Spring arrived. The trees on Main Street and in Central Park came into bud. As the buds opened into pale green leaves, Larry Martin got some new info—not what had happened to Pippy, but that he had known he was getting himself mixed up in something. He published another column. “Again we ask: ‘What happened to Pippy?’ He’s been mysteriously missing since February 14th. Who is he? He’s ‘Pippy’ De Falco [sic] and was known for years as a small timer in the local gambling fraternity. He sold tickets on baseball, football and basketball games and made a few dollars but nothing in the big time. He never seemed to step on anyone’s toes until early this year, when he was warned he might run into trouble.”
District Attorney Bionaz and Charles Griffith, the Johnstown police chief, meanwhile, assured people that they were working doggedly to uncover clues. But so far there weren’t many. Pippy just seemed to have vanished.
Larry Martin continued his coverage. He and Peg were getting tips suggesting that powerful people were involved in the bookie’s disappearance. It was, he wrote, “no secret among the ‘syndicate boys’ and some politicians and ‘respectable businessmen’ with close connections with the ‘syndicate’ that Pippy was becoming a nuisance …” I infer from this that the Martins were hearing that Pippy had shifted his allegiance back and forth from Little Joe’s organization to another one, making him an annoyance not just to Little Joe and those local politicians and businessmen who allied themselves with him, but to those in the rival organization as well. Martin also said his newspaper was now being threatened, and not by mobsters but by Johnstown businessmen: “This paper was warned that if we didn’t ‘lay off’ the Pippy case and forget it we would lose some advertising business.”
The Martins didn’t lay off. As more days went by Larry Martin became more strident, needling the police, wondering why they didn’t look for answers—as well as evidence of a corrupt partnership between city hall and the mob—in “the City Cigar store.” He taunted the police for not investigating City Cigar “even though the place was almost next door to the mayor’s office.”
Then, in May, Donald Perry, the attorney who had represented gamblers Holloway and Lee against the Pagano brothers, went to the police with a letter he had just received. “Leave the numbers racket alone,” it said, then added, “You don’t think P. defalco was swimming in February, do you?” In place of a signature, the letter contained a drawing of a black hand.
The letter—along with an anonymous phone call to Perry’s office, telling him, as Perry reported, that “if I didn’t keep my nose out of the numbers racket, I would have my head blown off”—changed everything. The long, sleepy period in which the city tolerated the rackets as a supplement to people’s lives, a provider of harmless amusement, was suddenly over. The media had been feeding people a stream of stories about mob activity at the national level. Right at the time Pippy went missing, Robert F. Kennedy’s book The Enemy Within, detailing the mob’s infiltration of labor unions and telling a story of extortion, theft, bribery, and lies on a massive scale, was published and became a bestseller. Suddenly it seemed that this same malevolent force had arrived in Johnstown. Death threats, the overt connection of the city’s quaint smalltime gambling culture to the mob, the real Italian mafia, even connecting it to the Mano Nera of the old days, the increasing likelihood that Pippy had been murdered, and the suggestion that the writer of the letter had not only been involved in the murder but was hinting at how it was done, associating it with water and drowning: it felt like the town was waking up from a long dream of innocence into dark reality.
Mayor Walter ordered twenty-four-hour police protection for Perry. On May 8, the raids started. The police had long kept an eye on George Sapolich, who had a reputation for violence and was known to have mixed it up with Pippy in the past. When he wasn’t boxing, Sappy ran craps and card games for Russ and Joe out of a place in the Cambria City section of town called the Recreation Center. Chief Griffith authorized the raid; Detectives Philip Vickroy, Ray Bender, and Mel Causer went in via the front door, while two uniformed officers entered from the rear. They found Sappy, “with an apron on dealing cards,” and a small group of gamblers. “Some money was on the counter but George scooped it into his trouser pocket,” the report noted. The detectives arrested Sappy and booked him on a “156-4-25 charge,” running an illegal gambling establishment.
They also arrested another man they found on the scene, who was named John Kon but whom people called Horsey. They took a statement from him, which I want to quote at length because of the level of detail it contains about the satellite operations that Russ and Joe oversaw—because this book is called Smalltime and Horsey evokes meaning of the term better than I can:
I, John M. Kon, have been informed that I do not have to make a statement if I do not wish to and that anything I do say may be used against me in court.
Pretty close to a month ago, George Sapolich asked me if I would paint his place at 604 Broad St. So I painted the place and he give me two dollars and a fifth of wine. A couple days later he called me back again to put some second hand linoleum down and he gave me a bottle of wine. I drank about half of it and then he got mad because I wasn’t doing it right so he spilled the wine down the sink and I walked out.
Then later on he got a couple pool tables in the place and then one day he came to me when I was sittin on the steps by the Roosevelt Club and he asked me to get in the car and when I got in the car I thought I was going to get something to drink. I asked him for a drink and he said to me Horsey, I’ll get you a drink but I want you to do me one favor. So he asked me if I would sign the lease to take over the poolroom and he would pay the rent and everything and pay me $14.00 a week and let me sleep there because I had no place to stay. We left there in his car and went up to Roxbury somewhere and went to a house. Then the man that George took me to give me two pieces of paper to sign. He told me it was a lease and to sign it and I did. I didn’t have my glasses on and I didn’t feel to good because I was drinking so I don’t know what was on the paper and I couldn’t read what was on it. Then he brought me down to the Gay Inn and gave me seventy-five cents for a drink.
Since that time I stayed in the place and cleaned it up and fixed the lights and everything. Every night he would give me enough for a drink to keep my nerves steady.
The God’s truth, about two weeks ago about 4:30 in the afternoon George told me to keep the front door locked so that the law don’t come in on them and they went in the back room and was gambling. There was four guys back there.
About a week or a week and a half before Palm Sunday, they were playing cards in the back room. And I remember one night after midnight there was a card game.
I seen them rolling dice on a table in the back room one time.
And today when the Detectives came in I was standing by the counter and George and this kid was playing cards for a quarter a game. Kliney was there too but he didn’t play. He just stood and watched.
The organization that Joe and Russ had built into a multimillion-dollar enterprise had grown and prospered in part on revenues from slick nightclubs and card games where the pots got into the thousands of dollars. But mostly the world that my grandfather lorded over from the end of World War II to the start of the Kennedy administration—which was now facing an existential threat—was Horsey’s world.
Two days after this bust, the police picked up a bookie named Lucille Savering and got her to detail the work she did for Little Joe. Her statement pointed to where the police were heading with their newfound zeal: “The money is picked up by Frank Torchia who is the pick up man for the GI Bank.”
Two days after that, at four in the afternoon, six policemen staked out a room upstairs from the Clinton Street Pool Room. Above the poolroom was the Gautier Club, and above that was a little attic office. For years the city ignored the fact that the boys took bets here—it was one of the places that fed bets and cash into the office above City Cigar—but the official policy had just changed. Th
ey waited for about fifteen minutes downstairs, then the door opened and out came Frank Filia. They marched him back upstairs, searched him, searched the place, found betting slips everywhere, and asked him to sign a statement that detailed the work he did here and the activity that went on. “I go to work everyday at 10:00 AM,” it began. After getting things ready, his statement said, “I just lay around and draw to pass the time away waiting for the phone to ring in order to take bets on the horses.” He outlined the procedure for taking bets. Milan Habala, the detective who typed up the statement, tried to get him to say that Yank Croco, who ran the poolroom, also took bets, but Frank scratched that line out. Normally, Frank said, he left at six, but “I knew something was wrong today and that the town was hot so I decided to leave early.” Habala, clearly trying to make a sharper connection between the gambling and the murder, added the line “I figured it was the police because I heard diFalco was picked up.” But Frank scratched that out too.
Habala told Frank he was under arrest for running an illegal gambling operation. But there was something else. Habala was looking at the drawings Frank did to pass the time. Nice drawings. The kid had talent. He mentioned the drawing on the death-threat letter that was sent to Donald Perry. Everyone knew of that letter by now.
“I swear to God, my knees started shaking right then. The only time in my life my knees were actually shaking with fright.” I was back at Panera Bread with Frank, just the two of us, and we were going over that day. I showed him the statement they made him sign. “Jesus, this takes me back,” he said. “I didn’t say these things. He wrote them down and I signed it.”
“Who did?”
“Milan Habala, that cocksucker. See, there’s a guy that’s no good.”
“I was kind of under the impression, because he was so determined, he was working the gambling beat for years, that he was basically just trying to be a good cop.”
Frank looked at me through his glasses and squinted, scrunching up his nose. “I’ll tell you something I learned in life. The guys like me, the guys who hung out in poolrooms and ran some numbers, that type, they’re maybe good, maybe bad, but mostly they’re not bad. The legitimate guys are worse.”
“Including Habala.”
“Habala’s mother wrote numbers. He used that. He became a cop because he knew where everything was, how it worked. He was promoting himself. We all knew that. I got so pissed off I told him one time, ‘I’ll beat your fucking brains in.’ ”
“What did he look like?”
“Chubby little guy, liked to wear a big hat.”
“So they tried to connect you to the writer of the letter.”
“They thought they were on to something about Pippy. They knew Pippy had worked at the same place. He would come in every day. I was just a kid—I only took bets. But Habala looks at my drawings and figures, ‘Look at this, we have a connection to that business.’ He was ready to connect me to a murder! I was on TV that night.”
“What? How?”
“They had a guy with a camera. He’s chasing me down the street when they’re taking me to the jail. I said, ‘Get the fuck outta here!’ So there I was on TV, tied to all this shit. I thought my career was over. It was the worst possible timing.”
“Why?”
That weekend, it turned out, he was due to get his big break. The band was playing at the War Memorial Arena, which had four thousand seats. “ ‘The George Arcurio Orchestra, Featuring Frank Filia,’ ” Frank said, reading it off the marquee he could still see in his mind’s eye. “I got arrested four days before the show. I figured that was it, I was done-for. People said to Junior,† ‘You better not use Frank.’ But Junior was good, he told me to play—the show must go on. And guess what? I walk into the arena … and everybody is shaking my hand! Guys are saying, ‘You look good on TV, Frank!’ ”
THEN THEY FOUND the body.
In late May, something peculiar was spotted in a flood-control dam on the Conemaugh River thirty-five miles west of Johnstown, hauled ashore, and carted to the morgue in nearby Greensburg. After more than three months in the water, there wasn’t much for a wife to identify, but Barbara diFalco drove to the morgue along with Pippy’s two brothers. The remains had been stripped of all clothes, presumably by the waters, but a shoe was still attached. It was a corrective shoe, used to help someone with a misshapen foot to walk. “That’s my Pippy!” Barbara cried. “That’s him. That’s his shoe. Oh my God!”
The coroner issued his report: “Death was not due to drowning. The examination of the body showed the most likely cause of death was a puncture or stab wound of the right side of the chest, which caused a collapse of the right lung.” It was the coroner’s professional judgment that the wound would likely have been made by an ice pick or a thin-bladed knife.
DIFALCO FIRST SLAIN, THEN TOSSED IN RIVER went the Tribune-Democrat’s banner headline on May 27.
The next day, just as people were digesting this news, yet another body was pulled from the Conemaugh River. A man named Walter Cook had gone missing the day after Pippy. When the second body turned out to be Cook’s, the city went into a whirl of speculation. Was the mob on a killing spree? “According to one source,” the Tribune-Democrat declared, “Cook and diFalco reportedly were seen together at a suburban tavern the night of Feb. 6. The same source claims the two men were on such friendly terms that Cook called Pippy ‘son.’ ”
Chief Griffith and District Attorney Bionaz announced the intensification of their efforts. “I am asking anyone who has information on this case to call me,” the police chief told the Tribune-Democrat. “We are investigating dozens of leads.” Mayor Walter assured people that “The investigation is continuing—both on the diFalco case and on gambling.” The state police were now involved as well. “From now on,” Bionaz announced, “when we pick up anyone we think is involved in the rackets we will be asking questions about murder—not about the numbers.”
Overnight, business at City Cigar slowed to near nothing. The ticker machine was taken off the counter. A few guys wandered in and shot desultory games of pool. Nobody asked for tip seals.
The Tribune-Democrat of May 27, 1960, reporting the discovery of Pippy diFalco’s body.
A week later, the police announced progress, of a sort. They had thoroughly investigated Walter Cook, the man who had disappeared around the time Pippy had and whose body had turned up just days after Pippy’s. They had determined that there was no connection between the men. The person who had originally said Cook knew Pippy had corrected himself—Cook actually knew someone named Pepper. Cook wasn’t a gambler. There were no linkages between him and the rackets. While diFalco had been murdered, Cook had apparently fallen into the river and drowned. The timing of the deaths was a coincidence.
Over the next several weeks Detective Habala led his squadron of officers on raids all over the city. In Prospect, they approached “Calvin C. Sanders, colored, aged 33,” outside the home of a known gambler and tried to apprehend him, but he ran. They chased him all the way down William Penn Boulevard, fired warning shots, and eventually nabbed him. They found on his person an envelope “with 11 slips amounting to $11.77.” In Minersville they picked up “Albert Fisher Jr., aged 22,” whom they suspected of being a numbers writer; he confessed, but asked them not to force him to plead guilty “due to his chances being ruined in going to further his education.” They made other arrests: on Central Avenue, in a barbershop on Chandler Avenue, and, together with the state police, in Somerset County.
On August 9, Little Joe made an attempt to stop the raids. His associate, Russ’s pal George Bondy, asked Detective Habala to meet him at Bondy’s place, the Mission Inn, next door to City Cigar. Habala entered and took a seat at a table. Bondy came in, sat right beside him rather than opposite him, and tried to hand him a piece of folded paper with money inside. “This writer refused the offering and Mr. Bondy placed it on the writer’s lap,” Habala wrote in his report. Bondy got up and sat across from Habala and tried to level
with him. All the banks in town were suffering. He made a point of noting the G.I. Bank in particular. He “told this writer that if he plays ball he could go far especially if any promotions are to be made,” Habala wrote. “He further stated that he and his organization are consulted on said promotions.” Habala said when he stood up the money fell on the floor. He didn’t pick it up.
Sometime in the next couple of weeks, Little Joe closed down City Cigar. It never reopened.
The searches and busts continued through the fall and into the New Year. In January, the police raided the Gautier Club and arrested four women and three men. “At the time of entry into the club,’ Det. Sgt. Philip Vickroy noted, “the last girl on the ‘bill’ was performing in the nude on the stage.” The club shut down after that.
By May of 1961, however, a year after Pippy’s body had turned up, the authorities were no closer to solving the murder. “Who killed ‘Pippy’ DiFalco?” the Tribune-Democrat asked. “A full year has passed since the body of the West End man—known to police as a small-time gambler—was found floating in the Conemaugh Flood Control Reservoir, near Saltsburg. But, despite a far-ranging investigation, the identity of his slayer has never been established.” The odds of finding the killer weren’t looking good. Mayor Walter told the paper that “city police have gone as far as they can go.” He believed a wider net had to be cast, but he complained that the state police “have shown no inclination to actively pursue the investigation.”
BUT THE CASE didn’t die. At almost that same moment, at the national level, Robert F. Kennedy, the new attorney general, launched a campaign to raise awareness of the extent of mob activities not only in major cities but in small ones as well. One of the places he highlighted was Newport, Kentucky, a city about half the size of Johnstown, which, as Kennedy told a Senate subcommittee, “was long known nationally for wide-open gambling and prostitution.” Law enforcement became crooked in cities of this size, Kennedy said, because it was easy for the mob to corrupt the authorities with money. His strategy was to bring in the IRS and the FBI, assist community crusaders, and get voters to throw out corrupt local officials.
Smalltime Page 18