Smalltime

12 The Haven

SOMETIME IN 1956, Little Joe decided he’d had enough of Russ’s drunken binges. He showed up at Russ’s house, and he brought John Strank, their partner in City Cigar, with him. Russ was coming off a bender. He had failed in some decisive way, one of a string of failures to show up or otherwise to do his job. Joe and Russ had remained close through everything, but Joe believed in discipline. “Uncle Joe didn’t want to do it, but he had to,” my dad told me. I hadn’t heard about this before. Mike Gulino was the one who had told me, and now when I brought it up Tony suddenly remembered the scene like he was watching it on TV. He had been there, listening from the top of the stairs. He remembered that John Strank was in the room, but that John didn’t say much. He was there as kind of a mediator, a mutual friend, who solemnized and formalized the occasion with his presence. Tony heard his uncle tell his dad that he was letting him go, he had no choice, and he knew that Russ knew that was true. Russ didn’t try to argue his way out of it. He just started crying. “I cried too,” my dad said.

Shortly afterward, Russ bought a bar of his own. He called it the Haven. Maybe he chose the name with his own needs in mind, though you would think if he was seeking refuge from drink he might have chosen another channel for his activities. Then Joe decided to give him a second chance. Russ jumped at it, vowed to reform, and soon went back to making his usual rounds on behalf of the organization: his morning shave and nails done at Pantana’s barbershop on Washington Street, then stopping in at City Cigar, the bowling alley, the Melodee Lounge, and Shangri-La. The banks, the bookies, the takes, the percentages.

He remained in his brother-in-law’s good graces enough that, in September 1956, he was given honored treatment. Russ’s mother, Annamaria Previte, died then, seventy years after her birth in San Pier Niceto. Her last years had been spent mostly in bed, her white hair foaming around her head, making her a figure of wonder and terror to her younger grandchildren. She had lived more than half a century in Pennsylvania but never learned more than a few English phrases. Everyone I talked to remembered the funeral. Some said there were a hundred cars in the procession, that the funeral home was so stuffed with flowers they trailed all the way down the sidewalk. People had come from as far away as Pittsburgh to pay their respects. Little Joe and John LaRocca had conspired to make her sendoff a grand affair, a show of respect. Word was that Kelly Mannarino had contributed an entire truckload of flowers. Despite his lapses, Russ still rated.

But while he was back in the organization, from now on he had a new base. The Haven was something that was just his. Or rather, it was theirs: Mary was listed as the actual owner of the bar, and she worked there too sometimes. So they had a little bit of a partnership going. They were trying to start over. “I still love Chinky,” Russ told Minnie. He gave his brother Tony a job at the Haven. It was a nice little bar too, on a lively corner, not downtown but at a crossroads where several neighborhoods came together. It’s still there today.

The Haven was the kind of place where friends would meet for a drink and a few laughs. Russ and Mary were close with a couple named Alex and Vicky Yuhas. They would drive down to the bar from their house, just up the road in Southmont, and the four of them would have cocktails at a table near the front window. Alex was a supervisor at Bethlehem Steel; Vicky worked for a fur company.

Then Alex got sick, and Russ began to help Vicky out. Vicky was fourteen years younger than Russ—he was forty-three, she twenty-nine. She had been a beauty queen, Miss Cambria County. My way of gauging the start of their affair comes from Frank Filia. Frank had been building a name as a singer with the George Arcurio Orchestra throughout the 1950s. One night in late 1957 he was playing at the Forest Park Club and saw Russ in the audience. “It was such a big deal to me, because Russ never gave me the time of day. And here he’d come to see me. And he actually requested a song. ‘All the Way.’ ”* The other thing Frank remembered about that night was that Russ had Vicky with him. It was Vicky who liked the club and pressed him to take her there.

This time, when Mary found out she took some pills. Actually, it was her second suicide attempt. The first time wasn’t so scary; she went to the hospital and came back soon after. She had done so much for him, been the dutiful wife. Russ would bring business associates home at three in the morning; without complaining she would wake up, fly into the kitchen, and cook them a full meal: spaghetti and filet mignon.

But this was a particularly sharp betrayal. Something very heavy descended on Mary after she found out about Vicky. She slid into a studied listlessness. After sending the kids off to school, she would draw the curtains and sit alone in the dark house, letting morning give way to afternoon. One day she went up to the bathroom and began swallowing pills. Apparently deciding that moving her body would hasten the effect, she proceeded down to the basement and started washing clothes. Tony wasn’t at home, but he had been sensing the gathering darkness. Miraculously, an ambulance showed up at the house. The doctor came out of the emergency room wearing a serious look and said, “I don’t know if we can save her.”

Mary lived. When she came home from the hospital she was puffed up. Minnie told me that after that, when she would go to their house in the middle of the day she could often tell that Mary had been drinking, and the place would be messy and kind of odd. “There would be, you know, a hammer or something on the coffee table.”

Life on Rambo Street lurched on. Tensions between Russ and Tony didn’t lessen, but his mother’s brush was death brought about a change in Tony. He was seventeen, filled with hurt, but now feeling the need to grow up. He suddenly regretted dropping out of school, and signed up for classes that would get him a diploma. He only went a few times, but he was trying. He had outgrown the cat gang. He still hung out with some tough guys. Rip, for one. Like everybody else, he was freaked out by the guy. Neither his father nor his uncle liked him to associate with Rip, for the same reasons they called on Rip to do ugly jobs. Around this time, Tony and Rip took a trip to Atlantic City. They swam around the steel pier together. The pier was a quarter mile out to sea. They were both in shape, both excellent swimmers. When I asked him why Rip of all people attracted him, he shrugged and said, “I was nuts!”

Smarting from his father’s rejection, Tony started veering away from City Cigar when he was downtown and instead headed across Main Street to Weiser’s Music Center. Kids his age were always inside checking out what was new, standing around with headphones on, bobbing their heads. Music had settled into a firm groove: “All Shook Up,” “That’ll Be the Day,” “Little Darlin’,” “Wake Up, Little Susie.” None of that existed for him. He’d slip into one of the listening booths, put a different platter on the turntable—“A foggy day … in London town. …”—and start snapping his fingers. He absorbed each of Sinatra’s albums from those years—Songs for Young Lovers, Swing Easy!, In the Wee Small Hours, A Swingin’ Affair!—and decades later could recite the song order on each and tell you who did the arrangement. Others his age were going to sock hops. Still kids and acting like it. Sinatra was a generation older, and most of the songs he sang were older still, but, for Tony, Sinatra was pointing the way. This was how a man behaved. This was how you showed toughness—with an open cut of vulnerability. This was how you held a cigarette, your whiskey, how you squinted to express world-weary resignation, how you treated a woman. This was how you invented yourself.

RUSS WASN’T THERE. Little Joe might have been there, in which case he was one of the middle-aged men running awkwardly across open fields in suits and ties and patent-leather shoes, fleeing the cops. John LaRocca was one of the runners—he got away. Kelly Mannarino from New Kensington got nabbed and was subjected to the indignity of being arrested and jailed like a common criminal.

It was a defining event in the history of organized crime in the United States, and the beginning of the end for the outfit in Johnstown. History books call it the Apalachin meeting. On November 14, 1957, somewhere around a hundred mob guys from all across the nation gathered at the country home of Joseph Barbara—the Little Joe of Scranton, Pennsylvania—in the rural town of Apalachin, New York. A state trooper noticed a large number of cars with out-of-state license plates in the area. The cops established a perimeter around the estate and moved in. The boys ran for it. About fifty-eight of them were collared.

What made the bust significant was J. Edgar Hoover, the all-powerful head of the FBI. Even after the Kefauver Committee had issued its findings on illegal gambling operations and their spread around the country, Hoover insisted that these were independent units and therefore not of major importance. There was no interconnected network; there was no American mafia that held councils and issued rulings over governance. One theory holds that Hoover maintained this position because he was a zealous protector of the bureau’s image and he knew that hunting and prosecuting the mob would be a long and messy business that would likely tarnish it. Another is that Hoover was unable to take his eyes off what he felt was the real threat to the country: communism.

The Apalachin meeting made it impossible for Hoover to deny that there was a nationwide mafia. The men captured at the farmhouse included bosses from Utica; Rochester; Cleveland; Dallas; Pittsburgh; Philadelphia; Kansas City; Tampa; Providence; Springfield, Illinois; Springfield, Massachusetts; Elizabeth, New Jersey; and Los Angeles, as well as representatives of all of the five families that ran New York. The federal government was forced to recognize the mafia as a criminal organization that operated across state lines. Hoover immediately instituted what he called the Top Hoodlum Program to track mob activity.

Nearly five years after filing a Freedom of Information Act request, I received two CDs from the FBI filled with documents that detailed the movements of the federal agents who implemented that program in western Pennsylvania—who, sixty-odd years earlier, were doing what I had been doing recently: chasing after Russ and Little Joe and their colleagues. The first item was the memo from Hoover, dated ten days after the Apalachin meeting, ordering every FBI office to “open an active investigation on each top hoodlum.” It listed fifty-one cities where “personal attention” was required, from Knoxville to Honolulu. LaRocca was identified as the “top hoodlum” in western Pennsylvania. The directive made clear he wasn’t the only target of investigation in the area: “Since each top hoodlum undoubtedly has subordinates carrying on legal and illegal operations under his direction, it will be necessary to fully identify and describe the activities of these persons.” Agents were also instructed to break down their reports into categories. Suggested categories included “prostitution; narcotics; gambling (subdivided as to bookmaking, lotteries, basketball and football pools, coin operated gambling devices, dice games, card games, roulette, horse racing, etc.); illegal union activities; illicit alcohol; fencing of merchandise, including that moving in interstate commerce; hi-jacking; interstate transportation of stolen property violations; fraud against the government violations, etc.”

Agents fanned out. In Johnstown, they managed to locate informants who worked for Russ and Joe at City Cigar and Capital Bowling. They began filing their reports, which included lists of cities to which telephone calls were made from their subjects’ residences (Little Rock, Newark, New York, Philadelphia, Wilkes-Barre) and accounts of interviews, the copies of which I received were heavily redacted:

On 1/2/58 [_________] was interviewed at [_________] where he is employed in a junk business owned by [_________]. It is to be noted that [_________] are presently on parole and that [_________] parole will expire on 5/18/58.

The agents zeroed in on Little Joe:

The gist of the information furnished by these informants is that Regino is the head of the ‘syndicate’ in Johnstown, Pa., and as such is responsible to men more highly placed in the syndicate, allegedly to individuals in the Pittsburgh area. His responsibility in the Johnstown area is to see that protection is arranged for the various gambling activities—i.e., slot machines, tipseals, numbers and some card games, and to generally control gambling because of this protection issued to him. Openly he is the owner of the Capitol Bowling Alleys located at the corner of Franklin and Vine Sts … On 1/14/58 [_________], Johnstown Credit Bureau, advised that Regino … was listed as the co-owner of the City Cigar Store … She noted that the City Cigar Store has always been notorious as a hangout for gamblers of all types.

The FBI files mostly corroborated what I had learned from the Panera sessions and other sources. I allowed myself a flicker of smugness over the fact that my information was considerably richer than what the bureau had obtained, though there were a few interesting new details in the CDs. I learned, for one, that LaRocca had given money “to Samuel R. Di Francesco to aid him in his campaign for district attorney of Cambria County.” That put the Pittsburgh boss directly in the midst of the activities of Joe, Russ, and the others in town as they became part of the establishment. “After his election,” the report noted, “this group had control of Cambria County.”

THE LURKING PRESENCE of FBI agents adds a wash of mystery to my mental image of the scene at the corner of Main and Market on an evening that has personal significance for me. It was December 1957, and the liveliest intersection of downtown Johnstown was crawling with holiday shoppers. City Cigar was doing a robust business, and people were streaming in and out of the Mission Inn next door. Tony happened to be on the corner, in front of city hall, hanging out with a guy named Louie Alvarez, when a woman stepped off a bus and met her friend. He knew one of them: Joyce Fratterole’s family used to live next to his uncle. He introduced himself to the other girl, who fourteen months later would become my mother, and asked what they were doing. They were headed to the movies. When they came out of the theater, he was there, under the marquee, waiting. It was raining. He asked if he could give them a ride. Smooth fellow, he dropped Joyce off first, even though it would probably have been more logical to go to Prospect and then to Hornerstown. As he pulled up in front of Rita’s house, he asked her out.

My mom, at nineteen, was sweet, shy, petite, pretty. She could have played a naïve bombshell in a Fellini film from the period, with her close-cropped black hair, bangs, and searching eyes. They were a match of personalities: Tony the oldest in a family of three children, who was used to doing things his way, Rita the youngest of five, the baby of her family, who didn’t mind playing follow the leader. But there was a hidden inversion. If you encountered them at a party back then you would assume that the gregarious, self-assured, practical-joke-loving fellow was the stronger of the two and the somewhat hesitant date he was introducing everyone to would over time freely bend herself to his will. You would be right in that she followed him in many things, but as the decades unfurled she turned out to be the one with the grit and resolve to hold both her family and her husband together.

Both families’ American identities were inflected by their southern Italian origins, but hers were more immediate. Her father had emigrated as a teenager, along with his brother. Dominico—who became Dominic—threw himself into America, and insisted that English be the language at home. But when his friends came over they roared at each other in Italian, and in many other ways, especially food, it was an Italian household. Dominic worked at the mill until one day his car was hit from behind by a bus; he used the money from the settlement to quit his job and open a corner grocery store. That’s where Rita was working in the months between graduating high school and meeting Tony.

She knew who Tony was from the start; everyone knew City Cigar and the people connected to it. Her parents, when she introduced him to them, seemed, she says, to act as though Russ’s was a respectable career path, as if their daughter was dating the son of a prominent local accountant.

But a theoretical racketeer is different from a flesh-and-blood one. A photograph I have of my two grandfathers on the night they met, in August of 1958, taken the evening my parents returned from their hasty elopement to a spaghetti dinner Mary hosted for both families, shows Rita’s timid shopkeeper father looking terrified as Russ sits beside him, smug and drunk, one arm proprietarily flung over the shoulder of his new relation.

________

AND HERE WE are, suddenly, at the moment—the murder that marked the beginning of the end for Russ. Pippy diFalco’s death doesn’t connect in any obviously direct way to my parents coming together, but in a small town and a small story all the threads pull on one another. There is, for one thing, the possibility that their best man was the murderer.

My parents met in December; in May, Rita was pregnant. In August, unable to hide it much longer but also unable to face their parents, they decided to run off to Virginia Beach, where they heard they could find a justice of the peace who would marry them. Tony was selling used cars; he borrowed one for the weekend. They packed a few things.

But wait. They wanted a witness. Someone to act as best man. “No, not a best man,” Tony insisted when I suggested this. “He just came to drive the car.” But why him, of all people? Tony shrugged. Rita offered that maybe he was the only person free at the time. I asked my mom if she liked Rip. “No! I was scared of him. He had a thing where he would date women and take all their money. He’d con them. He married this woman who was so nice, she was real straitlaced, and he was miserable to her. After they divorced he ran off with this other man’s daughter, who was underage.” Tony added: “That guy was so beside himself that Rip took his daughter away that he went after him. He thought he was going to kick the shit out of him. Rip broke his leg.”

“So this is the guy you chose to take with you when you eloped,” I observed. “The guy who had formerly been the head of a street gang. Who you met in prison.”

They both fell silent. “I never liked him,” Rita said. “I heard he died recently,” Tony said. “He was living in Florida for a long time.”

____________

* The song had come out in October of that year. It was featured in the film The Joker Is Wild, in which Frank Sinatra plays a singer in the Prohibition era who is pressured by mobsters to work for them. He becomes an alcoholic. I have to think Russ saw it, and can’t help but wonder if he felt echoes of his own life in it.