EARLY ON, RUSS made a point of befriending a man named John Torquato. Whenever his name came up in conversation with the old boys I interviewed, they spoke of him with something like reverence. If Italians were making headway in American society in the ’40s and ’50s, Torquato was pretty much single-handedly responsible for that in Cambria County. He was eight years older than Russ, had grown up in Windber, ten miles from Johnstown, and, rare for Italians of his generation, had gone to college. There, he found he was drawn not so much to any particular subject as he was to student government. He was forceful, friendly to everyone, and fascinated by how people organized themselves and allowed themselves to be organized by others. It was pretty clear what direction he would go in. “All John ever thought about was politics,” a cousin of his would say. “He lived politics all the time, every day.”
No one with an Italian background had ever had a political job in the county. The same was true for Irish, Polish, and Hungarian immigrants, but there was a particular animus toward Italians. The KKK in western Pennsylvania had targeted them; the steel mills only employed them in the lowest and most dangerous jobs. Back in 1911 the mayor of Johnstown made it a campaign promise that no one of Italian descent would work in his administration, not even as a street cleaner. Italians were the second largest immigrant group in the county, and for many people that was precisely the problem.
Torquato ingratiated himself with Democratic Party officials, got the lowest-level job in 1928, and worked his way up through a series of local, state, and federal positions until, in 1942, he was named chairman of the Democratic Committee in the county. He set about creating a classic political machine. If you voted Democratic and gave money to the party, he could help you out, and he did. Working with FDR’s administration and Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor he managed to shift the county from Republican-leaning to solidly Democratic. Along the way, he was on a mission to reverse discrimination against his fellow Italians. He appointed as many as possible to political jobs—provided they were Democrats.
It was natural for Torquato to form an alliance with Little Joe and Russ, and for them to want to join forces with him. But they didn’t follow strict party lines. Tony remembers Andrew Gleason—a local lawyer who was the head of the Republican Party in the county—being as regular a presence in the family living room as Torquato. For that matter, Gleason and Torquato were friends too.
In 1947, Little Joe Regino and John Torquato met on a topic of interest to both men: the idea of running the young, up-and-coming lawyer Sam Di Francesco for district attorney. An Italian had never held such a high post in the area. They approached Di Francesco; he was raring to go. Once he became a candidate, a group calling themselves the County Christian League fought hard against his election, warning all Protestants they had to get out and vote to prevent a “Pope-serving Catholic” from becoming the top legal officer in the county. But Di Francesco was a great candidate, ambitious and affable. He’d fought in the war. He believed communism was a threat but thought Joe McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade was dangerous. When he won, the long-suffering Italian community in town suddenly had a power base. Joe and Russ, John Torquato, Sam Di Francesco: they didn’t call all the shots, but together they called a lot of them. When the newly elected president of the United States came to town, John Torquato was at Harry Truman’s side, introducing him, waving to crowds, leaning in to whisper in his ear.
The alliance didn’t last long—at least, not in that form. In 1952 Russ went to Sam Di Francesco and asked a favor—precisely the kind of thing they had in mind when they worked to get him installed as DA. Lately, some social clubs in the northern part of the county had been pulling in customers and cash by featuring slot machines. Not pinball machines, like Little Joe had going in businesses all over town, which became an indirect means of gambling when a customer traded in games won for cash, but actual lemons-and-cherries slot machines, which spat out coins when you won. Social clubs were a Pennsylvania thing—essentially they were honky-tonk bars, but you had to be a member to get in. Membership usually involved nothing more than paying a nominal fee, but the fact that they were not open to the public meant they had fewer restrictions—they could stay open later, for example. They were also less likely to be raided by the police.
Little Joe didn’t like this development. It was a threat to his pinball business. Russ told Sam they wanted him to raid the clubs and shut them down. It shouldn’t have been hard. After all, slot machines were illegal. But remarkably, Sam refused. To understand why, I sat down with his son, Sam Junior. I knew him already. He was part of the posse of old guys who followed Frank Filia around town, meeting at Panera Bread twice a week, each of them nursing a cup of coffee, not wanting to shell out for a whole lunch, then splurging on the Thursday lunchtime pasta buffet at the Holiday Inn for Frank’s set with pianist John Pencola. Sam was a bit of a singer himself. At least once during every Holiday Inn set Frank would give him the mic for a song. He was in his eighties, a tiny man, twisted by arthritis and Parkinson’s disease. I can’t describe the waft of feeling that came over me the first time I saw him perform. Sam was bent at a right angle, actually singing to the floor as he rendered “On a Clear Day” in a weak but pleasant voice.
I imagine every group of retired old men sitting around in coffee shops has at least one designated joke-teller. Sam was that guy too. The first time I met him at the Holiday Inn, right after he sang his song and I told him how much I liked it, he said, “I wrote a song myself once. It’s called ‘I’ll Always Remember What’s-Her-Name.’ ” When I laughed, he informed me that if Ella Fitzgerald had married Darth Vader she would have been Ella Vader. Later, when somebody brought up the subject of wine, Sam asked if we knew how to make an Italian wine. (Squeeze his coglioni.)
For our chat about his father, I met up with Sam at his law office, where he still put in regular hours. “What can you tell me about the slot machines?” I asked.
“It was like this,” he said. “Joe and Russ wanted my father to bust these clubs and take out the slots. My dad wouldn’t go along with it because he knew the owners. He had been their solicitor, and he thought if they lost the slots it would be death for the clubs. He said no. Joe and Russ were mad as hell.” According to Sam, in crossing Joe and Russ his father upended his own career. “In ’52, when my dad was up for reelection, Joe and Russ decided to pull back a little on their support, just to put a scare into him. But he ended up losing. His time as DA turned out to be the high point of his career, and he lost it because he wouldn’t close the slot clubs. Later he ran for judge, twice, but he lost. He lusted after the bench. He was very bitter until the day he died. I told him, ‘God doesn’t want you to be a judge.’ ”
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ON MARCH 18, 1951, a tall, rather bland-looking, middle-aged man in a light-colored suit strode onto the set of the TV game show What’s My Line?, wrote his name on a blackboard for the audience to see, and took his seat next to the host. The idea of the game was for the four blindfolded panelists to ask questions and guess his occupation. Despite the fact that the guest was a freshman U.S. senator from Tennessee—not typically a position that would accrue celebrity status—they needed only a few tries to get it. Over the past year Sen. Estes Kefauver had become one of the most recognizable people in the country. Because the subject matter of the recently formed Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce—aka the Kefauver Committee—was of enormous popular interest, its proceedings were broadcast on national television. The hearings were structured a bit like a reality show. Kefauver and his fellow senators traveled around the country, visiting fourteen cities, and interviewed hundreds of people from different walks of life, many of whom were suspected of being major figures in organized crime.
A goal of the committee was to answer the question of whether there was such a thing as an American mafia—that is, whether an organized crime syndicate with Italian roots was running gambling and other illegal activities in cities large and small. Ordinary people on the streets of Johnstown—or Yonkers, Lansing, Lubbock, or Dubuque—knew perfectly well that there was, yet it was still in some way an unsettled question. There was a lack of certainty at the official level, which was connected to what many people chose to believe. Millie, for example, Little Joe’s wife, who would spend her entire life with what you might call a front-row seat to precisely this activity, would say, “Don’t be crazy! There is no such thing” whenever someone suggested that what her husband was involved in was “the mafia.” It’s possible she believed it. What was Freud’s formulation? “Knowing and not-knowing.” Knowing without wanting to know. Russ and Joe, typical for husbands of the era, never talked business with their wives, which in turn gave the women plausible deniability.
Tony remembered the effects of the Kefauver Committee’s hearings in his family home on Rambo Street in Johnstown, starting with his dad murmuring, “Jesus!” as he stared at the TV. “All of a sudden what they were doing was right there, in everybody’s living room. My dad was calling Kefauver a dirty bastard. I was a kid and I thought they were the tough guys, him and Uncle Joe. It felt weird to see them acting scared.”
Tony described a lot of nervous rushing around in that period, including a number of guys from out of town coming to the house. One, he told me, was a fellow named Kelly Mannarino. He paused in his reflection. “Have you come across that name?” He’d become steadily more interested in my archival research; he was curious about areas where it overlapped with his memories, maybe wanting a check on his own veracity. The Mannarino brothers, I had learned, were to the town of New Kensington, sixty miles to the east on the outskirts of Pittsburgh, what Little Joe and Russ were to Johnstown. Both organizations had emerged at about the same time. Where the mob had been attracted to Johnstown by the presence of the steel mills, and the money they brought, in New Kensington it was the Alcoa aluminum plant that had drawn them. There was an overlap of interest between the outfits in the two towns, which from time to time turned into a rivalry. Somebody who booked numbers for Little Joe in Blairsville, midway between Johnstown and New Kensington, might get the shit beat out of him. Boundary dispute.
Not long after his appearance on What’s My Line? Senator Kefauver entered the presidential race, running as a Democrat against the incumbent, President Harry Truman. Campaigning in a coonskin cap and with the mammoth publicity of the anti–organized crime hearings working for him, he stormed through the primaries, gathering enough momentum that Truman decided to retire rather than face a humiliating defeat in his own party. But the party bosses—some of whom had links to organized crime and didn’t care for the spotlight Kefauver had been shining—pulled a convention surprise, preempting the popular will and selecting Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson as their nominee instead. Stevenson, of course, went on to lose the general election to Dwight David Eisenhower, the general who had won the Second World War.
When the Kefauver Committee wrapped up, its work was packaged into a series of recommendations for how to deal with organized crime. One in particular, the establishment of state crime commissions, would eventually have a big impact on Little Joe’s operation, but that took a long time to get rolling. Once the hearings were off the TV screens things in town went back to normal.
And what was that, exactly?
Normal, through most of the ’50s, was a hundred people on the payroll of the G.I. Bank—bookies like Pippy diFalco, runners, money guys. Normal was weekly gin-rummy games for the high rollers, in a private room at Capitol Bowling Lanes, where pots could reach $10,000. Normal was cash pouring into the operation from tip seals. People rolled into City Cigar, the Clinton Street Pool Room, or other designated spots at all hours to buy them, at a dime or a dollar apiece. You tore your ticket off the board, opened the seal, and if your number matched the last one on the board you won six times your bet; if you lost, you threw the paper on the floor. Tip seals were big. Tony remembers being very young—this would have been just after the war—and going into City Cigar with his dad one morning before it had been cleaned up from the previous night. “The tip seals,” he said, “were up to my ankles.”
Maybe the most lucrative revenue source through the ’50s was pinball machines. Little Joe, together with John LaRocca, bought a company called P and C Amusements, which distributed jukeboxes, and used it to blanket the county with pinball games. Pinball was nominally for entertainment but everyone knew the machines were there for gambling. The beauty of pinball to the mob was that, since coins you put in didn’t correspond with a quantifiable product like cigarettes or candy, it was impossible to track the machines’ earnings. The high-tech fun of the game plus the possibility of beating it for cash made them addictive. The Johnstown Observer looked into it in 1954 and found ordinary workers were dumping their paychecks into the machines a nickel at a time. “A lady called us the other day and said her husband lost over $30.00 of his pay in playing a pinball machine. We couldn’t believe it so we began to make some investigations and found it was entirely possible.”
The machines were lucrative not just for the mob, which controlled their distribution, but for the many kinds of businesses that wanted them. Most bars had them, and so did restaurants, candy stores, five-and-dimes, gas stations, and hotels. “Practically every bar and restaurant in the city makes enough from the pin ball machines to pay the rent,” the Observer found. P and C had a thousand machines in operation at any one time, each making around $50 a week, for a total of more than $2 million a year—$17 million in today’s money.
Turning pinball machines into gambling devices required the involvement of the host establishment. When you reached a certain point total as a player, you were rewarded with a free game. Once you had racked up a number of free games you went to the bar or counter, where you got a cash payout. Once a week, a guy from P and C came around to service the machines and settle up with the management. He would split the take with the owner and write a receipt for one-quarter of the total: that is, by mutual agreement, the vending machine company and the bar or café that housed the machines underreported their earnings by half.
The machines had an additional value. Because of their popularity, Little Joe was able to use them as leverage. If a business that had his machines was having a hard time making ends meet, he might send an accountant to look over the owner’s financial situation. Joe could loan him a couple thousand, enough to get back on his feet, and take the payments on the loan, plus interest, out of the owner’s share of the pinball money. If he needed help again later, Joe might suggest a different arrangement: a piece of the business in exchange for a bailout. Steadily, he worked his way into all sorts of legitimate businesses in town. By 1960, Little Joe’s holdings included stakes in bars and restaurants around town, as well as City Cigar, the Melodee Lounge, the Gautier Club, the bowling alley and boxing gym, and a farm where he raised racehorses, including one called Moon Over Miami that Russ told my aunt he would give to her but, she said ruefully, never did.
I hankered for something like an official overview of how Little Joe and Russ worked things with the authorities. Of course, that wasn’t possible. Everything was off the books: nods, handshake deals. But Tony had an idea. He suggested we talk to an attorney named Caram Abood. Abood had spent his entire long career in the Cambria County justice system. He’d been DA in the early ’70s and then a county judge from the mid-’70s into the ’80s. He had as good a vantage on the situation two decades before his heyday as anyone living.
Abood met us in his law office. He was tall and Lincolnesque, both in build and in the cragginess of his features; in his eighties but still practicing a bit. He and my dad weren’t close friends but they greeted each other with the kind of quiet warmth that comes from living in a small town, where paths cross and re-cross over decades. “How you doing, Tony?” “OK, Cal, how about you?” “So good to see you. How’s Rita?” My dad told him about the book I was working on, how he and I were trying to get perspective on Russ and Little Joe and how they did what they did.
Cal Abood wanted to start with a Charles Bronson story. Lots of the old guys in town have a Charles Bronson story. One of the biggest Hollywood stars of the ’80s had grown up in a poor-as-dirt railroad village in the hills just to the east of Johnstown. Abood told me about two kids he’d been friends with who used to hang out at City Cigar, named Tom Burns and Charlie Buchinsky. “Tom and Charlie came out of the war together. They both got the 52–20: the government gave you twenty bucks a week for fifty-two weeks, to get you started. They bummed around the pool hall for a while wondering what they were going to do with their lives. Tommy was a boxer. He said to Charlie, ‘Let’s go to Philly and see if I can get some work as a fighter.’ Tommy eventually moved back home to marry his high school sweetheart. Charlie stayed and enrolled in acting school. Eventually he changed his name to Charles Bronson. And as you know, he became a big movie star. But he started out hanging around your grandfather’s place.”
“What did Tom Burns end up doing?”
“Hah! He became sheriff! We worked together. And he had to deal with Russ and Joe all the time. One day, though, who shows up in town but Charlie. He’s a big star now. He’s got his wife, Jill Ireland, with him. He wanted Tommy to come with him, to be the head of his security. He had a farm in Vermont, a home in Los Angeles, he was traveling the world. He needed someone he could trust. But Tommy didn’t want to. His roots were here.”
I told Abood I was trying to get a sense of Russ and Little Joe at their height—what the operation was like, how they set things up with the county’s elected officials so that they could go about their business. “It was a very straightforward payoff system,” he said. “They paid five percent of their take to whichever party was in power in the county, and in exchange they were left alone. Whenever an election was coming up, the party would call and say, ‘The DA is going to be sending some officers. You should have someone at each of your shops, and you should have a few dollars and a few numbers tickets around.’ Somebody had to take the fall. Then once they were at the county courthouse they would be sure to get the guy in front of Judge Nelson. Judge Nelson was the friendly judge. ‘Well, nobody got hurt. How do you plead? Guilty? A hundred dollar fine.’ And that would be it. What they didn’t want, but it happened sometimes, was to get in front of Judge Griffin. His nickname was ‘Chains.’ Judge Griffin didn’t take any offense as minor.”*
After we left Abood’s office, Tony took me to meet his cousin, Frank Trio (not to be confused with Frank Filia, my mom’s cousin). Frank, he said, would have another perspective on the power their uncle had had. Frank had lived with Joe and Millie for years and did odd jobs for them. Even in his eighties Frank was a ruggedly good-looking guy, with a chiseled face and a full head of lustrous dark hair. When we met I was struck by the fact that despite his age he seemed charged with pent-up energy. My dad had told me Frank had been a lifelong bachelor and tireless ladies’ man. But all things pass. “So how you doing, Frank?” Tony asked as we sat down in his living room. “Well, I can still piss out of it,” Frank said.
“Tell me about Joe,” I said.
“I started out working as Uncle Joe’s gardener,” he said. After a while, since Frank was on his own, Joe and Millie told him he could live in their attic, which they made into a little apartment. “A little while later, I’m downtown, and all of a sudden a cop pulls me aside and searches me. He knew I lived with Little Joe—he said he figured I was his gun man. That’s what he said: ‘gun man.’ This guy was new to the force, he didn’t know how things worked. I told Uncle Joe what happened. Next time I’m downtown, the same cop sees me, he says, ‘Hi, Mr. Trio.’ He always treated me with respect after that.”
This prompted my dad to offer up another small example of the extent to which his father and uncle got their way. Russ, he said, would routinely pull up on Main Street in front of City Cigar, which was one building away from city hall, and leave his car there. There was no parking allowed on Main Street: the only cars would be his and Joe’s. “They never got tickets!”
I wondered whether maybe he was exaggerating, building a stray childhood memory into a regular pattern, but then I came across a note on this very topic in the February 2, 1956, edition of the Observer, which reported more ground-level gossip than the Tribune did. Its publisher, Larry Martin, had begun a crusade against Joe and Russ, and over time he became snidely vocal toward Mayor Ned Rose, who had begun his term with some vigor but had steadily ceded power to Joe and Russ:
And by the way, Ned, known racketeers, petty gamblers and politicians make a habit of parking on Main Street directly opposite your office window during the late afternoon … while they leisurely ignore the no stopping signs.
IT WAS ABOUT this time, when the organization was at its swaggering height, that Russ faced the biggest crisis of his career, if you don’t count the self-generated ones. His boss and brother-in-law, Joe, had a falling-out with his boss, LaRocca. I got two different accounts of what caused the rift. One story was that Shangri-La was losing money; LaRocca blamed Joe and told him he wanted his investment back. Joe paid him, but considered himself mistreated—they had been business partners in the venture, which meant both ought to rise or fall on the investment. The other story I was told was that LaRocca had said something disparaging about Joe having adopted children. Which doesn’t make sense on the face of it because apparently LaRocca himself had an adopted son.
The two men had been close since their days in post-Prohibition Philly. They had houses practically next to each other in Pompano Beach. Their wives were good friends. But now the rift between them threatened the operation in Johnstown. There was always pressure from guys in Pittsburgh trying to take over the local rackets: it was LaRocca who kept them in check. And the boys in New Kensington and Greensburg, who also turned in to LaRocca, would try muscling in on Johnstown as well whenever anyone’s guard was down. Pippy diFalco, for one, seems to have caved in to their pressure, sometimes working with New Kensington and turning in to them rather than to Joe.
Suddenly everything was on the line. LaRocca sent a man to Johnstown and told Joe to make a place for him. Sam Fashion was from Altoona; his arrival in town meant that LaRocca didn’t trust Joe anymore. “He was sent here to keep an eye on Little Joe,” Mike Gulino told me. Joe was in a quandary because LaRocca wanted him to give Sam the sports book, which was Russ’s territory. It was a bad time for Joe to stand up to the Pittsburgh boss. LaRocca was at this moment increasing his own power. He was pushing westward, moving to take over Youngstown, Ohio. And he’d become close with the Gambinos in New York.
Mike told me Russ was the one who saved Joe. “Russ found out,” Mike said, “and he said, ‘Joe, don’t worry, I’ll make it work.’ ” He gave Sam the sports book, but kept a watch on things. After a while, Russ saw they were actually losing money on sports. “Russ says to Joe, ‘Sam Fashion don’t know shit from Shinola,’ ” Mike said. “But Russ come up with another idea. He knew Sam was a real good cook. ‘Why don’t we put him in charge of Shangri-La?’ ”
So that’s what they did, and Sam Fashion went for it. Maybe he was relieved. Joe had bought out LaRocca’s share of the supper club; he now offered it to Sam. Sam was indeed a very good cook.† Business picked up after he became the chef.
Most of the old boys I talked to seemed to have liked Sam Fashion well enough, but those who had worked directly with him were of a different opinion. “He was so full of shit,” Mike said. “He used to go to craps games. He thought he could skeech dice, but he couldn’t make a seven with a pencil. I had to work with him for a while. Never trusted him.”
My dad’s cousin Frank Trio made the same point a little more forcefully. “I was a cook at Shangri-La. Sam Fashion was a no-good fuckin’ bastard. A thief. He stole from the place for years, until Uncle Joe finally fired him. Then he asks me, ‘Why didn’t you tell me he was stealing?’ I said, ‘Uncle Joe, you always say you hate squealers!’ ”
The consensus of the old boys was that in negotiating a way through the split between his two superiors Russ saved the organization. Sam Fashion was accommodated, which mollified LaRocca, so that he didn’t take any further steps that would threaten Johnstown. At least, not for the time being. Some of the guys likened Russ to an executive steering a company through difficult circumstances. “There were jobs at stake,” one guy actually said. Several told me stories about how much Russ cared about the town and its people, that he felt something like responsibility. You needed money—he gave it to you, no questions asked. Mike in particular wanted to make sure I understood this side of Russ. “More than once I was with him,” he said, “we’d get something to eat at a lunch counter, and when he got up to pay he bought lunch for the whole place, without telling a soul. He’d do things like that.”
MY FATHER AND I had been trying to discover who his father was for three years now. After this much exploration, stitching together his memories and insights with all our other sources, we had a general sense of Russ in the mid-’50s as a man in charge. He had to have figured that he had well and truly arrived, that he had not merely beaten the system but changed it. He was basically part of the establishment. The payoffs formed a protective barrier. Behind it, he was flourishing in a way he could never have imagined even a few years before. Of course, he was also falling apart.
____________
* One of the old guys, named Jack Heinlein, told me a story that illustrated how Torquato’s Democratic Party machine and Little Joe’s organization worked together, and how his father got caught up in it: “My dad was retired from the Johnstown police force. One day he had a meeting with John Torquato and Joe Regino. And lo and behold, my dad became a county detective. It was understood that he would look after their interests.” Things went along just fine for a long while, until one day Jack’s father messed up. He was involved in a raid on one of Little Joe’s gambling outfits. The understanding was that you would give advance notice of a raid, so there would be a modest amount of cash and betting slips around—just enough to look good when the new story came out. Somebody screwed up this time. They found $50,000 in cash in the place. Detective Heinlein had no choice but to continue with the bust. To make matters worse, it was in the paper. “They got Little Joe for fifty thousand bucks, and they got a picture of my dad in the Tribune-Democrat looking at the money,” Jack said. “They were very good friends, but they had a falling-out after that. I told my dad that wasn’t the brightest thing to do. He said, no, it wasn’t.”
† To this day I make a cauliflower-and-anchovy pasta sauce that I learned from my mother, the recipe for which, she recently told me, originated with Sam Fashion.