After the 1950s, the great American film was not a western but a crime picture. But of course, calling The Godfather a crime picture is like calling the Mona Lisa a portrait. True enough, but not enough to describe the depth and perspective.
The Godfather transcends the crime genre in a harsh yet sympathetic examination of America’s immigrant story that gets beneath the old schoolbook account of grateful refugees embraced by Lady Liberty. The Sicilians—and the Jews, the Poles, the Greeks and everyone else from Southern or Eastern Europe—were treated as less than white by the country’s White Anglo-Saxon Protestants. The problems they faced upon arrival reflect the enduring problem of race in America. Because the new immigrants were whiter than Blacks, they were able to rise within a couple of generations, but meanwhile, some of the immigrants and their children resorted to crime to give themselves an extra ace in a game whose cards were marked.
Smalltime: A Story of My Family and the Mob is a fascinating account by a man in search of his roots, yet it has a bigger story to tell. Author Russell Shorto’s grandfather ran the crime syndicate that ran Johnstown, PA, a bustling steel town in postwar America. The author’s dad broke with the “Outfit,” as the mob called itself, and the family’s past had always been an uncomfortable unmentionable as he grew up. The time came, as dad and the elders passed retirement age and approached death, when Shorto overcame his own reluctance and began to unravel the twisted story.
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Shorto is a professional historian, best known for his work on the Dutch settlement of New York. In writing Smalltime, he joined a worldwide phenomenon of authors pulling at the scabs of their grandparents’ generation, opening the locked memory boxes and finding astonishing things—not only about their ancestors but the societies in which they lived and left to us as their legacy. Once he broke through his father’s icy reserve about the past, stories tumbled out and forgotten names surfaced. Shorto found many old timers eager to talk and tested their memories against the historical record. He paints postwar Johnstown in colors familiar from film noir. That city’s “Outfit” was the local subsidiary of a national crime syndicate that rose with Prohibition but whose roots are deep in the oppressive history of Sicily and the anti-immigrant barriers of WASP America in the early 20th century.
What Shorto’s ancestors faced was—in one of his memorable phrases—“not the American dream but American waking life” of bigotry and low pay in toxic surroundings. Escaping from the steel mills, Shorto’s grandfather and his coconspirators went into business for themselves in a capitalist underworld operated out pool halls and boxing clubs instead of board rooms and front offices. The Outfit ran betting rackets, vending machine operations and other schemes that broke existing laws or hovered at illegality. The shady money bought influence over cops and politicians who closed their eyes in exchange for a share of the skim. Shorto’s grandfather and his pals held court at the lunch counter of a cigar store two doors down from city hall.
People died but only on occasion. Unlike the psychotic mobs of nowadays, violence was doled out like medicine at the drug counter. Rough stuff was always an option but not the preferred way of doing business.
Written as vividly as a film storyboard, Smalltime brings to life the criminal shadowland of a medium-size American city during a time when the old Sicilian Mafia wrapped its arms around America in a tight embrace. It’s a chapter in the story of our nation of immigrants with lessons to be remembered about ethnicity and social mobility as we grapple with the problems of the present day.
