SPEAKING SOON TO RUSSELL SHORTO FOR HIS NEW "TAKING MANHATTAN: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America:" 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
🗓️ 23 March 2025
⏱️ 12 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
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.
Smalltime is a riveting American immigrant story that travels back to Risorgimento Sicily, to the ancient, dusty, hill-town home of Antonino Sciotto, the author’s great-grandfather, who leaves his wife and children in grinding poverty for a new life―and wife―in a Pennsylvania mining town. It’s a tale of Italian Americans living in squalor and prejudice, and of the rise of Russ, who, like thousands of other young men, created a copy of the American establishment that excluded him. Smalltimedraws an intimate portrait of a mobster and his wife, sudden riches, and the toll a lawless life takes on one family.
1889 Johnstown Flood
Transcript
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| 1:09.7 | I'm John Bachelor. |
| 1:13.2 | This is the new John Bacheloratchel show Russell Shorto. |
| 1:16.8 | His new book is Small Time, a story of my family and the mob. |
| 1:27.6 | It's also a story of Americana, migration, to enterprise, to criminality, to transforming the landscape to memory. |
| 1:29.7 | That's where we are in the 21st century. |
| 1:32.3 | It is now the late 1930s. |
| 1:35.1 | Millie and Joe are together. |
| 1:38.8 | After Joe does a time in bars, |
| 1:41.9 | Millie takes him home to Johnstown. |
| 1:43.3 | She doesn't like Philadelphia. |
| 1:43.9 | It's too big. |
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