
† I had heard all my life the story of ho
w, right after I was born, my dad was at the Melodee Lounge to hear Jon Eardley and told him his wife had just given birth, and on the spot Eardley wrote and played a song for the occasion. Alas, it was never recorded.
‡ Buster Tanase was decapitated in a car accident.
12
The Haven
SOMETIME IN 1956, Little Joe decided he’d had enough of Russ’s drunken binges. He showed up at Russ’s house, and he brought John Strank, their partner in City Cigar, with him. Russ was coming off a bender. He had failed in some decisive way, one of a string of failures to show up or otherwise to do his job. Joe and Russ had remained close through everything, but Joe believed in discipline. “Uncle Joe didn’t want to do it, but he had to,” my dad told me. I hadn’t heard about this before. Mike Gulino was the one who had told me, and now when I brought it up Tony suddenly remembered the scene like he was watching it on TV. He had been there, listening from the top of the stairs. He remembered that John Strank was in the room, but that John didn’t say much. He was there as kind of a mediator, a mutual friend, who solemnized and formalized the occasion with his presence. Tony heard his uncle tell his dad that he was letting him go, he had no choice, and he knew that Russ knew that was true. Russ didn’t try to argue his way out of it. He just started crying. “I cried too,” my dad said.
Shortly afterward, Russ bought a bar of his own. He called it the Haven. Maybe he chose the name with his own needs in mind, though you would think if he was seeking refuge from drink he might have chosen another channel for his activities. Then Joe decided to give him a second chance. Russ jumped at it, vowed to reform, and soon went back to making his usual rounds on behalf of the organization: his morning shave and nails done at Pantana’s barbershop on Washington Street, then stopping in at City Cigar, the bowling alley, the Melodee Lounge, and Shangri-La. The banks, the bookies, the takes, the percentages.
He remained in his brother-in-law’s good graces enough that, in September 1956, he was given honored treatment. Russ’s mother, Annamaria Previte, died then, seventy years after her birth in San Pier Niceto. Her last years had been spent mostly in bed, her white hair foaming around her head, making her a figure of wonder and terror to her younger grandchildren. She had lived more than half a century in Pennsylvania but never learned more than a few English phrases. Everyone I talked to remembered the funeral. Some said there were a hundred cars in the procession, that the funeral home was so stuffed with flowers they trailed all the way down the sidewalk. People had come from as far away as Pittsburgh to pay their respects. Little Joe and John LaRocca had conspired to make her sendoff a grand affair, a show of respect. Word was that Kelly Mannarino had contributed an entire truckload of flowers. Despite his lapses, Russ still rated.
But while he was back in the organization, from now on he had a new base. The Haven was something that was just his. Or rather, it was theirs: Mary was listed as the actual owner of the bar, and she worked there too sometimes. So they had a little bit of a partnership going. They were trying to start over. “I still love Chinky,” Russ told Minnie. He gave his brother Tony a job at the Haven. It was a nice little bar too, on a lively corner, not downtown but at a crossroads where several neighborhoods came together. It’s still there today.
The Haven was the kind of place where friends would meet for a drink and a few laughs. Russ and Mary were close with a couple named Alex and Vicky Yuhas. They would drive down to the bar from their house, just up the road in Southmont, and the four of them would have cocktails at a table near the front window. Alex was a supervisor at Bethlehem Steel; Vicky worked for a fur company.
Then Alex got sick, and Russ began to help Vicky out. Vicky was fourteen years younger than Russ—he was forty-three, she twenty-nine. She had been a beauty queen, Miss Cambria County. My way of gauging the start of their affair comes from Frank Filia. Frank had been building a name as a singer with the George Arcurio Orchestra throughout the 1950s. One night in late 1957 he was playing at the Forest Park Club and saw Russ in the audience. “It was such a big deal to me, because Russ never gave me the time of day. And here he’d come to see me. And he actually requested a song. ‘All the Way.’ ”* The other thing Frank remembered about that night was that Russ had Vicky with him. It was Vicky who liked the club and pressed him to take her there.
This time, when Mary found out she took some pills. Actually, it was her second suicide attempt. The first time wasn’t so scary; she went to the hospital and came back soon after. She had done so much for him, been the dutiful wife. Russ would bring business associates home at three in the morning; without complaining she would wake up, fly into the kitchen, and cook them a full meal: spaghetti and filet mignon.
But this was a particularly sharp betrayal. Something very heavy descended on Mary after she found out about Vicky. She slid into a studied listlessness. After sending the kids off to school, she would draw the curtains and sit alone in the dark house, letting morning give way to afternoon. One day she went up to the bathroom and began swallowing pills. Apparently deciding that moving her body would hasten the effect, she proceeded down to the basement and started washing clothes. Tony wasn’t at home, but he had been sensing the gathering darkness. Miraculously, an ambulance showed up at the house. The doctor came out of the emergency room wearing a serious look and said, “I don’t know if we can save her.”
Mary lived. When she came home from the hospital she was puffed up. Minnie told me that after that, when she would go to their house in the middle of the day she could often tell that Mary had been drinking, and the place would be messy and kind of odd. “There would be, you know, a hammer or something on the coffee table.”
Life on Rambo Street lurched on. Tensions between Russ and Tony didn’t lessen, but his mother’s brush was death brought about a change in Tony. He was seventeen, filled with hurt, but now feeling the need to grow up. He suddenly regretted dropping out of school, and signed up for classes that would get him a diploma. He only went a few times, but he was trying. He had outgrown the cat gang. He still hung out with some tough guys. Rip, for one. Like everybody else, he was freaked out by the guy. Neither his father nor his uncle liked him to associate with Rip, for the same reasons they called on Rip to do ugly jobs. Around this time, Tony and Rip took a trip to Atlantic City. They swam around the steel pier together. The pier was a quarter mile out to sea. They were both in shape, both excellent swimmers. When I asked him why Rip of all people attracted him, he shrugged and said, “I was nuts!”
Smarting from his father’s rejection, Tony started veering away from City Cigar when he was downtown and instead headed across Main Street to Weiser’s Music Center. Kids his age were always inside checking out what was new, standing around with headphones on, bobbing their heads. Music had settled into a firm groove: “All Shook Up,” “That’ll Be the Day,” “Little Darlin’,” “Wake Up, Little Susie.” None of that existed for him. He’d slip into one of the listening booths, put a different platter on the turntable—“A foggy day … in London town. …”—and start snapping his fingers. He absorbed each of Sinatra’s albums from those years—Songs for Young Lovers, Swing Easy!, In the Wee Small Hours, A Swingin’ Affair!—and decades later could recite the song order on each and tell you who did the arrangement. Others his age were going to sock hops. Still kids and acting like it. Sinatra was a generation older, and most of the songs he sang were older still, but, for Tony, Sinatra was pointing the way. This was how a man behaved. This was how you showed toughness—with an open cut of vulnerability. This was how you held a cigarette, your whiskey, how you squinted to express world-weary resignation, how you treated a woman. This was how you invented yourself.
RUSS WASN’T THERE. Little Joe might have been there, in which case he was one of the middle-aged men running awkwardly across open fields in suits and ties and patent-leather shoes, fleeing the cops. John LaRocca was one of the runners—he got away. Kelly Mannarino from New Kensington got nabbed and was subjected to the indignity of being ar
rested and jailed like a common criminal.
It was a defining event in the history of organized crime in the United States, and the beginning of the end for the outfit in Johnstown. History books call it the Apalachin meeting. On November 14, 1957, somewhere around a hundred mob guys from all across the nation gathered at the country home of Joseph Barbara—the Little Joe of Scranton, Pennsylvania—in the rural town of Apalachin, New York. A state trooper noticed a large number of cars with out-of-state license plates in the area. The cops established a perimeter around the estate and moved in. The boys ran for it. About fifty-eight of them were collared.
What made the bust significant was J. Edgar Hoover, the all-powerful head of the FBI. Even after the Kefauver Committee had issued its findings on illegal gambling operations and their spread around the country, Hoover insisted that these were independent units and therefore not of major importance. There was no interconnected network; there was no American mafia that held councils and issued rulings over governance. One theory holds that Hoover maintained this position because he was a zealous protector of the bureau’s image and he knew that hunting and prosecuting the mob would be a long and messy business that would likely tarnish it. Another is that Hoover was unable to take his eyes off what he felt was the real threat to the country: communism.
The Apalachin meeting made it impossible for Hoover to deny that there was a nationwide mafia. The men captured at the farmhouse included bosses from Utica; Rochester; Cleveland; Dallas; Pittsburgh; Philadelphia; Kansas City; Tampa; Providence; Springfield, Illinois; Springfield, Massachusetts; Elizabeth, New Jersey; and Los Angeles, as well as representatives of all of the five families that ran New York. The federal government was forced to recognize the mafia as a criminal organization that operated across state lines. Hoover immediately instituted what he called the Top Hoodlum Program to track mob activity.
Smalltime Page 16
