WHEN GAMBLING WAS A CRIME: 3/4: Smalltime: A Story of My Family and the Mob. by Russell Shorto (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 10 March 2024
⏱️ 11 minutes
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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.
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.
1907 HARRISBURG, PENNSYLVANIA
Transcript
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| 0:25.0 | Soul traders or limited company directors in the UK can apply. I'm John Bachelor. This is the new John Bachelor show Russell Shorto. His new book is Small Time, a story of my family |
| 0:45.4 | and the mob. It's also a story of America on a migration to enterprise to criminalityity to transforming the landscape to memory. |
| 0:57.0 | That's where we are in the 21st century. |
| 0:59.0 | It is now the late 1930s. |
| 1:01.0 | Millie and Joe are together after Joe does a time in bars. Millie goes |
| 1:09.4 | to takes him home to Johnstown. She doesn't like Philadelphia. It's too |
| 1:12.9 | big, it's too noisy. Joe is now partnering with Russell and their |
| 1:19.4 | partnership will be extremely successful. |
| 1:23.0 | Russell, I want to understand these partnerships. |
| 1:25.2 | They were never independent agents. |
| 1:27.7 | It seemed that they were always connected to larger and larger versions of themselves. |
| 1:33.0 | So Joe Regina and Russell Shorto, they will find an enterprise called City Cigar, but they don't |
| 1:41.2 | do that independent of larger organized crime. |
| 1:46.0 | Do they relate to Philadelphia or Pittsburgh at this point? |
| 1:49.0 | How is Johnstown connected to the web of organized crime. |
| 1:55.0 | Yeah, but Johnstown was connected to Pittsburgh and then Pittsburgh was connected to New York. |
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