My grandfather the mob boss
SMALLTIME: A STORY OF MY FAMILY AND THE MOB Russell Shorto Loot.co.za (R517) NORTON
ALL families are complicated in their own way. Best-selling writer and historian Russell Shorto knew that his grandfather was connected to the mid20th-century Mafia in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.
That wasn’t a mystery.
Russ Shorto, for whom his grandson is named, had a long rap sheet and controlled a lucrative illegal gambling enterprise for years with his partner and brother-in-law
“Little Joe” Regino.
Johnstown was a thriving manufacturing city at the time, and Shorto and Regino ran numbers, sports books, pool halls, poker rooms, pinball games and pretty much any activity that sated the betting desires of thousands of factory workers leaving their shifts.
But Shorto the writer didn’t know much else about his grandfather. He rarely saw him or spoke to him when he was young, and his grandfather died while he was in college. He knew that his father and his grandfather didn’t get along, but why they didn’t was unclear. The story he remembers hearing is that his grandfather wanted his father to become a partner in crime, but his dad refused.
Family stories are funny things, though, capable of morphing and shifting over the years until the unknowns outnumber the knowns. With Smalltime, Shorto traces his decision to learn the truth about his family’s past, discover its long-buried secrets, and explore unforgotten slights and how decisions made decades and decades ago continue to leave their mark.
But Shorto’s story is not just about his family. It’s also a social history of a place and time – industrial Pennsylvania from the early 20th century on – as it is being shaped by an influx of immigrants who are resented for their arrival, forced into the worst jobs and homes, and struggling to survive outside of an official America that makes their path harder at every opportunity.
Shorto writes in a chapter about the roadblocks erected by establishment forces to keep immigrants from gaining any power. “Back in 1911, the mayor of Johnstown made it a campaign promise that no one of Italian descent would work in his administration, not even as a street cleaner.”
The growth of the mob in cities like Johnstown, Shorto posits, was largely a result of the denial of access to legal routes to power and wealth. If the front door wasn’t open, the back door would have to do.
At times, the flatness of his grandfather’s character dampens the narrative. Why, a reader can justifiably ask, do I care about this person? The answer, unfortunately, is never fully apparent. A history of a gangster in a bygone time promises to be riveting, but there’s not enough there to make this a book you can’t put down. The spectre of an unsolved mob murder hangs over the story, hinting at a much deeper, darker tale.
That, too, proves to be a promise that doesn’t quite deliver.