3/4: The gritty and violent melting pot: 3/4: 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
⏱️ 11 minutes
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3/4: The gritty and violent melting pot: 3/4: 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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| 0:38.0 | I'm John Bachelors. This is the new John Bachelors show Russell Chorto. |
| 0:42.0 | His new book is Small Time, a story of my family and the mob. |
| 0:45.0 | It's also a story of Americana, from migration to enterprise to criminality. |
| 0:52.0 | Criminality to transforming the landscape to memory. |
| 0:56.0 | That's where we are in the 21st century. |
| 0:58.0 | It is now the late 1930s. |
| 1:01.0 | Millie and Joe are together after Joe does a time in bars. |
| 1:07.0 | Millie goes to take him home to Johnstown. |
| 1:10.0 | She doesn't like Philadelphia. It's too big. It's too noisy. |
| 1:13.0 | Joe is now partnering with Russell. |
| 1:18.0 | And their partnership will be extremely successful. |
| 1:22.0 | Russell, I want to understand these partnerships. They were never independent agents. |
| 1:27.0 | It seemed that they were always connected to larger and larger versions of themselves. |
| 1:32.0 | So Joe, Regina, and Russell Chorto, they will find an enterprise called City Sagar. |
| 1:39.0 | But they don't do that independent of larger organized crime. |
| 1:45.0 | Do they relate to Philadelphia or Pittsburgh at this point? |
| 1:48.0 | How is Johnstown connected to the web of organized crime? |
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