On September 15, President Kennedy signed into law three bills targeting organized crime, which called for cooperation with local authorities. Two days later, the Johnstown police department suddenly renewed its investigation into the local rackets. Of particular interest to the authorities now, Detective Habala indicated in his reports, were eight men, including “Russell ‘Russ’ Shorto,” George Bondy, and “Joseph ‘Little Joe’ Regino (who is the supposed head of the organization).” The Johnstown Police Department sent a letter to Robert Kennedy detailing their findings. Habala learned from an informant that, with City Cigar out of business, the organization in Johnstown was now headquartered “at the Shangri-La Lodge.” He typed up a memo to the chief of police telling him he had made a decision “to contact Superior Judges in Pittsburgh and some members of the Internal Revenue to anticipate the latest move by your office (concerning the letter sent to Att. Gen. Kennedy) …”
My assumption is that Russ, Joe, George Bondy, and the others on the list were interrogated at the time, though I couldn’t find records of those encounters. Shortly afterward, however, the city’s official attention seemed to zero in on one person. When they learned that that person was about to flee, they took action. On September 26, the police received a call from an informant: the suspect had contacted a waitress at the Seafood Restaurant downtown, saying he was leaving town but would stop in to pick up his football betting sheets. The cops conducted a “stake-out for apprehension of Erwin ‘Rip’ Slomanson” at the restaurant. They watched the place from 5:30 in the afternoon until 10:30 that night, then they gave up and went home.
The next day Detective Habala spotted Slomanson farther down Main Street, in front of Lee Hospital, “alone and driving his 1961 Chevrolet, color black.” Habala opened the passenger door and jumped in. Slomanson asked if he had a search warrant. Habala did, and showed it to him. The detective and two officers searched the car and found “1372 football sheets for this Saturday.” Slomanson was arrested on gambling charges as well as for carrying a concealed weapon.
At the police department, a high-level group—three detectives, the chief of police, and Mayor Walter—convened to interview the prisoner. The man who was suddenly the subject of the city’s official attention, however, “refused to give a statement of his activity.” The only thing Rip offered was when Habala asked him why there was a heavy hank of electric cable under his car seat. “I use that to defend myself with in case someone would get after me,” he said.
They kept on him, pestering and questioning and needling, until, in December, they gave up. He pled guilty to violating the gambling laws and paid a $400 fine. They had nothing else: no witness, no evidence, no confession, no way to tie him to the murder. They let him go.
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* I should note that Mike told me that Joe had told him the meeting didn’t happen this way. According to his account, Bionaz was the one trying to use the fact that both men had adopted children as a way to cozy up to Joe.
† George Arcurio was known as Junior.
14
The Fallout
PIPPY DIFALCO’S MURDER is a fault line in this story because it changed everything for my grandfather. The Johnstown mob was a source of stability in Russ’s otherwise very unstable life. It gave him purpose. It served as the foundation of his world, a foundation that he himself had helped build. The pressure from the authorities following the bookie’s death fractured the mob in town. Trying to follow Russ thus becomes even more complicated in the 1960s. He had already been on a downward course emotionally, even when he was rising professionally, but from now on he seemed to break up into pieces. His path became more erratic, his “choices” even harder to fathom. Where I can make him out most clearly is in negative: in the fallout, the imprint he made on other lives.
I did, however, stumble onto one excellent source, who gave me, among other insights, my only window onto Russ’s activities during the period around Pippy’s death. Alexis Kozak was Alex and Vicky’s daughter. It was Russ’s affair with Vicky that pushed my grandmother to try to kill herself. I hadn’t even known that Vicky had had a daughter. It was my aunt Sis who suggested one day, out of the blue, that maybe I would want to talk to her. I phoned Alexis and was instantly intrigued. Not only was she willing to talk, she seemed eager. Plus, she lived in town.
To put us in the mood for chatting about back in the day, we agreed to meet for lunch at the Holiday Inn during one of Frank Filia’s Thursday-afternoon sets. We took our seats as Frank was crooning in his velvety tones about being blue every Monday and looking forward to Sunday.
Alexis was a lively, chatty woman in her sixties. And she knew a lot. Russ and Vicky somehow kept their convulsive affair going throughout Alexis’s childhood and early adulthood, which meant Alexis had a perspective on Russ that no one in my family did: an intimate view of him in the period of his life after City Cigar. She told me right away that she had liked him. He was kind to her, and he would take her and her mother and various friends out for extravagant dinners: “Nobody else was ever allowed to pick up the check.”
Russ brought a whole new energy into her household, which Alexis found fascinating. “I was always watching what he did,” she said, “the way he acted.” She found it thrilling, for example, that Russ never left the house without a .32 revolver. She said that as part of his entourage she spent a lot of time at Shangri-La (which did indeed become the hangout after City Cigar closed down), eating pasta with her mother upstairs while in a room downstairs Russ, Joe, Sam Fashion, and other guys would hold a weekly meeting. A couple of times she and her mother were with Russ at Shangri-La and he got so drunk her mother made the decision to take him to the hospital. She remembered one time a pal of his suggesting as they rushed off, “Make sure you tell them he has chest pains. That way they’ll take him right away.”
Then Alexis asked me if I’d heard about the murder of Pippy diFalco. She said she had a memory of the night his body was found, something she had never told the police—because no one knew to ask her. “How interesting,” I said.
Around two o’clock in the morning on May 26, 1960, the day the discovery of the body was made public, while newspapers carrying the story were still in the process of being printed, her parents’ dining room was suddenly full of men. It was the middle of the night, but the men were loud—pumped up on the news that the whole town would soon be discussing. First reports—which would soon be corrected—were that there were no signs of injury, no “visible evidence of foul play.”
“I remember waking up and hearing all the noise,” Alexis said. “It was crazy down there.” She was eleven at the time, peering downstairs. “The room was full of these guys. The only two I knew were Johnny diFalco and Russ. And my mother and father were there. They were talking about Pippy and everyone was all worked up. You have to remember that my mother and dad were best friends with your grandparents. That gang never came to our house. But I think they wanted to meet somewhere neutral. The police wouldn’t have connected my dad with them at all. And the next day I saw in the paper that they had found Pippy in the river.”
Alexis didn’t remember any particular things that were said, only that the body had been found. At first her memory of that night—the fact that Russ and some of his colleagues had gotten advance notice of the discovery of the body—seemed to me vaguely incriminating; Alexis had always thought so too. Then I realized the story could have been broadcast on the late news, and in fact later found that WARD radio had reported it sometime after midnight. Besides, even if they had gotten word from someone on the police force, that didn’t necessarily mean anything other than that they knew the cops had linked Pippy to the rackets, and that they had to be prepared for a new level of scrutiny.
Thinking more about Alexis’s memory, and whether it offered any evidence for or against Russ’s involvement in the murder, it seemed noteworthy that Pippy’s brother had been with the guys. Johnny diFalco had been part of the organization since its earliest d
ays. The fact that he was there as the boys discussed this news struck me as potentially exculpatory. If their group had caused Pippy’s murder, it seemed unlikely that they would have plotted what to do about the body’s discovery in front of the dead man’s brother.
On the other hand, Russ’s behavior throughout this period was distinctly odd. I had given my daughter Eva the box my aunt had kept in her attic that contained all the personal documents Russ had left behind when he died. She pored through it and came up with some anomalies for this period:
Russ had an appraisal done on the building that the Haven was in, presumably meaning that he was thinking about buying it. The striking thing about it was the date: February 5, 1960. Two days before Pippy went missing.
Russ took out five life-insurance policies in 1960, with the Lincoln National Life Insurance Company, John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance, New York Life, the Knights Life Insurance Company of America, and Metropolitan Life.
The police subpoenaed Russ’s personal bank account in 1960, looking at his transactions from February to May, precisely the period of Pippy’s disappearance.
Where he seems to have been an indifferent record keeper throughout his life, Russ saved very detailed financial information—down to every canceled check—from 1960.
Eva and I discussed all of this. I ran it by some people who are savvier in financial matters than I am. On the first point, the appraisal on the building that the Haven occupied, it was dated before Pippy went missing. Even if I were playing devil’s advocate and assuming that Russ had a hand in the bookie’s death, it surely could not have been the case that he and his associates were anticipating it. And if they somehow had been, I couldn’t see a connection between it and Russ considering a real-estate purchase.
On the second point, I mentioned the insurance policies to Tony and he had an instant response. “My dad was obsessed with life insurance. He was convinced it was a racket. He thought he could outsmart the insurance companies. He was always buying policies, taking out loans on them, cashing them in.”
The audit of Russ’s finances for the period of Pippy’s disappearance clearly meant he was under suspicion of being involved in some way, which stands to reason. But it doesn’t mean anything else. And the records that were audited showed mundane transactions, mostly related to his bar.
I finally concluded that the fourth point, the level of detail of Russ’s recordkeeping in this year, was the key to his odd behavior at the time. City Cigar closed its doors in the aftermath of Pippy’s murder. Capitol Bowling, of which Russ was a partner, was sold. Bookies were being busted all over town. The G.I. Bank went dormant. The cops were presumably monitoring his every move. What Russ’s unusual activity tells me is not that he was potentially involved in murder but that in 1960 he was a very scared man. The box of records provides a financial snapshot of someone whose life had cracked open. The Johnstown mob, after all, was his life’s work. The enterprise that he had built from scratch and to which he had devoted himself for fifteen years was being raided, invaded, dismantled. The insurance policies, the liquidation of companies, the audit—all of this did relate to Pippy’s murder, but to its aftermath rather than the act. It showed the effects of the government crackdown—from the federal level to city hall in Johnstown—on one life.
BY THE LATTER part of 1960 the only thing Russ had left, in terms of financial resources, was his bar, the Haven. That’s where he seems to have retreated for a time. And, funnily enough, that’s where I was. Tony and Rita’s first child, the reason for their elopement, had been born the previous February. Tony had followed Sicilian tradition and named his firstborn son after his father, but he and Russ were “estranged” around this time, as my mother put it. But while they may not have spoken much, the new family needed a home, and Mary went to work on Russ, cajoling, reminding him that the apartment next to the bar was going to be available soon. My mother told me that despite the tensions between them she knew Russ cared about his son. “All of our parents were concerned—there we were, teenagers with a baby. Everybody wanted to help. He let us move in there. And he never charged us rent.” Mary rounded up some furniture, her sister contributed a bed, and Tony and Rita set up home.
I have exactly one memory of that apartment, which must be from when I was about three and a half because that was how old I was when we moved out. There was a white wall, and a door in that wall. My memory is of one time when the door opened, and suddenly you were in the bar. I know that’s why it stuck with me: the shocking incongruity, the dizzy feeling of unsettledness, that you were in your home but suddenly you were in a dark world of adults being adults, the sort of place from which a small child instinctively recoils. And that, of course, was Russ’s world.
Not long after the little family moved into the apartment beside the Haven, Mary put a crib up at her house. She and Russ would drive down to the apartment, pick up the baby, and bring him to their place. This was when Russ told Tony that they would keep me. I guess Russ liked having the baby around. With his world falling apart, it was soothingly normal. He saw that Mary liked it. Maybe he figured it would be good for the two of them. The kids—meaning Tony and Rita—were too young to be parents anyway. He and Chinky could raise the baby. It would settle him, help give him a new focus, now that he had to rebuild his life. On the other hand, his relationship with Vicky would have been hot and heavy at this time—maybe he figured that raising her grandson would distract Mary, give her something to focus on so that she would stop nagging him.
I imagine that when I heard this story as a child—that my grandfather had tried to take me but my dad had pushed back, Like hell you will—my reaction was giddy relief, a feeling of narrowly missing falling into a chasm. Maybe what I thought of was that door in our first apartment opening up and me being swallowed by the blackness.
Tony knew his father was serious in wanting to take his baby: “They did that kind of thing in the old country,” he told me. “They did it here too.” He didn’t yet know about the con with Isabel’s son, but others of his father’s generation had swapped kids around—because somebody was too young, or deemed to be mentally deficient, or didn’t have room or resources for one more, and somebody else had had a baby die recently and had all the clothes and things ready. You made decisions like that in a family, divided things up depending on who needed what. The paterfamilias issued the pronouncement. A Sicilian thing. Tony knew all that. But he had a right to his family and his future. “I got mad as hell,” he told me. “The fact that he would even think that.” He didn’t remember the scene, what the words were that passed between them.
But he had an ally. “Mary wasn’t going to let it happen,” my mother told me. Mary could be withering with Russ, and not just about his other women. Don’t be ridiculous. Don’t you see this is how kids become adults? Your son is a man now. You wanted him away from your affairs. Well, now he’s away.
Rita and Mary conferred on such things. Rita was still a teenager when she became part of the family, and Mary welcomed her. While Rita changed diapers and such, Mary confided in her new daughter-in-law in a way she never felt able to share with her sisters. Russ’s infidelities: she tolled them, the women’s names, the lipstick traces, every little painful thing.
Rita’s own mother was not well and never had been—had never truly been a mother. She had a mental illness that grew steadily worse once her children were born and growing; she lived mostly at a state mental hospital now. Mary was another mother, who opened up to her at once, which was warm and lovely. In opening herself, she revealed mostly pain. Rita accepted that, and empathized. “I loved her dearly,” she told me. She said Mary talked to her about her childhood, being the oldest and the only one of her siblings with a different father, the hard life on the farm. She never seemed to have had close friends. She talked about how she would go off on her own as a girl and spend a day at a swimming hole. She glowed when she talked about her time in New York: Fifth Avenue, Central Park, Childs Restaurant, the S
taten Island Ferry. “She was an independent woman by nature,” Rita said, “and I feel like she really was able to be herself in New York.”
THE RACKETS DIDN’T completely die out following the 1960 crackdown. There was a lull for a year or two, then Little Joe’s organization slowly reemerged, albeit in a more muted form. A police report in May 1963—written by Detective Habala—indicated that Russ was back in charge of sports betting, along with Sam Fashion, and he was now, as well, “one of the Heads of the G.I. Bank.” Habala listed forty-eight people working for Russ, either in the numbers or “the Fashion-Shorto organization” that ran a sports book.
But it wasn’t the same. The level of authority that Little Joe had exercised in the postwar years was gone. The fear and respect weren’t there, not like before. As a result, there were lots of independent operators around now. Dean Dallas had a separate bank. So did Al Fisher, John Mihalick, and a guy named Mickey Yon. Nick Sikirica ran a sports book. George Bondy, too, seemed to have gone out on his own, specializing in Empire treasury tickets, which were essentially illegal lottery tickets. And Rip Slomanson was back in town as well, running his own sports book, and had several guys working for him.
I have only a few scant pieces of information concerning Russ’s professional life in the ’60s. He continued as Little Joe’s lieutenant for a time, but in a reduced capacity. In addition to his work for his brother-in-law, Russ sold the Haven in 1965 and started another bar in Richland, a suburb to the east of town, called the Jockey Club. He ran card games out of there.
Smalltime Page 19
