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.
Smalltime draws an intimate portrait of a mobster and his wife, sudden
riches, and the toll a lawless life takes on one family.
But Smalltime is something more. The author enlists his ailing
father--Tony, the mobster's son--as his partner in the search for their
troubled patriarch. As secrets are revealed and Tony's health
deteriorates, the book become an urgent and intimate exploration of
three generations of the American immigrant experience. Moving, wryly
funny, and richly detailed, Smalltime is an irresistible memoir by a
masterful writer of historical narrative.
