5

The Cheat

I ASSUME ANNAMARIA’S was a somewhat different journey from San Pier Niceto to the port at Messina. The transport would have been the same as when Antonino went, mule having been the standard means well into the 1950s. But I’m imagining that my great-grandmother made the trip alone, rounding the steep bends and trundling down toward the cobalt, salt-scented coast with some mixture of anxiety, panic, and excitement at the mad step she was taking. She had no family, after all. She must have had a confidante, for just as Antonino needed someone else to write his letters she needed someone to decipher them, but otherwise it was only the two of them in this scheme. Her ticket was paid for, by Antonino. He had sent her money for the voyage: $10. And he knew the drill at customs, so he must have instructed her on what to say to the American officials. She dutifully listed him as her contact in the United States, referred to him as her “cousin,” and gave his address, 244 Findley Street, Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, as her destination and new home. This was a carefully orchestrated coup, on his part a clear act of betrayal, on hers a lunge at a future.

A year later their first child was born. They called her Anna. They hadn’t married and never would—not surprising, considering that he already had a wife and they were both Catholic. But they began presenting themselves as husband and wife shortly after her arrival, and my family always assumed they were.

The next part of this sustained act of subterfuge came a few years later, when they left town. The coal mine had lifted both of them from poverty, but it was ruinous work. In Antonino’s first full year on the job, 2,232 miners died from mining accidents in the United States, which was only a fraction of the true toll. For untold thousands, work in the mines led to the black-lung cough; the sufferer filled handkerchiefs with what one writer dubbed “inky expectoration,” then weakened rapidly until “in the course of a few years, he sinks under the disease.”

The little family traveled sixty miles south to Johnstown. Where Punxsutawney had been all about coal, Johnstown was a steel town. And it was growing furiously. Two decades before they arrived, a visitor described it as “new, rough, and busy, with the rush of huge mills and factories and the throb of perpetually passing trains.” Just then it was having another growth spurt.

The town had come into being a century before as a hardscrabble coal and iron center, with mostly German and Welsh immigrants working small mines and foundries tucked into its wooded gullies.* A man named Daniel Morrell gave it trajectory when he arrived from Philadelphia to run the Cambria Iron Company in the 1850s. He was one of the first people in the world to take advantage of a new, dramatically more efficient, process for turning iron into steel, and by the end of the Civil War he had turned Johnstown into the steel-producing capital of the United States. Morrell was a benevolent dictator, who abhorred unions but believed in taking care of his workers as a father would his children. He gave the city its first hospital and library, and ran the town government, the department store, and the local bank. Despite Morrell’s anti-union policy there seems to have been little outward expression of grievance from workers, who under him had a better standard of living than they had ever known.

In the 1870s, while Antonino Sciotto was taking his first steps in the cobbled lanes of San Pier Niceto, a new generation of industrialists in Pittsburgh, seventy miles to the west, made a run at Morrell’s empire. Morrell dismissed the upstarts—who included Andrew Carnegie, Andrew Mellon, and Henry Clay Frick—as mere financiers rather than real steel men, but within a short time they made Johnstown subordinate to Pittsburgh. They also ushered in a newly confrontational relationship between factory owners and workers. And, almost as if they had wanted to fashion a symbol of their relationship to lowly workers, the Pittsburgh titans conceived of a fairy-tale recreation area for themselves and their families in the hills above Johnstown. They formed a social club, erected a seventy-two-foot-high dam near the town of South Fork, and diverted water to create a gravity-defying mountaintop lake. Each member of the club built a palatial “cottage” around the lake, where their families could spend summers away from the heat of the city. Visitors described it as like something out of a dream, with women twirling parasols while servants worked oars and sails, fancifully sailing boats on top of a mountain.

As this paradise was nearing completion the people of Johnstown became alarmed: the South Fork Dam stood just east of the city, and 450 feet above it. Everybody feared the spring floods, which roared with biblical ferocity down the steep slopes. Morrell sent his chief engineer to inspect the dam; he reported “serious elements of danger.” The lords of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club ignored complaints. In 1889 the dam burst, the water cascaded into the valley, and 2,209 people in Johnstown were killed, most within ten minutes.

The Johnstown Flood was the greatest natural disaster in U.S. history to that time. It focused national attention on the concept of disaster relief (Clara Barton spent five months in the city, with a team of fifty Red Cross doctors and nurses). And the flood washed away the idea of an industrial overlord as a benevolent father figure. Newspapers across the country delivered a unanimous verdict on its cause: “The Club Is Guilty” … “An Engineering Crime.” Rebuilding took years. U.S. Steel and Bethlehem Steel moved into town in the aftermath. The mills expanded and modernized, and the town grew, but so did the class divide and the mistrust.

The steel mills became the focus of everything. Johnstown was roaring like a beast—as were the other little cities encircling it: Altoona and Youngstown, Morgantown and Wheeling. As Antonino and Annamaria arrived the mills downtown were clanging and booming and grinding out their girders and sheets. There was hope here, and not just in income but quality of life: the mills were easier on the body than the mines were.

In making his decision to move, however, Antonino apparently hadn’t factored in discrimination. To the town’s original German and Welsh inhabitants, the newcomers who had been flooding in for the past several years were all “Huns” or “Hunkies,” whether they came from Hungary, Poland, or Italy. The caste system in early twentieth-century America put Italians’ status roughly on par with that of Blacks. At around the time of the family’s move, a native-born white man earned $14 a week, while the average Black man earned $10 per week. For southern Italian immigrants in the United States, the figure was closer to $9. Decent jobs in the mill weren’t generally open to Italians.

But maybe the couple zeroed in on Johnstown precisely for this reason. There was a strike on at the Bethlehem Steel plant around the time they arrived. Striking workers complained that the company had brought “a couple of car loads of Negroes and Italians into the plant.” Antonino was apparently one of these scabs. He worked in the mill’s car shop, painting railroad cars. Eventually, though, the strike ended, and he wound up back in a coal mine.

So no, the move did not bring about a better work life. Instead, the significance of relocating to Johnstown turned out to be in the evolution of identities. From now on their names would appear differently on official documents. In Johnstown, Antonino Sciotto and Annamaria Previte became Tony and Mary Shorto.† The change wasn’t just due to vague notions of Americanness, of making pronunciation easier, and of fitting in. It was also a way to distance themselves from the past, from the village in the hills of eastern Sicily, and Antonino’s wife.

Soon Annamaria—Mary—was pregnant again and Antonino—Tony—was making the first of several trips back to San Pier Niceto. His mother was still alive: I’m told by family members that he traveled back in part to see her. And since his original plan to seek work in America had been to help support his wife and their children, he would have to see Francesca on his return trips. Did he stay with her when he visited, as man and wife? Was he able to dupe them all into thinking that he was on his own in Pennsylvania?

It doesn’t seem likely. His Sicilian village was truly a village. Everyone had to know what he and the orphan girl had done, were doing. What kind of homecoming did he have? How did Francesca receive him? Shortly after he first left for America, in 1901, their second child, their daughter, had died, at the age of two. Did father and mother console each other on his return? Or did she refuse to see him?

I think not. One of his trips back was in 1908. In 1909, Francesca gave birth to a third child, and Tony Shorto—or rather, Antonino Sciotto—is listed on the birth certificate as the father. (In Pennsylvania, at the same time, Mary, his American “wife,” was pregnant with their third child.) If the married couple were on intimate terms seven or more years after he had first left for America, that suggests to me that he kept his ties to his wife in other ways. Surely he was helping her financially throughout this period. I’m not entirely sure why this mattered to me—maybe I was trying to find his internal logic, what he told himself about what he was doing, how he justified this complex life he had fashioned. This seems to me so much a part of the work in doing family history—or for that matter any narrative digging into the past: trying to suss out what was going on in heads that are long dead. Maybe this is one’s own ulterior motive. Consciousness, even one’s own, is such a tenuous and unfathomable thing; maybe we try to look into our predecessors’ to shore it up in ourselves.

But no sooner had I reached this conclusion about my great-grandfather—that he must have been taking care of families on both sides of the Atlantic—than I received a surprising email from Joe Ruggeri, my informant in the village:

Hi Russell,

This morning I went to the dentist and I met someone I knew as a child (he is a few years older). He knew Francesca Spadaro, the wife of your great grandfather. He did not provide child support. She supported herself and her two children by washing the clothes of the wealthier families in SPN. This involved getting up early in the morning a few days a week, collecting the dirty clothes, walking down one mile to the river with the clothes and a tin container and soap, washing the clothes on the canal that carried the water from one grist mill to another, and then carrying the partly wet (and heavier) clothes back up the hill. Have a nice weekend. Joe

If this is true, then the story—and my great-grandfather’s self-justification—becomes even more complicated. How could Antonino have returned to Sicily repeatedly, lived with his wife while there, fathered another child with her, yet not have supported her?

I can try to game out different scenarios, but at the bottom one has to resort to the truism that human beings are complex creatures, buffeted by circumstances, sometimes of their own devising, whose motivations can shift on a dime, then later shift again, and then again. I’m left to conclude nothing more than what the evidence suggests: that Tony Shorto returned to his ancestral village repeatedly to visit his mother and others close to him; that on at least one occasion he was intimate with the wife whom he was actively betraying; that, despite this fact, as of a certain point—perhaps later—he stopped sending her money; and that the center of his life, these trips aside, was in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.

There, he and Mary had three more children in the next four years—all girls, making for a total of five girls.

Then, in 1914, came their first son. They called him Rosario, after Mary’s father, but it quickly became Americanized to Russell, or Russ.‡

The family’s first home in Johnstown was on a street filled with Hungarians. Neither Tony nor Mary ever learned much English, let alone Hungarian. They moved to another neighborhood near one of the entrances of the mill, rented the house, and took in boarders: four Italian men, all of them working in the coal mines. Besides a couple of Irish families, they were now surrounded by Italians.

And this is how the next generation grew up: Anna, Perina, Angeline, Sarah, Carmella (who went by Millie), and their little brother, Rosario, or Russell. Later there would be three more: Anthony, Catherine, and Nancy. Nine Sicilian American children raised in a Sicilian-speaking household in a rough coal-and-steel ghetto, surrounded by the thick wilds of the Pennsylvania mountains, by the plumes of smoke and dust from the mills, and by the matter-of-fact prejudice of Americans, who were threatened by this sudden rush of southern Europeans, who felt themselves whiter, more entitled to the available jobs. For the children, there wasn’t an issue of this being unfair. It was the way the world worked; it was reality—not the American dream but American waking life.

Then their lives changed. In 1920, Tony got word that his mother was dying. He left Mary and the children at the train station in Johnstown (seven-year-old Millie, who was old enough to appreciate the gulf of time he would be gone, was crying her eyes out on the platform as he waved goodbye), made the familiar trip east across the state, boarded the ship, traversed the imponderable ocean, rode the mule shuttle back up the hill, and so came again into the twisty, medieval streets of San Pier Niceto. The story my dad’s aunts used to tell was that by the time he got there the crisis had passed: his mother had recovered her health.

I don’t know how long he stayed, but there was an air of celebration at his departure. It had been a number of years since his last visit, and much had changed. I gather he was feeling richer. He took some family members to Messina with him the evening before he was to leave. There was a nice dinner at a proper restaurant, something unheard-of among the generationally impoverished villagers. Tony Shorto, the American, who these days was known to sport a three-piece suit, starched collar, tie, and cuff links, wanted to dazzle the hill people he’d been born among—wanted, I guess, to show how much he had distanced himself from them.

The story of what happened next came to me from Cindy Shorto, my father’s cousin’s wife, who got it from my father’s aunts: “He was leaving, so he took everybody out to dinner. When it was time to pay, these two guys saw his money belt, how thick it was. Later they got hold of him and kicked and stabbed him. He lived for three weeks and then he died.” He was killed for his newfound wealth.

For all his American inclinations, then, Antonino Sciotto’s story would end in Sicily, violently and abruptly, at the age of forty-four. He left two families on two continents. A little irony to end this anecdote: his mother, whose impending death had precipitated his visit, lived on for years after.

Antonino Sciotto.

I imagine news of this magnitude would have been sent by cable, but that supposes that someone in the village knew that the orphan girl Annamaria Previte was living in Pennsylvania as Antonino’s wife and the mother of his children. So maybe not. Maybe it came slowly, haphazardly, eventually reaching her in her home on Church Avenue in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a whisper or a letter conveying the information that a brief act of violence on an island in the middle of the Mediterranean Ocean had transformed her world. There’s an odd story that has survived in my family, which holds that two men showed up at her home in Pennsylvania one day, presenting themselves as relatives of the person or persons who had killed her husband. The story goes that they had come to apologize. It’s strange enough that it might be true. Maybe they were the ones who broke the news to her that her husband was dead.

What could she do now? She was an unskilled mother of nine, alone in America, whose English was restricted to a few phrases (example: my father remembers her anger coming out in a homemade locution of “summon-a-bitch!”). She had her boarders, who provided a little income. She had her children, the oldest of whom, Anna and Perina, were fourteen and thirteen, respectively, and could work, probably already were working. She had also brought her Sicilian hill-country survival strategies with her. She had the children set traps around the yard for sparrows and robins, which she would fry up; she gathered dandelions and wild mushrooms from the woods.

Russ was six when his father died. His childhood would come to be governed by his mother’s peasant wisdom. If a cut became infected, she packed it with cow manure. Come down with intestinal pain and you received the bonus unpleasantness of an egg-white enema. The smallest of the children were sent off along the railroad tracks to gather chunks of coal that flew off the trains. When they got meat they ate the whole animal—brains, lungs. Mary herself hardened and toughened as time went by. She was known to open a bottle with her teeth.

The house was pretty rough too. Grandchildren who eventually came along remember it being infested with rats and cockroaches; she kept chickens in the backyard, a pig kept under the porch (which eventually grew so big they had to dismantle the porch to get it out) and a goat for milk in the basement. The goat surfaces in one of the family stories about the period, which people point to as an early indication of Russ’s resourcefulness. One of the girls was struck by appendicitis, which forced Mary to rush her to the hospital, leaving the other children alone. Soon the baby started crying in hunger. In her panic, Mary hadn’t thought of this. It was Russ who had the answer. He and his sisters descended to the basement, he held the goat’s hind legs, one of the girls introduced the baby to the teat, and the problem was solved.

DESPITE A WORLD of hardships, Mary had a sliver of luck in the timing of Antonino’s death, for it coincided with the start of Prohibition. The thumbnail understanding of Prohibition—the way I saw it until I began researching—holds that it was a movement in which militant church ladies pushed for a ban on alcohol in order to improve the morals of their menfolk. That notion turns out to be so simplistic as to be almost a lie.

Take a step back. What was America like in the 1920s? It was roaring, right? There was a party going on. Jazz, flappers, Hollywood: it was all new, all being invented, furious and delirious and sequined. Theaters, whose sculpted grandeur had been meant to evoke ancient Greece, were suddenly being repurposed, Vaudevillians shouldered aside by the jaw-dropping high tech of the moving picture. Babe Ruth was revolutionizing baseball, and there he was, ghostily inhabiting your local venue, the Sultan of Swat swinging for the fences in newsreel footage. People were going out and doing something crazy-new and liberating: buying themselves a car. Then thundering off under their own steam like lunatics across the landscape, racing and weaving and crashing and bursting into flames. And if they survived, doing it all over again. Radio, too, was relatively new—the eerie magic of being connected to a mass culture only really became a thing in the 1920s. I can imagine Russ and his siblings bending over a box to hear the reedy, hissy sounds of the world out there. And to those first listeners the buzzings and cracklings weren’t just interference but part of the experience, part of the deep interconnectedness, for you were swimming in the world of physics, surfing the electromagnetic waves along with the rest of humanity, all together in this act of discovery.

But while you are imagining America in the 1920s as this mass hoopla, you also have to picture the place seething with a hundred hatreds. Because this jazz party was being foisted onto a country that until a minute before had thought of itself as overwhelmingly and decisively comprised of white Christian farm folk. Think of the couple in “American Gothic” suddenly finding their pious little house on the prairie invaded by cocktail-swizzling Charleston enthusiasts. Great swarms of immigrants were pouring into the country’s ports; new fashions, technologies, and innovations were changing life at the speed of light. For many, it was too much. Someone had to pay.

In fact, researching Prohibition is like reading the backstory to recent history. Yes, per capita alcohol consumption in the early twentieth century was considerably higher than today: the nation had a drinking problem, and targeting it was a motivation for temperance leaders. But the ban was also in a very real sense an effort to preserve “American values” by lashing out at people who were seen as threatening. The targeted groups were basically two: urban elites and recent immigrants. White Americans throughout the country’s heartland were alarmed at the sudden influx of millions of immigrants, who were widely believed to be of a lower order of humanity, who were thought incapable of self-control and prone to violence and rape. That alcohol, which weakened morals, was important to their cultures—the Germans had their beer halls, the Italians their wine, the Irish their whiskey—was proof that the newcomers constituted an anti-American invasion. From the perspective of Prohibition leaders like Carrie Nation, who became famous for barging into saloons swinging a hatchet, America’s cities were filled with nightclubs where elites developed perversions like homosexuality, and with hordes of immigrants who got sozzled in beer halls then rampaged through the streets. Beneath Prohibition’s Christian morality flowed a current of racism. It wasn’t coincidental that one of the forces behind it was the Ku Klux Klan, or that the Klan—a post–Civil War phenomenon that had long since faded—reemerged as an element in American life right at the time Prohibition went into effect.

In Johnstown, Prohibition was presaged by a weeklong revival led by one of the nation’s leading temperance champions, a former baseball star for the Chicago White Stockings known as Billy Sunday. He had made a second career out of railing religiously against every human manifestation of wickedness: drinking, dancing, gambling, theatre, the teaching of evolution. (Baseball, however, was OK.) Groups like the Anti-Saloon League hadn’t yet made much of an impact in the town, perhaps due to its sizable immigrant population, but Mr. Sunday’s event (which began and ended on a Sunday) changed that. The newspaper reported that 24,500 people showed up on the first day alone. People must have come from miles around to take in the show, for total attendance for the week supposedly topped half a million, in a town whose population was less than 60,000. And it was an all-out spectacle. Sunday’s performance was built around his athleticism. He writhed and flung himself across the stage, executing a kind of three-act battle with Satan for his own soul and the eternal salvation of those watching in stunned attention.

After Sunday wrapped things up with a parade down Main Street, the newspaper chronicled the change: “One week of Billy Sunday and the old town has been turned topsy-turvy.” Prohibition became wildly popular among the city’s white Protestant majority. Many of the leading citizens—the mayor, city councilmen, the heads of the Cambria Steel Company—jumped on the bandwagon.

Italians and other minorities pushed back. Western Pennsylvania had become known as “the wettest spot in the United States,” in part because of the concentration of minorities whose cultures involved alcohol—and this in turn probably led a couple of decades later to the particularly strong small-town mob presence in the same part of the country. The tension between them and the white Protestants increased. Many of the town’s able-bodied white men had been shipped overseas to fight in the World War, and Cambria Steel began recruiting Black replacements from the South. As had happened ten years earlier, when Tony and Mary Shorto arrived during a strike and Tony got work for a time in the mill, white workers railed against Blacks and, as they said, other “undesirables” taking their jobs.

Anger led to action. By January 1922 “a large class of prominent men in town” had joined the Ku Klux Klan, according to the newspaper. Soon after, the Klan staged a series of publicity stunts around town. After giving advance notice so as to gather a crowd, a group of men in white robes with hoods would file into a public building, such as the YWCA on Somerset Street, as if for a business meeting. They handed the clerk behind the desk literature describing their aims, as well as an envelope containing cash, in an effort to build goodwill.

The Klan in Johnstown seems to have had about 1,700 members at its height—a large number for a small city, surely because of the presence of industry and thus the threatening influx of immigrants and Blacks. The Klan was anti-Black, of course, but more to the point Klansmen considered themselves “pro-American,” meaning in favor of a white Protestant vision of America. According to KKK logic, only that slice of the racio-religio-ethnic pie could be considered as comprising the true descendants of the pioneers who had wobbled across the continent in their Conestoga wagons. Some of Johnstown’s leading citizens fell in with Klan teaching, believing that they and their fellow white-robed ones were pure stock, “the vanishing Americans,” being drowned in a sea of newcomers. Immigration was making the country, in the stirring words of William Joseph Simmons, the Grand Wizard who had resurrected the Klan in 1915, “a garbage can.”

Italians in town felt the rush of WASP purity like a slap and wanted to slap back. One of my elderly informants, relying on his father’s recollections, described the mood and the bitter logic in the Italian community: “Back then the people who ran the town would say, ‘My ancestors were on the Mayflower with the Pilgrims.’ And my dad would say, ‘Oh yeah? Well, who the fuck were the Pilgrims? Thieves, jailbreakers, and whores. And England put them on a boat and shipped them here. So the fuck what?’ ”

The nativist wave reached a haunting crest in Johnstown in August 1923. Newspapers as far away as Indianapolis reported on a lurid spectacle in the little steel town in western Pennsylvania. The ethnic mix of working-class folk whose homes were nestled in the town’s valleys gazed up in silent wonder one warm evening as, in the words of the mayor, Joseph Cauffiel, “No less than a dozen flaming crosses were burned on the hilltops around the city.” White-robed men with their faces hooded flanked the crosses like sentries. The mayor was horrified at the spectacle and the violence that erupted in the following days, in which two policemen were killed, and acted promptly. He did not, however, take the step of seeking out the identities of the hooded intimidators, but rather ordered a mass removal of “all negroes who have resided in that city for less than seven years,” which he said was for their own protection.

Blacks weren’t the only targets. The building resentment toward Italian immigrants was sharpened in 1920, just as Prohibition went into force, when two Italians, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, were accused of murdering two security guards in a botched robbery in Massachusetts. The story riveted the nation, and the trial of Sacco and Vanzetti became a fault line separating two Americas: one that feared the changes that had swept in, the other that wanted to find ways to make immigrants into Americans and help the country to adapt to the modern world.

Those in the first camp saw Sacco and Vanzetti as representatives of their “race”: murderous, addicted to alcohol, unable to control themselves, and above all vehicles by which the dreaded Catholic Church was infiltrating the body politic. Klan leader Hiram Evans characterized the view with language that was almost contractual. Catholics had to be opposed because the Church was “fundamentally and irredeemably, in its leadership, in politics, in thought, and largely in membership, actually and actively alien, un-American, and usually anti-American.”

You don’t read much about the KKK in accounts of how the mob got its start during Prohibition. I think that may be because most such accounts focus on the big cities, and the Klan had the greatest impact in smaller places like Johnstown. But its fury was bound up with, and became part of the force behind, the passage of the Volstead Act, which outlawed intoxicating beverages. The law went into effect in January 1920. Johnstown had six very active breweries. Like others all over the country, they halted production.

Has there ever been another law that generated such a tidal wave of unintended consequences? The Volstead Act created a nation of lawbreakers. Speakeasies sprang up in cities around the country. Doctors essentially became bartenders, prescribing whiskey to treat medical conditions. Most consequentially, Prohibition ushered in the era of organized crime. It gave Italian immigrants in particular—who had been marginalized by native-born white Americans, pushed into the lowest and most dangerous jobs, humiliated—a new role, one of power and respect.

Somehow I had gotten through life without ever reading a textbook on “organized crime,” which turns out to be a surprisingly loaded concept. Digging into my grandfather’s story meant trying to understand what the mafia was. The obvious path to studying the mafia—the one I traveled down first—involves looking into its beginnings in Sicily, how it was tied into the island’s twisted history, and how it made the jump to America. But the less obvious line of research takes you to places you never thought to associate directly with the likes of Lucky Luciano.

The standard textbook on the subject, Organized Crime, by Howard Abadinsky, begins its historical analysis with, of all things, a section devoted to the careers of John Jacob Astor, Cornelius Vanderbilt, and John D. Rockefeller. What could the legendary founders of modern American capitalism have to do with the mob? Those men have been dubbed robber barons for a reason. With their “rampant—that is, uncontrolled—capitalism,” Abadinsky explains, which involved violence, fraud, bribery, and intimidation on a national and sometimes global scale, these men not only built empires so colossal they became too big to fail, they provided striving newcomers models for success American-style.

Vanderbilt manipulated entire Central American nations, the U.S. State Department, and the Marine Corps to get his way in shipping. Astor built his fur empire by systematically swindling native Americans, and got rich as well as by smuggling opium. And they were not imprisoned for crimes but lionized as the great visionary leaders of their day. They defined American success. As Abadinsky says, “While contemporary organized crime has its roots in Prohibition, unscrupulous American business entrepreneurs, such as Astor, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Drew, Gould, Sage, Rockefeller, Stanford and Morgan, provided role models and created a climate conducive to its growth.”§

Imagine yourself one of the turn-of-the-century immigrants who arrived in vast numbers while these titans of industry were having their way with the continent, its natural resources, the American people, and the nation’s laws. You sweated in your lowly job and came home after twelve or fifteen hours of work to your family huddled in a cheap cold-water flat while the great men built castles for themselves. But you didn’t begrudge them—you admired them. They were showing the way things were done. In the land of opportunity, you saw, the idea was to take what you could get. Those striving newcomers kept their eyes open for a rung, a way up.

Prohibition provided it. Suddenly there was a runaway consumer demand—on every block of every street in every town—waiting to be filled. The illegality of the product must have seemed charming to recent immigrants. It was like declaring it against the law to breathe oxygen. Everyone knew that people were going to continue to drink. But astoundingly, the Volstead Act hamstrung the entire industry involved in the production and sale of alcohol, leaving the field wide open.

The term “organized crime,” I learned, came into being in part as a way to use ethnicity as a dividing line. The Irish, Jewish, and Italian mobs that grew up around the business of providing alcohol during Prohibition, and the American mafia that was weaned to maturity on it, were not so different in their tactics from Astor and Vanderbilt. But the label put them in a different category. There’s a suggestion, among scholars of the field, that, as with the impetus behind Prohibition, the concept itself was a kind of official complement to the uncouth work of the KKK—it was invented as a way to separate “real” Americans from the ethnic gangs of newcomers.

SO THEN, RUSS SHORTO, my grandfather, enters the scene here, in the same way that thousands of others did. “This is where they lived. Uncle Tribby, my parents. All those families packed into one house. Animals in the backyard. The pig under the porch.” I’m sitting with my parents in the car outside a row of houses on a steep hill in the Conemaugh Borough section of Johnstown. My dad is riffling through memories, his own colliding with things his parents told him about life here before he was born; it’s a four-generation pileup of ruminations. “Baba had a still down there. That’s how she supported the family.”

I’d heard before how Russ’s mother—my dad’s grandmother—operated a still in the basement. Mary, recently widowed, grieving and in need of money to support her brood—would fill empty Coke bottles with booze, stopper them with corks, and send the older kids out to the mill entrance to sell them.

Russ was six when Prohibition began, and nineteen when it ended. He was the oldest boy, the man of the house. He dropped out of school in the eighth grade. His real education, his chance at success, at a life different from what his father had been able to achieve in America, came thanks to the country’s alcohol ban, which was rooted in the seemingly eternal battle over American identity.

I don’t think my great-grandmother’s basement still was her own idea and execution. For one thing, her situation matches closely with what was going on elsewhere in the country. Bootlegging gangs sprang up everywhere. The commonest way for gang leaders to get product was to pay people to set up stills in their homes, and a goodly number of the operators were women, typically single mothers desperate for income. In a study of female bootleggers during Prohibition in New Orleans, for instance, Tanya Marie Sanchez found that

most alleged bootleggers were between the ages of thirty and forty. Most were widowed, divorced, or separated from their husbands, who were usually stevedores, laborers, or grocers. Female bootleggers were almost always mothers, who were often burdened with numerous children. A surname analysis of alleged bootleggers indicates that most of the women were of immigrant stock, usually of Irish, Italian, Spanish, or Jewish ancestry, and most resided downtown, in working-class neighborhoods.

All of this fits Mary Shorto to a tee. So do the rationales that Sanchez identifies:

For working-class mothers, bootlegging was both a convenient and lucrative method of supplementing meager family incomes. The production of alcoholic beverages was easily done in the home, for food and beverage preparation were traditional female domestic activities. Bootlegging also allowed mothers to earn money while remaining near their children. Although their activities put their children in proximity to alcohol, this posed no great moral dilemma for most female bootleggers, who appear to have been immigrants or children of immigrants whose cultures embraced a positive view of alcohol. For many white ethnic mothers, the making and selling of alcohol was both culturally acceptable and economically necessary.

The reason I don’t think Mary was alone in operating her still is that it was precisely around this sort of activity that Italian men of a certain stripe, in cities large and small, formed the groups that would evolve into the American mafia. And one such man appears on the scene at this time in Johnstown. His name was Philip Verone. When I say he appeared on the scene I don’t mean that he was a romantic interest of Mary’s. She had already taken care of that. Not too long after Antonino’s death she had done the practical thing and gotten herself remarried, to one of her Italian boarders, a man named Anthony Tucci, whom everyone called Tork.

Or rather, my family had always assumed they married. I was mildly perplexed that I couldn’t find marriage license on file for them when I began my family research. Later, however, a genealogist named Julie Pitrone Williamson, who had assisted me with earlier puzzles, emailed me out of the blue with information she had found proving that, just like my great-grandfather, Anthony Tucci had had a wife and child in Italy whom he had left behind when he emigrated to work in America. Mary’s luck, it seems, was to be the second “wife” of not one but two two-timers. Which makes me wonder how prevalent this sort of thing was among those Italian immigrant men.

This second husband, Tork, was even rougher than she was. “He was like a wild man,” said Eugene Trio, one of his step-grandchildren, “built like a boar, with thick fingernails. He could carry a hundred-pound sack like it was nothing. He didn’t wash too often.” The wildness doesn’t seem to have bothered Mary unduly; her last child, Nancy, was with Tork. And there are reflections among Mary’s grandchildren that suggest that Tork and Mary settled into a comfortable companionship—people recall them sitting on porch of an evening, Tork wearing a straw hat, passing a jug of wine back and forth, no fussing with glasses for them.

But there aren’t many indications that Tork provided what you would call a father figure for Russ, who would have sorely needed one. This is where Philip Verone came in. “The same guy who taught me taught your grandfather,” one of my oldest informants told me early in my research. “His name was Verone. And he was a black-hander.”

“Black Hand” is a kind of catch-all term that has been used to refer to the pre-mafia in the United States. The first appearance of it in print was in 1903, when the New York Herald published the story of a wealthy Italian contractor who had received a letter threatening to dynamite his house if he didn’t pay $10,000. It was signed Mano Nera. Shortly after, the New York Times was reporting on the “Black Hand Society” as a loose gang of blackmailers, which preyed mostly on other Italian immigrants.

The old boys in Johnstown had a slightly different take on the term. To them “black-handers” were certain men of the generation that came of age in the first two or three decades of the twentieth century. Some extorted other Italians, but others were seen as protectors of the community, who led the way through the ethnic thicket of a gritty and growing small city. The local leader was a man named Siciliano. His number two was Philip Verone.

As to what these men did, you might say that, with Italians squeezed into narrow economic corners, the black-handers looked for opportunities. Prohibition, and the instantaneous and exuberant demand for alcohol that came with it, was the chance of a lifetime. The network of stills cooking home-brewed spirits blossomed seemingly overnight—“Fumes of boiling mash filled the air,” went one description. Ten months after Prohibition went into effect, the Johnstown Tribune reported that “ ‘runners’ for various ‘big fellows’ are peddling the stuff openly.” I read that and see Russ and his sisters in Conemaugh Borough, literally between Coal Street and Steel Street, peddling their Coke bottles full of fire water, working for Mr. Verone.

The threat of being caught appears to have been modest. The mayor, Joseph Cauffiel, worked to block the sale of alcohol, but he had such an uphill struggle the accounts read like comedy. It wasn’t unheard-of for him to hire a “special policeman” to inspect bars and cafés then later, as head of police court, find the same man brought before him following his inspection rounds, charged with drunkenness.

Yet there were crackdowns. In Mary Shorto’s house, the kids were trained to roll the barrels out of sight if someone thought a cop was coming to the door. Once, they weren’t in time; she was caught, convicted, and sent to the Cambria County Jail for six months. “Aunt Millie told me the kids were by themselves that whole time and they were so scared,” Cindy Shorto said.

Russ therefore grew up under the cope of Prohibition justice. As a boy he learned what many never do their whole lives: that while the system appears rigid it is actually a highly fungible thing; that it’s possible for a tough-enough guy to leverage guts and power and recast it according to his will. The most resonant struggle in the town during those years was between Mayor Cauffiel and a burly tavern owner named Dan Shields. Shields kept his bar open despite the ban on selling alcohol, ostensibly restricting himself to coffee and sarsaparilla, but in fact he was a flagrant flouter of the Prohibition law, and Cauffiel had him in his sights. The mayor gathered evidence that Shields was selling alcohol and charged him, following the lingo of the local ordinance, with operating a “tippling house.” At first Shields failed to show up in court. When he was forced to, he gave as his defense that he didn’t know the meaning of the verb “to tipple.” The two met several times in court, each more heated. On one occasion Shields challenged the mayor to “meet me out in the woods.”

The feud widened. Shields had not only broad shoulders but wide-ranging aspirations—in real estate and politics. One of his properties had been a brewery; he had sold it, but Cauffiel apparently discovered that it was still producing beer—29,000 gallons of it since Prohibition had taken effect. Shields was held to be still involved in the business and was charged with violating the Volstead Act as well as with bribery for paying off the police and sending money and gifts (chocolates and flowers) to a female federal officer. He was found guilty, appealed, and the case eventually went to the U.S. Supreme Court, where William Howard Taft, the chief justice (and former president of the United States) dismissed the ruling on a technicality. On retrial Shields was found guilty again and ordered to serve two years in prison. But he called on connections in Washington and managed to have President Herbert Hoover commute his sentence. He served no jail time, continued his confrontational relationship with the city government, and rose to greater heights, unveiling an innovative new building in downtown Johnstown: an office and entertainment complex called the Capitol Building, with a splashy automobile showroom on the ground floor.

Shields’s fiery relationship continued with the next mayor, Eddie McCloskey, Shields once accused him of lying at a city council meeting. “Nobody calls me a liar and gets away with it!” McCloskey replied. The two men fell on each other, and Shields landed several punches on the mayor’s head before the police pulled him off. Despite collaring Shields, they had to be impressed by his pugilism: McCloskey was a former prizefighter.

Shields’s battles with the city government carried on over the whole of the 1920s and into the 1930s, culminating with him becoming mayor in 1936, and provided a local counterpoint to the robber-baron activities of previous decades—provided a model, that is, to Johnstown’s Italian bootleggers of how to work the system. You make connections. You bribe. You use guile. And if need be, you knock heads.

HERE, MAYBE, I begin to make some headway with Russ. At some point in his teens he caught the eye of the black-hander Mr. Verone. This Verone was a very short man, and a tough one, the kind who sees himself as a neighborhood protector. Maybe Russ showed some smarts to Mr. Verone in calculating what his family had taken in over a given week on bootlegged booze and what the gang owed them. Maybe Verone also singled him out because of his status as the oldest male in his family: he knew the kid would need a leg up in the world. Or maybe Russ took the initiative: feeling the lack of a strong father figure, desperate to get ahead, he offered himself to Verone. However it happened, the boy went into training.

Gambling was going to be the next big venture. It was already booming. Gambling was like alcohol under Prohibition. It was illegal but everybody did it. There was an endless market for it. And as the gang moved from booze to gambling, it took on an increasingly ethnic character. There was an unspoken subtext to the training: Italians couldn’t expect much in the way of respect or opportunities in WASP-ruled America, so they had to carve their own path. I don’t have a recording of those training sessions, but I have the memory of someone else who, several years later, was also trained by Verone. This man—I’ll introduce him shortly—would become Russ’s protégé.

Verone taught Russ cards. How to gamble, what the odds were on getting a flush or two pair, when to fold. But not just that. Getting ahead in an unfair world meant you had to improve the odds. Tony remembers being a boy watching his father at the dining-room table practice for hours at dealing the second card without the sleight-of-hand being noticed. Like an athlete, he had a regular warm-up routine before a big game.

Verone also taught Russ a new word: “skeech.” Maybe it was of Italian origin—schiacciare, to squeeze. It meant to cheat at dice. Not by loading them. You had to be able to do it with normal, unadulterated dice. Here’s how Russ’s protégé characterized the teaching:

“Philip Verone was the best dice man I ever met in my life. He had me practice and practice and practice. I could get a pair of dice and I could skeech ’em. I could roll a two—two aces—when I wanted. I could throw anything I wanted. After I was taught that, he says, ‘Now I’m gonna give you the hard part.’ He had a banking board, like they have in Vegas. Now he says, you gotta learn to do exactly what you been doing, but with that banking board. And man did I fuck up. But he taught me. You do this and you do that and you do this. But you don’t do that! He taught me right from wrong when it came to dice. That was his specialty.”

In December 1933, Pennsylvania became one of the last three states to ratify the Twenty-First Amendment to the Constitution, which repealed the Eighteenth Amendment and allowed the whiskey to start flowing again. Three years before, a movie called Chasing Rainbows had hit theaters—smarmy and lackluster, but with two memorable features. One was a sequence in color, which made audiences gasp. The other was the song that ended the film: “Happy Days Are Here Again.” It had been a hit then; now, three years later, it became a kind of national anthem. In Johnstown as elsewhere, the party spilled into the streets; people cheered passing beer trucks as if they were carrying President Roosevelt himself (who had been elected in part for championing repeal).

But the darkness that had precipitated the ending of Prohibition—the Great Depression—didn’t go away. A major impetus behind repeal, besides the demand for alcohol, had been the jolt to the economy that would come with reopened distilleries and breweries: half a million new jobs, millions in revenue for the depleted Treasury. Four years on, with unemployment hovering around 25 percent, the Depression was as devastating in Johnstown as other places. Yet it was a boon to the new industry that Russ had hitched himself to. When you’re down and out, do you not crave all the more the thrill of hope that gambling brings?

So Russ’s character was formed by Prohibition. And by the time he was nineteen he felt he was ready. Verone had taught him well. And not just in the technical and mechanical stuff, the use of the wrist and fingers to control the dice. He had given him something else, or helped tease it out of him.

And here I do feel that I’ve got my finger on something elemental about my subject. A philosophy. It was distilled from the hard life in the Sicilian mountains, a life of which Russ himself had no direct experience but whose lessons had been pressed into him by the ghostly presence of his father and further kneaded by his omnipresent mother. It was buffed by the flinty prejudice that ruled America’s towns, large and small. And it flourished in the encouraging climate of early twentieth-century American business, of capitalism in the raw. You figured out what people wanted and you gave it to them—or better yet you pretended to. You perfected a craft: of seeming to fulfill their need. It was a wisdom that characterized a profession that spans every nation, era, and background but became something of a hallmark of this period of American history. The cheat. That defines my subject, as well as any pat term could. Russ was a cheat.

____________

* Actually, there had been two earlier iterations. A group of Delaware Indians called the Conemack had had a village at the confluence of the two rivers that would form the northern tip of downtown. The first European settlement came when an Amish farmer named Schantz arrived in the valley with his family and set up a farm, betting on establishing a town that would become the county seat. When it was passed over, he upped stakes. Nevertheless, his name, Anglicized, would become the town’s.

† The actual change of the last name probably came compliments of a census taker or town clerk or some other official. If an illiterate, non-English-speaking Italian pronounces “Sciotto,” an American ear would hear it as something very like “Shorto.”

‡ Regarding Sicilian naming patterns: tradition dictated—and still dictates—that a couple name their first boy after the father’s father and their first girl after the father’s mother. I knew this long ago, and thought it strange that Antonino’s first son, my grandfather, was not named after the paternal grandfather, Santi. This was my first hint that the whispered story in my family—that Antonino had another family in Sicily—might be true. In fact, Antonino’s first son was the child he had with his wife, Francesca, in Sicily, whom they did indeed name Santi. Again following the Sicilian naming practice, the second son would have been named after the mother’s father. This relative was named Rosario. Hence, my grandfather was named Rosario, which became Americanized to Russell. I likewise was named after him. Russ, meanwhile, named his first son after Antonino.

§ While some of the more ruthless features of nineteenth-century capitalism were later blunted by laws, Michael Woodiwiss, another author on the history of organized crime, asserts that the business culture these men established continues in America’s largest corporations to this day, giving them the power to defraud the public in everything from drug policy to environmental regulations, to the point where “much of [the nation’s] business activity can be defined as simple racketeering.”