SPEAKING SOON TO RUSSELL SHORTO FOR HIS NEW "TAKING MANHATTAN: The Extraordinary Events That Created New York and Shaped America:" 4/4: 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
⏱️ 11 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.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm John Batchelor. This is the new John Bachelor show, CBS Audio Network. I'm speaking with the author, Russell Shorto. His new book is Small Time, a story of my family and the mob. We come now to an event that's important to |
| 0:23.6 | mention, because I want to get back to the family, but I want to frame this. There's a murder, |
| 0:28.2 | and the murder takes place off camera. We don't see it, but Russell's done the best he can |
| 0:34.5 | to put together why it happened and what it did to the operation. |
| 0:38.6 | His name was Pippi de Falco. |
| 0:41.1 | The year, I believe, is 1960? |
| 0:43.3 | Is that correct, Russell? |
| 0:44.5 | February 60. |
| 0:46.2 | Yeah. |
| 0:46.5 | Why do we believe he was murdered? |
| 0:48.2 | And they found his body later that spring coming up out of the river. |
| 0:53.1 | And that rocked everybody and seems to have been the beginning of the end of happy times. |
| 0:58.4 | Why was he, why was he killed, who killed him? |
| 1:01.3 | Well, the murder was never solved. |
| 1:04.0 | When I first started meeting with people in town and saying, you know, I want to look into my grandfather, |
| 1:10.5 | I want to understand who he was and what that world was, you know, I want to look into my grandfather, I want to understand |
| 1:11.3 | who he was and what that world was, invariably. Each one of these old people who I sat down |
| 1:17.9 | with would say, you know the story about Pippi, right? So, I mean, it was still, it's still, |
| 1:22.8 | to this day, that story echoes in town. He was a book. He booked sports. |
| 1:32.5 | He worked at times for Russ and Joe, but it also at times he would go out on his own. |
| 1:45.0 | And apparently, and this may have been his undoing, he would also at times work for one of the neighboring operations in Greensburg or McKeesport or New Kensington. |
| 1:56.5 | And he, and one of the reasons that this becomes such a big local mystery is that he just goes, |
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