Rooney’s career in the rackets started on the North Side with a numbers operation,
FBI documents and interviews with people who worked with Art Rooney Sr. show that one of the first racket operations that he was involved in was the simplest: the numbers, an illegal private lottery that flourished in the decades before Pennsylvania began running its own lottery.
Rooney’s role in the numbers games wasn’t just in Pittsburgh. A 1944 FBI crime survey said he joined his longtime partner Barney McGinley in running the same illegal enterprise in Braddock, where McGinley lived.
One anonymous source in 1976 identified for the FBI two people who would become lifelong associates of Rooney: David Lawrence, who was later one of the city’s legendary politicians, and Nate Farber, a sports book who became an integral part of Pittsburgh’s rackets.
While the source who spoke to the FBI said both men were involved with Rooney in the numbers, there is no supportive documents to show that’s the case with Lawrence, who later became Pittsburgh’s mayor.
Lawrence was one of Rooney’s earliest mentors and political backers. In 1963 as Pennsylvania governor, he approved giving the Steelers founder control of the state’s first horse track, Liberty Bell, located outside Philadelphia.
As early as 1913, they struck up a friendship about the time Rooney was 12 and Lawrence was twice his age and running semi pro ball teams that Rooney helped with.
Farber, sometimes known as Nathan or Nat, was about the same age as Rooney and took the fall for Rooney’s illegal enterprises during law enforcement crackdowns. He would later be arrested and convicted of running an illegal horse betting room in the Fort Pitt Hotel in 1948 that Rooney and McGinley oversaw together.
In the FBI’s annual crime survey of Pittsburgh in 1946, it notes that Farber “served as the front man” not only for Rooney but also Jaffe and another racketeer, Slim Silverheart, “in any gambling enterprise in which they desire to take part.”
Like Jaffe, Farber shows up connected to Rooney, Jaffe or McGinley in multiple FBI documents in various enterprises, including the numbers, illegal horse betting and card rooms in the city.
Rooney’s second oldest son, Art Jr., wrote in his book that his father was never part of the numbers and would have likely fessed up to it if he was, just as he admitted to his family that he was involved in running the Show Boat andslot machines.
But while Art Sr. may have been upfront with his family members about the Show Boat and slots, he never divulged his involvement to the public.
When he was once asked if the city’s ward chairmen — a position Art Sr. once held on the North Side — controlled the numbers operations in their areas, he said: “I don’t know if they had numbers when I was a ward leader. I don’t know if they had numbers on the North Side.”
Asked if operators of bootlegging, prostitution, gambling and numbers had to get ward leaders’ permission to run their schemes in various parts of the city, Art Sr. replied: “I don’t say that they operated without our knowledge.”
“I think that the numbers were pretty much restricted to the Hill and places like that. I don’t think that it was widespread until later on,” said Art Sr., referring to the years after he was ward leader in the 1930s.
The Hill was indeed a center for a numbers operation. It was run by a good friend of Art Sr.’s, Gus Greenlee, a legendary Pittsburgh figure in the Black community in particular. In 1930, Greenlee turned the Pittsburgh Crawfords into one of the bestever professional Negro League baseball teams and later built their ball field in the Hill.
But Art Sr.’s public stance that he didn’t even know much about the numbers game, differed markedly from what he told the FBI in 1959 when he was informed the interview would be kept confidential.
The FBI was looking into the ties between sports, gambling and the mob, and in the interview, Art Sr. — who was interviewed by the FBI at least three times over the years and always asked that his name be kept confidential — demonstrated then that he knew a lot about numbers operations.
“Mr. ROONEY made reference to possible organized gambling in the numbers racket but added that he was of the opinion that this was localized and certainly not nationwide,” the FBI document says, in part. “He said that he heard of the prevalent play of numbers in the Pittsburgh area and that several years ago he knew that any individual who desired could set up his own ‘bank’ or ‘book’ in the numbers racket if the individual remained in his own territory or ward.
“He added that over the past several years certain numbers banks have been more successful than others because the person who controlled the bank was smart enough and ‘laid off betting himself.’ Further that the ‘smart bank’ gained financially where the ‘dumb bank’ lost and as a result there are now but a limited number of success[ful] numbers operators in Pittsburgh; however, on occasions small banks do originate.”