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The John Batchelor Show

WHEN GAMBLING WAS A CRIME: 2/4: Smalltime: A Story of My Family and the Mob. by Russell Shorto (Author)

The John Batchelor Show

John Batchelor

Society & Culture, Arts, News, Books

4.52.8K Ratings

🗓️ 10 March 2024

⏱️ 8 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

WHEN GAMBLING WAS A CRIME: 2/4: 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.

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.

1889 AFTER THE JOHNSTONW FLOOR


Transcript

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0:00.0

Book your ticket to happiness with Sun Express Airlines. Oh, I'm John Bachelors here.

0:28.4

I'm John Bachelors show.

0:30.7

Russell Shortos here to help me tell a story that solves much of where America comes

0:36.4

from, the ambitions of young men and women who travel to America for work and establish

0:42.3

families and marry and have children.

0:45.4

In this particular case, it's the very famous Johnstown, Pennsylvania, the steel mills

0:50.0

of Johnstown that becomes the war, the arsenal of democracy of Johnstown some decades later.

0:56.5

However, we leave this threatened family of nine children and Anna Maria who is called Maria Russell's great-grandmother.

1:09.2

She must make do with no income.

1:11.6

There's no welfare going on we seize on one of her children to

1:15.9

follow for the rest of this story Rosario who was called Russell your namesake

1:21.1

he's born in 1914 What is what did he remember of his father's

1:26.9

death of being told of his father's death? Is there a family story about that

1:30.8

Russell? Well the family stories are that's really what I have to go on

1:35.0

and that that he was beaten up and murdered because of the bank roll the money that

1:40.9

he had on him.

1:43.0

And so from that moment he was six years old when his father died and he was the oldest boy and he becomes, as it were, the man of the family.

1:51.0

And that coincides very neatly with and that then becomes an income stream for his mother, for his family and for millions of

1:56.1

prohibition in America.

1:57.7

And that then becomes an income stream for his mother, for his family and for millions of other people in the country because suddenly you have

2:05.1

a product everybody in the country seems to want and the businesses that had been set up

2:12.1

to provide it suddenly are out of business.

...

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