Smalltime

by Russell Shorto

  Nearly five years after filing a Freedom of Information Act request, I received two CDs from the FBI filled with documents that detailed the movements of the federal agents who implemented that program in western Pennsylvania—who, sixty-odd years earlier, were doing what I had been doing recently: chasing after Russ and Little Joe and their colleagues. The first item was the memo from Hoover, dated ten days after the Apalachin meeting, ordering every FBI office to “open an active investigation on each top hoodlum.” It listed fifty-one cities where “personal attention” was required, from Knoxville to Honolulu. LaRocca was identified as the “top hoodlum” in western Pennsylvania. The directive made clear he wasn’t the only target of investigation in the area: “Since each top hoodlum undoubtedly has subordinates carrying on legal and illegal operations under his direction, it will be necessary to fully identify and describe the activities of these persons.” Agents were also instructed to break down their reports into categories. Suggested categories included “prostitution; narcotics; gambling (subdivided as to bookmaking, lotteries, basketball and football pools, coin operated gambling devices, dice games, card games, roulette, horse racing, etc.); illegal union activities; illicit alcohol; fencing of merchandise, including that moving in interstate commerce; hi-jacking; interstate transportation of stolen property violations; fraud against the government violations, etc.”

  Agents fanned out. In Johnstown, they managed to locate informants who worked for Russ and Joe at City Cigar and Capital Bowling. They began filing their reports, which included lists of cities to which telephone calls were made from their subjects’ residences (Little Rock, Newark, New York, Philadelphia, Wilkes-Barre) and accounts of interviews, the copies of which I received were heavily redacted:

  On 1/2/58 [_________] was interviewed at [_________] where he is employed in a junk business owned by [_________]. It is to be noted that [_________] are presently on parole and that [_________] parole will expire on 5/18/58.

  The agents zeroed in on Little Joe:

  The gist of the information furnished by these informants is that Regino is the head of the ‘syndicate’ in Johnstown, Pa., and as such is responsible to men more highly placed in the syndicate, allegedly to individuals in the Pittsburgh area. His responsibility in the Johnstown area is to see that protection is arranged for the various gambling activities—i.e., slot machines, tipseals, numbers and some card games, and to generally control gambling because of this protection issued to him. Openly he is the owner of the Capitol Bowling Alleys located at the corner of Franklin and Vine Sts … On 1/14/58 [_________], Johnstown Credit Bureau, advised that Regino … was listed as the co-owner of the City Cigar Store … She noted that the City Cigar Store has always been notorious as a hangout for gamblers of all types.

  The FBI files mostly corroborated what I had learned from the Panera sessions and other sources. I allowed myself a flicker of smugness over the fact that my information was considerably richer than what the bureau had obtained, though there were a few interesting new details in the CDs. I learned, for one, that LaRocca had given money “to Samuel R. Di Francesco to aid him in his campaign for district attorney of Cambria County.” That put the Pittsburgh boss directly in the midst of the activities of Joe, Russ, and the others in town as they became part of the establishment. “After his election,” the report noted, “this group had control of Cambria County.”

  THE LURKING PRESENCE of FBI agents adds a wash of mystery to my mental image of the scene at the corner of Main and Market on an evening that has personal significance for me. It was December 1957, and the liveliest intersection of downtown Johnstown was crawling with holiday shoppers. City Cigar was doing a robust business, and people were streaming in and out of the Mission Inn next door. Tony happened to be on the corner, in front of city hall, hanging out with a guy named Louie Alvarez, when a woman stepped off a bus and met her friend. He knew one of them: Joyce Fratterole’s family used to live next to his uncle. He introduced himself to the other girl, who fourteen months later would become my mother, and asked what they were doing. They were headed to the movies. When they came out of the theater, he was there, under the marquee, waiting. It was raining. He asked if he could give them a ride. Smooth fellow, he dropped Joyce off first, even though it would probably have been more logical to go to Prospect and then to Hornerstown. As he pulled up in front of Rita’s house, he asked her out.

  My mom, at nineteen, was sweet, shy, petite, pretty. She could have played a naïve bombshell in a Fellini film from the period, with her close-cropped black hair, bangs, and searching eyes. They were a match of personalities: Tony the oldest in a family of three children, who was used to doing things his way, Rita the youngest of five, the baby of her family, who didn’t mind playing follow the leader. But there was a hidden inversion. If you encountered them at a party back then you would assume that the gregarious, self-assured, practical-joke-loving fellow was the stronger of the two and the somewhat hesitant date he was introducing everyone to would over time freely bend herself to his will. You would be right in that she followed him in many things, but as the decades unfurled she turned out to be the one with the grit and resolve to hold both her family and her husband together.

  Both families’ American identities were inflected by their southern Italian origins, but hers were more immediate. Her father had emigrated as a teenager, along with his brother. Dominico—who became Dominic—threw himself into America, and insisted that English be the language at home. But when his friends came over they roared at each other in Italian, and in many other ways, especially food, it was an Italian household. Dominic worked at the mill until one day his car was hit from behind by a bus; he used the money from the settlement to quit his job and open a corner grocery store. That’s where Rita was working in the months between graduating high school and meeting Tony.

  She knew who Tony was from the start; everyone knew City Cigar and the people connected to it. Her parents, when she introduced him to them, seemed, she says, to act as though Russ’s was a respectable career path, as if their daughter was dating the son of a prominent local accountant.

  Tony and Rita at Russ and Mary’s house the day after their marriage.

  But a theoretical racketeer is different from a flesh-and-blood one. A photograph I have of my two grandfathers on the night they met, in August of 1958, taken the evening my parents returned from their hasty elopement to a spaghetti dinner Mary hosted for both families, shows Rita’s timid shopkeeper father looking terrified as Russ sits beside him, smug and drunk, one arm proprietarily flung over the shoulder of his new relation.

  ________

  AND HERE WE are, suddenly, at the moment—the murder that marked the beginning of the end for Russ. Pippy diFalco’s death doesn’t connect in any obviously direct way to my parents coming together, but in a small town and a small story all the threads pull on one another. There is, for one thing, the possibility that their best man was the murderer.

  My parents met in December; in May, Rita was pregnant. In August, unable to hide it much longer but also unable to face their parents, they decided to run off to Virginia Beach, where they heard they could find a justice of the peace who would marry them. Tony was selling used cars; he borrowed one for the weekend. They packed a few things.

  But wait. They wanted a witness. Someone to act as best man. “No, not a best man,” Tony insisted when I suggested this. “He just came to drive the car.” But why him, of all people? Tony shrugged. Rita offered that maybe he was the only person free at the time. I asked my mom if she liked Rip. “No! I was scared of him. He had a thing where he would date women and take all their money. He’d con them. He married this woman who was so nice, she was real straitlaced, and he was miserable to her. After they divorced he ran off with this other man’s daughter, who was underage.” Tony added: “That guy was so beside himself that Rip took his daughter away that he went after him. He thought he was going to kick the shit out of him. Rip broke his leg.”

&n
bsp; “So this is the guy you chose to take with you when you eloped,” I observed. “The guy who had formerly been the head of a street gang. Who you met in prison.”

  They both fell silent. “I never liked him,” Rita said. “I heard he died recently,” Tony said. “He was living in Florida for a long time.”

  ____________

  * The song had come out in October of that year. It was featured in the film The Joker Is Wild, in which Frank Sinatra plays a singer in the Prohibition era who is pressured by mobsters to work for them. He becomes an alcoholic. I have to think Russ saw it, and can’t help but wonder if he felt echoes of his own life in it.

  13

  The Murder

  IN FEBRUARY OF 1960, Pippy diFalco was a forty-five-year-old bookie well known around town. He worked for himself but turned in a percentage of his take to Little Joe’s organization. Or was supposed to. He had a wife named Barbara who was twelve years younger than him, and a two-year-old boy. Just about all my sources knew him. My dad knew him. So did Minnie. Frank Filia crossed paths with him on a daily basis: “A funny guy. You never knew what he was thinking.” Mike Gulino probably knew him better than anyone still living. They were partners for several years, working a book as a team. “I met him right when he came out of the service, right after the war. We trusted each other. Kinda. The thing about Pippy, he was the type of guy, if somebody was making money, he felt he was supposed to get some of it. Greedy. We had a nice little business together. Then, next thing you know, he’s working for Little Joe and Russ, and our thing is over. Then he quits that and goes out on his own.”

  Pippy worked his own circuit, had about fifty regular customers. He’d meet them at City Cigar, the Mission Inn, the Show Boat, moving around town. Most paid cash—he’d add it to that big bank roll of his; for some he’d take their bets on credit.

  He went missing sometime after two in the morning on February 7. The next day he wasn’t at the Embassy Theatre to sit through viewing after viewing of the day’s feature. The ticket takers at the Majestic and the State didn’t see him either. He didn’t show up at the Acme supermarket for bologna and sliced bread. Nobody at City Cigar or the Clinton Street Pool Room would likely have registered surprise at his absence. He could have been on an out-of-town run; otherwise, he often had good reason to lay low for a spell.

  Barbara knew something was wrong right away. She was aware of his tendency to chase around after other women, but she also knew he was fussy about keeping in touch with her. Even when he went to Pittsburgh, three hours away, he would call—long-distance, collect—to let her know he’d arrived safe.

  By mid-February, with Pippy’s car still parked on Vine Street where he he’d left it, people began talking. Larry Martin, the editor of the Johnstown Observer, picked up the chatter. He and his wife, Peg, had taken over the weekly newspaper a few years earlier and given it new life. They were a good team: he editor in chief, she “office manager” and dogged reporter. They featured a gossip column on the front page and both worked hard to fill it with things that people were really talking about, things the daily, the Tribune-Democrat, didn’t devote stories to until they had fully blossomed. “A well known ‘man about town,’ known as a ‘bookie’ to his friends, has been reported missing from his usual haunts for about two weeks,” Martin wrote on February 18. The Martins had been hearing gossip about growing tensions between factions in the western Pennsylvania mob: “In fact, the New Kensington crowd is ready to move into the city lock-stock-and-barrel, if they haven’t already. A conference is now being held in Florida to decide who is to take over what part.” According to their information, within LaRocca’s realm the New Kensington faction was ascendant, and Little Joe’s Johnstown organization was slipping. The Martins wondered whether the bookie’s disappearance was connected to this change in fortunes.

  Little Joe was suddenly feeling pressure from within the city government as well. Ned Rose, who had come in as mayor in 1948 and had been a good friend to the organization, who seemed to be as much a presence at City Cigar as he was at city hall, was out. The man who had been elected to replace him, George Walter, was a newcomer who had run on a commitment to reform local politics. Walter was a young man with a PhD in sociology and a clean image that belied a tenacity. He had a freshness that reminded people of Sen. John F. Kennedy, whose face was everywhere these days and who later that year would be elected president.

  Walter took over the mayor’s office in city hall just weeks before Pippy went missing. Given the way he’d campaigned, there was little likelihood of him stopping in at City Cigar for a collegial game of pool, but Joe and Russ tried to get him on their side anyway. A decade later, when the Pennsylvania Crime Commission held public hearings on mob activity in the state, Walter testified that on four separate occasions representatives from vending-machine companies in Johnstown, which were owned by Little Joe, had offered to make contributions to his political campaign; that five times during his term he found an envelope containing $400 cash on his desk; and that a prominent Johnstown businessman had offered to make him vice president of a new corporate franchise in exchange for him agreeing to a “controlled gambling” arrangement like the one that attorney Caram Abood had told me was in effect in the ’50s. “We would arrange for each one of the numbers banks to contribute one victim for each term of court,” Walter told the Crime Commission in describing the plan put before him, with the idea that these regular scapegoats would make him “respectable with the Tribune-Democrat.” Walter said he refused.

  The boys supposedly tried something similar with the new district attorney. Ferdinand Bionaz had likewise entered office on the winds of change. He told the Crime Commission in 1971 that two men had approached him when he ran for office saying they wanted to contribute money to his campaign. One was Little Joe. The other was George Bondy, who had accompanied Russ when he took Tony for his memorable trip to Atlantic City to introduce him to the gambling world. “Mr. Regino said that he felt I was a great guy because I had adopted two children, he had adopted a child, and that we should have something in common,” Bionaz told the Commission. He went on to say that Little Joe had told him “he had friends who needed encouragement from time to time. And that he wanted to have a district attorney that wasn’t going to go out and cut throats.” Bionaz said he told Little Joe he didn’t need his help. Nevertheless, after he won election he said he found an envelope containing $1,000 in cash on his desk.*

  In January, then, District Attorney Bionaz and Mayor Walter became allies. Before Pippy diFalco’s disappearance had even become public knowledge, Bionaz announced an assault on the local rackets. Then in late February, the city police started looking into the Pippy diFalco situation. A detective named Milan Habala became the point man, trudging through the snow, darkening the doorway at City Cigar and other places Pippy was known to frequent.

  In early March, with no news on Pippy’s whereabouts, the Martins pushed further in their gossip column, and seemed to be taunting those in power: “It’s been over a month since ‘Pippy’ was reported missing. What’s the mystery? Is it getting too hot for certain people? The big time rackets are really tough.” They added a dig at Little Joe, suggesting that his throne had been usurped—“There’s a new czar in the gambling game in Johnstown and anything can happen”—then wondered aloud about Pippy: “If he was taken for a ride will his body ever be found? He’s not the type to disappear without letting his family know where he is going.”

  It was a confusing time for everybody. The Apalachin meeting of a bit more than two years earlier had roiled the organization, in western Pennsylvania and elsewhere, with federal agents sweeping into pool halls and nightclubs, giving bookies and other lower-level operators a scare. Local police departments and politicians, some of whom had been party to mob activity if not actual partners, were likewise in a state of turmoil. With the waters so cloudy and unsettled, it is just possible to see the outlines of what was happening in Johnstown. Someone outside the local orga
nization was trying to take advantage of the confusion, making a play for the town’s rackets, even as some within law enforcement were trying to crush the rackets altogether. Meanwhile, Little Joe was determined to steady the ship and ride out the storm.

  In the midst of all this, a melodramatic little subplot played out, something that people at first got a kick out of as it unfolded in the newspapers. A couple of ordinary gamblers called Perry Holloway and John Lee played the numbers with the Pagano brothers and claimed they hit big but the brothers refused to pay up. That wasn’t supposed to happen. If you had a bank and one of your players won a hefty payout, requiring you to come up with more money than you had at the time, you were supposed to go up one rung—in this case, to ask Little Joe to cover the winnings, or even LaRocca. You didn’t welch. Holloway said he went to Pete Pagano and complained, and in response Pagano slugged him and told him to forget about it or he’d wind up dead. Holloway didn’t forget about it but instead took the unusual step of hiring an attorney. Donald Perry filed charges, the case went to court, and Pagano was found guilty of threatening Holloway’s life. Pagano, the Tribune-Democrat reported, “was ordered to post a $2500 peace bond for one year.”

  At the Observer, Larry Martin folded this story into his coverage of the missing bookie: “Within the past week there have been several instances of threatened violence over the numbers racket. Some of the operators are not paying off on big hits. In fact they are even claiming that the police are in cahoots with the gamblers—even after they are arrested and taken to jail.”

  Some readers found it funny that the rackets were now so wide open that you could hire a lawyer to represent your gambling interests. For Little Joe, though, this was ugly as hell. He prided himself on running a tight ship. And the only thing worse than publicity was bad publicity. If people started thinking that a gambler might not get his winnings, his business was over. He was operating a bank, after all, and banks were built on trust.