Smalltime : A Story of My Family and the Mob

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.An urgent and intimate exploration of three generations of the American immigrant experience.Smalltime is a moving, wryly funny and richly detailed memoir by a masterful writer of historical narrative.