Mafia
has long history here, growing from bootlegging days
Second of two parts
Monday, November 06, 2000
By Torsten Ove, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
The date was Sept. 13, 1931. Joseph Siragusa, 49, a bootlegger known as the "Yeast Baron" of Allegheny County, is preparing for his morning shave in the basement bathroom of his Squirrel Hill mansion.
His face covered with lather, he walks into the main room of the basement
and finds himself facing three men with guns.
He wheels and runs for the staircase.
Too late.
Five bullets rip into his chest and face.
He falls, grasping a stairway post, as two holy pictures tacked to the post
fall onto his body.
When police arrive, they find a bizarre scene.
As Siragusa lies lifeless beneath a string of rosary beads, his prized
parrot, Polly, shrieks from a cage nearby.
Poor Joe! Poor Joe!
"Two hours later she was still repeating her lament," read the
account in The Pittsburgh Press, "while two canaries in a second basement
chorused funeral tones."
Such was the death of one of Pittsburgh's
earliest mob bosses.
It wasn't the first spectacular killing, or the last.
Chicago has its Scarface Al Capone and New York its Lucky Luciano, but Pittsburgh is not without its own bloody mob history.
The Western Pennsylvania mob is one of 24 traditional
Mafia families in the United States,
and its rise and decline has mirrored that of families in other cities.
The mob grew from the bootlegging years of the 1920s as immigrants seized
economic opportunity. It became entrenched by alternately intimidating and
protecting urban communities. It flourished for five decades despite internal
power struggles.
And in the end, it was crippled by a combination of its own greed and
relentless law enforcement.
Origins
Organized crime, in Pittsburgh
and elsewhere, is largely a story of immigrants and alcohol.
In the early part of the century, groups of criminals were already active.
In Pittsburgh Police homicide logbooks, murders were often chalked up to the
Black Hand, a secretive free-lance gang that preyed mostly on Italian
immigrants.
But the outlawing of alcohol in 1920 created the first large-scale criminal
organizations as Irish, Jewish and Italian immigrants took control of the
bootlegging industry.
All three groups had flocked to the industrial cities, Pittsburgh
among them, for jobs. All three found themselves at the bottom of the economic
food chain, their prospects hindered by poverty and discrimination. Under those
circumstances, the urban landscape was a breeding ground for crime.
There were other social factors at work, too, mostly rooted in ethnicity.
According to "Blood and Power," a history of organized crime by
Stephen Fox, the saloon was at the center of Irish community life, so the Irish
found themselves in the ideal position to become the first bootleggers. Jewish criminals
also recognized the profit potential, giving rise to such notorious groups as Detroit's
Purple Gang.
But the Italians -- and in particular the Sicilians -- would come to
dominate the underworld.
One of the main catalysts was Benito Mussolini. When he assumed power in
1922, he consolidated his regime in Sicily
by subduing the Sicilian Mafia. Sicilian gangsters fled to America,
where they gravitated to bootlegging.
The early Italian gangs didn't enjoy the same protections from the law as
the Irish, who had ties with police and politicians. But what they had,
according to "Blood and Power," was "their reputation for
deadly, unpredictable violence."
Of all the gangs, the Sicilians proved the most violent. The early Mafia
bosses in Pittsburgh and other
cities grew up in Sicily, where
the mob has its origins.
For 2,000 years, the island had been occupied by foreign powers whose feudal
overlords kept private armies to enforce their authority. The armies evolved
into secret societies. After the reign of Napoleon, these Mafia groups became
mediators between peasants and the aristocracy.
The Mafia "families" were adept at exerting political influence
and granting favors, but they also committed crimes and terrorized the
populace.
The Sicilians brought that legacy with them to America,
where the same symbiotic relationship took root in Italian communities.
In Pittsburgh, mobsters
established themselves in the Italian neighborhoods of Larimer, the Hill
District and Homewood. Outside the
city, they set up rackets in New Kensington,
Arnold, Wilkinsburg,
McKees Rocks, Wilmerding, Braddock and other blue-collar towns.
The early years
The American Mafia, with its familiar hierarchy, national commission and
established families in various cities, didn't truly take shape until the end
of Prohibition in 1933.
In the decade leading up to repeal, gangs fought constantly over territory.
Between 1926 and 1933, there were more than 200 gangland killings in Allegheny
County, according to old news
accounts. About half of them went unsolved. Many bootleggers simply
disappeared.
The first true boss to emerge here was Stefano Monastero, who had run
bootleg supply warehouses on the North Side since 1925 and had survived several
murder attempts.
On Aug. 6, 1929, his luck
ran out.
As he and his brother, Sam, stepped out of their car in front of St.
John's General Hospital
on their way to visit a member of their gang, assassins opened fire on them
with shotguns.
Police charged Monastero's arch-rival: Joe "The Ghost" Pangallo,
who had himself survived numerous attempts on his life, including a 1927
incident in which a dynamite blast blew him through the roof of his car on
Wylie Avenue.
Monastero was succeeded by Siragusa, who had emigrated illegally from Sicily
to Brooklyn, N.Y.,
in 1910 and moved to Pittsburgh at
age 18.
He made a fortune supplying beer makers with yeast, his rackets controlled
by Salvatore Maranzano of New York.
Joe Bonanno of New York fame
became Maranzano's apprentice, supervising his whiskey stills in Pennsylvania.
Like many bosses in smaller cities, Siragusa made tribute payments to
Maranzano.
But a nationwide purge was coming.
In the late 1920s and early 1930s, a new faction of mobsters led by Lucky
Luciano was trying to wrest control of the rackets from the old-liners in New
York.
Maranzano became a victim on Sept. 10, 1931. Three days later, a group of New
York hitmen showed up at Siragusa's $35,000 showplace
home and gunned him down.
John Bazzano, whose son John Bazzano Jr. is one of the few remaining Pittsburgh
mob members, became the new boss.
An unimposing Sicilian who immigrated to the United
States in the 1890s, John Sr. worked as a
theater manager, then built an empire by controlling sugar and yeast for beer
makers. He lived with his wife and five children in a palatial Mt.
Lebanon home where the lawn was
"as smooth as golf links."
In 1932, he tried to consolidate his power by ordering the most spectacular
gang murder in the city's history: the Volpe killings.
The eight Volpe brothers were racketeers in the Turtle
Creek Valley
who claimed royal Italian blood and virtually owned police and politicians in
Wilmerding. One of them, James, served on Wilmerding Council.
They made no effort to hide their status. According to one news account, they
were known for their "gaudy display of showmanship, calculated to impress
their humble neighbors and feed a colossal conceit."
John Volpe drove a 16-cylinder Cadillac with bulletproof windows and a
license plate that read "J.V.8." -- the 8 stood for the eight
brothers. He also wore a watch fob studded with 25 diamonds arranged to form
his initials.
Bazzano had agreed to take on the Volpes as his partners, and they used the
Roma Coffee Shop on Wylie Avenue,
which Bazzano owned, as their headquarters.
But when the brothers expanded their territory into East Liberty
and the North Side, Bazzano ordered them rubbed out.
On the morning of July 29, 1932,
gunmen pulled up to the coffee shop and opened fire. John was shot four times
on the sidewalk. Inside the shop, a spray of bullets struck Arthur Volpe as he
ate a bowl of corn flakes. James Volpe died trying to hide behind the counter.
On the weekend of the funeral, an estimated 50,000 people visited the Volpe
home to pay their respects -- including judges, prosecutors, police and
politicians.
The turnout illustrated another reality of mob power. Despite its criminal
nature, the Mafia was respected by the public as much as feared. That respect
is one of the main reasons for the longevity of organized crime.
By paying off police, judges and politicians, gangsters had the power to
keep the peace, convey favors, sell jobs and take care of neighborhood
problems.
Sometimes, of course, killing was also necessary.
After the Volpe hit, two of the surviving brothers, Louis and Joseph,
complained to the La Cosa Nostra Commission in New York,
which had been recently formed to oversee Mafia disputes. Because the hit had
not been sanctioned, the hierarchy decided to make an example of Bazzano.
In an often-used mob trick, he was lured to a dinner in New
York and set upon by almost everyone in attendance.
On Aug. 8, 1932, his body
turned up in the middle of a street in Brooklyn,
N.Y., wrapped in a burlap sack. He had been
stabbed 22 times in the chest with ice picks and strangled with a rope. His
tongue had also been cut out and his lips sealed with tape.
Police arrested 14 La Cosa Nostra members a few days later, including
notorious New York mobster Albert
Anastasia.
The charge: loitering. Police said they never could gather evidence to
prosecute anyone for the killing.
Glory days
When Prohibition ended, the bootleggers needed a new source of income and
returned to the traditional rackets of gambling and loan-sharking.
As its factions consolidated through murder, the Mafia slowly became
established as a national criminal enterprise, mostly unchallenged.
"On some levels, gangsters then had more power than ever before or
since," Stephen Fox writes in "Blood and Power." "The
general public at the time was remarkably naive, even willfully ignorant, of
the situation."
The mob entered its heyday, which would last through the 1970s.
After his gruesome death, Bazzano had been replaced by Vincenzo Capizzi, who
ruled the family until 1937, when he voluntarily stepped down. Control passed
to Frank Amato Sr., of Braddock, whose son Frank "Sonny" Amato Jr. is
a current mob member, according to the former Pennsylvania Crime Commission and
the FBI.
Amato Sr. expanded the family's influence beyond Allegheny
County, concentrating mostly on
gambling, but in 1956 developed a kidney ailment and resigned to become
underboss.
John Sebastian LaRocca took over.
Born in 1901 in Sicily, he
came to the United States
in 1910 and settled with his family in Indiana
County. At 14, he took a job in a
coal mine in Yatesboro and stayed until 1922, when he went to prison for three
years for assaulting a young woman.
When he got out, he moved to Scranton
and married, settling with his wife in Jamestown,
N.Y. After a failed attempt to run a gas
station, he began transporting illegal liquor between Jamestown
and Buffalo.
He and his wife moved to Pittsburgh
in 1933, where he set up a beer equipment and concrete block business in Oakland.
In the next decade, he gained control of the numbers rackets in Homewood
and elsewhere. He was arrested and convicted several times for larceny,
receiving stolen property and operating a lottery.
Citing his criminal record, the Immigration and Naturalization Service tried
to deport him in 1953 as an "undesirable alien."
The effort led to scandal. During the deportation hearings, several
prominent figures testified on his behalf. One of them, Allegheny County Judge
Premo J. Columbus, LaRocca's former attorney, said "there is no human
being I would respect more than John LaRocca."
Outgoing Gov. John S. Fine stymied the deportation when he granted LaRocca
an unprecedented back-dated pardon for a 1939 larceny conviction. That decision
caused an uproar, but Fine dismissed it as a "tempest in a teapot."
In the end, the crime boss stayed and his stature grew. In 1957, he attended
the infamous meeting of mob leaders at a house in Apalachin,
N.Y., with his lieutenants, Michael
Genovese and Gabriel "Kelly" Mannarino.
Mannarino ran his own empire in New Kensington
with his brother Sam and became a local legend, enjoying a cozy relationship
with politicians.
When the Mannarinos' mother died in 1957, according to old FBI files,
federal agents were stunned to see Pittsburgh Mayor David L. Lawrence arrive at
the Mannarino home to pay his respects.
Mannarino's influence stretched from New York
to Cuba.
A year after the Apalachin incident, according to the FBI, his associates
were arrested and later convicted for trying to ship $10,000 worth of rifles
and machine guns stolen from an Ohio armory to rebel soldiers in Cuba under
Fidel Castro.
The scheme was an attempt to take back control of the Sans Soucie, a casino
in Havana owned by Mannarino, who
believed that Castro would protect his gambling interests.
The 1950s and 1960s were lucrative years for the Pittsburgh
mob, and LaRocca commanded a national reputation. In 1959, he appeared before
the Senate Rackets Committee and pleaded the Fifth Amendment when asked by
Robert F. Kennedy if he was among those who escaped the roundup at Apalachin.
A decade later, LaRocca and underboss Mannarino, along with Thomas
"Sonny" Ciancutti, attended a national conference to pick a successor
to New York crime boss Vito
Genovese, who the FBI said is not related to Michael Genovese.
"[LaRocca] was what has come to be known as 'a man of respect,' "
wrote the former Pennsylvania Crime Commission, "characterized by
allegiance to the traditional 'Mafia values' of obeying orders, keeping
secrets, and effective use of violence."
Some officials in Pittsburgh
refused to accept that LaRocca was a big wheel in the Mafia or that the city
even had a mob family.
"As far as I know," Public Safety Director James J. Dillon said in
the early 1960s, "there is no syndicated crime in Pittsburgh."
A police superintendent said LaRocca was simply a businessman.
The unraveling
Federal agents knew better.
An IRS agent, Andrew Susce, had investigated LaRocca in 1943 at the
direction of J. Edgar Hoover. But Susce said he was fired by his immediate boss
when his 300-page report revealed extensive public corruption. The suppressed
report was later used as background by U.S. Attorney Dick Thornburgh in his
prosecutions of mobsters in the 1970s.
As LaRocca's health began to fail, leadership fell to Mannarino, Joseph
"Jo Jo" Pecora and Michael Genovese. But Pecora was convicted on
gambling charges in 1979, and a year later Mannarino died of cancer.
When LaRocca died in 1984, the Pittsburgh
family chose Michael Genovese as the new boss.
According to the Crime Commission and the FBI, Genovese aggressively pursued
the drug trafficking trade, in violation of old mob rules.
The shift left the mob exposed, investigators say, because drugs invited
more scrutiny from police and federal authorities than other Mafia rackets.
Because drug dealers faced serious jail time, they were more likely to turn
informant.
Which is precisely what happened.
Through the 1980s, the FBI systematically attacked cocaine networks that
provided the mob with a steady flow of income. Major cocaine cases involved key
associates of the mob, including Gary Golden, Eugene Gesuale, Joe Rosa, Marvin
Droznek and Paul "No Legs" Hankish. The drug investigations
eventually led to Charles "Chucky" Porter and Louis Raucci Sr.,
Genovese's top officers, who orchestrated the distribution of thousands of
kilos of coke.
During the mid-1980s, with drug profits flowing, the Pittsburgh
family had initiated new members for the first time in many years. Porter and
Ciancutti became members in 1986. Joseph Naples and Lenine "Lenny"
Strollo, who controlled the Youngstown
rackets, were inducted in 1987.
Their fates indicate how far the mob has fallen.
Porter, along with Raucci and seven others, was convicted of racketeering in
1990 and went to prison. Raucci died in 1995 while a federal prisoner. Porter
turned informant shortly after, according to a recent motion filed by the U.S.
attorney's office.
Naples is long dead, killed in a
mob hit in Youngstown in 1991 that
the FBI suspects Strollo engineered.
Last year, Strollo became a government witness and testified at a federal
trial in Cleveland. Now Ciancutti,
one of the handful of members left at age 70, is in trouble.