2/4: The gritty and violent melting pot: 2/4: Smalltime: A Story of My Family and the Mob by Russell Shorto
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 18 February 2023
⏱️ 9 minutes
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2/4: The gritty and violent melting pot: 2/4: Smalltime: A Story of My Family and the Mob by Russell Shorto
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https://www.amazon.com/Smalltime-Story-My-Family-Mob/dp/0393245586/ref=tmm_hrd_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=&sr=
Family secrets emerge as a best-selling author dives into the history of the mob in small-town America.
The best-selling author Russell Shorto, praised for his incisive works of narrative history, never thought to write about his own past. He grew up knowing his grandfather and namesake was a small-town mob boss but maintained an unspoken family vow of silence. Then an elderly relative prodded: You’re a writer―what are you gonna do about the story?
Smalltime is a mob story straight out of central casting―but with a difference, for the small-town mob, which stretched from Schenectady to Fresno, is a mostly unknown world. The location is the brawny postwar factory town of Johnstown, Pennsylvania. The setting is City Cigar, a storefront next to City Hall, behind which Russ and his brother-in-law, “Little Joe,” operate a gambling empire and effectively run the town.
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| 0:33.6 | I'm John Bachelors. This is the new John Bachelors show Russell Stortos here to help me tell |
| 0:44.0 | a story that solves much of where America comes from. The ambitions of young men and women |
| 0:51.4 | who travel to America for work and establish families in Mary and have children. In this |
| 0:57.2 | particular case, it's the very famous Johnstown Pennsylvania, the steel mills of Johnstown |
| 1:02.4 | that becomes the war, the arsenal of democracy of Johnstown some decades later. However, |
| 1:08.4 | we leave this threatened family of nine children and Anna Maria, who is called Maria, Russell's |
| 1:19.0 | great grandmother. She must make do with no income. There's no welfare going on. We |
| 1:25.0 | seize on one of her children to follow for the rest of this story. Rosario, who is called |
| 1:31.3 | Russell, your name say he's born in 1914. What is what did he remember of his father's |
| 1:38.5 | death of being told of his father's death? Is there a family story about that Russell? |
| 1:43.2 | Well, the family stories are that's really what I have to go on in that he was beaten |
| 1:49.0 | up and murdered because of the bankroll, the money that he had on him. From that moment, |
| 1:56.0 | he was six years old when his father died and he was the oldest boy and he becomes as |
| 2:00.5 | it were the man of the family. That coincides very neatly with the beginning of prohibition |
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