SOMEWHERE ALONG THE way, without our quite realizing it, my father and I had shifted our focus in our search for his father. Where for three years or more we had been chipping away at Russ like archaeologists working a dig, excavating his life from the Prohibition era to the Kennedy administration, we were now talking mostly about Tony: his past, his path. We seemed to have tacitly agreed that the eldest son was an extension of the father, that even though my dad had not followed Russ in the rackets his course had nevertheless continued from his father’s.
Our study of Russ in 1960, then, when he was running scared in the aftermath of Pippy diFalco’s murder, segued into reconstructing what Tony was doing at that time. We chuckled a little when I pointed out a funny dynamic in Tony’s life as he set off into adulthood, with a wife and a young child to support. Before, he had desperately wanted to be part of the local mob but his father wouldn’t let him in; now he was trying to establish himself apart from his father’s world, to separate from it, but his social circle was still comprised of guys from the rackets. Rip, when he wasn’t under threat of a murder charge or running his own book, would stop by the apartment from time to time. One of the first businesses Tony started was a spaghetti takeout service, and his partner was Nino Bongiovanni, the guy who had run the lunch counter at City Cigar, who was arrested in the raids following the murder of Pippy diFalco and later would be busted for taking part in one of Mike Gulino’s scams.
And when it came time to baptize Tony and Rita’s baby, Sappy Sapolich, the disgruntled prizefighter turned game runner, ended up being the guy who stood in the nave of the Church of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, on McKinley Avenue, broken-nosed and hunkering, as my godfather, alongside Rita’s sister Jean as godmother, reciting the rote answers to the questions that were intended to guarantee the moral rectitude of the sponsors prior to an infant’s baptism:
| Do you believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth? | I do believe. |
| Do you renounce Satan? | I do renouce him. |
| And all his works? | I do renounce them. |
| And all his allurements? | I do renounce them. |
In later years, on the rare occasions when our family would run into Sappy—I remember a church barbecue of some sort, a group of guys huddled around a picnic table, a pile of wrinkled dollar bills in the middle, him with a visor on his head and a cigarette hanging from his mouth, pausing in the dealing of cards to engage me in a solemn handshake—I found it disorienting to think that this man was to oversee my spiritual development.
Eventually I learned why Sappy was nominated for the role. One of Tony’s runaway episodes during his cat-gang days in his early teens had ended with the police finding him and calling Russ. Russ looked around for someone who would go to Ohio to fetch him. Sappy said he’d get the kid. From the moment Tony saw his lumbering form coming to retrieve him he had looked at the boxer as a protector. Five years later, as a young father, he turned to Sappy much as his father had.
Tony’s feelings, too, were still firmly stuck in the detritus of his father’s world as he moved into his own orbit. Anger was hardening him; he was in the process of walling his father off from his family. Five decades later, in my parents’ living room, with him lying back in his easy chair, the oxygen tube clipped insouciantly to his nose as he worked his chewing gum and stared meditatively at the ceiling, we talked a little about this, but only a little. It was a hard place to go. I asked my dad what he thought the root of the anger he held back then had been. He didn’t mention what now seemed to me palpable, that his rejection of his father was related to what he incorrectly perceived to be his father’s rejection of him. And I couldn’t bring myself to suggest it to him, to say that his father’s use of fists rather than words to protect his son had been understandably misinterpreted; that Russ had wanted to keep Tony out of the rackets for his own good, but Tony had viewed it as his father not thinking as highly of him as he did of others—of Mike Gulino, for one; that, maybe, he’d decided his father didn’t love him.
There were plenty of other reasons for him to be angry. There was the pain his father had caused his mother, and the outrage at Russ trying to take his child.
In my dad’s mind, though, the thing that grew as he and my mother built their family was hurt on behalf of his own children: “The years went by, and he never lifted a finger to be a grandfather. He never came by. He wouldn’t have known you kids if he fell over you on the sidewalk. I was so mad at him for a lot of years.”
________
TONY’S CAREER PATH had basically been set when he was fourteen and somehow got a job selling pots and pans door to door, and realized that he was good at it. Not long after, he went to the library and checked out the Dale Carnegie book How to Win Friends and Influence People, devoured it, and committed himself to, as that forerunner of all self-help manuals put it, “develop a deep, driving desire to master the principles of human relations.” “It was the first book I ever read that I wanted to read,” he said. It clicked with what he knew in his bones, that sales was nothing more or less than making a connection with people. Instead of getting his high school diploma he took a fourteen-week sales course, in which all the other students were middle-aged men. “Act enthusiastic AND YOU’LL BE ENTHUSIASTIC!” he exclaimed, characterizing for me its essence. He got a job working alongside two veteran salesmen, selling siding door to door. One of them had a lisp and a schtick of earnestness: “He’d say to the customer, ‘My mouth ith moving but my heart ith talking.’ I almost fell on the floor laughing. But the thing was, he meant it. I learned a lot from those guys.”
Over the next few years Tony pulled himself out of the crisis that was his early life, and supported a wife and children, by embracing sales as if it were a religion. He might at one time have imagined he would be selling numbers or tip seals, but as it turned out it didn’t matter to him what the product was. He sold cars, pasta, and encyclopedias with equal vim. One time he bought a hillside that was covered with evergreen trees, hired some guys to cut down all the trees, sold them at Christmastime, then sold the hillside. He steeled himself against the waves of rejection that come a salesman’s way by devouring a syllabus of his own selection, working toward a self-bestowed degree in self-help. Think and Grow Rich. The Power of Positive Thinking. Selling the Sizzle. Psycho Cybernetics. Paperbacks of those books—dog-eared, splay-backed, with whole paragraphs viciously underlined, the margins stuffed with his slanted all-caps printing—littered the landscape of my childhood. He had his philosophy reduced to a motto: “A Winner Never Quits and a Quitter Never Wins.” He tried to drill it into me. Even as a child I demurred—something in me warned that it was too pat, too cheesy.
His attempts to imbue his eldest son with his hard-earned wisdom reached a climax when I was in fifth grade. He marched me into the dining room of our home, where a bookcase lined one wall, then commanded me to pull out the dictionary and look up the word “impossible.” Even though I didn’t know exactly where this was going, I could sense that it was one of his gimmicks. He handed me a pair of scissors and instructed me to cut the word out of the dictionary. Why? I had a love for books (which he had instilled); it seemed sacrilegious.
“Because it doesn’t exist.”
“Yes, it does. It’s right here. I-M-P-O-S …”
And there was that beam of his, his face lighting up because he had you right where he wanted you.
“Nope. Doesn’t exist.”
Despite my resistance, the image of that page of the dictionary, with the little rectangle neatly sliced out of it, remains in my memory. A winner never quits. Tony never did. Tony. How could you not fall in love with such a father? People said he looked like Robert Vaughn in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. He was a secret-agent body double, a jazz aficionado, an up-and-comer, a fashion plate and man about town; a winner not despite but because of the many failures. You know who struck out more times than anybody in the history of baseball? Babe Ruth! I had no idea whether that was true, but he forced me to grin at the wisdom. He told me about his own failures in sales, making them seem the saddest stories, then turned them inside out with the kicker that each failure fired him up for the next round. And the next time, he’d win: sell a Pontiac off the lot, or whatever else was put before him. He loved the game, he was good at it. It wasn’t about the stuff; it was about attitude. Your attitude about yourself and the world and how, dammit, the two were meant for each other.
It dawned on me, as we sat in his living room reliving the first stage of his career, that this mindset, this dynamo, came right out of the clashes with Russ. It wasn’t just, as I had always thought, a freakish contrast of personalities between father and son. There was a direct line between what Russ had been and what Tony was becoming. Surely without intending any such thing, Russ, in shutting his son out of his life and the rackets, in fomenting a hurt, put this spin on him, set him on his razzle-dazzle trajectory.
THEY BASICALLY DIDN’T speak for ten years. In that time—the mid-’60s to the mid-’70s—Tony rose as a small-town entrepreneur. He graduated from selling cars and books to buying and selling houses, becoming a player on the local real-estate scene. Along the way, he started a bar, which he slyly called the Office Lounge (“Where were you, honey?” “At the Office …”). Small towns being what they are, the Office happened to be located a block away from the Haven. Russ had sold the Haven a few years before, but it was still in business, and the contrast between the two was generationally striking. The Haven’s crowd was comprised of people who, like Russ, had had their heyday in the Eisenhower administration. Thanks to Tony’s personality, the Office took off right from the start, and it filled with relatively hip young adults clutching glasses of “Chablis,” “Burgundy,” and Mateus Rosé—people who’d come of age amid Watergate and were trying to shake off the gloom of that era and suss out a brighter future for themselves.
Eventually, Tony was able to fulfill a dream and buy a house for his family in Westmont, the upscale suburb with the best school district. But he needed $5,000 for the down payment.
“Where did you get it?”
“Borrowed from my uncle Joe.”
Beat.
“You took money from a mob boss?”
“He was my uncle! I paid him back right away.”
Then one day at the Office—it was the afternoon; no customers, Tony was alone behind the bar getting the cash drawer ready for the evening—the door opened and there stood Russ. Russ tended to mumble; he said something about how he liked the place—it had class. The back wall was deep-blue wallpaper with the Manhattan skyline outlined in silver. They talked about little things. And Tony felt his heart softening. Russ was a little over sixty but looked older: ravaged and sad-eyed. Wasn’t it better to reconcile before it was too late? Tony asked him what he was up to. Russ mentioned a deal he was working on, an investment. A book. Tony knew perfectly well he didn’t mean the kind you read. Russ was wondering: maybe Tony would like to get in on it. Tony said it was nice of him to offer, but he’d have to pass. Russ said he understood. But if his son could see his way to giving him a loan—a couple thousand was all he needed—he would be able to get the money back to him, with interest, within a week or so.
Tony lent him the money. A week later, Russ came back. He almost had all the pieces in place. He just needed another two thousand bucks, then he’d pay the whole four thousand back plus another thousand.
“It went on like that,” my dad said. “When I was down ten thousand, I knew I was being conned by my own father. He didn’t see it as a con, I don’t think. I said to myself, ‘This is ridiculous.’ ”
“Did he ever pay you back?”
“No.”
Jump ahead a couple of years, and Tony is now at his career peak. He has parleyed the success of the Office into another venture, opening a huge disco in the suburb of Richland. It was in a former factory; he called it the Factory. All of his people skills were paying off, and his promotions—Foxy Ladies Nite!—were right on target; the place was packed every weekend.
And once again there comes an evening when Tony looks up—this time across a sea of customers, over the long curved bar and toward the entrance—and sees his father standing there. An old man in a suit that harkened back to an impossibly bygone era, blinking, looking around at the roomful of young people, their faces patterned with dots of light from the disco ball, moving to the bass-heavy beat of Donna Summer. The next time Tony looks up, he is gone.
I wondered, while Tony was telling me this, what Russ was thinking. I wondered if he was thinking that, after all, his son had followed in his footsteps, replicated the kind of small-town entrepreneurial realm that Russ had created, but had done it differently—on the up-and-up. Or maybe he’d just wanted to hit his son up for money but saw that he was too busy.
RUSS’S LAST YEARS were hard. He had several heart attacks, which tore through him like hurricanes, leaving wreckage. A picture of him at sixty-five shows a man you’d swear was in his eighties. He was popping nitroglycerin pills like candy. He still lived at Vicky’s house, but they couldn’t stand each other. Each had tried at different times to break away, but they ended up sabotaging each other’s attempts. Once, when he was still feeling vigorous enough to experience indignation, Vicky came home and mentioned warily that a man who worked at a clothing store in Westmont had asked her out. She was suggesting, sort of, that maybe they should give each other some room. She was still in her forties at the time; it wasn’t too late for her. Alexis told me that shortly afterward the man called Vicky in a panicky voice, asking her to please stay out of his store. Russ had come in and threatened to kill him.
He was fading fast though. Sometime in late 1980 or early ’81 Russ asked my aunt if she would let him move into her house. He said he couldn’t take living with Vicky anymore. “Dad, Mom stays with me now every weekend,” she told him. “I can’t have you both here.” Not long after, he made his final trip to the racetrack in West Virginia, where he had one more heart attack, while clutching 37 tickets—trifectas, exactas, quinellas—totaling $305 in bets. His last gamble. The hospital called my parents. My dad called my aunt. “I still feel bad that I told him he couldn’t stay with me,” Sis said. “He didn’t have long to live.”
Just before Russ’s funeral, Sis told her mother about Joey, that he was Russ’s son. She hadn’t had the strength to tell her before, or maybe she didn’t think her mother had the strength to hear it. “I would have raised Joey as my own” was Mary’s comment. As it turned out, having the information helped her get through the funeral. For years, she’d felt a coldness from Russ’s sisters and their children. It hurt her; she didn’t understand the reason. Apparently there was awkwardness in their knowing Joey’s parentage while she did not.
The awkwardness seemed to melt away with Russ’s death. At the funeral, which was a large affair—hundreds of people trooping through Ozog’s Funeral Home on Broad Street and filing into Saint Emerich’s Church on Chestnut Avenue—Russ’s family members came up to Mary, one by one, the Verones and Shortos and Basiles and Trios, kissed her, held her, treated her as the aunt, in-law, matriarch that she was. I was there, just graduated from college and now, with my brother and four of Russ and Mary’s nephews, a pallbearer. I watched my grandmother playing the role of widow, assuming it like an actress. Her tears opened up as the relatives came to her, one after the other, and told her how sorry they were for her. She was weeping, I suppose, over what one can’t help but weep over at the funeral of a spouse: the inexorable linearity of life, the imponderability of what was and might have been, the massive ache of humanness. And I imagine she felt relief.
LITTLE JOE DIED four year later, in 1985. His funeral was even bigger than Russ’s, with a parade of Lincolns and Cadillacs that made the evening news. The obituary in the Tribune-Democrat differed from what he might have hoped for before the Crime Commission hearings. He was acknowledged as president of Keystone Sales and owner of the former Shangri-La Lodge, but that information was buried. The newspaper led by calling him “a reputed local organized crime figure” who “was considered by the Federal Bureau of Investigation to be a lieutenant in the western Pennsylvania La Cosa Nostra.”
Shortly after his death, a special agent for the Pennsylvania Crime Commission gave the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette a kind of epitaph for Joe, Russ, and others like them, the men who had built their smalltime fiefdoms in the postwar era: “They are growing old and dying off, and it does not seem that people are knocking down the doors to become members because there is a lot of independence. People figure, ‘Why should I give this organized guy money when I can just keep it all for myself?’ ”
I VISITED MIKE one more time in the nursing home. He had deteriorated since I’d last seen him. He would die within a few months, at the age of eighty-seven. We talked about a lot of things, but he seemed to have something in particular on his mind concerning Russ and the influence he’d had on his life.
Before, I hadn’t quite been able to fathom the gap between the way Mike thought of my grandfather and the way people in my family viewed Russ. But listening to him now I had a little epiphany. Maybe, to Russ, Mike had not just been—as Mike himself had told me—a kid who was already tainted by the rackets and therefore a kindred spirit. Maybe Russ could allow himself to get close to Mike—to view him almost like a son, to love him—because their relationship wasn’t burdened by the harm that Russ was at that time doing to his wife. Several times my dad, in talking about his father, had used the word “shame.” “He was filled with shame.” I didn’t get it, and when I asked him to explain what he meant, he couldn’t. Now suddenly I did get it.
That behavior didn’t cloud Russ’s relationship with Mike. He didn’t have to feel guilty. He could be himself. He never broke character: Tony saying that to me about his father meant that he knew there was a facade he would never get past. Whereas Russ could reveal himself to Mike. Mike felt the genuineness—it must have been a relief for both of them, in a world of hard guys, a transactional world, to allow yourself that kind of openness—and he never forgot it. I wondered if the chance to relive that special relationship, to feel it again, wasn’t what motivated him to want to sit with me hour after hour over the years.
What Mike wanted to talk about in particular was his final con. He laid it out for me, describing it as a kind of homage to Russ. It was such a bold piece of work, and so clearly an extension of what he took to be Russ’s teaching, that I later spent some effort in corroborating the details, unpacking how it all went. In executing it, Mike brought his mentor’s philosophy, born of the post-Prohibition world, into the era of Bill Clinton and Madonna and Nintendo. And, like in a caper film, where the old crew gets back together for one more job, he reunited some of the guys from Russ’s era.
He began to hatch the idea for his last con, which he called “The Box” and which federal prosecutors later dubbed the “Johnstown Sting,” when he was doing time for bookmaking. As he’d told me before, he was pissed off with himself. He and Russ and all the guys had come of age at a time when gambling was supposedly immoral and therefore illegal; they’d devoted their lives to devising ways to feed the eternal hunger people had to bet, to try to beat the odds. Then, over the previous decade, he’d seen the government muscle in and take over that business, as if the state were just another mob outfit. All of a sudden state lotteries spanned the country. He’d been busted for running a book when states were basically doing the same thing. He wasn’t going to make that mistake again. He’d go back to his roots. Run a con. But what?
One day after he got out of prison he was sitting in the steam room at the YMCA when another guy sat next to him. They got to talking. His companion was an older gentleman, a businessman, clearly very conservative. When Mike said his name, the man remembered reading about his arrest and his bookmaking empire. Mike was struck by how much this straitlaced fellow knew about bookmaking—and by how much he didn’t know. “That’s when it hit me—a little knowledge can be dangerous. I said to myself, ‘I can beat this guy. And there are a million just like him.’ ”
The fellow from the steam room knew that even in an era of state lotteries illegal books remained popular. There were lots of guys who didn’t want to give a share of their winnings to the IRS. The man knew some of the ins and outs of illegal bookmaking, including the fact that bookies “lay off” to other bookies: make bets with other bookmakers in order to cover potential losses. Mike began to envision a con that revolved around layoffs.
Of course, if you want to scam somebody who knows a thing or two about bookmaking, you have to go to great lengths to show that your operation is secure. That’s why it’s called a confidence game. You have to convince the guy you’re scamming that he isn’t being scammed. Mike started thinking about a box. Back in the days of the G.I. Bank, Russ and Joe had a contraption that looked like a toolbox, which had a lock and a timer fixed to it. The day’s betting slips went into it. It was closed and locked to signal the end of the day’s action. It stayed locked until a set time, when it sprung open. It was a security device to prevent past-posting: making bets after the number was known.
So one day, a guy named Rich Sapolich—who happened to be the son of Sappy, my godfather—got a call from Nino Bongiovanni, who had been a friend and associate of Mike’s from back when Mike ran the Harrigan table at City Cigar and Nino ran the lunch counter. Rich was an electrical engineer who was good with his hands, good at making things. “Nino calls me up and says, ‘Mike wants to talk to you,’ ” Rich told me. (I’d arranged to meet him at the Holiday Inn. Also on the scene for this particular lunchtime chat session were Frank Filia, Sam Di Francesco, my dad, and a talented pool player from the City Cigar days called Chooch Boscola.) “He wouldn’t say what it was about. I go to Nino’s place. He says we’re going to take a ride with Frank.” This was Frank Pagano—the guy who was my dad’s nursing-home roommate. Frank and Mike also had a friendship that dated to City Cigar.
Frank showed Rich a box—one of the boxes Russ and Joe used for the G.I. Bank, which Mike had somehow gotten his hands on. “It was a sort of comical old-school technology, but it worked,” Rich said. “Apparently it was made by a guy who was a bomb expert in World War II. Mike asked if I could make one, only better.”
Rich made the box. He told me he spent ten months getting it right. (Mike complained about this: “Richie was a genius, but it took him a fuckin’ lifetime to get anything done.”) They tried out the box. Then he completely redesigned it. “It was really nice-looking,” Rich said. “It looked like it could have been on the space shuttle. I like clean design.”
Once the box was ready Mike’s job was to find the mark—“the fish,” the guy who was going to take the bait. Greedy guys, guys with lots of money who wanted more. Guys who were smart, but not as smart as they thought they were. He found them everywhere. Doctors, dentists, accountants, engineers, real-estate developers …
Mike’s story was that he was a bookie’s bookie, taking layoffs from bookmakers all over Pennsylvania and surrounding states. The fictional bookies were supposedly taking bets on the daily number from the Pennsylvania state lottery. What he needed, he told the fish, was an investor, someone who could cover him in the event that a number hit big. He didn’t come off like he was selling himself; it was the investor who had to prove to him that he had the funds and the discretion. Mike was well known as a bookie. Guys heard about his new venture and lined up, asking to be let in. “What, my money’s no good?” one of them complained when Mike declined to let him invest.
They lined up because it was such a sweet deal—there was no real risk involved. They weren’t gambling but investing. The odds of the numbers game were such that the house was guaranteed to earn roughly 40 percent of the total amount bet. Mike would split that with the investor. The reason he needed an investor was because of the daily fluctuation: some days a number would hit big, and instead of profiting they would have to pay out. That was the investor’s only job, to come up with half the winnings. Mike told the investor he prided himself on paying winners within twenty-four hours. So if a number hit, the investor had to be ready to make a payout on the spot. And he was careful to warn the fish about the size of the action: with bets ranging from $100 to $500, and 600-to-1 payoffs, the fish might have to come up with $40,000 or $50,000, or more. “And I told them this is all cash. When you win, you get cash. If you have to pay, you pay cash.”
With the fish on the line, either Frank or Nino would show up at his house or hotel room just before 7 p.m., when the lottery number was drawn on TV. (Once the FBI was on to the sting, they set up a video recorder in a hotel room where Mike was meeting a prospective fish, who was actually a government agent. They captured him assuring the man of Nino’s trustworthiness. “He’s an extension of my right arm,” Mike says on the tape. “The only thing about me he don’t know is when I fuck my old lady.”) They would then watch TV, see the day’s number pulled, and at 7:01 the high-tech lock on Rich’s box would pop open and together they would go through the bets in the box to tally things up.
The box contained ten slips, each of which listed about fifty numbers played, along with the amount bet on each. These bets had supposedly been called in to Mike’s secretary throughout the day. The fish was told that the box was locked at 6 p.m., when betting closed. The trick of the whole scam—Rich’s ingenious element—was a tiny printer concealed in the lid. The instant the winning number was announced on TV, Rich, who was sitting in a car nearby, radioed it to the printer, which printed out a slip with the number and dropped it in among the others, thus assuring that the fish would have to make a payout rather than receive one. The slip also showed the amount the fictitious winner had bet. “We were pretty conservative at first,” Rich told me. “But we got bolder as we went. I started with winning bets of around $20,000. The highest was a quarter of a million.”
“But I guess sometimes you let the fish win?” I asked Mike.
“No! Why let him win?” Their first fish was a doctor from Greensburg. After he had lost badly for several days in a row he told Mike he was going to quit at the end of the week if his luck didn’t turn around. “I said to Nino and Frank, ‘He’s gonna go till Sunday then quit. We have to cripple him.’ Frank said, ‘No, let’s let him win once. Then he’ll stick around.’ I said, ‘Fuck you. I didn’t put all this money into this thing to let some fucking doctor win. We are the guys who have to win.’ ” They took him for a total of $465,000 before he quit.
Mike was stunned by how well the con worked. And it kept working. Next they took a doctor from Pittsburgh for $430,000, a real-estate developer from Johnstown for $300,000, a dentist from State College for $280,000. The owner of a dog-kenneling business later admitted to the jury in federal court that he couldn’t even remember how much he’d lost: “I was in such a state of panic, I didn’t know.” A retired urologist from Johnstown played along for three days, lost $157,000, then threw in the towel.
Mike prided himself on his ability to keep the fish on the line. The urologist told the court that Mike had gone so far as to advise him on what to do with all the cash once he started winning, giving him tips on how to avoid the notice of the IRS. After a few losses, Mike would tell the fish that he had hit an unlucky streak, with bettors winning several days in a row, but that that only meant the odds were now heavily in his favor, he just had to stay in the game—the only way he would lose was if he bailed out. Another physician in Johnstown kept listening, and kept paying up, until, after twenty-eight days, he’d given Mike $247,000 in cash. “After suffering a staggering loss, I had no interest in continuing this misadventure,” he told the jury.
Some investors left in anger, some in confusion. Virtually none, it seems, realized at the time that they had been conned. One time Mike showed Rich a wedding invitation. Not long before, they had taken a doctor for close to $1 million before he bowed out. He sent Mike a little handwritten note, apologizing for not being able to keep up his side of what he still believed was a business arrangement. To show his regard for his former partner, he invited him to his daughter’s wedding.
The Johnstown Sting ran for seven years before the feds caught up with Mike and his compatriots. By that time, it was all getting too much for them anyway. There was no goal, no endgame. They just kept taking money from rich guys who were greedy enough to give it to them. They were constantly looking over their shoulders. And they didn’t know what to do with the money. They had it stuffed in their mattresses and attics. Frank Pagano had more than $50,000 in a coffee can in his garage. They were starting to get on one another’s nerves, too. Rich was feeling weird about Mike. He slowly came to realize that Mike wasn’t in it for the money: “He just loved to beat these guys. He wasn’t going to stop until he was forced to.”
In 1995 a fish in Ohio whom Mike was in the process of luring turned out to be an FBI informer. Rich and Frank both testified in exchange for leniency; Frank wore a wire to help build the case against Mike. (I mentioned Mike to Frank in the nursing home. “There was nobody in the world closer than Mike and me, but we don’t even talk now,” he said with some sadness. “We parted ways over that box.”) The feds found evidence that Mike had bilked people out of a total of $2 million. Mike chuckled and told me it was five times that amount.
The trial played out in the Tribune-Democrat over the course of 1996. Mike was tickled by the fact that right up to the trial itself federal agents believed that the fictitious book had been real; they kept pressing him to know where earnings from it were stashed. “That’s when you know you pulled a hell of a con,” he said.
Mike’s lawyers argued that he deserved probation due to ill health. PRISON FOR SCAM ARTIST ran the ultimate headline: the judge ruled that his crimes demanded jail time. After his earlier imprisonment Mike had sworn off bookmaking and returned to the purer business of running a scam, but the end result was the same. He got eighteen months in a federal penitentiary.
MIKE SAID HE wanted to relate the details of his last con to me because Russ had been the guiding force behind it—because “I owe everything to Russ.” Being a kid and watching Russ play gin rummy for big money in the room behind the bowling alley in the late ’40s, cheating fearlessly, had been, for him, the equivalent of a college education. As he described those card games—the cigar smoke, the sweat and the booze, the guys in their suits with their ties shimmied loose, the heads of department stores and banks and factories drawn together by their common hankering for this ancient form of competition—I thought for the first time about the two sides to Russ’s career, which I had lumped together but suddenly realized were quite different. He had started out as a cheat then altered his course once Joe came to town and brought the mob franchise with him. Joe had given him an unparalleled opportunity—I’m tempted to say an offer he couldn’t refuse—with the result that Russ became a kind of company man, a manager of an expanding enterprise. That came with all the pressures of any corporate position, in addition to those pressures that were unique to the rackets. I wondered if the shift into that line of work wasn’t what drove him to drink. If I thought through everything people had told me, it seemed he had been most in his element when he was a cheat, pure and simple.
The package of skills that characterized a successful cheat—the poise, the coolness, the outrageous assumption of sincerity—was what had attracted and even moved Mike when, as an impressionable teen, he met Russ. And here was what seemed a true conundrum: These two men had become close because each had seen himself in the other. They forged a bond out of mutual respect and openness. They allowed themselves to be naked before the other, without artifice. And yet what led to that genuineness, what each saw inside the other and identified with, was an innate aptitude for deceit.
It was as a kind of gentleman con artist that Mike chose to remember Russ. He really wanted me to appreciate that, to see it as a virtue. “Everybody thought Russ was a sonofabitch, but when he was cheatin’ he was slick as can be,” he said. “Those card games were big. He was playing with guys who ran companies. Some of the players were in the rackets—murderers, guys from out of town, guys you didn’t want to fuck with. It ain’t easy to con guys like that. But when Russ would go to get his card, he’d take three—right in front of you. You didn’t see it happen, and you didn’t see them extra cards in his hand. Then, the hand before he was going to knock, he’d get rid of them. He could make a deck of cards talk. I saw him beat a guy for $20,000 in a single game and the guy never had a clue.”
Mike’s unseeing gaze slowly scanned the room as he came down from this heady memory, and finally settled on me. One of the last things he said to me was so disorienting, and I guess so sweet in its intent, that I laughed out loud: “You got good genes.”