Smalltime

by Russell Shorto

  The awkwardness seemed to melt away with Russ’s death. At the funeral, which was a large affair—hundreds of people trooping through Ozog’s Funeral Home on Broad Street and filing into Saint Emerich’s Church on Chestnut Avenue—Russ’s family members came up to Mary, one by one, the Verones and Shortos and Basiles and Trios, kissed her, held her, treated her as the aunt, in-law, matriarch that she was. I was there, just graduated from college and now, with my brother and four of Russ and Mary’s nephews, a pallbearer. I watched my grandmother playing the role of widow, assuming it like an actress. Her tears opened up as the relatives came to her, one after the other, and told her how sorry they were for her. She was weeping, I suppose, over what one can’t help but weep over at the funeral of a spouse: the inexorable linearity of life, the imponderability of what was and might have been, the massive ache of humanness. And I imagine she felt relief.

  LITTLE JOE DIED four year later, in 1985. His funeral was even bigger than Russ’s, with a parade of Lincolns and Cadillacs that made the evening news. The obituary in the Tribune-Democrat differed from what he might have hoped for before the Crime Commission hearings. He was acknowledged as president of Keystone Sales and owner of the former Shangri-La Lodge, but that information was buried. The newspaper led by calling him “a reputed local organized crime figure” who “was considered by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to be a lieutenant in the western Pennsylvania La Cosa Nostra.”

  Shortly after his death, a special agent for the Pennsylvania Crime Commission gave the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette a kind of epitaph for Joe, Russ, and others like them, the men who had built their smalltime fiefdoms in the postwar era: “They are growing old and dying off, and it does not seem that people are knocking down the doors to become members because there is a lot of independence. People figure, ‘Why should I give this organized guy money when I can just keep it all for myself?’ ”

  I VISITED MIKE one more time in the nursing home. He had deteriorated since I’d last seen him. He would die within a few months, at the age of eighty-seven. We talked about a lot of things, but he seemed to have something in particular on his mind concerning Russ and the influence he’d had on his life.

  Before, I hadn’t quite been able to fathom the gap between the way Mike thought of my grandfather and the way people in my family viewed Russ. But listening to him now I had a little epiphany. Maybe, to Russ, Mike had not just been—as Mike himself had told me—a kid who was already tainted by the rackets and therefore a kindred spirit. Maybe Russ could allow himself to get close to Mike—to view him almost like a son, to love him—because their relationship wasn’t burdened by the harm that Russ was at that time doing to his wife. Several times my dad, in talking about his father, had used the word “shame.” “He was filled with shame.” I didn’t get it, and when I asked him to explain what he meant, he couldn’t. Now suddenly I did get it.

  That behavior didn’t cloud Russ’s relationship with Mike. He didn’t have to feel guilty. He could be himself. He never broke character: Tony saying that to me about his father meant that he knew there was a facade he would never get past. Whereas Russ could reveal himself to Mike. Mike felt the genuineness—it must have been a relief for both of them, in a world of hard guys, a transactional world, to allow yourself that kind of openness—and he never forgot it. I wondered if the chance to relive that special relationship, to feel it again, wasn’t what motivated him to want to sit with me hour after hour over the years.

  What Mike wanted to talk about in particular was his final con. He laid it out for me, describing it as a kind of homage to Russ. It was such a bold piece of work, and so clearly an extension of what he took to be Russ’s teaching, that I later spent some effort in corroborating the details, unpacking how it all went. In executing it, Mike brought his mentor’s philosophy, born of the post-Prohibition world, into the era of Bill Clinton and Madonna and Nintendo. And, like in a caper film, where the old crew gets back together for one more job, he reunited some of the guys from Russ’s era.

  He began to hatch the idea for his last con, which he called “The Box” and which federal prosecutors later dubbed the “Johnstown Sting,” when he was doing time for bookmaking. As he’d told me before, he was pissed off with himself. He and Russ and all the guys had come of age at a time when gambling was supposedly immoral and therefore illegal; they’d devoted their lives to devising ways to feed the eternal hunger people had to bet, to try to beat the odds. Then, over the previous decade, he’d seen the government muscle in and take over that business, as if the state were just another mob outfit. All of a sudden state lotteries spanned the country. He’d been busted for running a book when states were basically doing the same thing. He wasn’t going to make that mistake again. He’d go back to his roots. Run a con. But what?

  One day after he got out of prison he was sitting in the steam room at the YMCA when another guy sat next to him. They got to talking. His companion was an older gentleman, a businessman, clearly very conservative. When Mike said his name, the man remembered reading about his arrest and his bookmaking empire. Mike was struck by how much this straitlaced fellow knew about bookmaking—and by how much he didn’t know. “That’s when it hit me—a little knowledge can be dangerous. I said to myself, ‘I can beat this guy. And there are a million just like him.’ ”

  The fellow from the steam room knew that even in an era of state lotteries illegal books remained popular. There were lots of guys who didn’t want to give a share of their winnings to the IRS. The man knew some of the ins and outs of illegal bookmaking, including the fact that bookies “lay off” to other bookies: make bets with other bookmakers in order to cover potential losses. Mike began to envision a con that revolved around layoffs.

  Of course, if you want to scam somebody who knows a thing or two about bookmaking, you have to go to great lengths to show that your operation is secure. That’s why it’s called a confidence game. You have to convince the guy you’re scamming that he isn’t being scammed. Mike started thinking about a box. Back in the days of the G.I. Bank, Russ and Joe had a contraption that looked like a toolbox, which had a lock and a timer fixed to it. The day’s betting slips went into it. It was closed and locked to signal the end of the day’s action. It stayed locked until a set time, when it sprung open. It was a security device to prevent past-posting: making bets after the number was known.

  So one day, a guy named Rich Sapolich—who happened to be the son of Sappy, my godfather—got a call from Nino Bongiovanni, who had been a friend and associate of Mike’s from back when Mike ran the Harrigan table at City Cigar and Nino ran the lunch counter. Rich was an electrical engineer who was good with his hands, good at making things. “Nino calls me up and says, ‘Mike wants to talk to you,’ ” Rich told me. (I’d arranged to meet him at the Holiday Inn. Also on the scene for this particular lunchtime chat session were Frank Filia, Sam Di Francesco, my dad, and a talented pool player from the City Cigar days called Chooch Boscola.) “He wouldn’t say what it was about. I go to Nino’s place. He says we’re going to take a ride with Frank.” This was Frank Pagano—the guy who was my dad’s nursing-home roommate. Frank and Mike also had a friendship that dated to City Cigar.

  Frank showed Rich a box—one of the boxes Russ and Joe used for the G.I. Bank, which Mike had somehow gotten his hands on. “It was a sort of comical old-school technology, but it worked,” Rich said. “Apparently it was made by a guy who was a bomb expert in World War II. Mike asked if I could make one, only better.”

  Rich made the box. He told me he spent ten months getting it right. (Mike complained about this: “Richie was a genius, but it took him a fuckin’ lifetime to get anything done.”) They tried out the box. Then he completely redesigned it. “It was really nice-looking,” Rich said. “It looked like it could have been on the space shuttle. I like clean design.”

  Once the box was ready Mike’s job was to find the mark—“the fish,” the guy who was going to take the bait. Greedy guys, guys with lots
of money who wanted more. Guys who were smart, but not as smart as they thought they were. He found them everywhere. Doctors, dentists, accountants, engineers, real-estate developers …

  Mike’s story was that he was a bookie’s bookie, taking layoffs from bookmakers all over Pennsylvania and surrounding states. The fictional bookies were supposedly taking bets on the daily number from the Pennsylvania state lottery. What he needed, he told the fish, was an investor, someone who could cover him in the event that a number hit big. He didn’t come off like he was selling himself; it was the investor who had to prove to him that he had the funds and the discretion. Mike was well known as a bookie. Guys heard about his new venture and lined up, asking to be let in. “What, my money’s no good?” one of them complained when Mike declined to let him invest.

  They lined up because it was such a sweet deal—there was no real risk involved. They weren’t gambling but investing. The odds of the numbers game were such that the house was guaranteed to earn roughly 40 percent of the total amount bet. Mike would split that with the investor. The reason he needed an investor was because of the daily fluctuation: some days a number would hit big, and instead of profiting they would have to pay out. That was the investor’s only job, to come up with half the winnings. Mike told the investor he prided himself on paying winners within twenty-four hours. So if a number hit, the investor had to be ready to make a payout on the spot. And he was careful to warn the fish about the size of the action: with bets ranging from $100 to $500, and 600-to-1 payoffs, the fish might have to come up with $40,000 or $50,000, or more. “And I told them this is all cash. When you win, you get cash. If you have to pay, you pay cash.”

  With the fish on the line, either Frank or Nino would show up at his house or hotel room just before 7 p.m., when the lottery number was drawn on TV. (Once the FBI was on to the sting, they set up a video recorder in a hotel room where Mike was meeting a prospective fish, who was actually a government agent. They captured him assuring the man of Nino’s trustworthiness. “He’s an extension of my right arm,” Mike says on the tape. “The only thing about me he don’t know is when I fuck my old lady.”) They would then watch TV, see the day’s number pulled, and at 7:01 the high-tech lock on Rich’s box would pop open and together they would go through the bets in the box to tally things up.

  The box contained ten slips, each of which listed about fifty numbers played, along with the amount bet on each. These bets had supposedly been called in to Mike’s secretary throughout the day. The fish was told that the box was locked at 6 p.m., when betting closed. The trick of the whole scam—Rich’s ingenious element—was a tiny printer concealed in the lid. The instant the winning number was announced on TV, Rich, who was sitting in a car nearby, radioed it to the printer, which printed out a slip with the number and dropped it in among the others, thus assuring that the fish would have to make a payout rather than receive one. The slip also showed the amount the fictitious winner had bet. “We were pretty conservative at first,” Rich told me. “But we got bolder as we went. I started with winning bets of around $20,000. The highest was a quarter of a million.”

  “But I guess sometimes you let the fish win?” I asked Mike.

  “No! Why let him win?” Their first fish was a doctor from Greensburg. After he had lost badly for several days in a row he told Mike he was going to quit at the end of the week if his luck didn’t turn around. “I said to Nino and Frank, ‘He’s gonna go till Sunday then quit. We have to cripple him.’ Frank said, ‘No, let’s let him win once. Then he’ll stick around.’ I said, ‘Fuck you. I didn’t put all this money into this thing to let some fucking doctor win. We are the guys who have to win.’ ” They took him for a total of $465,000 before he quit.

  Mike was stunned by how well the con worked. And it kept working. Next they took a doctor from Pittsburgh for $430,000, a real-estate developer from Johnstown for $300,000, a dentist from State College for $280,000. The owner of a dog-kenneling business later admitted to the jury in federal court that he couldn’t even remember how much he’d lost: “I was in such a state of panic, I didn’t know.” A retired urologist from Johnstown played along for three days, lost $157,000, then threw in the towel.

  Mike prided himself on his ability to keep the fish on the line. The urologist told the court that Mike had gone so far as to advise him on what to do with all the cash once he started winning, giving him tips on how to avoid the notice of the IRS. After a few losses, Mike would tell the fish that he had hit an unlucky streak, with bettors winning several days in a row, but that that only meant the odds were now heavily in his favor, he just had to stay in the game—the only way he would lose was if he bailed out. Another physician in Johnstown kept listening, and kept paying up, until, after twenty-eight days, he’d given Mike $247,000 in cash. “After suffering a staggering loss, I had no interest in continuing this misadventure,” he told the jury.

  Some investors left in anger, some in confusion. Virtually none, it seems, realized at the time that they had been conned. One time Mike showed Rich a wedding invitation. Not long before, they had taken a doctor for close to $1 million before he bowed out. He sent Mike a little handwritten note, apologizing for not being able to keep up his side of what he still believed was a business arrangement. To show his regard for his former partner, he invited him to his daughter’s wedding.

  The Johnstown Sting ran for seven years before the feds caught up with Mike and his compatriots. By that time, it was all getting too much for them anyway. There was no goal, no endgame. They just kept taking money from rich guys who were greedy enough to give it to them. They were constantly looking over their shoulders. And they didn’t know what to do with the money. They had it stuffed in their mattresses and attics. Frank Pagano had more than $50,000 in a coffee can in his garage. They were starting to get on one another’s nerves, too. Rich was feeling weird about Mike. He slowly came to realize that Mike wasn’t in it for the money: “He just loved to beat these guys. He wasn’t going to stop until he was forced to.”

  In 1995 a fish in Ohio whom Mike was in the process of luring turned out to be an FBI informer. Rich and Frank both testified in exchange for leniency; Frank wore a wire to help build the case against Mike. (I mentioned Mike to Frank in the nursing home. “There was nobody in the world closer than Mike and me, but we don’t even talk now,” he said with some sadness. “We parted ways over that box.”) The feds found evidence that Mike had bilked people out of a total of $2 million. Mike chuckled and told me it was five times that amount.

  The trial played out in the Tribune-Democrat over the course of 1996. Mike was tickled by the fact that right up to the trial itself federal agents believed that the fictitious book had been real; they kept pressing him to know where earnings from it were stashed. “That’s when you know you pulled a hell of a con,” he said.

  Mike’s lawyers argued that he deserved probation due to ill health. PRISON FOR SCAM ARTIST ran the ultimate headline: the judge ruled that his crimes demanded jail time. After his earlier imprisonment Mike had sworn off bookmaking and returned to the purer business of running a scam, but the end result was the same. He got eighteen months in a federal penitentiary.

  MIKE SAID HE wanted to relate the details of his last con to me because Russ had been the guiding force behind it—because “I owe everything to Russ.” Being a kid and watching Russ play gin rummy for big money in the room behind the bowling alley in the late ’40s, cheating fearlessly, had been, for him, the equivalent of a college education. As he described those card games—the cigar smoke, the sweat and the booze, the guys in their suits with their ties shimmied loose, the heads of department stores and banks and factories drawn together by their common hankering for this ancient form of competition—I thought for the first time about the two sides to Russ’s career, which I had lumped together but suddenly realized were quite different. He had started out as a cheat then altered his course once Joe came to town and brought the mob franchise with him. Joe had given him
an unparalleled opportunity—I’m tempted to say an offer he couldn’t refuse—with the result that Russ became a kind of company man, a manager of an expanding enterprise. That came with all the pressures of any corporate position, in addition to those pressures that were unique to the rackets. I wondered if the shift into that line of work wasn’t what drove him to drink. If I thought through everything people had told me, it seemed he had been most in his element when he was a cheat, pure and simple.

  The package of skills that characterized a successful cheat—the poise, the coolness, the outrageous assumption of sincerity—was what had attracted and even moved Mike when, as an impressionable teen, he met Russ. And here was what seemed a true conundrum: These two men had become close because each had seen himself in the other. They forged a bond out of mutual respect and openness. They allowed themselves to be naked before the other, without artifice. And yet what led to that genuineness, what each saw inside the other and identified with, was an innate aptitude for deceit.

  It was as a kind of gentleman con artist that Mike chose to remember Russ. He really wanted me to appreciate that, to see it as a virtue. “Everybody thought Russ was a sonofabitch, but when he was cheatin’ he was slick as can be,” he said. “Those card games were big. He was playing with guys who ran companies. Some of the players were in the rackets—murderers, guys from out of town, guys you didn’t want to fuck with. It ain’t easy to con guys like that. But when Russ would go to get his card, he’d take three—right in front of you. You didn’t see it happen, and you didn’t see them extra cards in his hand. Then, the hand before he was going to knock, he’d get rid of them. He could make a deck of cards talk. I saw him beat a guy for $20,000 in a single game and the guy never had a clue.”