Smalltime

by Russell Shorto

  Russ’s world had shrunk drastically, thanks to the combination of federal, state, and local authorities and his own life choices. Once, he had practically run the town. What he had from now on was a small sports book of his own and the Jockey Club, which catered mostly to his aging friends.

  As it turned out, he got out at a good time. The Kefauver Committee’s recommendations from the early 1950s took more than a decade to come to fruition, but in time they led to President Lyndon Johnson’s creating a President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice, which in turn led to the formation of the Pennsylvania Crime Commission. In 1970 the Crime Commission made a study of organized crime in cities around the state. “During the course of that survey, Commission investigators received allegations that a serious condition existed in the Johnstown area with regard to large-scale illegal gambling operations and their relationship to local government and law enforcement,” its 1971–72 report read.

  The commission held hearings in Ebensburg, the county seat, at which it heard testimony from dozens of people who were involved in the rackets, both on the law enforcement side as well as those who were “managers of and participants in illegal enterprises.” They interviewed Mayor Walter, District Attorney Bionaz, and Detective Habala. Among the higher-ups on the other side of the equation they subpoenaed John LaRocca, Joe Regino, George Bondy, and others, most of whom invoked the Fifth Amendment. There is no indication in the published records that Russ was subpoenaed.

  The commission’s report was published—in book form running to 185 pages—and on October 30, 1971, the Tribune-Democrat took the extraordinary step of printing it in its entirety, making for a bombshell of an issue. Little Joe had gone to enormous lengths over the decades to keep his profile so low as to be almost nonexistent. He had carefully burnished the persona of a quiet, respectable businessman. Now he was openly identified to the people of Johnstown—friends and neighbors, people who had admired him as part of the fabric of society—as an “underworld figure,” as “Cosa Nostra captain Joseph Regino.” The city was informed that “Regino has a criminal record of arrests for assault and battery, highway robbery, gambling and sale of narcotics.” The report stated that “underworld ‘summit’ meetings were held at the Shangri-La lodge.” It outlined the scope of Little Joe’s operation and how it functioned.

  Little Joe seems to have been mortified by this public outing. He was probably especially enraged at the inclusion of the narcotics charge. That had been when he was very young, and he was never convicted on it. It may have been trumped up. People insisted that he and Russ had always been adamantly opposed to drugs as part of their operation.

  I was told that Joe arranged to have every copy of that day’s edition of the newspaper destroyed. I don’t know how he would have accomplished this feat, but the issue is missing from every library that carries the paper on microfilm, and it’s even absent from the Tribune-Democrat’s own archives.

  15

  The Salesman

  SOMEWHERE ALONG THE way, without our quite realizing it, my father and I had shifted our focus in our search for his father. Where for three years or more we had been chipping away at Russ like archaeologists working a dig, excavating his life from the Prohibition era to the Kennedy administration, we were now talking mostly about Tony: his past, his path. We seemed to have tacitly agreed that the eldest son was an extension of the father, that even though my dad had not followed Russ in the rackets his course had nevertheless continued from his father’s.

  Our study of Russ in 1960, then, when he was running scared in the aftermath of Pippy diFalco’s murder, segued into reconstructing what Tony was doing at that time. We chuckled a little when I pointed out a funny dynamic in Tony’s life as he set off into adulthood, with a wife and a young child to support. Before, he had desperately wanted to be part of the local mob but his father wouldn’t let him in; now he was trying to establish himself apart from his father’s world, to separate from it, but his social circle was still comprised of guys from the rackets. Rip, when he wasn’t under threat of a murder charge or running his own book, would stop by the apartment from time to time. One of the first businesses Tony started was a spaghetti takeout service, and his partner was Nino Bongiovanni, the guy who had run the lunch counter at City Cigar, who was arrested in the raids following the murder of Pippy diFalco and later would be busted for taking part in one of Mike Gulino’s scams.

  And when it came time to baptize Tony and Rita’s baby, Sappy Sapolich, the disgruntled prizefighter turned game runner, ended up being the guy who stood in the nave of the Church of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, on McKinley Avenue, broken-nosed and hunkering, as my godfather, alongside Rita’s sister Jean as godmother, reciting the rote answers to the questions that were intended to guarantee the moral rectitude of the sponsors prior to an infant’s baptism:

  Do you believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth? I do believe.

  Do you renounce Satan? I do renouce him.

  And all his works? I do renounce them.

  And all his allurements? I do renounce them.

  In later years, on the rare occasions when our family would run into Sappy—I remember a church barbecue of some sort, a group of guys huddled around a picnic table, a pile of wrinkled dollar bills in the middle, him with a visor on his head and a cigarette hanging from his mouth, pausing in the dealing of cards to engage me in a solemn handshake—I found it disorienting to think that this man was to oversee my spiritual development.

  Eventually I learned why Sappy was nominated for the role. One of Tony’s runaway episodes during his cat-gang days in his early teens had ended with the police finding him and calling Russ. Russ looked around for someone who would go to Ohio to fetch him. Sappy said he’d get the kid. From the moment Tony saw his lumbering form coming to retrieve him he had looked at the boxer as a protector. Five years later, as a young father, he turned to Sappy much as his father had.

  Tony’s feelings, too, were still firmly stuck in the detritus of his father’s world as he moved into his own orbit. Anger was hardening him; he was in the process of walling his father off from his family. Five decades later, in my parents’ living room, with him lying back in his easy chair, the oxygen tube clipped insouciantly to his nose as he worked his chewing gum and stared meditatively at the ceiling, we talked a little about this, but only a little. It was a hard place to go. I asked my dad what he thought the root of the anger he held back then had been. He didn’t mention what now seemed to me palpable, that his rejection of his father was related to what he incorrectly perceived to be his father’s rejection of him. And I couldn’t bring myself to suggest it to him, to say that his father’s use of fists rather than words to protect his son had been understandably misinterpreted; that Russ had wanted to keep Tony out of the rackets for his own good, but Tony had viewed it as his father not thinking as highly of him as he did of others—of Mike Gulino, for one; that, maybe, he’d decided his father didn’t love him.

  There were plenty of other reasons for him to be angry. There was the pain his father had caused his mother, and the outrage at Russ trying to take his child.

  In my dad’s mind, though, the thing that grew as he and my mother built their family was hurt on behalf of his own children: “The years went by, and he never lifted a finger to be a grandfather. He never came by. He wouldn’t have known you kids if he fell over you on the sidewalk. I was so mad at him for a lot of years.”

  ________

  TONY’S CAREER PATH had basically been set when he was fourteen and somehow got a job selling pots and pans door to door, and realized that he was good at it. Not long after, he went to the library and checked out the Dale Carnegie book How to Win Friends and Influence People, devoured it, and committed himself to, as that forerunner of all self-help manuals put it, “develop a deep, driving desire to master the principles of human relations.” “It was the first book I ever read that I wanted to read,”
he said. It clicked with what he knew in his bones, that sales was nothing more or less than making a connection with people. Instead of getting his high school diploma he took a fourteen-week sales course, in which all the other students were middle-aged men. “Act enthusiastic AND YOU’LL BE ENTHUSIASTIC!” he exclaimed, characterizing for me its essence. He got a job working alongside two veteran salesmen, selling siding door to door. One of them had a lisp and a schtick of earnestness: “He’d say to the customer, ‘My mouth ith moving but my heart ith talking.’ I almost fell on the floor laughing. But the thing was, he meant it. I learned a lot from those guys.”

  Over the next few years Tony pulled himself out of the crisis that was his early life, and supported a wife and children, by embracing sales as if it were a religion. He might at one time have imagined he would be selling numbers or tip seals, but as it turned out it didn’t matter to him what the product was. He sold cars, pasta, and encyclopedias with equal vim. One time he bought a hillside that was covered with evergreen trees, hired some guys to cut down all the trees, sold them at Christmastime, then sold the hillside. He steeled himself against the waves of rejection that come a salesman’s way by devouring a syllabus of his own selection, working toward a self-bestowed degree in self-help. Think and Grow Rich. The Power of Positive Thinking. Selling the Sizzle. Psycho Cybernetics. Paperbacks of those books—dog-eared, splay-backed, with whole paragraphs viciously underlined, the margins stuffed with his slanted all-caps printing—littered the landscape of my childhood. He had his philosophy reduced to a motto: “A Winner Never Quits and a Quitter Never Wins.” He tried to drill it into me. Even as a child I demurred—something in me warned that it was too pat, too cheesy.

  His attempts to imbue his eldest son with his hard-earned wisdom reached a climax when I was in fifth grade. He marched me into the dining room of our home, where a bookcase lined one wall, then commanded me to pull out the dictionary and look up the word “impossible.” Even though I didn’t know exactly where this was going, I could sense that it was one of his gimmicks. He handed me a pair of scissors and instructed me to cut the word out of the dictionary. Why? I had a love for books (which he had instilled); it seemed sacrilegious.

  “Because it doesn’t exist.”

  “Yes, it does. It’s right here. I-M-P-O-S …”

  And there was that beam of his, his face lighting up because he had you right where he wanted you.

  “Nope. Doesn’t exist.”

  Despite my resistance, the image of that page of the dictionary, with the little rectangle neatly sliced out of it, remains in my memory. A winner never quits. Tony never did. Tony. How could you not fall in love with such a father? People said he looked like Robert Vaughn in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. He was a secret-agent body double, a jazz aficionado, an up-and-comer, a fashion plate and man about town; a winner not despite but because of the many failures. You know who struck out more times than anybody in the history of baseball? Babe Ruth! I had no idea whether that was true, but he forced me to grin at the wisdom. He told me about his own failures in sales, making them seem the saddest stories, then turned them inside out with the kicker that each failure fired him up for the next round. And the next time, he’d win: sell a Pontiac off the lot, or whatever else was put before him. He loved the game, he was good at it. It wasn’t about the stuff; it was about attitude. Your attitude about yourself and the world and how, dammit, the two were meant for each other.

  It dawned on me, as we sat in his living room reliving the first stage of his career, that this mindset, this dynamo, came right out of the clashes with Russ. It wasn’t just, as I had always thought, a freakish contrast of personalities between father and son. There was a direct line between what Russ had been and what Tony was becoming. Surely without intending any such thing, Russ, in shutting his son out of his life and the rackets, in fomenting a hurt, put this spin on him, set him on his razzle-dazzle trajectory.

  THEY BASICALLY DIDN’T speak for ten years. In that time—the mid-’60s to the mid-’70s—Tony rose as a small-town entrepreneur. He graduated from selling cars and books to buying and selling houses, becoming a player on the local real-estate scene. Along the way, he started a bar, which he slyly called the Office Lounge (“Where were you, honey?” “At the Office …”). Small towns being what they are, the Office happened to be located a block away from the Haven. Russ had sold the Haven a few years before, but it was still in business, and the contrast between the two was generationally striking. The Haven’s crowd was comprised of people who, like Russ, had had their heyday in the Eisenhower administration. Thanks to Tony’s personality, the Office took off right from the start, and it filled with relatively hip young adults clutching glasses of “Chablis,” “Burgundy,” and Mateus Rosé—people who’d come of age amid Watergate and were trying to shake off the gloom of that era and suss out a brighter future for themselves.

  Eventually, Tony was able to fulfill a dream and buy a house for his family in Westmont, the upscale suburb with the best school district. But he needed $5,000 for the down payment.

  “Where did you get it?”

  “Borrowed from my uncle Joe.”

  Beat.

  “You took money from a mob boss?”

  “He was my uncle! I paid him back right away.”

  Then one day at the Office—it was the afternoon; no customers, Tony was alone behind the bar getting the cash drawer ready for the evening—the door opened and there stood Russ. Russ tended to mumble; he said something about how he liked the place—it had class. The back wall was deep-blue wallpaper with the Manhattan skyline outlined in silver. They talked about little things. And Tony felt his heart softening. Russ was a little over sixty but looked older: ravaged and sad-eyed. Wasn’t it better to reconcile before it was too late? Tony asked him what he was up to. Russ mentioned a deal he was working on, an investment. A book. Tony knew perfectly well he didn’t mean the kind you read. Russ was wondering: maybe Tony would like to get in on it. Tony said it was nice of him to offer, but he’d have to pass. Russ said he understood. But if his son could see his way to giving him a loan—a couple thousand was all he needed—he would be able to get the money back to him, with interest, within a week or so.

  Tony lent him the money. A week later, Russ came back. He almost had all the pieces in place. He just needed another two thousand bucks, then he’d pay the whole four thousand back plus another thousand.

  “It went on like that,” my dad said. “When I was down ten thousand, I knew I was being conned by my own father. He didn’t see it as a con, I don’t think. I said to myself, ‘This is ridiculous.’ ”

  “Did he ever pay you back?”

  “No.”

  Jump ahead a couple of years, and Tony is now at his career peak. He has parleyed the success of the Office into another venture, opening a huge disco in the suburb of Richland. It was in a former factory; he called it the Factory. All of his people skills were paying off, and his promotions—Foxy Ladies Nite!—were right on target; the place was packed every weekend.

  And once again there comes an evening when Tony looks up—this time across a sea of customers, over the long curved bar and toward the entrance—and sees his father standing there. An old man in a suit that harkened back to an impossibly bygone era, blinking, looking around at the roomful of young people, their faces patterned with dots of light from the disco ball, moving to the bass-heavy beat of Donna Summer. The next time Tony looks up, he is gone.

  I wondered, while Tony was telling me this, what Russ was thinking. I wondered if he was thinking that, after all, his son had followed in his footsteps, replicated the kind of small-town entrepreneurial realm that Russ had created, but had done it differently—on the up-and-up. Or maybe he’d just wanted to hit his son up for money but saw that he was too busy.

  RUSS’S LAST YEARS were hard. He had several heart attacks, which tore through him like hurricanes, leaving wreckage. A picture of him at sixty-five shows a man you’d swear was in his ei
ghties. He was popping nitroglycerin pills like candy. He still lived at Vicky’s house, but they couldn’t stand each other. Each had tried at different times to break away, but they ended up sabotaging each other’s attempts. Once, when he was still feeling vigorous enough to experience indignation, Vicky came home and mentioned warily that a man who worked at a clothing store in Westmont had asked her out. She was suggesting, sort of, that maybe they should give each other some room. She was still in her forties at the time; it wasn’t too late for her. Alexis told me that shortly afterward the man called Vicky in a panicky voice, asking her to please stay out of his store. Russ had come in and threatened to kill him.

  He was fading fast though. Sometime in late 1980 or early ’81 Russ asked my aunt if she would let him move into her house. He said he couldn’t take living with Vicky anymore. “Dad, Mom stays with me now every weekend,” she told him. “I can’t have you both here.” Not long after, he made his final trip to the racetrack in West Virginia, where he had one more heart attack, while clutching 37 tickets—trifectas, exactas, quinellas—totaling $305 in bets. His last gamble. The hospital called my parents. My dad called my aunt. “I still feel bad that I told him he couldn’t stay with me,” Sis said. “He didn’t have long to live.”

  Just before Russ’s funeral, Sis told her mother about Joey, that he was Russ’s son. She hadn’t had the strength to tell her before, or maybe she didn’t think her mother had the strength to hear it. “I would have raised Joey as my own” was Mary’s comment. As it turned out, having the information helped her get through the funeral. For years, she’d felt a coldness from Russ’s sisters and their children. It hurt her; she didn’t understand the reason. Apparently there was awkwardness in their knowing Joey’s parentage while she did not.