This book tells a story that is rooted in the many smaller stories that its participants told me. Its core is a series of interviews—several hundred hours’ worth, with dozens of people, conducted over a period of more than seven years. But what was I to do with this material, which often included rumor, secondhand reflection, and memories subject to the effects of time? I write both history and journalism; the two professions share a common approach to sources, whether the information comes from old pieces of paper in archives or elderly people in nursing homes. For items that are relatively small or noncontroversial—what color somebody’s Cadillac was, say—a single source suffices. For anything more problematic, standard practice is to seek two independent sources. Regarding the notion that my grandfather regularly carried a gun, for example, while his children never witnessed him doing so, two people, both of whom knew him intimately at different times in his life, told me, independently of each other and without my prompting, that this was the case. That was good enough for me to state it as fact.
Naturally, in a book such as this, many assertions or claims fall into a grayer area. The whole matter of who killed Pippy diFalco came at me in a vast cloud of gossip, speculation, and hearsay, anchored by a certain amount of journalism and police work. Some people gave me details about the night Pippy went missing that were not included in the official record, but I could not corroborate their information. If I thought such single-sourced details were worth including—whether they concerned Pippy’s murder or anything else—I made sure to indicate as well the less-than-certain foundation on which they rested.
As a writer of narrative history, I was determined both to weave the smaller family story I tell in these pages into a wider historical context and to double-check assertions that people made from recollection against the written record. In other words, if this book was to be largely a memoir, I nevertheless wanted it to fall as well into the category of history, and to be undergirded by a base of documentation. I obtained or corroborated many personal details by means of census records, birth and death certificates, funeral registers, family photos, ship manifests, naturalization papers, tax returns, gambling slips, IOU’s, and the like. Here, arranged by subject matter, are other sources I consulted, both to corroborate (or question) stories and to provide context.
Finley, M. I. A History of Modern Sicily. 3 volumes. London: Chatto & Windus, 1968.
Lewis, Norman. The Honoured Society: The Sicilian Mafia Observed. London: Eland, 1984.
Micale, Antonino. “San Pier Niceto: Avvenimenti e personaggi.” Unpublished manuscript.
Moe, Nelson. The View from Vesuvius: Italian Culture and the Southern Question. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
Ruggeri, G. San Pier Niceto nel 1714. Palermo: Associazione Mediterranea, 2015.
Washington, Booker T. The Man Farthest Down: A Record of Observation and Study in Europe. Garden City: Doubleday, 1912.
With the help of Joe Ruggeri and Mario Italiano, I also made use of records in the town hall of San Pier Niceto, Sicily.
Abadansky, Howard. Organized Crime, 9th edition. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, Cengage, 2010.
Andrews, Kenneth, and Charles Sequin. “Group Threat and Policy Change: The Spatial Dynamics of Prohibition Politics, 1890–1919.” American Journal of Sociology 121, no. 2, September 2015.
Boissoneault, Lorraine. “A 1957 Meeting Forced the FBI to Recognize the Mafia—and Changed the Justice System Forever.” Smithsonian, November 14, 2017.
Bonano, Joseph. A Man of Honor: The Autobiography of Joseph Bonano. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1983.
Bologna Boneno, Roselyn. “From Migrant to Millionaire: The Story of the Italian-American in New Orleans, 1880–1910.” Doctoral dissertation, Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College, 1986.
Burbank, Jeff. “Robert F. Kennedy’s Crusade Against the Mob.” The Mob Museum. http://themobmuseum.org/blog/robert-f-kennedys-crusade-mob/.
Finkel, Ken. “John Avena and South Philadelphia’s Bloody Angle.” The Philly History Blog. https://www.phillyhistory.org/blog/index.php/2014/03/john-avena-and-south-philadelphias-bloody-angle/.
Kennedy, Robert F. “Statement by Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy to the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the Senate Government Operations Committee.” United States Department of Justice, September 25, 1963.
Laurino, Maria. The Italian Americans: A History. New York: W. W. Norton, 2014.
Luconi, Stefano. “Italian Americans and Machine Politics: A Case-Study Reassessment from the Bottom Up.” Italian Americana 15, no. 2, Summer 1997.
———, “Machine Politics and the Consolidation of the Roosevelt Majority: The Case of Italian-Americans in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.” Journal of American Ethnic History 15, no. 2, Winter 1996.
Maurer, David W. The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man. New York: Anchor, 1940.
Pegram, Thomas. One Hundred Percent American: The Rebirth and Decline of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2011.
Pitkin, Thomas Monroe, and Francesco Cordasco. The Black Hand: A Chapter in Ethnic Crime. Totowa, NJ: Littlefield, Adams & Co., 1977.
Sanchez, Tanya Marie. “The Feminine Side of Bootlegging.” Louisiana History 41, No. 4, Autumn, 2000.
Saverino, Joan L. “ ‘Domani Ci Zappa’: Italian Immigration and Ethnicity in Pennsylvania.” Pennsylvania Folklife 45, Autumn 1995.
Schiess, Michael. “The Mob, the Mayor, and Pinball.” What It Means to Be American (blog), October 4, 2016, https://www.whatitmeans tobeamerican.org/artifacts/the-mob-the-mayor-and-pinball/.
Turkus, Burton B., and Sid Feder. Murder, Inc.: The Story of the Syndicate. New York: Da Capo, 1951.
Veronesi, Gene P. Italian-Americans & Their Communities of Cleveland. Cleveland Memory, Cleveland State University Library, http://www.clevelandmemory.org/italians/index.html.
von Lampe, Klaus. Organized Crime: Analyzing Illegal Activities, Criminal Structures, and Extra-Legal Governance. Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2016.
Wasserman, Ira M. “Prohibition and Ethnocultural Conflict: The Missouri Prohibition Referendum of 1918.” Social Science Quarterly 70, no. 4, December 1989.
White, Shane, Stephen Garton, Stephen Robertson, and Graham White, Playing the Numbers: Gambling in Harlem Between the Wars. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010.
Yeager, Daniel. A First-Year Course in Criminal Law. New York: Wolters-Kluwer, 2018.
I made extensive use of the archives of the Johnstown Tribune-Democrat and the Johnstown Observer; of records from the Johnstown Police Department, the Cambria County Courthouse, the library of the Johnstown Area Heritage Association, and the Cambria County Library in Johnstown; and of FBI files on Joseph Regino and John LaRocca obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests. In addition, the following sources were particularly valuable:
Arnold, Carrie. “A Scourge Returns: Black Lung in Appalachia.” Environmental Health Perspectives 124, no. 1, January 2016.
Berger, Karl, ed., Johnstown: The Story of a Unique Valley. Johnstown: Johnstown Flood Museum, 1984.
Comte, Julien. “ ‘Let the Federal Men Raid’: Bootlegging and Prohibition Enforcement in Pittsburgh.” Pennsylvania History 77, no. 2, 2010.
Johnstown City Directory, R–L. Pittsburgh: Polk & Co., 1910–1965.
Mazak-Kahne, Jeanine. “Small-Town Mafia: Organized Crime in New Kensington, Pennsylvania.” Pennsylvania History 78, no. 4, 2011.
McCullough, David. The Johnstown Flood. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1968.
Pennsylvania Crime Commission. 1971–72 Report. Lingletown, PA: Office of the Attorney General of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, 1972.
———. Organized Crime in Pennsylvania: A Decade of Change, 1990 Report. Lingletown, PA: Office of the Attorney General of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, 1991.
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. “Mafia Vacuum.” March 5, 1987.
Pizzola, Peter M. “The Significance of Unionization at Bethlehem Steel in 1910 and 1918–1919.” Master of Arts Thesis, Lehigh University, 1996.
U.S. Department of Labor. “Coal Fatalities for 1900 Through 2019.” Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA). https://arlweb.msha.gov/stats/centurystats/coalstats.asp.
U.S. War Production Board. Report of War Plants and Services in Urgency Rating Bands III Thru VII, 1945. U.S. National Security Resources Board,
Whittle, Randy. Johnstown, Pennsylvania: A History, Part One: 1895–1936. Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2015.
———. Johnstown, Pennsylvania: A History, Part Two: 1937–1980. Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2007.