Smalltime

by Russell Shorto

  At Haddon Hall the family had all the servants they could want. So why bring their housekeeper with them? As a babysitter, one might proffer. But they also brought Marcia expressly to watch the little ones. (She told me with amazement that Russ handed her a $100 bill every day to amuse the kids on the boardwalk, and gave another hundred to Tony, who was older and was allowed to go off on his own. In the early ’50s, needless to say, a C-note bought a lot of taffy.)

  So what was Isabel’s role? What did Mary think?

  Late in that first year, Isabel had to leave for a while; she went back to Altoona. Sometime later Joe and Millie made a little announcement. They were adopting another child, a son. Wonderful—let’s have a toast. And now that they had two children, Millie would need some help around the house. Everybody decided that Isabel, when she came back, would work for them too.

  And that’s what they did, Joe and Russ. For years and years it went on like that. As the gambling empire waxed, as numbers were played and payoffs were made, as they took over more and more legit local businesses, as Russ began to slide downhill, going from slightly unstable to dangerously unreliable. As Russ and Mary fought about other women. As Tony and his siblings grew up.

  “Isabel’s mother wanted to take the baby and raise him,” Minnie told me. “But Isabel didn’t want that. She thought she was going to get Russell to marry her.” But he wasn’t going to do that. Instead, he and Joe decided the way things would be.

  And yet, Joe didn’t play an active role in this decision. Because as time went by a regular routine evolved at Joe’s house. Isabel would clean the house, then get out: she and Millie made sure she left before Joe got home, because he wasn’t comfortable with her being around. He seems to have agreed to the arrangement at the outset because Russ wanted it, but over time the psychodynamics became too messy for him.

  Naturally Russ, Joe, and Millie knew about the con from the outset—and Isabel was in on it, of course, though against her will. Of the adults involved, only Mary was out of the loop. She would, as the years passed, feel self-conscious, aware of others—Millie’s relatives, friends of Joe—giving her pitying looks, whispering, but not knowing the cause. The kids didn’t know. And Joe and Millie’s little boy—another Joe, whom they called Joey to avoid confusion—had no idea that Millie wasn’t his mother, that the guy he called dad, who was the big boss in town, wasn’t his dad, but that the one he called Uncle Russell was.

  As Russ saw it, it was an arrangement that worked out for everyone. This way, see, Isabel could keep near her son. Making his bed, picking up after him. Why, it was almost like she was his mother.

  The con became part of everyone’s life. It worked its way into Russ and Mary’s household. My aunt Sis was aware of it on some level. She was eight years younger than Tony, but remembers being a little girl watching her father lying on the couch moaning in a drunken stupor and observing the odd behavior of the housekeeper stroking his head and soothing him with words whispered into his ear.

  Did Tony see any of this in the early days? He was the eldest, seven years older than the next sibling, which meant he was probably the only one old enough to truly be aware, to be formed by the nexus of his dad’s business dealings, affairs, and drinking. What did he see?

  He saw a lot. It’s 1949; he’s eleven. Cars are pulling up in front of the house, men in their baggy suits stepping out, the loud report of leather heels on the porch floor, deep laughter filling the living room. Important men. Sam Di Francesco was recognizable from the papers: the newly minted district attorney, whose rags-to-riches life the Tribune had just declared “outdoes heroes of Horatio Alger.” A local hero! They pulled him in. He was a paesan, after all. He put some skin in the game, too, became a participant in their latest venture. Russ and Joe had taken over the lease on the Heidelberg, the old German-American Club, which had been shut down during the war. They were going to call the new place Shangri-La. It would be a big supper club in the woods, out toward Ligonier, on the way to Pittsburgh. It was gonna be posh as hell. They needed Sam to do some work for it. “The problem was the place was just over the town line, where you couldn’t have a liquor license,” my dad said. “With Sam’s help, they actually got the line moved, so they would pay city taxes, and that way they could sell liquor.” I had heard this story before, but this time, as Tony retold it, I was aware of something in his voice—pride, I think.

  LaRocca, the Pittsburgh boss, came to the house, too, around this time. He was going to be a partner in Shangri-La. Even at his age Tony knew who he was. Everybody knew who he was. He had a serious edge about him. You treated him with respect.

  There were other things the boy took note of. Maybe it wasn’t especially odd that Tony’s mother had new things all the time, but she got them in a way that none of his friends’ mothers did. The big card games were going on now in the back room at the bowling alley, and when Russ had roped in a whale—Joe Marks, say, of Marks Apparel, across Main Street from City Cigar—he would sometimes agree to take his winnings in goods. He’d come home and give Chinky an order: Go down to Marks and do some shopping. Take as much as you can carry. The manager would watch as she browsed, assist her as she tried on dresses and coats, package everything up nicely. Instead of paying, she would sign a piece of paper, deducting the amount from the gambling debt.

  Or, out of the blue, a brand-new RCA television set arrives from Glosser Brothers Department Store, unasked-for but, as far as Tony was concerned, wildly welcome. And just like that the household is transformed by the ten-inch screen, which broadcasts snow all day long but then flickers into extraordinary life from 7 to 10:30 p.m.: Ed Sullivan. The Morey Amsterdam Show. Kukla, Fran and Ollie. Texaco Star Theatre.

  Sometimes a case of cleaning supplies would arrive on the front porch: “20 Mule Team Borax.” Or chewing gum. Or candy bars.

  To a kid, this was all like a pirate’s booty. Because it was. It was also normal, for his family. Tony knew perfectly well what was behind it. He knew all about the G.I. Bank and the tip seals. Mostly he picked things up from overhearing conversations. But once his dad gave him something like a formal introduction to the business. Russ had a good pal named George Bondy, who owned the Mission Inn next door to City Cigar and was involved in the organization. One time Russ and George took Tony to Atlantic City with them. Even the drive down was memorable. George had a Cadillac; he told Tony to stick his arm out his window while he did the same on his side. “Now flap your arm! We’re taking off!” Most of their working vacation was spent at the racetrack. The energy in a roaring crowd of gamblers was thrilling. Russ gave Tony some money, talked to him about horses, and Tony listened as if his future depended on it. Pedigree and handicapping; how to bet, how to work with odds; the difference between an exacta and a quinella. “I won fifty bucks!” my dad told me. “I was on top of the world!” Russ sat back and watched as his boy clutched his tickets and cheered.

  They went to an illegal casino while they were there and Russ gave his son a direct insight into what he did. “I was mesmerized by the slot machines,” Tony said. “He gave me a real stern look. ‘Listen. They want you to be dazzled by all the lights so that they can take your money. Its designed to beat you. You can’t win. You get it?’ And I did get it. I never became a gambler.”

  These moments, I was beginning to realize, gave Tony an expectation, a feeling that he was being groomed for something.

  But Isabel. Did Tony see anything there? A quick caress or a swap of glances, the kind of thing that, though barely glimpsed, might send a juvenile psyche into free fall? If so, he buried it. There was no trace of it in the memory of the old man who was my fellow researcher. But as a child he certainly experienced the fall-out from his father’s affairs. He was aware at least in a subliminal way of a dagger being slowly plunged into the heart of his family unit; the energy from it zinged through him like electricity. Yet just when he was sensing his father’s perfidy, and was ready to sympathize with his mother, she quashed it by letting him kno
w that he and his siblings were to blame for her predicament. She only stuck around, she told him, “because of you kids.” And well into her own self-medicating with alcohol, she would put an even finer point on it: “You’re the reason I suffer.”

  As Russ’s carrying-on continued, Mary’s feelings of being trapped became overwhelming. “What really stands out is the time my mother cut up all the furniture,” Tony said. “It was new, expensive stuff. She took a knife and slashed the couch and all the chairs, stabbed the cushions, the stuffing was flying.” Tony took charge that time, got his little brother and sister out of the house. He wasn’t old enough to drive but he got them in the car anyway and took off.

  “Where did you go?”

  “I don’t remember. I just remember I didn’t want the kids to see that.”

  As things spiraled downward, and feeling he had nowhere else to turn, Tony sought out the parish priest, a certain Father Francis. He didn’t express his predicament directly to Father Francis. He didn’t say, “I’m afraid at home.” He tried to translate his dilemma into the kind of lingo he figured a man of God would go for. “What,” he asked, “is the most important thing in the Bible?”

  You might expect Father Francis to come back with “forgiveness,” or “love,” or “mercy,” or “Jesus died for our sins.” Or maybe to turn things around, ask the boy some questions about his situation, try to figure out what kind of answer would help him.

  But no. He replied: “ ‘I am that I am.’ ” That, he informed the boy, was the most important thing in the Bible. One of the broadest, most obscure lines in the Old Testament. A dereliction of priestly duty, if you ask me; a failed opportunity to help a desperate young member of his congregation. Moses, in Exodus, is tending a flock when he comes upon the burning bush. God speaks to him from within the bush, instructs him to tell the Israelites that he has been ordered to lead them out of bondage. It’s when Moses asks what name he should attach to the deity issuing the command that he gets the mind-tripping response. “I am everything” might have been one attempt at translating its meaning. Or the priest might have helped by pointing out that in the same passage the Lord also says, “I am the God of your father.” Or at least he could have talked about the various interpretations of the Hebrew verb “to be.” But the priest didn’t clarify. He left the boy alone with a verse whose meaning has been debated by centuries of theologians.

  And yet, somehow, the elliptical scripture inflicted on the eleven-year-old worked. It turns out the kid had a spiritual bent; he was a lover of koans and parables, things that upset the neat, rational template we try to impose on reality. He chewed on the linguistic twistiness of what the priest had said.

  And he kept chewing. Zip forward a generation, and there I am, as a kid, about the same age as my dad was, having a theological conversation with him, sparked by what I don’t recall. And my father defined God for me with the same formulation. I don’t know how Father Francis intoned it to him, but Tony was an exuberant dad when I was young, who would get fully into character when he was telling a story, and he declaimed the verse in a theatrical baritone, as if he were doing voiceover for a Cecil B. DeMille movie, as if he had become Elohim, the God of the Israelites:

  “I am … that I am!”

  When—no-nonsense child that I apparently was—I asked prosaically what it meant, he just repeated the phrase, this time with such resonance I heard the echo of his voice upstairs in the hall that led to our bedrooms.

  9

  The Establishment

  EARLY ON, RUSS made a point of befriending a man named John Torquato. Whenever his name came up in conversation with the old boys I interviewed, they spoke of him with something like reverence. If Italians were making headway in American society in the ’40s and ’50s, Torquato was pretty much single-handedly responsible for that in Cambria County. He was eight years older than Russ, had grown up in Windber, ten miles from Johnstown, and, rare for Italians of his generation, had gone to college. There, he found he was drawn not so much to any particular subject as he was to student government. He was forceful, friendly to everyone, and fascinated by how people organized themselves and allowed themselves to be organized by others. It was pretty clear what direction he would go in. “All John ever thought about was politics,” a cousin of his would say. “He lived politics all the time, every day.”

  No one with an Italian background had ever had a political job in the county. The same was true for Irish, Polish, and Hungarian immigrants, but there was a particular animus toward Italians. The KKK in western Pennsylvania had targeted them; the steel mills only employed them in the lowest and most dangerous jobs. Back in 1911 the mayor of Johnstown made it a campaign promise that no one of Italian descent would work in his administration, not even as a street cleaner. Italians were the second largest immigrant group in the county, and for many people that was precisely the problem.

  Torquato ingratiated himself with Democratic Party officials, got the lowest-level job in 1928, and worked his way up through a series of local, state, and federal positions until, in 1942, he was named chairman of the Democratic Committee in the county. He set about creating a classic political machine. If you voted Democratic and gave money to the party, he could help you out, and he did. Working with FDR’s administration and Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor he managed to shift the county from Republican-leaning to solidly Democratic. Along the way, he was on a mission to reverse discrimination against his fellow Italians. He appointed as many as possible to political jobs—provided they were Democrats.

  It was natural for Torquato to form an alliance with Little Joe and Russ, and for them to want to join forces with him. But they didn’t follow strict party lines. Tony remembers Andrew Gleason—a local lawyer who was the head of the Republican Party in the county—being as regular a presence in the family living room as Torquato. For that matter, Gleason and Torquato were friends too.

  In 1947, Little Joe Regino and John Torquato met on a topic of interest to both men: the idea of running the young, up-and-coming lawyer Sam Di Francesco for district attorney. An Italian had never held such a high post in the area. They approached Di Francesco; he was raring to go. Once he became a candidate, a group calling themselves the County Christian League fought hard against his election, warning all Protestants they had to get out and vote to prevent a “Pope-serving Catholic” from becoming the top legal officer in the county. But Di Francesco was a great candidate, ambitious and affable. He’d fought in the war. He believed communism was a threat but thought Joe McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade was dangerous. When he won, the long-suffering Italian community in town suddenly had a power base. Joe and Russ, John Torquato, Sam Di Francesco: they didn’t call all the shots, but together they called a lot of them. When the newly elected president of the United States came to town, John Torquato was at Harry Truman’s side, introducing him, waving to crowds, leaning in to whisper in his ear.

  The alliance didn’t last long—at least, not in that form. In 1952 Russ went to Sam Di Francesco and asked a favor—precisely the kind of thing they had in mind when they worked to get him installed as DA. Lately, some social clubs in the northern part of the county had been pulling in customers and cash by featuring slot machines. Not pinball machines, like Little Joe had going in businesses all over town, which became an indirect means of gambling when a customer traded in games won for cash, but actual lemons-and-cherries slot machines, which spat out coins when you won. Social clubs were a Pennsylvania thing—essentially they were honky-tonk bars, but you had to be a member to get in. Membership usually involved nothing more than paying a nominal fee, but the fact that they were not open to the public meant they had fewer restrictions—they could stay open later, for example. They were also less likely to be raided by the police.

  Little Joe didn’t like this development. It was a threat to his pinball business. Russ told Sam they wanted him to raid the clubs and shut them down. It shouldn’t have been hard. After all, slot machines w
ere illegal. But remarkably, Sam refused. To understand why, I sat down with his son, Sam Junior. I knew him already. He was part of the posse of old guys who followed Frank Filia around town, meeting at Panera Bread twice a week, each of them nursing a cup of coffee, not wanting to shell out for a whole lunch, then splurging on the Thursday lunchtime pasta buffet at the Holiday Inn for Frank’s set with pianist John Pencola. Sam was a bit of a singer himself. At least once during every Holiday Inn set Frank would give him the mic for a song. He was in his eighties, a tiny man, twisted by arthritis and Parkinson’s disease. I can’t describe the waft of feeling that came over me the first time I saw him perform. Sam was bent at a right angle, actually singing to the floor as he rendered “On a Clear Day” in a weak but pleasant voice.

  I imagine every group of retired old men sitting around in coffee shops has at least one designated joke-teller. Sam was that guy too. The first time I met him at the Holiday Inn, right after he sang his song and I told him how much I liked it, he said, “I wrote a song myself once. It’s called ‘I’ll Always Remember What’s-Her-Name.’ ” When I laughed, he informed me that if Ella Fitzgerald had married Darth Vader she would have been Ella Vader. Later, when somebody brought up the subject of wine, Sam asked if we knew how to make an Italian wine. (Squeeze his coglioni.)

  For our chat about his father, I met up with Sam at his law office, where he still put in regular hours. “What can you tell me about the slot machines?” I asked.

  “It was like this,” he said. “Joe and Russ wanted my father to bust these clubs and take out the slots. My dad wouldn’t go along with it because he knew the owners. He had been their solicitor, and he thought if they lost the slots it would be death for the clubs. He said no. Joe and Russ were mad as hell.” According to Sam, in crossing Joe and Russ his father upended his own career. “In ’52, when my dad was up for reelection, Joe and Russ decided to pull back a little on their support, just to put a scare into him. But he ended up losing. His time as DA turned out to be the high point of his career, and he lost it because he wouldn’t close the slot clubs. Later he ran for judge, twice, but he lost. He lusted after the bench. He was very bitter until the day he died. I told him, ‘God doesn’t want you to be a judge.’ ”