Smalltime

by Russell Shorto

  Others became part of things soon after. Either Russ or Joe hired Johnny DiFalco’s brother, Pippy, to write numbers. He was an odd sort—kind of sneaky, smarmy—but he’d been wounded in the war. Maybe they took him on out of a spirit of patriotism. Soon, though, he went out on his own, running a sports book. Which was OK, provided he turned in a percentage. Rip Slomanson came aboard, too, as an enforcer. He was young and crazy, tall, trim, all muscle and ready to fight anybody. LaRocca had suggested to Little Joe that they might use him—he’d done work for him recently. It wasn’t long before the two newcomers clashed. Nobody knows what sparked it—whether Joe used Rip to send Pippy a little message about keeping up his payments or what—but Rip beat the hell out of Pippy one night, left him half-dead on the sidewalk. He bloodied him enough that later, when Pippy went missing, people’s thoughts immediately went to Rip.

  But that was years later. One day not long after they opened for business Joe had a talk with Russ. The boys in Philly told me to always keep sports separate from other business. I want you on sports because of your head for numbers. From then on, Russ had nothing to do with the G.I. Bank. This was in 1946, the first postwar baseball season. Major League Baseball had continued through the war, but many of the top players had been fighting overseas. Now, for the first time in years, everyone would be back. With the talent, the stars—Stan Musial, Ted Williams, the imminent pivot of Jackie Robinson from the Negro Leagues—anticipation was high. And baseball was the biggest sport for betting action.

  But just as the season was getting under way a problem arose. Running a sports book was all about “the line.” The house had to weigh the two teams’ likelihood of winning and add points to the underdog so as to balance things out. If you didn’t have a razor-sharp oddsmaker, gamblers would eat you alive. The line came from the boys in Pittsburgh—they had the top bookmakers—but that spring, at the very start of the season, Joe got some bad news. Apparently due to a power struggle between some of LaRocca’s guys and Little Joe’s, there was a break in the information flow. “Little Joe says to Russ, ‘We can’t get the line.’ ” This is Mike Gulino telling me how it unfolded—and at the same time telling me the story of how he and Russ cemented their relationship. I’m back in his kitchen; Eleanor has laid a platter before us, made a pot of coffee, and gone out. This time I’d brought her some flowers. “Russ says, ‘That’s no problem, Joe. There’s a young kid around here. You put him and me upstairs above the Melodee Lounge.’ Now, Chris Contakos owned the building, see? Chris Contakos was the bum of all bums, by the way. But that don’t matter. Upstairs he had a couple a rooms where guys could go with their broads—Chris did everything to make a buck. So Russ calls for me and he says, ‘Listen, kid, I want you to go home and get some clothes. You and I’s gonna move in up above Melodee Lounge.’ And that’s what we did—we set ourselves up there. Johnny Oswald was the only guy allowed up. He’d bring us all the papers every morning, and Russ got to work.”

  Russ did the math, mostly based on starting pitcher stats, and Mike assisted. They had a lot of numbers to crunch: 16 teams, 154 games, plus a best-of-three National League pennant series between St. Louis and the Brooklyn Dodgers and the World Series, between the Cardinals and the Boston Red Sox, which went to seven games (the Cardinals won). They basically lived together during that season, Russ and Mike. They ate together. They slept there so they were ready when the papers were delivered early each morning with fresh stats and they could have the line ready for the bookies.

  “By the end of that season, me and Russ, we were like this.” Mike wrapped two thick fingers around each other. And suddenly he wasn’t talking about oddsmaking anymore but about my family. “All the work I did after that, over the next ten, fifteen years, it wasn’t for the mafia. It was for Russ. You see what I’m saying here? Russ come off to everybody like a tough guy, a wiseguy. But deep down in his heart, he was a piece of cake. He was kind of an older brother to me. But in a way it was something more, like he was the father I didn’t have. I had a father, don’t get me wrong. But he didn’t understand—he wasn’t in the business. And I was a little bit like the son Russ didn’t have, even though he had his two sons. But with me it was different.”

  It made me a little bit queasy hearing Mike talk like this. Suddenly, just sitting there, I felt like I was betraying my father by listening to him explain how he had placed himself in between my dad and my grandfather—or how Russ had given him that position. I thought back to the couple of times I’d asked Tony if he wanted to come down to Mike’s house with me for one of my interview sessions. Why wouldn’t he? They’d known each other all their lives. It was a two-minute drive down the hill. But he shook his head. Nah. Mike must have gotten himself thinking along a similar track, because he then said, referring to the bar my dad owned in later years, “I used to go down to your dad’s place once in a while. I knew he used to drink a bit. I tried to get him to stop. He liked me, I think. But it was different with your grandfather.”

  I was feeling physically warm sitting there in Mike’s kitchen, like the oven was on or something. I’d come for an interview about the mob, we’d been talking about oddsmaking and the 1946 baseball season. This was suddenly something else. But I pushed on. “What do you mean?”

  This instantly irked him. “What do you mean what do I mean?”

  “You say it was different with you and my grandfather. How?”

  All at once he erupted: “The fuck you want me to say?! He loved me, OK? And I loved him. I don’t know how else to explain our situation.”

  I was conscious of a lot of things. The tile flooring in Mike’s kitchen. The smell of the coffee Eleanor had made us before she left—she always went out when I came to chat. Mike’s eyes magnified by his glasses, the sheen of sweat on his face, the slight tremor in him as he gazed at me, as he came down from this emotional outburst. I was aware of how jarring the emotion must have been for him. And of how, as he’d told me before, he’d had this on his mind for years and years. And here I came, basically begging him to talk about it, even though I’d had no idea what it was. And he realizing that this was the obvious time for him to talk about it, and I was the very person. Namesake.

  I was still being daft, though. I shook my head. “I don’t get it. You say Russ saw you as his protégé. But why would he need you when he was grooming my dad for that?”

  “Grooming your dad for what?”

  “My dad told me Russ wanted him to follow in his footsteps, but he refused.”

  Mike was looking at me more closely than he had before. “I’m sorry, Russell, but it wasn’t like that.” It wasn’t like that. What was it like? I knew by this point, but I asked anyway and he told me. “Tony was—what?—six years younger than me. See? This is a little later, now. Maybe 1953, 1954, somewhere in there. And your dad wanted to be a mobster in the worst way. I was working at City Cigar at this point, running the floor, so I saw everything that went on. Tony would show up, trying to hang around and be a tough guy. If Russ caught him he would beat the shit out of him. It was painful to watch. He didn’t want his boy within a hundred miles of the place.”

  I nodded. I knew perfectly well that Russ had pressured Tony to be part of the organization, and that Tony had rejected him, for our sake, his family’s sake. That story underlay my childhood. But now I also knew that what I knew was wrong.

  “And … why?”

  He was exasperated again. “What’s so hard to understand? This was a criminal life. Russ wasn’t going to do that to his son.”

  “But he did it to you.”

  “Because I was already in that world. We were two of a kind.”

  I DROVE BACK up the hill to my parents’ house after my visit with Mike. They asked how it went. I told them Mike was a real character. We talked a little bit about his entanglements with the law. They debated how much time he’d spent in prison as a result of his final caper, in the 1990s, a pretty glorious little con that went on for several years, in which he scammed docto
rs and CEOs all over the mid-Atlantic region—I fucked people that wanted to be fucked—before he got caught. I said nothing about what Mike had just told me.

  I did start going around to other sources, checking on all the information Mike was giving me, both to corroborate the particulars and to test his general veracity. Some of what he told me was fairly outlandish, but pretty much everything I could track down checked out.

  AFTER SPENDING MUCH of the 1946 baseball season locked together in a room above the Melodee Lounge, Russ and Mike were a team. As the operation in Johnstown flowered, Mike became a sidekick, running around town and doing things for Russ.

  Russ brought him into City Cigar, where he eventually took over the Harrigan table. The Harrigan game was very popular among gamblers. It made a lot of money for the house, and the house needed to have someone running it, like a referee. Russ’s brother-in-law, Angelo Trigona, had been doing it. Simple work: you shook out the “pills,” which were dice with only one number on each, and distributed two to each player. The first pill was the order in which you shot, the second was the number of the ball you had to sink. First guy to sink his ball wins. Simple: game over. But Mike complicated it. Mike practiced in the mornings to prepare himself for the job, transferring the skills Mr. Verone had taught him to another use. He got so he could manipulate the pills, holding a high number in one hand and a low one in the other. That way he could manage the games, keeping them short and brisk, which pleased Russ and Joe because the house made money on each game. He could also keep a hotshot from winning too many games in a row, which might discourage other players. “When Mike took over from Angelo, the Harrigan table became the hot table,” one of the old boys told me.

  THE NEXT TIME I was in town doing research, I asked my dad if he wanted to come down to the Holiday Inn with me to see Frank and hang out with the old guys who would be there. Most of the guys I’d first met at Panera Bread, and a few others, congregated around Frank’s Thursday lunchtime set. He said OK. This was something new. As with Mike, he’d known them all his life, but for decades he had kept himself apart.

  As soon as Frank sees my dad come hobbling into the dining room he barks into the mic: “Ladies and gentlemen, Tony Shorto! Whaddaya know!” He leans down to confer with John, the piano player, then says, pointing a finger as my dad is maneuvering himself into a seat, “This one’s for you, Tony.” And launches into a languid rendering of “Dindi,” an almost embarrassingly romantic bossa nova standard the Sinatra version of which was my dad’s favorite tune back in the day.

  Frank joined us after the set; we were already talking about the old days—me with my recorder going. Eventually somebody mentioned Mike Gulino.

  “Sure, Mike helped,” my dad said suddenly, utterly randomly. “He used to help my dad a little bit, setting the odds.”

  Beat.

  “Mike helped a lot,” Frank said.

  “I remember him coming to the house,” Tony went on, warming a little to the topic. “In a zoot suit and wide-brimmed hat. They used to call those hats bammers. With the three-inch brim. He was chomping on a cigar. He cut a figure, I’ll tell you.”

  And just like that I had a picture, not only of Mike back in the day but of my dad as a boy in his teens, and a sense of what he felt way down inside, seeing this older kid coming in, at his dad’s side, looking like the movies’ idea of a mafia swell. While his dad refused to let him be part of that. Him staring at that older kid with awe, but with something else stabbing at him too.

  8

  The Con

  RUSS AND JOE were successful men now. Through the war, both, together with their wives, had continued to live in the immigrant way, with extended family in narrow houses in the old part of town, near the mills and mines, one cramped bedroom to each nuclear family, each day a multigenerational hullabaloo of groans and sighs and smells and squabbles. After the war, both men bought houses in newer neighborhoods, Joe near the river in Dale and Russ on Rambo Street in Roxbury, the kind of neighborhoods with neat, modest streets filled with middle-class families, with Packards parked out front and Schwinns leaning against fences.

  By now Russ and Mary had three children, what would be their complete family. Millie and Joe struggled in that department; they apparently tried to have a child, but something was wrong with one or the other of them. Finally, they adopted a baby girl.

  There were wild amounts of money flying around now. One of Tony’s early memories: “I walked into the bedroom one day, and my dad had more cash than you ever saw stacked all across the bed, must have been fifty grand. I realize now he was making the banks for different bookies.” But you didn’t act like you were swimming in cash. Joe and Russ wore nice suits, but sober, and never tailored. They drove Buicks; there was a no-Cadillacs rule in effect.

  Joe also bought a big house in Pompano Beach, Florida, at this time, next to LaRocca’s vacation house, and both Joe’s and Russ’s family began making regular winter trips there.

  Maybe the money got to Russ. He stayed quiet and reserved, because that’s what you did. But forces inside him were stewing.

  The two families shared a housekeeper. Isabel was her name. She came from Altoona—forty-five miles away. It was Russ who found her—or, rather, she found him. He was in Altoona one night for a big card game, which was at the house of a guy Russ knew named Don Schmittel, who worked for LaRocca there. Don introduced them. Russ, I’d like you to meet my sister. Isabel, this is Russ. Isabel mentioned that she needed a job. She was tall, lanky, with lazy eyes. Russ said he could find something for her. She started doing the cleaning at his and Mary’s house in late 1948.

  Russ’s drinking—his serious, medicinal drinking—began around this time too. Maybe it came on with the first rushes of cash, the cascades of ones and fives and tens and twenties, the gnarled bankrolls from the pockets of the bookies dumped onto the desktop. Maybe when he got his first handgun. Maybe when they had to start threatening people who tried to welch on bets. Maybe, when things got a little bit rough, he needed to fortify himself.

  At home, the fights had begun. Mary could deal with drunkenness. Drunk husbands were everywhere. Johnstown’s police records of the time seemed to use “staggering” as a synonym for drunkenness. “Staggering on sidewalk.” “Slumped over.” Can I give you a hand, buddy? All the old guys talk about how the whiskey flowed. “In those days whiskey was more powerful,” one of them assured me. “So when people were drunk they were really drunk. They would piss their pants, they would bounce off the wall and fall dead asleep on the pavement.” And it was always whiskey, always hard liquor. You sat down to shoot the breeze and somebody poured you a shot. Buy you a shot? Shot-and-a-beer? Mary didn’t mind the drinking. In fact, she was known to abet it, hand him a bottle to help him pass out—better that than him running around on her.

  Mary found out about one woman, a waitress named Tess, who worked next door to City Cigar, at the Mission Inn, who was bold enough to phone the house and ask for him. She went ballistic: screaming, firing dishes and glasses at Russ. Then she heard about another, name of Tootsie, and that was enough. Mary and Russ had just had their second child. Mary carried the baby to Russell’s sister Perina, who was living in Franklin. Perina had become the matriarch of Russ’s family—they called her “the General.” Perina was the only person, besides Little Joe, with any authority over Russ. Mary thrust the baby at her: “Here, you can raise him.” Eventually Perina got her to calm down by telling her she would talk to Russ.

  But Mary didn’t see what was right under her nose. When did the snuggling with Isabel start? It could have been one day while Mary was out for lunch with a group of lady friends, or over at her sister Vera’s house: Vera had an abusive husband and needed her older sister just then. Maybe Isabel was changing the sheets on the marital bed and he came up from behind; he couldn’t resist, she didn’t say no.

  But my dad’s cousin Minnie—who was Russ’s niece, knew him well, worked for him at City Cigar, considered him a good man, lo
ved him—thinks it started before Isabel entered his employ. She told me Isabel made a play for Russ the night they met at her brother’s house. “Russ was a good-looking Italian guy, and everyone knew he had money, he was on the rise.” That, of course, is a darker scenario. It would mean that he knowingly planted a psychological landmine in his family home. If that were the case, I would have to back up, rethink his entire relationship with Mary, restart my whole study of this man and what formed him. Which I can’t do: he hid things too well. One time Tony said to me, speaking of his father, “He never stepped out of character.”

  Lots of guys back then had mistresses. But what kind of person would bring his mistress into his household? And not just that. Tony tells me Isabel was a constant presence. She lived with the family for a time. They took her on vacations with them. These weren’t little weekend getaways either. The modesty rule applied in town, but once you were out of town you could let loose with your wealth. An extended network of friends and family members packed off together for a month every summer in Atlantic City, staying at Haddon Hall, the classiest place in town, in a suite of rooms overlooking the ocean, with room service and their own reserved corner of the dining room. The place was so posh, the bathroom sinks had three faucets: hot, cold, and ice-cold. (“The kids drank so much ice water they would go to the bathroom constantly!” my dad’s older cousin Marcia said.) Everyone dressed for dinner. In the evenings they regularly went to the 500 Club, the legendary place—it was onstage at “The Five” that Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis took off as a comedy duo—whose mobster owner, Skinny D’Amato, was a friend of Joe’s.