RUSS AND MARY’S first child, born three days after Christmas in 1938, was a boy. Russ might have considered himself fully American, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t also honor Sicilian tradition and his own (distant) memory of his father—Antonino, the immigrant, who had died when he was six—by naming the boy after him. Tony’s earliest memories were of life during wartime. The little family was living in Franklin Borough, two miles from downtown Johnstown and one steep block up the hill from the Franklin mill gate. My dad and I sat there idling in the car one afternoon about seventy-five years after the fact as he recounted what might have been his earliest memory: walking down the precipitously sloping street in winter, his mother holding his hand in one of hers and carrying a black metal lunch pail in the other. They were on their daily mission, to deliver Russ his lunch. Where all the other mill workers brought sandwiches with them at the start of their shift, Mary delivered Russ a hot meal. “She’d pile spaghetti in one side, and there’d be something like a breaded pork chop, and a salad,” another family member told me. “The other workers couldn’t get over it.”
Tony remembered this particular day because of what happened: Mary slipped on the ice and they both went careering down the hill. They slid all the way to where the guard was stationed, by the gate. (The fact that the town’s steel plants had armed guards spoke to their importance. Fiorello La Guardia, New York’s mayor, who served during the war as director of civil defense, said as much to a reporter when he was in town in 1942: “The Germans are pretty aware of Johnstown and its steel mills. It would probably be one of the central targets in an attack.”)
The war years were a bad time to start a new venture. Everyone had a job, but there wasn’t much to buy. Everything from meat to sugar to gasoline to alcohol was being rationed. No new cars were being produced; if you drove your car for anything but work or medical reasons, you got fined. All new construction was halted.
But Joe and Russ had ideas. Before Joe headed off for basic training in Louisiana they made an investment in the future. As I say, I believe Joe modeled the small-town mob setup they eventually created on that of John Avena’s Philadelphia operation. Most of those features were part of the general mob template, but Joe copied something else that was particular to Avena. Avena was big on having a legitimate business as a front, and his, at the intersection of Twelfth and Webster Streets in Philadelphia, was a cigar store. Just before Joe headed for Louisiana, he and Russ opened a business on Main Street in Johnstown, two doors from city hall. They called it City Cigar. It was right there in the open, right in the middle of town, and it was going to be the center of everything.
They brought in a partner on City Cigar. John Strank was Czech, not Italian, but he was a good friend and he came with advantages. He was a neighbor of Russ and Mary’s in Franklin. In his youth he had been imprisoned for robbery; it’s possible either Russ or Joe did time with him in the Pennsylvania Industrial Reformatory in Huntingdon. Both men knew him well and trusted him. And there was something more. In the years following his youthful indiscretion Strank had joined the police force, and rose to become chief of police of the little borough of Franklin. As such, he knew everyone on the Johnstown police force. That would be useful.
They rode out the war in this fashion. Joe was away in the service for a couple of years (at the military base down South—he never saw action), then back just as the war ended. Russ stayed employed at the mill and worked part-time at the cigar store, which really was a cigar store at first, to which they slowly added nine pool tables in the vast room in the rear, with one billiards table front and center. Strank, a tall, lumbering man with a kindly face, oversaw the place.
A lot of their friends were overseas, fighting in Europe or the Pacific. One day the hard news came in that John Strank’s nephew Michael, who was five years younger than Russ and had grown up with him in Franklin, had been killed in action on a little island in the Pacific called Iwo Jima. At about the same time a photo appeared in the paper showing six Marines raising an American flag on a mountaintop on the island. It was Mike’s company in the picture—that was him in the middle of the group, hands gripping the flagpole. He’d been the sergeant tasked with planting the flag, the leader of the squadron, and now he was part of this new symbol of American pride. He died a week later on the island. The guys at City Cigar were sad and at the same time proud as hell: would-be mobsters with a hero in the family. For the rest of their lives, as that photo went around and around the world and became perhaps the most iconic image of the whole war, they would talk reverently about Mike’s achievement.
Less than three months later the Johnstown Tribune ran the largest, inkiest headline of its history: V-E DAY PROCLAIMED. People were happy that fighting was over in Europe, but the mood was oddly subdued—after all, local boys were still dying in the Pacific. By contrast, on August 13, V-J Day, when victory over Japan became official, downtown erupted in a madhouse of confetti and honking horns. Picture red-white-and-blue bunting, streamers shimmering down from rooftops. Picture Russ standing outside City Cigar, cigarette dangling from his lips and hands in his pockets, as thousands of people lined the sidewalk on Main Street, men in their baggy pants, jacketless in the heat, women in summer dresses, standing in the bright sunlight cheering at the marching bands and horse-drawn wagons separated by boxy DeSotos, Packards, and Pontiacs.
Tony was there, too, a few blocks away, age six, holding his mother’s hand, gawping. Afterward, a big treat, they walked to the restaurant where Mary worked and he was allowed to order an open-faced sandwich.
I feel like these were pretty good times in that family of three. Russ, just past thirty, was feeling strong, like he was getting a foothold. He was still behaving himself at this point, as far as I can tell. He and Mary loved each other in the way that results when there’s a strong physical attraction combined with genuine admiration of the other person’s most prominent traits. She had squinty eyes; he called her Chinky. He meant it affectionately. She may not have told Russ yet as she sat watching Tony eat his celebratory meal, but Chinky was nearly two months pregnant with their second child.
Other elements in Russ’s world were growing too. He began the gambling operation out of City Cigar almost immediately after President Truman announced the end of fighting in Europe, even before Joe got back to town. And as was happening in other small cities around the country, he started making payoffs to local officials around the same time. Russ and Joe were lucky in that they began their enterprise at a time when the municipal government was weakening. In the earlier part of the century Johnstown’s mayor and council had been activists, laying out and then putting into effect large civic-improvement projects: building an airport, new schools, and a sports stadium. Since the Depression, local leaders had shifted into a laissez-faire mode of governing, doing little more than collecting taxes and providing basic services. Without a proactive system of oversight, officials had latitude to define their jobs, and to profit from them, as they saw fit.
The first mayor elected in the postwar period was from an old Johnstown family and had been educated at no less a place than the Wharton School before coming back home to enter politics. He was affable, cultured, smart, but he had his predilections. Ned Rose—people called him Red Nose because of his taste for strong spirits—became a regular at City Cigar, walking the thirty or forty paces from his office at city hall for a chat or a game of cards, and presumably left with an envelope in his pocket.
Despite a general feeling of relief that the war was over, it was a hectic and confused time in Johnstown, as in the country as a whole. No one knew what to expect in the near future, for nobody had been through anything like the circumstances of the past several years. Troops were streaming back home even as other men were signing up and leaving town for military stints. Some factories went out of business. The Sylvania plant, in which 850 workers made radar equipment and components for antiaircraft shells for the army, closed down the minute the war ended.
But after a period of adjustment Johnstown, along with other manufacturing centers in the region, from Cumberland, Maryland, to Wheeling, West Virginia, shifted onto an upward trajectory. Cambria County was a place where people made things, hard things, and that output—bricks, ceramics, radiators, sheet metal—was in greater demand than ever before. A year after the war’s end Bethlehem Steel, now the biggest employer in town, poured more than $100 million into modernizing its Johnstown facility.
Russ and Joe were investing in their business as well. But there were kinks to be worked out. On June 2, 1945, three weeks after VE Day, with downtown still glowing in the expectation that all fighting would soon be over and as City Cigar was alive with the clack of balls, crowded with bettors and pool players, a familiar, hulking form darkened the doorway. Detective Carroll strutted in, holding aloft a search warrant in which he had earlier asserted to the presiding alderman that he had “reasonable cause to believe and he verily does believe that gambling equipment is illegally possessed and used and gambling is permitted at the City Cigar Store at 411 Main St, in the City of Johnstown, Cambria County, Pennsylvania, all of which is contrary to the Act of Assembly, and all of which your affiant expects to be able to prove.” He inspected the premises, saw what he expected to see, collared Russ, and brought him in.
Russ hadn’t perfected the payoff system, apparently. Detective Carroll surely knew what was afoot, but he was determined that the rule of law would prevail. He busted Russ five times at City Cigar between June 1945 and September 1946.
Then something changed in the two-man power struggle. Someone above him either explained things to Detective Carroll or had him transferred. Russ was never arrested again. The organization was in place.
LATE 1945. RUSS is walking down the street in Conemaugh Borough when he passes a group of guys shooting craps against the side of a building. Something about the kid with the dice makes him stop. Russ had a wry little twist of a smile he would whip out when something interested him. He looks down at the kid. I know who taught you. They start talking. The kid acknowledges that, yes, Philip Verone, the same diminutive black-hander who taught Russ how to skeech, was his mentor.
What’s your name?
Mike Gulino.
Russ’s eyebrows shoot up. The coal kid?
Everybody in town knew the coal story. The backdrop to it was a massive strike in 1937 involving coal miners, workers on the rail lines that supplied coal to the steel mills, and the mill workers. As such groups of workers nationally came to realize they were allies in a struggle against rapacious industrialists, and began to unionize, the mill and mine owners in Cambria County resisted forcefully. There were confrontations in front of the mill gate that summer, and a near riot downtown that included cars overturned, organized brick attacks, and a young scab being stripped naked by the strikers and paraded through the streets. A rumor went around that forty thousand coal miners from all around western Pennsylvania were going to invade Johnstown. Governor George Earle declared martial law and sent in the state police; on top of which three hundred and fifty “special deputies” were appointed, each receiving a helmet and a stick. With industry leaders calling the strikers things like “racketeers” and “Communists,” it was a serious-enough instance of class warfare to make the New York Times.
Eventually the strike ended, but the situation remained tense over the next couple of years. The big newspapers proclaimed that the Depression was over, but nobody in neighborhoods like Woodvale and Conemaugh noticed. People were still struggling in the most basic ways—with hunger and cold. And every afternoon, at about four o’clock, a big old train loaded with coal trundled right past people’s houses and came to a stop inside the Bethlehem Steel plant. Sure, they needed it to make steel, but what about basic human existence? The animosity, the class tension between hordes of impoverished locals and the men who ran the big steel and coal companies, had hardened. One winter day a gang of men—Italian, Black, Mexican—doused the railroad ties with gasoline and ignited it as the train was approaching. As it came screeching to a halt they rushed out, opened the hoppers, and half the neighborhood emerged from the alley behind Maple Avenue with buckets, tubs, anything that would hold coal to warm their homes.
The next day there was a knock on the door of the house of Mr. and Mrs. Gulino in Conemaugh. Mr. Esposito, who acted as the neighborhood MD despite his lack of formal medical training, asked to see their son, Mike. Jack Ragno wants to talk to you. Jack Ragno was the top black-hander in the area—in other words, the community leader. Mike was scared—lighting a fire on the tracks had been his idea—but he went to see him. Ragno was an old man who only spoke Sicilian, but Mike had grown up with the language. I like what you did. Mike shook his head: I didn’t do nothin’. Ragno grinned. Listen, the railroad cops are lookin’ for you. They don’t know it’s a kid that was behind the business with the coal. But I put the word out: nobody talks. Then the old man changed the subject: I understand you like gambling.
Jack Ragno figured he’d help the kid, give him a leg up. He sent him to Philip Verone, the same man who, eight years before, had taught Russ. Verone taught him to skeech dice. Once Mike was able to throw a seven or a pair of sixes at will, Verone introduced a banking board, complicating the throw, and they started all over again. Then Ragno sent him to study cards with a guy in Hornerstown. He was still in his teens, but he was already a pro.
Russ took an immediate liking to the kid. Russ was building something; he could use an assistant. Plus, while he knew half the town, all his friends were adults. He must have figured it would be handy to have somebody in touch with the younger crowd. In a short time, he formed a strong bond with Mike Gulino, stronger than he ever had with any of his three children.
The recurring theme of my early research into Russ and his world, the thing that stumped me, was the imponderability of my subject. All the early stories I’d culled featured him prominently but as an opaque center. I couldn’t get a fix on him. Taking a historical approach, backing up to his parents and their migration to America, filling in the background, had yielded some fruit. I was developing a bit of … sympathy for the guy. But I couldn’t say I felt I knew who he was—or that anyone I’d talked to who had known him knew who he was.
I was still meeting regularly with Frank Filia, my mother’s cousin, who had pushed me onto this path. Sometimes we’d get together at Panera Bread, other times I’d go see him play the Thursday lunch set at the Holiday Inn downtown. John Pencola on piano and Frank on bass and vocals, making small talk with the customers enjoying the all-you-can-eat pasta buffet, then launching into “My Funny Valentine.” When Frank took a break he’d come and sit with me. Often several of the guys from the old days would be there too. I had mentioned three or four times now how frustrated I was in trying to pierce the mystery of Russ. Before, Frank had shrugged, said something about how Russ was a quiet guy. Once he said, “Your dad once told me, ‘Frank,’ he said, ‘I hardly knew my father.’ ” This time when I started to complain to Frank about Russ, he was nodding. “I know what you said, I get it. Listen, I been talkin’ to somebody. He wasn’t sure at first. But he’s ready now. And believe me, nobody knew Russ like Mike.”
I had never even heard Mike Gulino’s name before. Somehow he was going to be the key to unlock the safe? Frank pulled out his flip phone and called him—“Remember who I told you wanted to talk to you?”—and we got an instant audience. “You won’t believe this,” he kept saying to me as the car swept past the concrete-reinforced banks of the river and wound up the hill.
Johnstown is such a small place, it turned out Mike lived less than half a mile from my parents. We pulled up next to an old frame house covered in brown shingles sitting next to a gravel-strewn lot. His wife, Eleanor, opened the door and ushered us in. “I know your parents … I knew your grandparents …” We walked through a living room covered in wall-to-wall beige shag carpet, with brown, 1970s-era furniture. Mike, the old man who’d once been the kid attracting Russ’s notice with his dice play, was in the kitchen. He wasn’t exactly a large man, but he had the presence of a giant. He was in his mid-eighties, needed a chair-lift to get up the stairs, was hooked up to oxygen, and was half-blind. His glasses made his eyes bulge. But sitting there at the kitchen table, with a Formica backdrop and an antipasto platter that Eleanor had laid out in the foreground, he seemed like some kind of king. Maybe he was hard of hearing; anyway, his voice thundered. And these were the first words he boomed at me:
“Everything you heard about your grandfather, just put it in the ashcan! Because I know you heard a lot of negative things, see? Nobody knew Russ! Not like I knew him!”
Mike had had a storied career. The first part of it was as Russ’s right-hand man: “Everything I learned, I learned from Russ!” Later on, he had an operation that stretched from Florida to Las Vegas. He’d known Lucky Luciano, the man who invented the American mafia, and he once had Dean Martin sitting on his lap in a Vegas casino, crying over the death of his son. He was a powerful bookmaker in his time, active up and down the East Coast. But as he told me in a later interview—I ended up sitting down with Mike eleven times in all, not to mention spending a great deal of time corroborating his information—he didn’t see himself as a bookie or a mobster: “I’m a con man. That’s all I am.” But he went on to say that he had lived by a personal code, which had formed in the rough old days of class and ethnic warfare. “I fucked a lot of people in my life,” he told me. “But I only fucked people with money, greedy people, people that wanted to be fucked. I never fucked the workingman. I beat banks. I beat corporations. Fuckin’ bastards deserved it.”
An hour or so into our first meeting, Mike gave me what he believed was Russ’s philosophy. He unspooled it carefully, in a way that made me think it was memorized. “You gotta understand that Russ was my mentor. I soaked up everything he said. And Russ once told me, ‘Mike,’ he says, ‘there’s two different kinds of people. With the first, you throw a handful of shit in a guy’s face and he knows it’s shit. You forget about that guy—you can’t make money off him. But with the other kind, you tell him the shit you’re feeding him is ice cream … and he’ll believe it. You let him think that—you get him to love the taste of it. And then you take every fuckin’ dime he’s got.’ ”
We were silent then in the kitchen, Mike, me, Frank, I not knowing quite how he expected me to react. It felt almost like he thought of himself as a spiritual leader to whom I had come for wisdom, and he had given it to me, but in the form of a riddle, and he was testing, waiting to see how I responded. I think eventually I nodded. Then he leaned in, breathing salami and with his big, bulbous, rheumy eyes up close, and he said, very seriously, “That’s one of the most important things Russ ever told me.”
At the end of our first interview Mike said something I didn’t quite get. “I also knew your father very well when we were young. Maybe, because of Russ, some things were tough for your father.” I didn’t really know where to go with this. I was already standing, ready to leave. He waved it off. “But I’m glad we’re having this conversation,” he said. “I’ve had this on my mind for years and years.”
SO: THE LATE ’40s. Clark Gable and Rita Hayworth. Pontiac Chieftains and Plymouth Club Coupes. The suburbs rising. Big bands starting to seem a bit stale and flabby while the arresting drama of the solo voice—Bing! Frank!—is suddenly and utterly vital to quelling the existential angst and swelling the passions of the returning troops and their ardent lovers. And then, of course, came all the booming that made the baby boom. Guys I interviewed who came of age in that era could get pretty worked up thinking back on it. “We’re talkin’ pre-Elvis, pre–sexual revolution. There was no porn. Everything was hush-hush and mysterious. The first time I took a girl to a motel, Jesus, I can’t describe how exciting. Of course, I lasted about a minute.”
Johnstown’s mills and plants were at full production by 1947—people were calling the place Little Chicago—and a textile industry took off as well, with a focus on bras and dresses. Workers had a little spare change, even after buying the wife a new Speed Queen washer. Russ wasn’t swaggering around town—he wasn’t like that. But he was on the move. He and Joe assembled the pieces of their empire deliberately and fairly rapidly.
A big part of the business plan involved the numbers. The numbers racket had originated in Harlem in the 1920s (an outgrowth of a nineteenth-century game called “policy”). Then, post-Prohibition, proto-mobster Dutch Schultz forced his way in by making the Black bankers who ran the game in their various neighborhoods “partners,” and eventually squeezed them out. It was a sweet, simple game: pick three numbers and depending on the combination you could win up to six hundred times the amount you bet. It quickly spread around the country as a mafia staple, eventually to be replaced by state-run lotteries.
There’d been a numbers racket in Johnstown for a while now. It was run by Charlie Catillo. Charlie was an old friend of Russ’s. But Joe told Russ they were going to do to him what Dutch Schultz and Lucky Luciano had done to onetime legendary Harlem bankers like Alex Pompez and Stephanie Saint-Clair (aka Madame Queen): give him a percentage in exchange for handing over his business. Joe was calling the shots on this, maybe under LaRocca’s guidance. We’re takin’ that business over. You tell Charlie we’re gonna take care of him. But we’re takin’ that business.
Russ told Charlie. And within a year Charlie was working for them, and the G.I. Bank was born. Russ built it into a citywide bank, and gave it the spiffy postwar rebranding, a name that blended the patriotic energy of the returning troops with the solidity of a financial institution. The numbers may have originated in Harlem, but everything about the game suggested a different neighborhood of New York City, one to which the rising Italian immigrants aspired: Wall Street. Wall Street was, of course, the money establishment. It was largely closed to Italians, just as other arenas of the American establishment were. An Italian had about as much chance of becoming a stockbroker as of being elected president. So, piece by piece, they created their own version of the establishment world. And since, given the illegal nature of it, they couldn’t rely on the authorities to settle disputes between various parties, they had to do it themselves. That’s one way of looking at the American mob.
What Russ and Joe were building in Johnstown—what Joe had taken part in in Philly, what guys like Lucky Luciano and Frank Costello and Salvatore Maranzano had created in New York—was a mirror of American capitalism. They took to the ruthlessness of that system, its rapaciousness, but also maintained the awareness that you couldn’t just take without giving something back. You were selling a product. Booze was the first product. Then, after Prohibition, in prudish mid-twentieth-century America, the vehemence with which gambling was denounced and criminalized precisely angled it for these men as the next income generator. The general public’s deep longing for it (there were an estimated 50 million American gamblers in the early ’50s), combined with the puritanical forces that outlawed it, made for a sellers’ market.
The numbers was different from other forms of gambling in a way that made it particularly appealing. Its very language mimicked Wall Street. In the lingo of the numbers, men like Russ and Joe were “bankers.” Early players in Harlem talked not about placing bets but “making an investment.” The authors of Playing the Numbers: Gambling in Harlem Between the Wars suggest that Black New Yorkers turned to the numbers in the 1920s in part because they were shut out from most banking activities. Sure, banks were happy to take their money and let them open savings accounts, but “borrowing money to open or expand a business, or indeed for any purpose, was almost an impossibility for African Americans.” There was no such thing as a Black person getting a mortgage to buy a house, for instance. Blacks couldn’t even work as bank tellers. Thinking of the nickels and dimes you gave to your bookie as an investment, therefore, gave you a feeling of legitimacy, of buying a stake in your future. Many looked at it as being as certain an investment as any other. By playing the same number every day, you were putting money into a kind of account; you believed that one day your number would hit and you would get back your original stake, plus interest.
The Italian men of Russ’s generation, who wanted to be players in the American game as much as their WASP counterparts did, saw bookmaking as akin to running an investment firm. You were providing a financial service. Yes, you stood to make a fairly staggering profit—around 40 percent on every bet—but so did the titans of the legit financial industry. Joe knew the essential thing was to establish a system that had the regularity and convenience of a bank. His goal was to create something his customers trusted. He wanted it to be a bedrock institution in the community. I don’t know if he achieved that, but everyone over a certain age I talked with in Johnstown saw the G.I. Bank as a kind of service, one that offered an attractive product and that was reliable. Trust began with the fact that you could look up the winning numbers yourself, Monday through Friday, in the black and white of the Tribune. They were the closing numbers of the New York Stock Exchange.
And for Joe and Russ, it was self-evident that you linked to the community by being in the community. You wanted to be as much a part of residents’ lives as the post office was. So you made your product available wherever people gathered. At barber shops, like Angelo’s in the Johnstown Bank & Trust Building, Harry’s on Fourth Avenue, or Coppola’s in Conemaugh. Your bookies stopped in at the bowling alleys, at the American-Slovak Social Club and the Polish National Alliance Club. They took customers’ loose change over the counter at candy stores, like Kels Konfectionary Korner, and at novelty shops, hardware stores, and even in law offices. When people stopped in for a bowl of chili or a couple of hot dogs for lunch—at the Corner Inn, Franklin Lunch, Coney Island Hot Dogs, or in the Glosser Brothers Department Store cafeteria—the G.I. Bank was there. When you moseyed up to the bar for a beer after work, at the Hill Top Tavern, Jim Dandy’s, the Essex House, the Four Leaf Clover, the Steel Bar, or the Terminal Café; at Lill’s, Marie’s, Mike’s, Steve’s, Angie’s, Bertha’s, Tony’s, or Zip’s, there was someone—maybe the bartender, maybe your wife’s kid brother—able to take your ten cents or your four bits and record your favorite numbers. By many estimates, more than half the town played the G.I. Bank at its height.
Money poured into the office above City Cigar. Once a week Joe would call LaRocca, make an appointment, and get a driver to take him to Pittsburgh. In the trunk (I assume it was in the trunk: nobody I talked to could answer this question) was LaRocca’s cut. As for the rest, Russ and Joe needed to launder it. I don’t think, ultimately, they were in the business of crime per se. It was business qua business that they were after; criminal activity happened to be the ignition. So they surveyed the town for further opportunities. Joe and Millie weren’t big on making the scene, but Russ and Mary liked to dress up and live a little, which gave them a perspective. They went to fancy supper clubs in Pittsburgh, and occasionally in Atlantic City. (I have a photograph of the two of them, smiling and looking sharp, Mary’s neck and ears adorned with pearls, enjoying the show at Club Harlem, Atlantic City’s world-renowned Black nightclub, which hosted the likes of Ella Fitzgerald and Cab Calloway.) With wartime restrictions at an end and locals having so much more spending money, wasn’t it about time Johnstown had a high-class entertainment option?
I don’t know what deal Joe and Russ struck with Chris Contakos, the owner of the building on Franklin Street that housed the Central Cafe, where Mary had worked and where she and Russ met, but they took it over one floor at a time. The top floor became a boxing gym; the one below it they turned into Capitol Bowling Lanes, where Tony remembers working as a pin setter when he was a kid. But their pride and joy was the Melodee Lounge, on the second floor, above Central Cafe. They threw a mort of cash into creating a lavish interior that made you feel like you weren’t in the middle of some western Pennsylvania steel town but rather on East Sixtieth Street in New York, at the Copacabana. They hired a chef for the place who could do a two-inch steak that sizzled as it was laid before you and a bar manager who understood the importance of pushing not just top-shelf liquors but colorful drinks to appeal to the ladies: Grasshoppers, “Punch Romaine,” and the Millionaire. They hired a booking agent out of Pittsburgh who started lining up rising stars like Sammy Davis Jr. and the Will Mastin Trio. Russ understood that white Americans were drawn to Black entertainers—their shows were hipper, and the integrated atmosphere gave the place an edgy, urban vibe—so he made that a specialty. “Now presenting the finest sepia attraction in the entertainment business” went one of his ads. Among the first groups he booked was the Four Blues, who’d just had a hit with “It Takes a Long Tall Brownskin Gal (to Make a Preacher Lay His Bible Down).” But while things were changing fast in the postwar era, with Italians now being accepted as “white,” the wall was still in place with regard to Blacks. Black performers couldn’t sit in the audience after their set but had to retire to their dressing room.
Not long after, Joe and Russ opened a second club two blocks down the street. Just as Russ had done with his Franklin Pool Room, which he positioned right outside the mill gate in that borough, they placed the Gautier Club across from the main gate to the Gautier Division of the Bethlehem Steel plant. It was the mirror opposite of the Melodee Lounge in terms of demographics of both the clientele and the acts. Gautier was essentially a strip club for mill workers, a place where after eight hours as steel pourer or stove tender guys could let loose and down a few boilermakers while roaring at ladies like Christie Doll, who was billed as a “top-notch terpsichorean artist,” and “lovely dancer Mignon.” There was an ex-vaudevillian who emceed the shows, and an old lady accompanying the acts on piano. The club was on the second floor. Right below it they opened the Clinton Street Pool Room, which was likewise a proletariat version of City Cigar.
Russ’s friends, guys he’d grown up with, run card games with, been busted alongside—guys like Sam Polina, Johnny DiFalco, Pete Pagano, Tommy Croco, Charlie Torcia, Buster Tanase, Joe Picklo, Joe Bruno—all assumed roles in the rapidly expanding operation. So did Russ’s brother Tony, and some of his sisters’ husbands. Writing numbers. Taking phone bets. Running craps games. Managing the pool hall or the bowling alley. Keeping the customers off the ladies working the stage at the Gautier Club.
Others became part of things soon after. Either Russ or Joe hired Johnny DiFalco’s brother, Pippy, to write numbers. He was an odd sort—kind of sneaky, smarmy—but he’d been wounded in the war. Maybe they took him on out of a spirit of patriotism. Soon, though, he went out on his own, running a sports book. Which was OK, provided he turned in a percentage. Rip Slomanson came aboard, too, as an enforcer. He was young and crazy, tall, trim, all muscle and ready to fight anybody. LaRocca had suggested to Little Joe that they might use him—he’d done work for him recently. It wasn’t long before the two newcomers clashed. Nobody knows what sparked it—whether Joe used Rip to send Pippy a little message about keeping up his payments or what—but Rip beat the hell out of Pippy one night, left him half-dead on the sidewalk. He bloodied him enough that later, when Pippy went missing, people’s thoughts immediately went to Rip.
But that was years later. One day not long after they opened for business Joe had a talk with Russ. The boys in Philly told me to always keep sports separate from other business. I want you on sports because of your head for numbers. From then on, Russ had nothing to do with the G.I. Bank. This was in 1946, the first postwar baseball season. Major League Baseball had continued through the war, but many of the top players had been fighting overseas. Now, for the first time in years, everyone would be back. With the talent, the stars—Stan Musial, Ted Williams, the imminent pivot of Jackie Robinson from the Negro Leagues—anticipation was high. And baseball was the biggest sport for betting action.
But just as the season was getting under way a problem arose. Running a sports book was all about “the line.” The house had to weigh the two teams’ likelihood of winning and add points to the underdog so as to balance things out. If you didn’t have a razor-sharp oddsmaker, gamblers would eat you alive. The line came from the boys in Pittsburgh—they had the top bookmakers—but that spring, at the very start of the season, Joe got some bad news. Apparently due to a power struggle between some of LaRocca’s guys and Little Joe’s, there was a break in the information flow. “Little Joe says to Russ, ‘We can’t get the line.’ ” This is Mike Gulino telling me how it unfolded—and at the same time telling me the story of how he and Russ cemented their relationship. I’m back in his kitchen; Eleanor has laid a platter before us, made a pot of coffee, and gone out. This time I’d brought her some flowers. “Russ says, ‘That’s no problem, Joe. There’s a young kid around here. You put him and me upstairs above the Melodee Lounge.’ Now, Chris Contakos owned the building, see? Chris Contakos was the bum of all bums, by the way. But that don’t matter. Upstairs he had a couple a rooms where guys could go with their broads—Chris did everything to make a buck. So Russ calls for me and he says, ‘Listen, kid, I want you to go home and get some clothes. You and I’s gonna move in up above Melodee Lounge.’ And that’s what we did—we set ourselves up there. Johnny Oswald was the only guy allowed up. He’d bring us all the papers every morning, and Russ got to work.”
Russ did the math, mostly based on starting pitcher stats, and Mike assisted. They had a lot of numbers to crunch: 16 teams, 154 games, plus a best-of-three National League pennant series between St. Louis and the Brooklyn Dodgers and the World Series, between the Cardinals and the Boston Red Sox, which went to seven games (the Cardinals won). They basically lived together during that season, Russ and Mike. They ate together. They slept there so they were ready when the papers were delivered early each morning with fresh stats and they could have the line ready for the bookies.
“By the end of that season, me and Russ, we were like this.” Mike wrapped two thick fingers around each other. And suddenly he wasn’t talking about oddsmaking anymore but about my family. “All the work I did after that, over the next ten, fifteen years, it wasn’t for the mafia. It was for Russ. You see what I’m saying here? Russ come off to everybody like a tough guy, a wiseguy. But deep down in his heart, he was a piece of cake. He was kind of an older brother to me. But in a way it was something more, like he was the father I didn’t have. I had a father, don’t get me wrong. But he didn’t understand—he wasn’t in the business. And I was a little bit like the son Russ didn’t have, even though he had his two sons. But with me it was different.”
It made me a little bit queasy hearing Mike talk like this. Suddenly, just sitting there, I felt like I was betraying my father by listening to him explain how he had placed himself in between my dad and my grandfather—or how Russ had given him that position. I thought back to the couple of times I’d asked Tony if he wanted to come down to Mike’s house with me for one of my interview sessions. Why wouldn’t he? They’d known each other all their lives. It was a two-minute drive down the hill. But he shook his head. Nah. Mike must have gotten himself thinking along a similar track, because he then said, referring to the bar my dad owned in later years, “I used to go down to your dad’s place once in a while. I knew he used to drink a bit. I tried to get him to stop. He liked me, I think. But it was different with your grandfather.”
I was feeling physically warm sitting there in Mike’s kitchen, like the oven was on or something. I’d come for an interview about the mob, we’d been talking about oddsmaking and the 1946 baseball season. This was suddenly something else. But I pushed on. “What do you mean?”
This instantly irked him. “What do you mean what do I mean?”
“You say it was different with you and my grandfather. How?”
All at once he erupted: “The fuck you want me to say?! He loved me, OK? And I loved him. I don’t know how else to explain our situation.”
I was conscious of a lot of things. The tile flooring in Mike’s kitchen. The smell of the coffee Eleanor had made us before she left—she always went out when I came to chat. Mike’s eyes magnified by his glasses, the sheen of sweat on his face, the slight tremor in him as he gazed at me, as he came down from this emotional outburst. I was aware of how jarring the emotion must have been for him. And of how, as he’d told me before, he’d had this on his mind for years and years. And here I came, basically begging him to talk about it, even though I’d had no idea what it was. And he realizing that this was the obvious time for him to talk about it, and I was the very person. Namesake.
I was still being daft, though. I shook my head. “I don’t get it. You say Russ saw you as his protégé. But why would he need you when he was grooming my dad for that?”
“Grooming your dad for what?”
“My dad told me Russ wanted him to follow in his footsteps, but he refused.”
Mike was looking at me more closely than he had before. “I’m sorry, Russell, but it wasn’t like that.” It wasn’t like that. What was it like? I knew by this point, but I asked anyway and he told me. “Tony was—what?—six years younger than me. See? This is a little later, now. Maybe 1953, 1954, somewhere in there. And your dad wanted to be a mobster in the worst way. I was working at City Cigar at this point, running the floor, so I saw everything that went on. Tony would show up, trying to hang around and be a tough guy. If Russ caught him he would beat the shit out of him. It was painful to watch. He didn’t want his boy within a hundred miles of the place.”
I nodded. I knew perfectly well that Russ had pressured Tony to be part of the organization, and that Tony had rejected him, for our sake, his family’s sake. That story underlay my childhood. But now I also knew that what I knew was wrong.
“And … why?”
He was exasperated again. “What’s so hard to understand? This was a criminal life. Russ wasn’t going to do that to his son.”
“But he did it to you.”
“Because I was already in that world. We were two of a kind.”
I DROVE BACK up the hill to my parents’ house after my visit with Mike. They asked how it went. I told them Mike was a real character. We talked a little bit about his entanglements with the law. They debated how much time he’d spent in prison as a result of his final caper, in the 1990s, a pretty glorious little con that went on for several years, in which he scammed doctors and CEOs all over the mid-Atlantic region—I fucked people that wanted to be fucked—before he got caught. I said nothing about what Mike had just told me.
I did start going around to other sources, checking on all the information Mike was giving me, both to corroborate the particulars and to test his general veracity. Some of what he told me was fairly outlandish, but pretty much everything I could track down checked out.
AFTER SPENDING MUCH of the 1946 baseball season locked together in a room above the Melodee Lounge, Russ and Mike were a team. As the operation in Johnstown flowered, Mike became a sidekick, running around town and doing things for Russ.
Russ brought him into City Cigar, where he eventually took over the Harrigan table. The Harrigan game was very popular among gamblers. It made a lot of money for the house, and the house needed to have someone running it, like a referee. Russ’s brother-in-law, Angelo Trigona, had been doing it. Simple work: you shook out the “pills,” which were dice with only one number on each, and distributed two to each player. The first pill was the order in which you shot, the second was the number of the ball you had to sink. First guy to sink his ball wins. Simple: game over. But Mike complicated it. Mike practiced in the mornings to prepare himself for the job, transferring the skills Mr. Verone had taught him to another use. He got so he could manipulate the pills, holding a high number in one hand and a low one in the other. That way he could manage the games, keeping them short and brisk, which pleased Russ and Joe because the house made money on each game. He could also keep a hotshot from winning too many games in a row, which might discourage other players. “When Mike took over from Angelo, the Harrigan table became the hot table,” one of the old boys told me.
THE NEXT TIME I was in town doing research, I asked my dad if he wanted to come down to the Holiday Inn with me to see Frank and hang out with the old guys who would be there. Most of the guys I’d first met at Panera Bread, and a few others, congregated around Frank’s Thursday lunchtime set. He said OK. This was something new. As with Mike, he’d known them all his life, but for decades he had kept himself apart.
As soon as Frank sees my dad come hobbling into the dining room he barks into the mic: “Ladies and gentlemen, Tony Shorto! Whaddaya know!” He leans down to confer with John, the piano player, then says, pointing a finger as my dad is maneuvering himself into a seat, “This one’s for you, Tony.” And launches into a languid rendering of “Dindi,” an almost embarrassingly romantic bossa nova standard the Sinatra version of which was my dad’s favorite tune back in the day.
Frank joined us after the set; we were already talking about the old days—me with my recorder going. Eventually somebody mentioned Mike Gulino.
“Sure, Mike helped,” my dad said suddenly, utterly randomly. “He used to help my dad a little bit, setting the odds.”
Beat.
“Mike helped a lot,” Frank said.
“I remember him coming to the house,” Tony went on, warming a little to the topic. “In a zoot suit and wide-brimmed hat. They used to call those hats bammers. With the three-inch brim. He was chomping on a cigar. He cut a figure, I’ll tell you.”
And just like that I had a picture, not only of Mike back in the day but of my dad as a boy in his teens, and a sense of what he felt way down inside, seeing this older kid coming in, at his dad’s side, looking like the movies’ idea of a mafia swell. While his dad refused to let him be part of that. Him staring at that older kid with awe, but with something else stabbing at him too.