PIPPY DIFALCO’S MURDER is a fault line in this story because it changed everything for my grandfather. The Johnstown mob was a source of stability in Russ’s otherwise very unstable life. It gave him purpose. It served as the foundation of his world, a foundation that he himself had helped build. The pressure from the authorities following the bookie’s death fractured the mob in town. Trying to follow Russ thus becomes even more complicated in the 1960s. He had already been on a downward course emotionally, even when he was rising professionally, but from now on he seemed to break up into pieces. His path became more erratic, his “choices” even harder to fathom. Where I can make him out most clearly is in negative: in the fallout, the imprint he made on other lives.
I did, however, stumble onto one excellent source, who gave me, among other insights, my only window onto Russ’s activities during the period around Pippy’s death. Alexis Kozak was Alex and Vicky’s daughter. It was Russ’s affair with Vicky that pushed my grandmother to try to kill herself. I hadn’t even known that Vicky had had a daughter. It was my aunt Sis who suggested one day, out of the blue, that maybe I would want to talk to her. I phoned Alexis and was instantly intrigued. Not only was she willing to talk, she seemed eager. Plus, she lived in town.
To put us in the mood for chatting about back in the day, we agreed to meet for lunch at the Holiday Inn during one of Frank Filia’s Thursday-afternoon sets. We took our seats as Frank was crooning in his velvety tones about being blue every Monday and looking forward to Sunday.
Alexis was a lively, chatty woman in her sixties. And she knew a lot. Russ and Vicky somehow kept their convulsive affair going throughout Alexis’s childhood and early adulthood, which meant Alexis had a perspective on Russ that no one in my family did: an intimate view of him in the period of his life after City Cigar. She told me right away that she had liked him. He was kind to her, and he would take her and her mother and various friends out for extravagant dinners: “Nobody else was ever allowed to pick up the check.”
Russ brought a whole new energy into her household, which Alexis found fascinating. “I was always watching what he did,” she said, “the way he acted.” She found it thrilling, for example, that Russ never left the house without a .32 revolver. She said that as part of his entourage she spent a lot of time at Shangri-La (which did indeed become the hangout after City Cigar closed down), eating pasta with her mother upstairs while in a room downstairs Russ, Joe, Sam Fashion, and other guys would hold a weekly meeting. A couple of times she and her mother were with Russ at Shangri-La and he got so drunk her mother made the decision to take him to the hospital. She remembered one time a pal of his suggesting as they rushed off, “Make sure you tell them he has chest pains. That way they’ll take him right away.”
Then Alexis asked me if I’d heard about the murder of Pippy diFalco. She said she had a memory of the night his body was found, something she had never told the police—because no one knew to ask her. “How interesting,” I said.
Around two o’clock in the morning on May 26, 1960, the day the discovery of the body was made public, while newspapers carrying the story were still in the process of being printed, her parents’ dining room was suddenly full of men. It was the middle of the night, but the men were loud—pumped up on the news that the whole town would soon be discussing. First reports—which would soon be corrected—were that there were no signs of injury, no “visible evidence of foul play.”
“I remember waking up and hearing all the noise,” Alexis said. “It was crazy down there.” She was eleven at the time, peering downstairs. “The room was full of these guys. The only two I knew were Johnny diFalco and Russ. And my mother and father were there. They were talking about Pippy and everyone was all worked up. You have to remember that my mother and dad were best friends with your grandparents. That gang never came to our house. But I think they wanted to meet somewhere neutral. The police wouldn’t have connected my dad with them at all. And the next day I saw in the paper that they had found Pippy in the river.”
Alexis didn’t remember any particular things that were said, only that the body had been found. At first her memory of that night—the fact that Russ and some of his colleagues had gotten advance notice of the discovery of the body—seemed to me vaguely incriminating; Alexis had always thought so too. Then I realized the story could have been broadcast on the late news, and in fact later found that WARD radio had reported it sometime after midnight. Besides, even if they had gotten word from someone on the police force, that didn’t necessarily mean anything other than that they knew the cops had linked Pippy to the rackets, and that they had to be prepared for a new level of scrutiny.
Thinking more about Alexis’s memory, and whether it offered any evidence for or against Russ’s involvement in the murder, it seemed noteworthy that Pippy’s brother had been with the guys. Johnny diFalco had been part of the organization since its earliest days. The fact that he was there as the boys discussed this news struck me as potentially exculpatory. If their group had caused Pippy’s murder, it seemed unlikely that they would have plotted what to do about the body’s discovery in front of the dead man’s brother.
On the other hand, Russ’s behavior throughout this period was distinctly odd. I had given my daughter Eva the box my aunt had kept in her attic that contained all the personal documents Russ had left behind when he died. She pored through it and came up with some anomalies for this period:
Eva and I discussed all of this. I ran it by some people who are savvier in financial matters than I am. On the first point, the appraisal on the building that the Haven occupied, it was dated before Pippy went missing. Even if I were playing devil’s advocate and assuming that Russ had a hand in the bookie’s death, it surely could not have been the case that he and his associates were anticipating it. And if they somehow had been, I couldn’t see a connection between it and Russ considering a real-estate purchase.
On the second point, I mentioned the insurance policies to Tony and he had an instant response. “My dad was obsessed with life insurance. He was convinced it was a racket. He thought he could outsmart the insurance companies. He was always buying policies, taking out loans on them, cashing them in.”
The audit of Russ’s finances for the period of Pippy’s disappearance clearly meant he was under suspicion of being involved in some way, which stands to reason. But it doesn’t mean anything else. And the records that were audited showed mundane transactions, mostly related to his bar.
I finally concluded that the fourth point, the level of detail of Russ’s recordkeeping in this year, was the key to his odd behavior at the time. City Cigar closed its doors in the aftermath of Pippy’s murder. Capitol Bowling, of which Russ was a partner, was sold. Bookies were being busted all over town. The G.I. Bank went dormant. The cops were presumably monitoring his every move. What Russ’s unusual activity tells me is not that he was potentially involved in murder but that in 1960 he was a very scared man. The box of records provides a financial snapshot of someone whose life had cracked open. The Johnstown mob, after all, was his life’s work. The enterprise that he had built from scratch and to which he had devoted himself for fifteen years was being raided, invaded, dismantled. The insurance policies, the liquidation of companies, the audit—all of this did relate to Pippy’s murder, but to its aftermath rather than the act. It showed the effects of the government crackdown—from the federal level to city hall in Johnstown—on one life.
BY THE LATTER part of 1960 the only thing Russ had left, in terms of financial resources, was his bar, the Haven. That’s where he seems to have retreated for a time. And, funnily enough, that’s where I was. Tony and Rita’s first child, the reason for their elopement, had been born the previous February. Tony had followed Sicilian tradition and named his firstborn son after his father, but he and Russ were “estranged” around this time, as my mother put it. But while they may not have spoken much, the new family needed a home, and Mary went to work on Russ, cajoling, reminding him that the apartment next to the bar was going to be available soon. My mother told me that despite the tensions between them she knew Russ cared about his son. “All of our parents were concerned—there we were, teenagers with a baby. Everybody wanted to help. He let us move in there. And he never charged us rent.” Mary rounded up some furniture, her sister contributed a bed, and Tony and Rita set up home.
I have exactly one memory of that apartment, which must be from when I was about three and a half because that was how old I was when we moved out. There was a white wall, and a door in that wall. My memory is of one time when the door opened, and suddenly you were in the bar. I know that’s why it stuck with me: the shocking incongruity, the dizzy feeling of unsettledness, that you were in your home but suddenly you were in a dark world of adults being adults, the sort of place from which a small child instinctively recoils. And that, of course, was Russ’s world.
Not long after the little family moved into the apartment beside the Haven, Mary put a crib up at her house. She and Russ would drive down to the apartment, pick up the baby, and bring him to their place. This was when Russ told Tony that they would keep me. I guess Russ liked having the baby around. With his world falling apart, it was soothingly normal. He saw that Mary liked it. Maybe he figured it would be good for the two of them. The kids—meaning Tony and Rita—were too young to be parents anyway. He and Chinky could raise the baby. It would settle him, help give him a new focus, now that he had to rebuild his life. On the other hand, his relationship with Vicky would have been hot and heavy at this time—maybe he figured that raising her grandson would distract Mary, give her something to focus on so that she would stop nagging him.
I imagine that when I heard this story as a child—that my grandfather had tried to take me but my dad had pushed back, Like hell you will—my reaction was giddy relief, a feeling of narrowly missing falling into a chasm. Maybe what I thought of was that door in our first apartment opening up and me being swallowed by the blackness.
Tony knew his father was serious in wanting to take his baby: “They did that kind of thing in the old country,” he told me. “They did it here too.” He didn’t yet know about the con with Isabel’s son, but others of his father’s generation had swapped kids around—because somebody was too young, or deemed to be mentally deficient, or didn’t have room or resources for one more, and somebody else had had a baby die recently and had all the clothes and things ready. You made decisions like that in a family, divided things up depending on who needed what. The paterfamilias issued the pronouncement. A Sicilian thing. Tony knew all that. But he had a right to his family and his future. “I got mad as hell,” he told me. “The fact that he would even think that.” He didn’t remember the scene, what the words were that passed between them.
But he had an ally. “Mary wasn’t going to let it happen,” my mother told me. Mary could be withering with Russ, and not just about his other women. Don’t be ridiculous. Don’t you see this is how kids become adults? Your son is a man now. You wanted him away from your affairs. Well, now he’s away.
Rita and Mary conferred on such things. Rita was still a teenager when she became part of the family, and Mary welcomed her. While Rita changed diapers and such, Mary confided in her new daughter-in-law in a way she never felt able to share with her sisters. Russ’s infidelities: she tolled them, the women’s names, the lipstick traces, every little painful thing.
Rita’s own mother was not well and never had been—had never truly been a mother. She had a mental illness that grew steadily worse once her children were born and growing; she lived mostly at a state mental hospital now. Mary was another mother, who opened up to her at once, which was warm and lovely. In opening herself, she revealed mostly pain. Rita accepted that, and empathized. “I loved her dearly,” she told me. She said Mary talked to her about her childhood, being the oldest and the only one of her siblings with a different father, the hard life on the farm. She never seemed to have had close friends. She talked about how she would go off on her own as a girl and spend a day at a swimming hole. She glowed when she talked about her time in New York: Fifth Avenue, Central Park, Childs Restaurant, the Staten Island Ferry. “She was an independent woman by nature,” Rita said, “and I feel like she really was able to be herself in New York.”
THE RACKETS DIDN’T completely die out following the 1960 crackdown. There was a lull for a year or two, then Little Joe’s organization slowly reemerged, albeit in a more muted form. A police report in May 1963—written by Detective Habala—indicated that Russ was back in charge of sports betting, along with Sam Fashion, and he was now, as well, “one of the Heads of the G.I. Bank.” Habala listed forty-eight people working for Russ, either in the numbers or “the Fashion-Shorto organization” that ran a sports book.
But it wasn’t the same. The level of authority that Little Joe had exercised in the postwar years was gone. The fear and respect weren’t there, not like before. As a result, there were lots of independent operators around now. Dean Dallas had a separate bank. So did Al Fisher, John Mihalick, and a guy named Mickey Yon. Nick Sikirica ran a sports book. George Bondy, too, seemed to have gone out on his own, specializing in Empire treasury tickets, which were essentially illegal lottery tickets. And Rip Slomanson was back in town as well, running his own sports book, and had several guys working for him.
I have only a few scant pieces of information concerning Russ’s professional life in the ’60s. He continued as Little Joe’s lieutenant for a time, but in a reduced capacity. In addition to his work for his brother-in-law, Russ sold the Haven in 1965 and started another bar in Richland, a suburb to the east of town, called the Jockey Club. He ran card games out of there.
Russ’s personal life, meanwhile, became ever more complicated. If I am searching for a personality in researching this book, and feel continually thwarted at trying to locate it, in this period it is particularly frustrating. It feels as though Russ tried to hide by dividing himself up among different women—as though he’d hit on the brilliant idea that creating enough chaos would keep him distracted from looking at what was at its center. I had the feeling he was hiding from himself.
His affair with Vicky was fiery; maybe it was exciting to carry it on behind their spouses’ backs, but it had to have been utterly exhausting. Meanwhile, Isabel never went away. She was still cleaning for Joe and Millie, from which position she was able to oversee her little boy’s childhood. And now she had gotten Russ to let her do the cleaning at the Haven. For more than a decade she had persisted in believing that Russ would leave Mary for him. Certainly he knew that was her hope; maybe he led her along. I suspect he was too weak to stand up to her force of personality, too weak to sever ties with her, and rationalized that keeping her in his employ was a workable compromise, just as he had thought that giving their child to Joe and Millie was a solution.
But naturally Isabel found out about Vicky. Vicky thus replaced Mary as the object of her ire. One night Vicky and Alex were at the Haven. They had brought Alexis with them. It was getting late; Alex left because he had to work in the morning. Vicky and her daughter stayed until closing time—in other words, just when Isabel showed up to start cleaning. (“My mother thought nothing of keeping me out till two in the morning,” Alexis said.) As Russ locked up, he told Vicky he would take her and Alexis downtown to Coney Island Hot Dogs for a late-night snack. “So we waited and we followed him in our car,” Alexis told me. “And all of a sudden here comes Isabel following everybody. We were driving up Roxbury Avenue and she sideswipes my mother’s car. Your grandfather got out of his car and started screaming at her. He didn’t see it but she had a hatchet. She hit him right in the top of the head with it. All I could see was blood coming down. I was sure he was dead. Isabel took off and my mother and I took him to the ER. My mother called your grandmother and told her what happened. And she said, ‘Let the bastard die.’ ”
Russ lived. Mary’s suffering continued. While I was interviewing various women in my family, I asked for their thoughts about my grandmother’s situation. She was married to a man who was a pathological cheat not only at dice and cards but in life, in his marriage. His behavior bred psychological chaos, drove her to the depths of depression and maybe to the brink of madness. Why didn’t she leave him?
Everyone had the same answer. “Women didn’t leave their husbands,” Minnie told me. “A lot of times they had good reason to, but they didn’t do it.” As long as Russ kept returning home at night, Mary was trapped.
Finally, in 1964, he moved out. The last straw was when Vicky showed up at the family home to confront him and Mary—and she was clearly pregnant. My guess is that Russ had made an effort to deny that he was the baby’s father, and that set her off. My aunt says a loud shouting match ensued, with Vicky doing most of the shouting. That was too much for Mary; and at last it was too much even for Russ.
Mary was relieved once Russ was gone. Years of black, corrosive tension drained away from the household. “I don’t know why he didn’t do that years earlier,” my mother said. “They were torturing each other.” I think the answer must have been Russ’s weakness. As much as he needed the affairs, he also needed the relative stability of a home life.
My sharpest and warmest memories of my grandmother are from precisely this time—after Russ left home, beginning in the summer when I was five years old. My mother had her hands full with my younger siblings; I liked being with my grandmother, so for a time I spent mornings and afternoons at her house. She doted on me, fried me steaks for lunch, set up a tray in front of the TV for me to watch daytime reruns of I Love Lucy and The Honeymooners, smiled at me with her watery eyes. I didn’t mind her steadily pouring herself little glassfuls of beer throughout the day from the quart bottles she had delivered by the case. I knew they were meant to help her. At times she could be almost light. She had a dog named Bee-Bee. I loved it when she fried four eggs: two for me and two for the dog. She spent the whole day with Bee-Bee, talking to her. I listened resolutely as she told me that Bee-Bee standing beside the front door and growling in a rolling “ow—OWWW” sound meant that the dog was attempting to speak English: “I wanna go OUT.” I knew she believed that.
She was also perfectly capable of enveloping me in her painful reveries. I don’t remember her railing against her husband, but I knew that ache was there. She would at times go off on jags against “the Serbians.” I didn’t know who the Serbians were, but they were clearly awful people. I had no idea that she’d had an abusive stepfather, let alone that he had been a Serb.
I suppose I understood that my grandfather had recently moved out. I have dim memories of just before—him sitting at the kitchen table, a napkin tucked into his shirt top, her waiting on him—and I guess I understood that an event like the husband leaving the home only happened following great turmoil. Strange to say, but I found the house, on those languorous afternoons when it was just my grandmother and me, to be simultaneously a place of comfort and mystery. I loved exploring it, and it occurs to me that I was trying then to do what I am doing right now. I knew that things had happened in this house. There was a story, and I was trying to report it. I felt that my exploration needed to be carried out with some stealth. I had to assume an air of nonchalance. I studied the objects as if they held clues.
On the mantel sat a bust of two lovers twisted into a kiss. I recognize it now, looking at it in my mind’s eye, as Art Deco in style. The man and woman were so molded to each other, the lips so fused, they suggested a union of utter completeness. In the basement was some leftover paraphernalia from Russ’s days as an operator of illegal casinos: dice in a cage that had a handle you could turn; a bright-green board playfully divided up into circles and squares. Toys that weren’t toys.
On the banquette in the dining room there was what appeared to be a set of books, but if you opened the top you saw they weren’t books at all but a kind of box. Inside was a kit for making drinks: tumblers, shaker, strainer, shot glasses. This object seemed particularly significant. Why would you need to hide this activity behind a literary facade? Who was it being hidden from? I seem to have known both to associate my grandfather with alcohol and that he hid things from people. I opened this little chest only when I was alone, and only once or twice.
In spite of the heaviness of the atmosphere, I felt content being with my grandmother in her home. I loved my own house, but it was a chaotic place of babies and toddlers. Here it was quiet, and I had my grandmother to myself. She and I valued each other. Of course, I didn’t appreciate the timing. It didn’t occur to me that my grandmother had replaced one Russell Shorto with another.
WHEN VICKY’S BABY was born, in 1964, her husband, Alex, accepted him as his own son. They named him Sandor, after Alex’s father. The boy had a fraught life. Alexis remembered a time when Sandor was two years old and Isabel showed up at their house and picked him up off the front porch. She started to take him, Alexis screamed, Vicky came out. Isabel put the baby down and ran. “She resented Sandor,” Alexis said. “She was going to kidnap him.”
I don’t know how to characterize what supposedly happened next, so I’ll just quote what Alexis told me: “A man went to Isabel’s apartment soon after that and threw acid on her face. Apparently it was a message—to tell her that enough was enough.” Alexis wasn’t sure the man succeeded—nobody mentioned to me that Isabel’s face was disfigured after that. I asked her how she knew this, and she said she remembered Russ telling her mother about it. I asked if he said it with surprise or concern. “No, I think he was sort of chuckling,” she said. In other words, she said, Russ was telling Vicky that she wouldn’t have to worry about her son’s safety anymore, because Isabel had been scared off.
This story shocked me more than all the stories surrounding Pippy’s murder. I didn’t know what to do with it. I still don’t.
Alex died in 1972, of lung cancer. After that, Russ moved into Vicky’s house. He and Sandor were then much like father and son, after a fashion. Russ would get the boy out of school early so he could take him to the racetrack. “Sandor loved the track,” Alexis said. “He loved gambling. He idolized Russ.” Russ took Vicky, Alexis, and Sandor to the Shangri-La, or some other fancy supper club, three times a week. “Sandor and I grew up with that kind of lifestyle. Russ and his friends lived for the present. We loved being with him.” Sandor accompanied Russ on trips around town, to meet bookies and gamblers. Sometimes the boy would whisper to Alexis, in a thrilled voice, “This is the mafia!”
But here’s a strange thing. Vicky would not admit that Sandor was Russ’s son. She made Sandor call him Uncle Russ. Sandor knew better; he longed to have the relationship clarified. As a defiant teenager, he would yell at his mother, “I’m a Shorto—I know it!”
And here’s a stranger thing. The way people in my family understood the breakup of my grandparents’ marriage was that when Sandor was born, Russ left Mary for Vicky, and later, when Alex died, he and Vicky lived together as a couple, even though he remained married to Mary. But Alexis told me it was more complicated than that. When Russ moved into Vicky’s house, he slept not in Vicky’s bedroom but in Sandor’s. He and Sandor shared a set of twin beds. Alexis never once saw her mother and Russ being affectionate with each other.
Alexis and I put our heads together. What we concluded was that Russ and Vicky had a child together during their affair, which forced Russ out of his married home. He lived after that in the apartment above the Jockey Club. But by the time Vicky’s husband died—when Sandor was eight years old—Russ and Vicky’s relationship had become something else. They were no longer lovers but rather two people disillusioned with each other—Vicky had originally thought of him as a mobster with lots of money, and it was looking increasingly like he was more of a broke old drunk—who were now connected by a child and nothing else. Russ couldn’t go back to Mary, and Vicky wanted a father figure for Sandor, even if she refused to have the relationship acknowledged. So Russ moved into her house, as something between a tenant and an uncle.
But even that was fraught. About the only thing they did that reminded Alexis of some couples was fight. “They fought all the time,” she said. “I remember one time my mother threw a sweeper at him.” Where my family believed that Russ was off enjoying himself in another relationship, he seems instead to have exchanged one domestic hell of his own creation for another.
I met Sandor twice when I was in my late teens. He struck me as painfully earnest and desperately longing for something. Because of the tension between Vicky and my grandmother, there was very little contact between him and my family. Sandor wanted nothing more than to have that very contact. Some in my family actively shunned him, preferring to pretend he didn’t exist. My father, however, as if he felt an obligation to make amends for his father’s moral failings, went out of his way to embrace Sandor. He would meet with him, the way he did with the AA people he counseled, and commiserate, talk, even pray with him.
Sandor died of a brain tumor in 2007, at the age of forty-two. Tony visited him in the hospital, and referred to those visits many times. “He just wanted to be loved,” he would say, getting almost angry, as if one of us were arguing the point with him. “I told him he was my brother and that I loved him. He just wanted to belong.”
AS FOR RUSS’S other out-of-wedlock son, the one raised by Joe and Millie, I don’t recall ever meeting Joey before I started on this project. Once, right after my first Panera Bread session with Frank and the guys and just as I began doing research, he came to my parents’ house at my dad’s request, along with some other relatives, to share stories about the very old days of Antonino and Annamaria. When I had tried to bring up more recent matters, Joey balked. He didn’t want to go there. I understood. His situation was different from Sandor’s because he had grown up as part of our extended family—as Russ’s nephew. But learning later in life that he wasn’t who he thought he was could not have been easy. A few years later, however, when I was near the end of my research, and realized that I couldn’t write about Russ without some involvement on Joey’s part—Joey was, in a way, as central to the story of Russ and Joe as the mob was—I asked my aunt to contact him again.
This time he agreed to sit down and talk about himself. I didn’t know how he felt as he approached our meeting, but I was nervous. Would he throw up a wall of outrage when I brought up his parentage? Did he openly acknowledge it? How awkward was this going to be? I brought my aunt along, telling her it would make Joey more comfortable, but I was also thinking of myself.
His emotions weren’t apparent. At seventy, he was gruff, grizzled, manly. He had an interesting way of dealing with sensitive material. I would ask a question, and his first answer would be dismissive. Then he’d circle back around and give a blunt, forthright reply. When I steeled myself and asked how he had found out that he was actually Russ’s son, he was vague, meandered off onto another topic, so I thought that was in essence his answer. Then about five minutes later he said, “I found the adoption papers.” I respected this approach. It seemed to me he was saying, Look, I’ll help you, but this is hard stuff. Give me a minute.
After a bit he became more direct in his answers, or as direct as he could be.
RUSSELL: Did you ever confront your parents about the fact that they weren’t your parents?
JOEY: I said something to my mother. I never said anything to my dad about it.
RUSSELL: What did Millie say when you told her you knew she wasn’t your mother?
JOEY: She started crying.
RUSSELL: Did you ever tell Russ you knew he was your dad?
JOEY: I think I probably did, but I don’t recall.
This seemed both extraordinary and totally believable.
RUSSELL: Did he treat you as special in any way?
JOEY: Not that I can remember.
Joey talked about his life growing up: how his mother was “the sweetest of them all,” who had only one rule: you had to be at the dinner table at the stroke of six. As for his father: “Him and I didn’t really get along.” Little Joe, he said, was never happy with him, was always berating him. “You never heard him raise his voice to anyone,” he said, reflecting what others had told me. “Except he raised his voice at me all the time. My sister got good grades, she could do no wrong. Her wedding was huge.”
I had heard from many people about this wedding. It was held at the Shangri-La and was just about the most lavish affair the town had ever seen. There were eight hundred guests, tents, flowers, lines of limos. Some people told me they believe the wedding actually contributed to Little Joe’s downfall—that the spectacle of it caught the attention of state investigators who were just then looking to crack down. My dad told me that when he saw The Godfather several years later its famous mob wedding scene brought him back to the wedding of Little Joe’s daughter, and suddenly his whole background came into focus.
I asked Joey why he thought his dad was so hard on him. My aunt sharpened the question: “Do you think that he resented that you were my dad’s son?”
“I think he resented that I wouldn’t do what he wanted me to do,” Joey replied. “He wanted me to be an attorney. I wasn’t going to do that. I hated school. When I went to college I thought it was all about how much you could drink.”
I asked Joey about Isabel’s involvement in his childhood. He said she was always around the house in his early years, caring for him and his sister. Then, suddenly, Little Joe got fed up with the situation. Isabel had become progressively more involved—more of a mother, which was increasingly awkward for Millie. “He told her to get out of town,” Joey said. So after Russ had forced Isabel to give up her child, and Russ and Joe together had demoted her from mother to servant, Little Joe chased her away. Isabel spent the next several years in California.
Then she came back and somehow picked up where she had left off, working for Joe and Millie and doting on Joey and his sister. “She was always buying us presents,” Joey said. When he turned sixteen, she bought him a ring with a diamond chip in it. That was the closest she came, during his childhood, to acknowledging their relationship.
Then, several years later, Joey was a young man sitting at the bar at El Rancho Steak House getting drunk with some friends. Isabel happened to come in. “She came up and gave me hell for wasting my time,” he said. “I gave her hell back. She said, ‘How can you talk to me that way?’ And then she said … ‘I’m your mother.’ And I said, ‘I know.’ ”
Isabel died in 1999. Joey said he was pretty close to her at the end.
Joey told me that when Sandor was in the hospital dying he went to visit him. Joey felt an urge to connect. They were linked by this odd bond—they were Russ’s unacknowledged sons. But Sandor wasn’t having any of it. He said Sandor was bitter and angry at his fate, and lashing out. Joey left feeling angry.
In all of these stories and events—involving Joey, Isabel, Sandor, Alexis, Mary, Vicky, Alex—Russ was present in his usual way. He was the offscreen actor, the boundaryless protagonist whose morals were relaxed enough, whose hold on himself was tenuous enough, that he let other lives play out across the decades, simply backed away, and left people to puzzle out their places and their identities.
SOMETIME BETWEEN 1965 and 1970 Russ stepped out of the organization for good. This time, according to Mike, he went to Joe rather than wait for Joe to come to him. “Russ says to Joe, ‘I just can’t quit the booze. I’m no good to you anymore.’ ”
Russ’s world had shrunk drastically, thanks to the combination of federal, state, and local authorities and his own life choices. Once, he had practically run the town. What he had from now on was a small sports book of his own and the Jockey Club, which catered mostly to his aging friends.
As it turned out, he got out at a good time. The Kefauver Committee’s recommendations from the early 1950s took more than a decade to come to fruition, but in time they led to President Lyndon Johnson’s creating a President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice, which in turn led to the formation of the Pennsylvania Crime Commission. In 1970 the Crime Commission made a study of organized crime in cities around the state. “During the course of that survey, Commission investigators received allegations that a serious condition existed in the Johnstown area with regard to large-scale illegal gambling operations and their relationship to local government and law enforcement,” its 1971–72 report read.
The commission held hearings in Ebensburg, the county seat, at which it heard testimony from dozens of people who were involved in the rackets, both on the law enforcement side as well as those who were “managers of and participants in illegal enterprises.” They interviewed Mayor Walter, District Attorney Bionaz, and Detective Habala. Among the higher-ups on the other side of the equation they subpoenaed John LaRocca, Joe Regino, George Bondy, and others, most of whom invoked the Fifth Amendment. There is no indication in the published records that Russ was subpoenaed.
The commission’s report was published—in book form running to 185 pages—and on October 30, 1971, the Tribune-Democrat took the extraordinary step of printing it in its entirety, making for a bombshell of an issue. Little Joe had gone to enormous lengths over the decades to keep his profile so low as to be almost nonexistent. He had carefully burnished the persona of a quiet, respectable businessman. Now he was openly identified to the people of Johnstown—friends and neighbors, people who had admired him as part of the fabric of society—as an “underworld figure,” as “Cosa Nostra captain Joseph Regino.” The city was informed that “Regino has a criminal record of arrests for assault and battery, highway robbery, gambling and sale of narcotics.” The report stated that “underworld ‘summit’ meetings were held at the Shangri-La lodge.” It outlined the scope of Little Joe’s operation and how it functioned.
Little Joe seems to have been mortified by this public outing. He was probably especially enraged at the inclusion of the narcotics charge. That had been when he was very young, and he was never convicted on it. It may have been trumped up. People insisted that he and Russ had always been adamantly opposed to drugs as part of their operation.
I was told that Joe arranged to have every copy of that day’s edition of the newspaper destroyed. I don’t know how he would have accomplished this feat, but the issue is missing from every library that carries the paper on microfilm, and it’s even absent from the Tribune-Democrat’s own archives.