SMALLTIME

Historian Shorto vividly portrays the lives of farm-team mobsters, among them his own ancestors.

When immigrant Antonino Sciotto and his common-law wife arrived in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, more than a century ago, he changed their names to Tony and Mary Shorto. This change, writes the author, an accomplished chronicler of Dutch Manhattan and other fulcrums of world history, “wasn’t just due to vague notions of Americanness….It was also a way of distancing themselves from the past, from the village in the hills of eastern Sicily.” Ironically, it was while on a visit to his mother in his homeland that Tony was killed after flashing a money belt stuffed with dollars. He had fathered children by that time, including five girls and, in 1914, a boy named Rosario, Americanized to Russell, the author’s grandfather and namesake. After living hand to mouth in childhood with his widowed mother, Russ senior hustled to carve out a spot in the Prohibition era, building a small-city empire that included booze, gambling, and other more or less soft crimes, with some of the money going to the mob in Pittsburgh and some traveling to the ruling Mafia families in New York. Prohibition addressed a national drinking problem, Shorto allows, but it also targeted two groups disproportionately: “urban elites and recent immigrants,” with the term “organized crime” also carrying an ethnic connotation that spoke against the “Irish, Jewish, and Italian mobs that grew up around the business of providing alcohol during Prohibition.” The implication was that homegrown criminals were noble solitary outlaws against the dangerous, conspiratorially minded new arrivals. The criminal enterprise ran deep but was often peaceful, though violence was certainly not unknown. In a narrative full of sharp twists, Shorto learns, to his surprise, that his own father served jail time “as a teenage gun wielder”—though in later years, his father, thoroughly assimilated, turned to sales and the think-and-grow-rich slogans of the postwar era.

A lively addition to the history of Italian American immigration and its discontents.