THE JOHNSTOWN MOB: 4/4: Smalltime: A Story of My Family and the Mob. by Russell Shorto (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 23 July 2023
⏱️ 11 minutes
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THE JOHNSTOWN MOB: 4/4: Smalltime: A Story of My Family and the Mob. by Russell Shorto (Author)
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.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I'm John Bachelor. This is the new John Bachelor show, CBS Audio Network. I'm speaking with |
| 0:15.1 | the author, Russell Shorto. His new book is Small Time, a story of my family and the mob. |
| 0:21.3 | We come now to an event that's important to mention, because I want to get back to |
| 0:25.5 | the family, but I want to frame this. There's a murder, and the murder takes place off |
| 0:30.9 | camera. We don't see it, but Russell's done the best he can to put together why it happened, |
| 0:37.4 | and what it did to the operation. His name was Pipi Tifalco. The year I believe is 1960, |
| 0:43.9 | is that correct, Russell, February 60. Why do we believe he was murdered, and they found |
| 0:49.7 | his body later that spring coming up out of the river, and that rocked everybody and |
| 0:55.6 | seems to have been the beginning of the end of happy times. Why was he killed? Who killed him? |
| 1:01.0 | Well, the murder was never solved. When I first started meeting with people in town and |
| 1:08.6 | saying, you know, I want to look into my grandfather, I wonder, understand who he was and |
| 1:12.8 | what that world was, invariably, each of one of these old people who I sat down with |
| 1:18.8 | would say, you know the story about Pipi, right? It was still to this day that story echoes |
| 1:24.9 | in town. He was a bookie, he booked sports, he worked at times for Russell Joe, but it |
| 1:31.2 | also, at times, he would go out on his own and apparently, and this may have been his |
| 1:36.3 | undoing, he would also, at times, work for one of the neighboring operations in Greensburg |
| 1:43.3 | or McKeece Board or New Kensington. And one of the reasons that this becomes such a big |
| 1:53.4 | local mystery is that he just goes, he goes missing. The body doesn't turn up for about six |
| 1:59.9 | weeks. And in that interval, you see it in the paper, they're saying, where's Pipi? What happened |
| 2:05.6 | to Pipi? Who's Pipi? He's this local bookie and he was working for the boys. And by the way, |
| 2:10.6 | what do they do? Why are we allowing this to happen? Why are we allowing this kind of operation |
| 2:14.6 | to go on in public? This is against the backdrop of the campaign for a president in 1960 in |
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