I’d heard before how Russ’s mother—my dad’s grandmother—operated a still in the basement. Mary, recently widowed, grieving and in need of money to support her brood—would fill empty Coke bottles with booze, stopper them with corks, and send the older kids out to the mill entrance to sell them.
Russ was six when Prohibition began, and nineteen when it ended. He was the oldest boy, the man of the house. He dropped out of school in the eighth grade. His real education, his chance at success, at a life different from what his father had been able to achieve in America, came thanks to the country’s alcohol ban, which was rooted in the seemingly eternal battle over American identity.
I don’t think my great-grandmother’s basement still was her own idea and execution. For one thing, her situation matches closely with what was going on elsewhere in the country. Bootlegging gangs sprang up everywhere. The commonest way for gang leaders to get product was to pay people to set up stills in their homes, and a goodly number of the operators were women, typically single mothers desperate for income. In a study of female bootleggers during Prohibition in New Orleans, for instance, Tanya Marie Sanchez found that
most alleged bootleggers were between the ages of thirty and forty. Most were widowed, divorced, or separated from their husbands, who were usually stevedores, laborers, or grocers. Female bootleggers were almost always mothers, who were often burdened with numerous children. A surname analysis of alleged bootleggers indicates that most of the women were of immigrant stock, usually of Irish, Italian, Spanish, or Jewish ancestry, and most resided downtown, in working-class neighborhoods.
All of this fits Mary Shorto to a tee. So do the rationales that Sanchez identifies:
For working-class mothers, bootlegging was both a convenient and lucrative method of supplementing meager family incomes. The production of alcoholic beverages was easily done in the home, for food and beverage preparation were traditional female domestic activities. Bootlegging also allowed mothers to earn money while remaining near their children. Although their activities put their children in proximity to alcohol, this posed no great moral dilemma for most female bootleggers, who appear to have been immigrants or children of immigrants whose cultures embraced a positive view of alcohol. For many white ethnic mothers, the making and selling of alcohol was both culturally acceptable and economically necessary.
The reason I don’t think Mary was alone in operating her still is that it was precisely around this sort of activity that Italian men of a certain stripe, in cities large and small, formed the groups that would evolve into the American mafia. And one such man appears on the scene at this time in Johnstown. His name was Philip Verone. When I say he appeared on the scene I don’t mean that he was a romantic interest of Mary’s. She had already taken care of that. Not too long after Antonino’s death she had done the practical thing and gotten herself remarried, to one of her Italian boarders, a man named Anthony Tucci, whom everyone called Tork.
Or rather, my family had always assumed they married. I was mildly perplexed that I couldn’t find marriage license on file for them when I began my family research. Later, however, a genealogist named Julie Pitrone Williamson, who had assisted me with earlier puzzles, emailed me out of the blue with information she had found proving that, just like my great-grandfather, Anthony Tucci had had a wife and child in Italy whom he had left behind when he emigrated to work in America. Mary’s luck, it seems, was to be the second “wife” of not one but two two-timers. Which makes me wonder how prevalent this sort of thing was among those Italian immigrant men.
This second husband, Tork, was even rougher than she was. “He was like a wild man,” said Eugene Trio, one of his step-grandchildren, “built like a boar, with thick fingernails. He could carry a hundred-pound sack like it was nothing. He didn’t wash too often.” The wildness doesn’t seem to have bothered Mary unduly; her last child, Nancy, was with Tork. And there are reflections among Mary’s grandchildren that suggest that Tork and Mary settled into a comfortable companionship—people recall them sitting on porch of an evening, Tork wearing a straw hat, passing a jug of wine back and forth, no fussing with glasses for them.
But there aren’t many indications that Tork provided what you would call a father figure for Russ, who would have sorely needed one. This is where Philip Verone came in. “The same guy who taught me taught your grandfather,” one of my oldest informants told me early in my research. “His name was Verone. And he was a black-hander.”
“Black Hand” is a kind of catch-all term that has been used to refer to the pre-mafia in the United States. The first appearance of it in print was in 1903, when the New York Herald published the story of a wealthy Italian contractor who had received a letter threatening to dynamite his house if he didn’t pay $10,000. It was signed Mano Nera. Shortly after, the New York Times was reporting on the “Black Hand Society” as a loose gang of blackmailers, which preyed mostly on other Italian immigrants.
The old boys in Johnstown had a slightly different take on the term. To them “black-handers” were certain men of the generation that came of age in the first two or three decades of the twentieth century. Some extorted other Italians, but others were seen as protectors of the community, who led the way through the ethnic thicket of a gritty and growing small city. The local leader was a man named Siciliano. His number two was Philip Verone.
As to what these men did, you might say that, with Italians squeezed into narrow economic corners, the black-handers looked for opportunities. Prohibition, and the instantaneous and exuberant demand for alcohol that came with it, was the chance of a lifetime. The network of stills cooking home-brewed spirits blossomed seemingly overnight—“Fumes of boiling mash filled the air,” went one description. Ten months after Prohibition went into effect, the Johnstown Tribune reported that “ ‘runners’ for various ‘big fellows’ are peddling the stuff openly.” I read that and see Russ and his sisters in Conemaugh Borough, literally between Coal Street and Steel Street, peddling their Coke bottles full of fire water, working for Mr. Verone.
The threat of being caught appears to have been modest. The mayor, Joseph Cauffiel, worked to block the sale of alcohol, but he had such an uphill struggle the accounts read like comedy. It wasn’t unheard-of for him to hire a “special policeman” to inspect bars and cafés then later, as head of police court, find the same man brought before him following his inspection rounds, charged with drunkenness.
Yet there were crackdowns. In Mary Shorto’s house, the kids were trained to roll the barrels out of sight if someone thought a cop was coming to the door. Once, they weren’t in time; she was caught, convicted, and sent to the Cambria County Jail for six months. “Aunt Millie told me the kids were by themselves that whole time and they were so scared,” Cindy Shorto said.
Russ therefore grew up under the cope of Prohibition justice. As a boy he learned what many never do their whole lives: that while the system appears rigid it is actually a highly fungible thing; that it’s possible for a tough-enough guy to leverage guts and power and recast it according to his will. The most resonant struggle in the town during those years was between Mayor Cauffiel and a burly tavern owner named Dan Shields. Shields kept his bar open despite the ban on selling alcohol, ostensibly restricting himself to coffee and sarsaparilla, but in fact he was a flagrant flouter of the Prohibition law, and Cauffiel had him in his sights. The mayor gathered evidence that Shields was selling alcohol and charged him, following the lingo of the local ordinance, with operating a “tippling house.” At first Shields failed to show up in court. When he was forced to, he gave as his defense that he didn’t know the meaning of the verb “to tipple.” The two met several times in court, each more heated. On one occasion Shields challenged the mayor to “meet me out in the woods.”
The feud widened. Shields had not only broad shoulders but wide-ranging aspirations—in real estate and politics. One of his properties had been a brewery; he had sold it, but Cauffiel apparently discovered that it was s
till producing beer—29,000 gallons of it since Prohibition had taken effect. Shields was held to be still involved in the business and was charged with violating the Volstead Act as well as with bribery for paying off the police and sending money and gifts (chocolates and flowers) to a female federal officer. He was found guilty, appealed, and the case eventually went to the U.S. Supreme Court, where William Howard Taft, the chief justice (and former president of the United States) dismissed the ruling on a technicality. On retrial Shields was found guilty again and ordered to serve two years in prison. But he called on connections in Washington and managed to have President Herbert Hoover commute his sentence. He served no jail time, continued his confrontational relationship with the city government, and rose to greater heights, unveiling an innovative new building in downtown Johnstown: an office and entertainment complex called the Capitol Building, with a splashy automobile showroom on the ground floor.
Shields’s fiery relationship continued with the next mayor, Eddie McCloskey, Shields once accused him of lying at a city council meeting. “Nobody calls me a liar and gets away with it!” McCloskey replied. The two men fell on each other, and Shields landed several punches on the mayor’s head before the police pulled him off. Despite collaring Shields, they had to be impressed by his pugilism: McCloskey was a former prizefighter.
Shields’s battles with the city government carried on over the whole of the 1920s and into the 1930s, culminating with him becoming mayor in 1936, and provided a local counterpoint to the robber-baron activities of previous decades—provided a model, that is, to Johnstown’s Italian bootleggers of how to work the system. You make connections. You bribe. You use guile. And if need be, you knock heads.
HERE, MAYBE, I begin to make some headway with Russ. At some point in his teens he caught the eye of the black-hander Mr. Verone. This Verone was a very short man, and a tough one, the kind who sees himself as a neighborhood protector. Maybe Russ showed some smarts to Mr. Verone in calculating what his family had taken in over a given week on bootlegged booze and what the gang owed them. Maybe Verone also singled him out because of his status as the oldest male in his family: he knew the kid would need a leg up in the world. Or maybe Russ took the initiative: feeling the lack of a strong father figure, desperate to get ahead, he offered himself to Verone. However it happened, the boy went into training.
Gambling was going to be the next big venture. It was already booming. Gambling was like alcohol under Prohibition. It was illegal but everybody did it. There was an endless market for it. And as the gang moved from booze to gambling, it took on an increasingly ethnic character. There was an unspoken subtext to the training: Italians couldn’t expect much in the way of respect or opportunities in WASP-ruled America, so they had to carve their own path. I don’t have a recording of those training sessions, but I have the memory of someone else who, several years later, was also trained by Verone. This man—I’ll introduce him shortly—would become Russ’s protégé.
Verone taught Russ cards. How to gamble, what the odds were on getting a flush or two pair, when to fold. But not just that. Getting ahead in an unfair world meant you had to improve the odds. Tony remembers being a boy watching his father at the dining-room table practice for hours at dealing the second card without the sleight-of-hand being noticed. Like an athlete, he had a regular warm-up routine before a big game.
Verone also taught Russ a new word: “skeech.” Maybe it was of Italian origin—schiacciare, to squeeze. It meant to cheat at dice. Not by loading them. You had to be able to do it with normal, unadulterated dice. Here’s how Russ’s protégé characterized the teaching:
“Philip Verone was the best dice man I ever met in my life. He had me practice and practice and practice. I could get a pair of dice and I could skeech ’em. I could roll a two—two aces—when I wanted. I could throw anything I wanted. After I was taught that, he says, ‘Now I’m gonna give you the hard part.’ He had a banking board, like they have in Vegas. Now he says, you gotta learn to do exactly what you been doing, but with that banking board. And man did I fuck up. But he taught me. You do this and you do that and you do this. But you don’t do that! He taught me right from wrong when it came to dice. That was his specialty.”
In December 1933, Pennsylvania became one of the last three states to ratify the Twenty-First Amendment to the Constitution, which repealed the Eighteenth Amendment and allowed the whiskey to start flowing again. Three years before, a movie called Chasing Rainbows had hit theaters—smarmy and lackluster, but with two memorable features. One was a sequence in color, which made audiences gasp. The other was the song that ended the film: “Happy Days Are Here Again.” It had been a hit then; now, three years later, it became a kind of national anthem. In Johnstown as elsewhere, the party spilled into the streets; people cheered passing beer trucks as if they were carrying President Roosevelt himself (who had been elected in part for championing repeal).
But the darkness that had precipitated the ending of Prohibition—the Great Depression—didn’t go away. A major impetus behind repeal, besides the demand for alcohol, had been the jolt to the economy that would come with reopened distilleries and breweries: half a million new jobs, millions in revenue for the depleted Treasury. Four years on, with unemployment hovering around 25 percent, the Depression was as devastating in Johnstown as other places. Yet it was a boon to the new industry that Russ had hitched himself to. When you’re down and out, do you not crave all the more the thrill of hope that gambling brings?
So Russ’s character was formed by Prohibition. And by the time he was nineteen he felt he was ready. Verone had taught him well. And not just in the technical and mechanical stuff, the use of the wrist and fingers to control the dice. He had given him something else, or helped tease it out of him.
And here I do feel that I’ve got my finger on something elemental about my subject. A philosophy. It was distilled from the hard life in the Sicilian mountains, a life of which Russ himself had no direct experience but whose lessons had been pressed into him by the ghostly presence of his father and further kneaded by his omnipresent mother. It was buffed by the flinty prejudice that ruled America’s towns, large and small. And it flourished in the encouraging climate of early twentieth-century American business, of capitalism in the raw. You figured out what people wanted and you gave it to them—or better yet you pretended to. You perfected a craft: of seeming to fulfill their need. It was a wisdom that characterized a profession that spans every nation, era, and background but became something of a hallmark of this period of American history. The cheat. That defines my subject, as well as any pat term could. Russ was a cheat.
____________
* Actually, there had been two earlier iterations. A group of Delaware Indians called the Conemack had had a village at the confluence of the two rivers that would form the northern tip of downtown. The first European settlement came when an Amish farmer named Schantz arrived in the valley with his family and set up a farm, betting on establishing a town that would become the county seat. When it was passed over, he upped stakes. Nevertheless, his name, Anglicized, would become the town’s.
† The actual change of the last name probably came compliments of a census taker or town clerk or some other official. If an illiterate, non-English-speaking Italian pronounces “Sciotto,” an American ear would hear it as something very like “Shorto.”
‡ Regarding Sicilian naming patterns: tradition dictated—and still dictates—that a couple name their first boy after the father’s father and their first girl after the father’s mother. I knew this long ago, and thought it strange that Antonino’s first son, my grandfather, was not named after the paternal grandfather, Santi. This was my first hint that the whispered story in my family—that Antonino had another family in Sicily—might be true. In fact, Antonino’s first son was the child he had with his wife, Francesca, in Sicily, whom they did indeed name Santi. Again following the Sicilian naming practice, the second son would have been named after the mothe
r’s father. This relative was named Rosario. Hence, my grandfather was named Rosario, which became Americanized to Russell. I likewise was named after him. Russ, meanwhile, named his first son after Antonino.
§ While some of the more ruthless features of nineteenth-century capitalism were later blunted by laws, Michael Woodiwiss, another author on the history of organized crime, asserts that the business culture these men established continues in America’s largest corporations to this day, giving them the power to defraud the public in everything from drug policy to environmental regulations, to the point where “much of [the nation’s] business activity can be defined as simple racketeering.”
6
The Made Man
THE AMERICAN MOB came into being in the ’30s and early ’40s. That’s my own reckoning: others date it to the 1920s. Either way, that’s a long time period for the “coming into being” phase, and it’s a big country. In other words, there are good reasons for the multiplicity of theories and narratives regarding its founding.
As far as I can tell from stitching together archival and book research with my more intimate interview-based inquiries, two things were happening simultaneously in the formative era, one of which was represented by Russ and the other by his partner and brother-in-law, Joe. One: the old way was persisting. Gangs, which had previously used Prohibition as a moneymaker, had switched to gambling after the passage of the Twenty-First Amendment and in the midst of the Great Depression. They were operating small outfits to take advantage of all those dreaming of a strike. Often the scales were tipped in these games: in other words, the con was on. This was what Russ was up to in his late teens and twenties. Shooting craps and using his skeeching skills to get the dice to fall his way. Motoring up and down the hills of Johnstown, running a traveling gambling enterprise out of the spacious trunk of his Packard. A freelancer, working with a couple of pals, offering a service, and if circumstances were right shaking down a customer.
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