Smalltime

by Russell Shorto

  MY FATHER AND I had been trying to discover who his father was for three years now. After this much exploration, stitching together his memories and insights with all our other sources, we had a general sense of Russ in the mid-’50s as a man in charge. He had to have figured that he had well and truly arrived, that he had not merely beaten the system but changed it. He was basically part of the establishment. The payoffs formed a protective barrier. Behind it, he was flourishing in a way he could never have imagined even a few years before. Of course, he was also falling apart.

  ____________

  * One of the old guys, named Jack Heinlein, told me a story that illustrated how Torquato’s Democratic Party machine and Little Joe’s organization worked together, and how his father got caught up in it: “My dad was retired from the Johnstown police force. One day he had a meeting with John Torquato and Joe Regino. And lo and behold, my dad became a county detective. It was understood that he would look after their interests.” Things went along just fine for a long while, until one day Jack’s father messed up. He was involved in a raid on one of Little Joe’s gambling outfits. The understanding was that you would give advance notice of a raid, so there would be a modest amount of cash and betting slips around—just enough to look good when the new story came out. Somebody screwed up this time. They found $50,000 in cash in the place. Detective Heinlein had no choice but to continue with the bust. To make matters worse, it was in the paper. “They got Little Joe for fifty thousand bucks, and they got a picture of my dad in the Tribune-Democrat looking at the money,” Jack said. “They were very good friends, but they had a falling-out after that. I told my dad that wasn’t the brightest thing to do. He said, no, it wasn’t.”

  † To this day I make a cauliflower-and-anchovy pasta sauce that I learned from my mother, the recipe for which, she recently told me, originated with Sam Fashion.

  10

  The Music

  IT WAS AN Indian-summer morning in 1951, and Frank Filia was sixteen, walking down Main Street, aglow and alive and surging with all the possibility that this precise sunny moment held for him. The night before, he’d summoned his courage, walked into the Clinton Street Pool Room, and asked the boss, Yank Croco, for a job. Yank stared at the kid for a minute—he knew him; he came in sometimes and shot pool—and said OK. He could help out in the place, maybe run some numbers. A hundred a week. Come back in the morning.

  And here he was, on his first assignment: go down to the newsstand and pick up the Racing Form. Even the price of it set this work apart: 35 cents! The regular newspaper cost a nickel. Then he heads back, opens the place up, takes the covers off the tables, cleans the felt, makes sure the chalk is stocked and the cue sticks are on their racks. He opens the paper, reads through the day’s races, and calls the office, above City Cigar, to get the scratches from Johnny Oswald, one of Russ’s main guys. Johnny’s been at it for hours already. By now he knows which horses aren’t running. Frank has to get the numbers of those horses so he can inform the bettors. First time Frank calls Johnny for scratches, Johnny corrects him on how to do it.

  “First number: 23.”

  “Number 23.”

  “Wait a minute. Don’t repeat after me. Just write ’em down.”

  “OK, but I was told to repeat …”

  “You repeat when a guy’s placing a bet. Guy says, ‘Give me San Francisco minus three for twenty dollars.’ You say, ‘San Francisco minus three for twenty.’ But when I’m giving you the scratches, you just listen and write.”

  But this moment, even before he starts, when he’s strutting down the street about to start his first day on the job, is the one that stands out. “I honestly think that was the happiest day of my life,” says Frank, a man in his eighties, who has lived a life of considerable hardship shot through with thin veins of sweetness, a life grounded on the philosophy of the gambler. “I was sixteen, walking down the street, the sun is shining, and I’m thinking, ‘I’m in the mob!” He quit school on the spot. A hundred a week: that was what a middle-aged journeyman millwright at Bethlehem Steel earned, a union guy, with a wife and family. Frank said that that morning was the first time he understood what a city was. He saw the town as a machine made of many parts that fit perfectly together. An organism. You had the mills powering it all. The workers streaming into the gates with their hardhats and lunch buckets. Over there was the Woolworth lunch counter, where all the teenagers took their dates. Next to it the jewelry store where, a few years later, those same guys, now working in the mill, bought rings for the girls they’d made up their mind to propose to. And the realtor, where you went when you were ready to buy a house. The furniture store, to fill it. The place you bought clothes and things for babies. The schools. Even the store that sold you your gravestone. Every damn thing fit together.

  And he was a part of it now, because the mob was a part of it. Everyone knew that. Everyone played the numbers, the pinball machines, the tip seals. They provided hope, exhilaration, energy. They were the juice.

  Frank told me this was why he’d pressed me to write this book. He didn’t want it to die and be gone forever. That moment, his realization, the beauty of the Clinton Street Pool Room, of the sweating and swearing men, the throaty laughter laced with menace on a hot summer afternoon, the lumbering bodies that suddenly became artful in bending over a table, the cue sticks angling like swords, of Red Picklo declaring he’d get a machine gun and wipe out all the motherfuckers, three-hundred-pound Joe Bruno who would make the guys guffaw when he’d take a couple of hot dogs with him to the toilet, the guy who thought he was a wolf-man, the drunk who would stagger into the poolroom and declare that he was going to invent perpetual motion. “I didn’t know what the hell that meant. But I just loved it. The human thing. One time somebody took me to the ballet. I said, ‘What the hell is this?’ Then all of a sudden it hit me. They’re speaking with their bodies! It was a wonderful world back then. It still is.”

  Frank was still a kid when he started at the poolroom. “We had our heroes. And you know who we admired most. Russ and Joe. But you didn’t talk to them, not really. They were way up here. Intimidating.” Frank would see Russ walking down the sidewalk, stopping a guy, engaging him in quiet, serious conversation, cigarette dangling, eyes narrow against the smoke. He sees Joe sitting on the bench in the park where he liked to muse on things. If you were a kid like Frank, you might get up your nerve, walk by and say, “Hiya, Joe,” and he’d nod. Nice guy, helluva guy. But you didn’t want to bother him. Everyone knew he liked this spot. (But how many of them knew why? How many knew that this was the very spot where, twenty years earlier, as a skinny kid, he’d drunk soda after soda, going in and out of the Dew Drop Inn to court Millie?) Russ and Little Joe, always in suits and fedoras, the big men at the top of the heap. “They ran the town. The mayor didn’t. The mills didn’t. They did. Everybody knew that.”

  ________

  BUMP AHEAD TO 1954. Tony Shorto is hanging out on Wolves’ Corner, Main and Market, where guys congregate and wait for something to turn up. He’s only fifteen but dressed like a twenty-year-old sharpy, in a tailored suit with pegged pants, baggy up top and tapered tight at the ankle. Suede shoes. Hair slicked back in a ducktail. Smoking a cigarette. Feeling pretty good but a little rootless—he’d cut school today. Not only that, he’s decided he’s not going back. He’s free. But he doesn’t know what to do with himself. Usually there’s a crowd, but it’s the middle of the day, not much going on. He decides to cross Main Street and go into City Cigar.

  As he passes the bench in front of the place, he’s aware of something moving. It’s a man, a drunk who’s stirring awake.

  “Hey, kid!”

  “Oh. Hiya, Chumsy.”

  “Hey, kid. Come here. This thing. I think I’ve got one in my ear. He went in my ear. It’s crawlin’ up around in my head.”

  “Oh, yeah? What can I do about it?”

  “Can you look in there?”

  He bends down.

  “I don�
�t see nothing, Chumsy. Maybe if you go back to sleep …”

  As soon as Tony steps inside the poolroom Mike Gulino spots him, raises his eyebrows as if to say, You know you’re not supposed to be here. Tony smiles: It’s OK.

  People are gathered around a table in back. Fat Pete is putting on a little show. He used to hustle on a national level—Indianapolis, St. Louis, Chattanooga, Winston-Salem—but as his condition deteriorated his game dropped. He has some kind of eye problem; he’s now half-blind, and so fat he has to squeeze past the lunch counter in front. He can still beat most guys around here though.

  Tony spots his friend Bob Meagher. “I saw Chumsy out front. Told me he had a worm crawling around in his head.”

  “ ‘Peachy, Peachy!’ ” Meagher says. “He calls me Peachy. I think he’s a queer.”

  Sappy comes in, looking mean as usual. George Sapolich. He’s a local boxing champ, runs craps games and is trying to start a poker game; turns in a percentage to Little Joe. He’s tall and restless; his nose is bent. He’s always pissed off at somebody. One time he clocked a guy in front of the movie theater and sent him to the pavement, out cold, a perfect stranger, just because he was in a bad mood. You seen Pippy? Nobody’s seen Pippy yet today. Owes me money. Someday I’m gonna kill that son of a bitch. Sappy goes over to Meagher.

  “Meagher, why don’t you come down to my poker game?”

  “Sorry, George, I don’t play poker.”

  “Well, fuck you! Don’t come to my poker game! Don’t come anywhere near me, you shit!”

  Meagher shakes his head. “Hey, George, do you punch yourself in the face at night to go to sleep?”

  Sixty-two years later, Tony and Bob Meagher are sitting in Bob’s backyard, laughing as they swap these stories about back in the day. Meagher segues to the present for a minute—he’s got a sizable polyp in his colon but his prostate is surprisingly trim—then tells me how he walked into City Cigar one day and Buster Tenase, who was managing the place then, called him over. “ ‘Hey, kid, you wanna make fifty bucks?’ ‘Doing what?’ I says. ‘Take the pinch,’ he says. Jesus Christ! I was never so mad. You know how when an election was coming city hall would call the place and tell them to get ready for a raid? Your grandfather would round up one of the old drunks, like Chumsy, to take the pinch. Guy like that already has an arrest record, getting busted doesn’t mean anything to him. But I’m nineteen years old, I considered myself very sharp, full of promise. I was offended. I says to Buster, ‘You must think I’m a real fucking loser.’ I was so fucking mad, I walked out of the back door of the poolroom, which happened to lead right into the office of the draft board. I walked in there. I said, ‘Take me.’ And that’s how I ended up in the army.”

  THEN THEY START talking about music—about the time, the precise moment, when music suddenly changed. “It was 1954,” Meagher said. “You gotta understand we came from a great era. Tony Bennett was in his prime. Sinatra was in his prime. Such a great mixture of music, a soundtrack playing in the background of your life, wherever you went.”

  My dad interrupts: “The thing about it was, it was accessible to the general public, but it was intricate as hell. Complicated arrangements. Beautiful. Art—it was art!”

  “That’s it,” says Meagher. “And then one day this guy comes along. And he goes: ‘One … Two … Three o’clock. Four o’clock rock.’ Huh? Then this prick goes, he goes, ‘Five … Six … Seven o’clock. Eight o’clock rock.’ And I’m thinking, What the fuck is that?”

  “I hated it,” Tony says.

  “We all hated it,” Meagher says. “It didn’t suit our life.”

  Music guided Tony’s development. He was precocious, dying to grow up, ready to be a man, if not exactly to act the part then at least to look it. (“Whoever heard of an eighth grader wearing tailored suits to school?” his cousin Marcia said. “That’s what he did. Till he dropped out.”) He glommed onto jazz early on—it had an arcane logic, a mystery you could ponder, almost like the mysteries of religion. That was partly why rock-’n’-roll never worked for him. Too direct. Woody Herman. Roy Eldridge. Gene Krupa. Eddie Shu. Jabbo Smith. As he got older he went deeper into it. Jon Eardley, a trumpeter who was from Altoona and whom Tony got to know personally before he made a name for himself in Europe. The guitarist Joe Pass was from Johnstown, had grown up in the same neighborhood as Russ. Mariano Passalaqua was his dad; Frank Filia’s father had given Joe his first guitar. Jazz was a language. The human screaming of the horns, the syncopation, the narrow spaces of the jazz clubs, with their shifting clouds of cigarette smoke and the opaque, blue-black lighting, the mixing of races, the sweat on the face of a musician at work—all of it spoke to him, hinting at something.

  Then Sinatra hit him. Right across Main Street from City Cigar was the Embassy Theatre. Tony walked out of it one night in October 1953. From Here to Eternity was the film. Burt Lancaster was the star, but Sinatra, in a supporting role, was the revelation. He’d been the big craze in the postwar years, fronting Tommy Dorsey’s band, roomfuls of kids screaming at him doing his romantic cooing. Then, as with dozens of other pop stars, his career was over. He’d been exactly right for the time, the war and just after, and that was it. He faded away like the others.

  But here he was, back, and in the most remarkable way. There had never been anything like it in American culture, an artist stopping his own free fall, taking his career by the horns, reinventing himself in front of the whole world. Landing a serious role in the year’s biggest movie and playing the hell out of it.

  One day in the car my dad started talking about all of this. He wasn’t normally given to psychosocial analysis. I was intrigued by the amount of thought he had put into the subject, how he must have combed through it over the years. He talked about how the movie role served as Sinatra’s pivot point, how he used the energy to recharge his music and his persona. Then he was suddenly changing music itself, leading his new label, Capitol Records, into uncharted terrain. The voice coming through the record player was pitched so personally, the vulnerability in the phrasing so raw. It had a new richness, a layer that wasn’t there when he was with Dorsey, which hinted at life experience—dames, whiskey, wounds of the heart, being pushed around and learning to push back.

  There was something else, which Tony didn’t mention, maybe because it was too obvious. Sinatra was Italian. He was the signal that things had changed. You didn’t have to live in some netherworld that existed alongside American society. You could be part of it; you could own it.

  And I think there was one other thing as well, something in that voice, something very particular that registered in Tony’s ear. The small-town element. Hoboken, where Sinatra had grown up, was another Johnstown, a little powerhouse of a factory town, narrow rectilinear streets forming a patchwork of ethnic ghettos. The money and power and muscle were there, just like in the big cities, but it was closer, more comprehensible. Growing up in a town like that gave you perspective. Frank Filia had discovered that too. The whole chain of being, from the bums on the sidewalk to the mayor puffing on a cigar in his office window, was right in front of you. You knew what it was all about. You felt, as you were coming of age, that you could take it on. You had the world on a string.

  Tony jumped from that realization, that glorious burst of energy, right into the poolroom. He had to be there. He started showing up at all hours. The fact that his father didn’t want him there made it tricky. The two of them were playing a game. Tony didn’t quite get its rules, or why they had to play it. Because the poolroom was the center of things; it was where his future lay. But he had to calculate when Russ would be away. Then he could hang out, shoot pool, sharpen his game, chat up the bookies, watch the tip seals being delivered by the barrelful, listen to the clatter of the ticker machine, watch how bets were placed, see who the big players were, how they acted. All of this mattered. By now his parents knew he’d dropped out of school. His mother threw a fit. Russ and Little Joe dragged him to the principal’s office, had a
conference there. A skinny, handsome kid in a tailored suit, hanging his head but looking defiant as the adults had their adult conversation. You’ll go back. No, I won’t. The defiance was a cry for parental attention. And it worked. Not only his dad but his uncle took notice. The two biggest guys in town, making a fuss over him.

  Tony didn’t go back to school. The next day he was at City Cigar again, amid the cigarette smoke and the clack of balls. His game was getting pretty good. He’d never be a hustler, but that wasn’t his path. He was supposed to be here. He was made for this. He knew everybody, from the bums to the lawyers shooting a game on their lunch break to the office workers and hustlers. People told him stories, bragged to him about his father; he listened with complicated pleasure as somebody described how Russ had beaten a guy out of $20,000 in a single card game. Tony knew his tactics. He’d watched as his dad practiced false dealing on the dining-room table. He was thrilled to hear the tales of his father’s cheats, but as he described them to me I felt that something about these stories hurt too. Still, he talked to everybody, and he listened. He had a gift for chatter, a bright energy. He made friends easily. He may not have been good at cards, but he was a natural when it came to people, which his morose father was not.