Smalltime: A Story of My Family and the Mob

by Russell Shorto Narrated by Russell Shorto

Overview

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 becomes 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.

Editorial Reviews

Francisco Goldman

"Russell Shorto, one of our most celebrated narrative historians, is expert at mining history for fascinating gems, but here it’s as if he breaks through into his own heart."

Tom Perrotta

"Smalltime is a big pleasure—an emotionally astute, deeply personal work of family and cultural history."

Wall Street Journal

"Shorto has produced something that feels altogether fresh, a street-level portrait of how his late grandfather helped build what amounted to a Mafia small business…Shorto is a terrific storyteller…few of his words are wasted, a delight these days."

Andre Dubus III

"Part memoir, part narrative history rich in mesmerizing detail, at the heart of Smalltime is the abiding love the author clearly holds for his colorful and flawed Sicilian immigrant family, one that looks so very much like the American family. I could not put this book down, and you won’t be able to either."

The Daily Beast

"An entertaining book about the Shorto clan intertwined with a history of the Italian mob, Sicilians in the U.S., and the rise and fall of Johnstown, a central Pennsylvania steel town…Ultimately, Smalltime does not pull any punches while telling its story. It’s strikingly personal, but also a peek into the uniqueness of the American experience."

Dave Davies

"I read a lot of books for NPR's Fresh Air—Smalltime, the memoir by Russell Shorto about his grandfather, a mob boss in a Western PA steel town, is one of my favorites."

Kevin Baker

"Shorto tells us the story of a small-town, smalltime mob, but, much more than that, the story of an American family over three generations. By turns tender, poignant, and unsparing."

Christopher Castellani

"This immersive, poignant memoir reminds us all to question the stories and myths we’ve grown up with. These pages are both gritty and elegiac, tense and tender, embodying the contradictions at the heart of all families. A deeply satisfying read."

Adriana Trigiani

"Russell Shorto is a magnificent writer and Smalltime is a delicious story. A world so vividly rendered, you will find it hard to leave."

Jay Parini

"A compelling memoir, one that reads with the forward momentum of a good novel. A splendid book in every way."

Newsweek

"Shorto finally turns a key in the proverbial locked drawer of his family's chest, only to find a web of mob figures waiting to tell their story….the story of his family's hidden figures vividly unfolds."

Washington Post

"With Smalltime, Shorto traces his decision to learn the truth about his family’s past, discover its long-buried secrets, and explore unforgotten slights and how decisions made decades and decades ago continue to leave their mark."

New York Times Book Review

"Shorto [is] a master of historical narrative…[Smalltime is] a story of family dynamics. Of love and loss and betrayal. Of Shorto’s hometown. Of his own relationship with his father and his father’s relationship with his father.…[O]nce Shorto’s on the highway, steering us along with his usual humor and eye for quirky detail, settling an hour from his hometown for easy access, we are with him. All the way."

Francis Ford Coppola

"Russell Shorto’s Smalltime draws a convincing portrait of a time when Italian Americans weren’t permitted to live in certain neighborhoods or rise too high in the political firmament. This remembrance of his grandfather’s and great-uncle’s lives—of slots and pinball machines, ‘tip seals,’ ‘skeeched dice,’ and places like the Melodee Lounge and City Cigar—mixes great history and lovely, lingering memories: ‘Long conversations about spaghetti sauce and aunts who kissed you on the lips: those were the ways we were Italian.’"

Robert A. Orsi

"Written with a keen ear for the darkly humorous inflections of Italian American speech, Shorto’s story of a small-town USA mobster, his grandfather, ought to change forever how we think about the mafia. La Cosa Nostra flourished not only in big cities but across the continent, wherever there were mines and factories, as much a part of the post–World War II industrial boom as smokestacks, union bosses, and big cars with fins. Smalltime is also a deeply personal and moving reflection on the bonds between Italian American grandfathers, fathers, and sons. Beautifully written, brilliantly researched, Smalltime establishes itself immediately as a classic of the Italian American experience."

Library Journal

02/01/2021

With this latest work, bestselling author Shorto (Revolution Song) offers a fast-paced exploration of family roots. This is a multigenerational history tale as well as a localized mob story, about a mystery that slowly unraveled the life of Shorto's grandfather, a mobster and local legend in Johnstown, PA. That history is in turn cased inside the story of small-town organized crime, which also revolves around many of Shorto's other older relatives. The resulting engaging narrative showcases a microcosm of American history, following the lives of the author's Italian ancestors and their children, showing how they created their own hierarchy and establishment, as illegal as some of it was, to circumvent their lack of representation in the local community in an attempt to live their American Dream. Shorto quotes from extensive interviews with former mobsters and friends who clarify or correct the research he found in local newspapers and uncovers family secrets to reveal the colorful history of his relatives—and their entanglements with the law. Also included are numerous family photographs and even favorite family recipes. VERDICT This delightful account is a definite must-read for those who love mob movies and many of their tropes, both dramas and comedies, and who enjoy family sagas that are uniquely American.—Amanda Ray, Iowa City P.L.

Kirkus Reviews

★ 2020-10-27
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.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940176114935
Publisher:	Recorded Books, LLC
Publication date:	02/02/2021
Edition description:	Unabridged

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