Welcome to Youngstown...

By Vince Guerrieri
210 west Managing Editor [send email]

There are two paths to greatness in Youngstown, Ohio: skill or talent in football, or association with organized crime.

At one point or another, Jim Traficant has done both.

Like many blue-collar towns, Youngstown is proud of its athletes. One of the Boys of Summer, Brooklyn Dodgers outfielder George “Shotgun” Shuba, hailed from the West Side of town. A bridge is named after Frank Sinkwich, the 1942 Heisman Trophy winner with the University of Georgia. Signs at just about every entry point to the city in Northeast Ohio hail its winning high school and college football teams.

A better idea would be to take down all of the signs and replace them with signs that say, “Welcome to Youngstown, where ordinary rules of right and wrong do not apply.”

A 1963 magazine article called Youngstown “Crimetown U.S.A.” Since then, it seems everyone has taken a turn telling similar tales, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Newsweek, “60 Minutes” and “Nightline.” George Magazine called Youngstown one of the most corrupt cities in America. The New Republic went one better and called Youngstown the most corrupt city in America. Molly Ivins compared Youngstown to Personville, the thoroughly unredeemable town in Dashiell Hammett’s 1928 novel Red Harvest, and U.S. News and World Report compared U.S Rep. Jim Traficant to a character on “The Sopranos.”

Since Traficant went on trial for racketeering, bribery and income tax evasion in the spring of 2001, the glare of the national spotlight has shone on him and his district. People are trying to understand what type of area could spawn a man like Traficant, with his lack of fashion sense and Einstein-influenced hair. They found people who called Traficant an embarrassment to the community, but they also found, even after he’d been convicted, people who said Traficant was silenced because he told it like it was, that he was just a victim of the Washington power structure. They were surprised to find people who still thought of Traficant as the biggest underdog in a city full of them, and went so far as to say that they’d vote for him while he was
in prison.

I wasn’t surprised. I grew up in Youngstown, and I knew many of those people. But you can’t really blame them. It’s just the city they call home.

Youngstown’s a city where a man accused of taking bribes can get elected to Congress and a man can get disbarred and thrown off the bench as a judge and still get elected mayor. It’s a city where the current county prosecutor bears scars from an assassination attempt, and his predecessor is in jail for selling justice to the highest bidder. It’s a city where gangsters could incorporate their own borough for the sole purpose of running a gambling den unchecked. It’s a city that expects its public officials to be on the take and politicians in general to be guilty of something. It’s a city that believes that Jim Traficant’s only crime was getting caught.

We Italians are corrupt and irreligious above all others.
-- Niccolo Machiavelli

Although my grandfather was born in a small village near Uniontown, Pennsylvania, he lived most of his life in or around Youngstown.

My grandfather, called Charlie by just about everyone he knew, was first-generation American. His father, named Alezio Guerrieri but called “The Old Man” by his sons, came over from Italy and worked in the coal mines in Southwestern Pennsylvania until he had enough money to start a grocery store in the 1920s. He demonstrated the can-do entrepreneurialism that made America great by selling fruit, vegetables, lunchmeat and wine, which at the time happened to be illegal.

Charlie liked to tell the story of the day revenooers came to the family house. The Old Man was a gracious host, plying them with cookies and coffee in the living room while his son Christy bashed in barrels of wine in the basement, letting any evidence spill onto the floor and into the drain.

By the time Charlie was 12 years old, the family had uprooted. The story was that the family was headed to Detroit, but they barely crossed over into Ohio, settling on the East Side of Youngstown, with its burgeoning Italian population.

At that time, Youngstown was a mecca for immigrants from southern and eastern Europe. In 1900, Youngstown Iron Sheet and Tube was incorporated. The word iron was eventually dropped from its name, and Youngstown Sheet and Tube eventually became the largest locally owned steel company in the nation. One writer compared the Mahoning River Valley through Youngstown and Warren to the Ruhr Valley, the center of industry in Europe. Mills and factories ran around the clock, employing thousands of people and turning the sky gray in the day and orange at night. In 1900, the population of Youngstown was 44,885. Twenty years later it had tripled.

After the nation came to its senses and repealed Prohibition, the Old Man opened a bar on Oak Street on the East Side, serving beer, sandwiches, spaghetti and lottery tickets. The food was all right, and the Old Man was now allowed to sell beer, but since the state hadn’t gotten into the lottery business at that point, the lottery tickets – The Bug – were thoroughly illegal.

When you think of stories learned from your grandfather, the popular image is of fairy tales, when a purely good hero defeats a purely evil villain and lives a happy life with the princess. Or you might think of idealized stories about growing up in the good old days, when everything was cheap, nobody had money, but all you needed was love.

Unfortunately, idealists are in short supply in Youngstown. The city that offered well-paying jobs to unskilled laborers was also a haven for organized crime. When I went away to college, I’d introduce myself and say I was from Youngstown. The combination of my hometown and my surname prompted people to ask, “Are you in the Mafia?”

Prohibition and gang warfare were the good old days to Charlie, and those were the stories he shared with me.

Charlie told tales that were equal parts Damon Runyon and Mario Puzo. He remembered the days when police officers collected the day’s Bug receipts, and knew men named Doc Sawbones, Big Dom, Brier Hill Jimmy and, my personal favorite, Sledgehammer Jerry, an enforcer in Youngstown in the late 1930s and early 1940s. He drove a Buick Roadmaster four-door convertible and kept a sledgehammer in the trunk.

Coins deposited in jukeboxes, cigarette machines and pinball games were a major source of revenue for organized crime. Sledgehammer Jerry made sure that those machines belonged to the man that paid him. If they didn’t, he’d go out to the car, get his sledgehammer, and smash the machines.

They found his car in Cuyahoga Falls, but they never found Sledgehammer Jerry.

When we drove past the Colonial House on Market Street on the South Side, Charlie would point and say, “That’s where Vince DeNiro blew up in his car.” On July 17, 1961, Vince met some friends at the Colonial House. After an evening of revelry, he walked to an Oldsmobile parked nearby. He put his foot on the starter pedal, and the explosion rattled windows all the way to downtown, including the windows of Charlie’s home on Willis Avenue. They found one shoe still on the starter pedal. The other was found on the rooftop of a building three blocks away. There was a joke making the rounds in Youngstown that barbers would cut your hair for $2, and start your car for $3.

DeNiro’s murder took place during the term of Youngstown Mayor Frank Franko, who was originally elected judge as a Republican, but switched affiliations when he ran for prosecutor in a county where even Republicans are registered Democrats. Franko was disbarred for, among other things, campaigning for prosecutor while a judge and fixing his parking tickets. He promptly ran for mayor—and won!

When we drove down Fifth Avenue on the North Side, Charlie would point and say, “That’s where your cousin Mario used to live.” Mario’s house was bombed about a year after Vince DeNiro met his end. In the 1960s, “Ban the Bomb” meant something entirely different in Youngstown.

To this day, there are former residents of the North Side who recognize my last name, ask me if I’m related to Mario, and tell me what they were doing when his house was bombed. Mario lived to fight another day, but is currently a guest of the state penal system.

Every man has a vice. Charlie’s was gambling; his game, craps. Charlie used to frequent craps tables at the Jungle Inn, a sumptuous but illegal gambling den in a hamlet called Halls Corners.

Halls Corners was formed by a group of particularly enterprising gangsters, who petitioned the state to incorporate a borough. In this borough there were about a dozen residents and the Jungle Inn, which began as a cathouse but became most notorious as a gambling casino. It was a place that most people thought only existed in movies, with a machine gun nest above the front doors. In the days before he became famous, a Steubenville native named Dino Crocetti, later known to the world as Dean Martin, sang at the Jungle Inn.

Halls Corners had no police force, county sheriffs could be bought and the Ohio Highway Patrol had no duties outside of traffic enforcement, so the Jungle Inn ran unfettered until the State Liquor Board finally shut it down for serving booze without a license.

With the pervasive corruption of Youngstown, my grandfather, a smart but not educated man, retained a healthy contempt for authority in all of its forms. Although Grandma got him away from crap games, Charlie continued to play the lottery, which was legal by the time I was born. The Ohio Lottery funds schools in the state, but Randy Gardner, the Ohio House Majority Leader, told a crowd of students at Bowling Green State University that the lottery’s primary purpose was to co-opt the illegal lotteries that were run throughout the state.

One evening, in his bemusement, Charlie pontificated about state lotteries, telling me, “At least when the Mob ran the numbers, you knew where the money went.”

When I die I don’t want no part of heaven
I would not do heaven’s work well
I pray the devil comes and takes me
To stand in the fiery furnaces of hell
--Bruce Springsteen, “Youngstown”

It was into this wild town that Jim Traficant was born in 1941. The city’s population was peaking at nearly 167,000, and the mills continued to run full tilt as part of what Franklin Roosevelt called “The Arsenal of Democracy.”

Traficant, whose surname was originally Traficante, was a member of the first graduating class of Cardinal Mooney High School, one of the two Catholic high schools in the city, not far from the spot where Vince DeNiro got what is sardonically called a “Youngstown tune-up.”

Traficant became a quarterback at Mooney, and beat Ursuline in the first game of the biggest rivalry in the city. He attended the University of Pittsburgh and played football there as well, even getting a tryout with the Steelers.

Like many people in Youngstown, he took a turn working in the steel mills. He received two master’s degrees from Youngstown State University, and ran for Mahoning County Sheriff in 1980 on a platform of “Honesty in Politics.”

Youngstown was in the middle of its second Mob war in a generation when Traficant ran for office. Trouble was brewing in Cleveland, as an upstart named Danny Greene tried to wrest control of rackets from the Mafia family in Cleveland. Greene survived a couple assassination attempts, but his Irish luck ran out on October 5, 1977, when a bomb was planted in a car parked next to his. Greene came out of his dentist’s office in Lyndhurst and walked to his car. The bomb was detonated, and Greene met his maker instantly.

One of Greene’s assassins was a Youngstown hood named Ronnie “The Crab” Carabbia. Carabbia and Greene’s other killers were brought to trial, and the Crab was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison. After serving nearly 25 years, he was released on parole to Youngstown in September 2002.

The Cleveland Mob was notably weakened in the aftermath of Danny Greene’s death, and the Pittsburgh Mob saw a chance to gain control in Youngstown, leading to a mob war between the two factions. The Cleveland Mob attempted to buy Traficant off, offering him $100,000. The Pittsburgh faction, led by a man named Vincenzo “Brier Hill Jimmy” Prato and his protégé Joey Naples, also offered $60,000 to Traficant.

Traficant, not playing favorites, accepted all the money he was offered, and won election as sheriff. By the time he took office in 1981, the city’s best days were behind it. On September 19, 1977, a day residents of the Mahoning Valley call Black Monday, Youngstown Sheet and Tube, by then part of a national conglomerate, closed one of its mills, instantly throwing 5,000 people out of work. A little more than a year later, more than 1,000 additional employees of Youngstown Sheet and Tube lost their jobs when another mill in Youngstown closed. U.S. Steel followed suit and closed their mill in Youngstown. By 1980,
the population of the city was down to 115,000, decreasing by 50,000 over 20 years.

The effects were devastating. The city’s amusement park, Idora Park,
limped along until a fire finally forced its closing in 1984. The Youngstown City Schools closed buildings. The two department stores in downtown Youngstown had become parts of national chains and also surrendered in the 1980s, turning an already reeling downtown into a ghost town full of boarded-up storefronts. Ironically, as the city’s present and future got bleaker, the skies got brighter and bluer, with the haze from the mills vanishing.

One of Traficant’s duties as sheriff was serving eviction notices, and he had more than his fair share to serve at that point, mostly to unemployed steelworkers. Out of a sense of compassion, or maybe because it made for good theater, Traficant refused to evict these workingmen who were guilty of nothing but losing their jobs. Traficant spent time in jail for his refusal to serve the eviction notices, and he became a folk hero. Some people thought he could walk on water.

Can a city be governed without any alliance with crime?
--Lincoln Steffens

On August 9, 1982, FBI agents arrested Mahoning County Sheriff Jim Traficant on charges of receiving bribes and filing a false income tax return.

The FBI established that Traficant had accepted bribes from gangsters including Charlie Carabbia, Ronnie’s brother, who had taped his conversations with the office-seeker in 1980. The FBI played the tapes for Traficant, who signed a confession shortly thereafter. But Carabbia wasn’t around to testify. Like Sledgehammer Jerry, his car turned up, in Cleveland, but he was nowhere to be found. Although he was not a lawyer, Traficant was determined to defend
himself in federal court.

Traficant recanted his confession, and told jurors in federal court inCleveland that he took the money, but he did so as part of “the most unorthodox sting operation in the history of Ohio politics.” At the time he took the bribes, Traficant was a candidate for sheriff. He put the FBI and Mahoning County officials on trial, railing against widespread corruption in county government and the federal
organization.

It worked. Traficant was acquitted, and came home to a hero’s welcome in 1983. The next year, he ran for Congress and won, defeating Republican incumbent Lyle Williams.

Traficant’s brand of chip-on-the-shoulder populism played well in the Mahoning Valley, where unemployment continued to hover around the 25 percent mark. Traficant boasted that he was a son of a truck driver, albeit one with post-graduate education. He gained a cult following on C-SPAN and the Perspectives page of Newsweek, with his less than polished appearance and speeches on the House floor peppered with earthy words. He once said the national security brain trust needed a proctologist on staff and said another time that with an interest rate hike, Alan Greenspan and the Federal Reserve gave the finger to the nation. He suggested ending the 1994 baseball strike by putting both sides of the debate in a windowless room, plying them with hot dogs, beans and beer and locking the door.

As Congressman, Traficant was one of the two most powerful people in Mahoning County, with the other being Don Hanni Jr., the chairman of the county Democratic Party and a self-styled political boss in the vein of William Tweed of New York.

Traficant wanted to unseat Hanni, who served as attorney for various mob figures, and Hanni wanted to remove Traficant from Congress. At one point, Hanni tried to declare Traficant legally insane to have his Congressional seat vacated. The attempt failed, and Traficant has referred to himself as legally sane since. Hanni, for his part, later mended fences with Traficant, and said he did him a favor, because Traficant was the only person on Capitol Hill with proof of his sanity.

During his second term in Congress, Traficant faced civil charges from the Internal Revenue Service, who pointed out that he received the bribe money, didn’t impound it, spent some of it and didn’t declare it on his income taxes. Congressman Traficant had his salary garnished by the IRS.

We’re bigger than U.S. Steel.
--Meyer Lansky

Since Joe Valachi testified before Congress in the 1960s, someone is always willing to write the Mafia’s obituary. Prosecutors pursued gangsters relentlessly and successfully, and from the breakup of the Cleveland Mob after Danny Greene’s killing in 1979 to the 1991 conviction of John Gotti in New York City, too many people are too willing to believe that the Mafia has become a relic.

But it still showed a strong pulse in Youngstown. Joey Naples survived the Mob war in the 1960s that claimed two of his brothers, but one night in August 1991, he viewed the construction site of his retirement home in Beaver Township, and as he walked to his car, he was shot and killed from the cornfields across the road.

In 1994, Don Hanni was turned out as Mahoning County Democratic Party chairman. A grassroots group called Mahoning County Democrats for Change unseated him by installing their own candidates as precinct captains, which elected a new chairman.

After Naples’ death, Lenny Strollo became Youngstown’s crime boss. Ernie Biondillo made a push to take over the rackets, but met his end
in 1996 when his car was boxed in on his drive to work through Youngstown’s East Side. Two men jumped out of the cars and shotgunned Biondillo’s Cadillac.

That year, a man named Paul Gains was elected prosecutor, defeating incumbent James Philomena, who had his house bombed during his term in office. Gains was shot in his home on Christmas Eve of that year. He survived, and took the oath of office with his arm in a sling.

After that, all hell broke loose. The killers of Biondillo and shooters of Gains were identified and indicted, and they rolled on Strollo and other gangsters in the city. When Biondillo’s killers went to jail, it was the first time in the city’s history that the books were closed on a Mob murder.

Philomena was tried and convicted, as were several municipal and county judges, a county commissioner and other elected officials. Hospitals closed. Property values declined. The city was in the middle of a drug turf war, and murder rates rose to a point where Youngstown had one of the highest per-capita murder rates in the nation.

Bruce Springsteen wrote a song about the mills in Youngstown, a wistful acoustic dirge about a dying city that was left behind by the world. He sang it on tour with the full backing of the E Street Band, turning it into an angry howl from the depths of hell. Invariably, he followed that song with a song that suited Youngstown just as well, if not better—Murder Incorporated.

There were attempts to revitalize the city, most notably with the Phar-Mor chain of discount drug superstores. The corporate headquarters for the chain was in downtown Youngstown, in a building formerly used as an Erie Railroad Terminal and Strouss’s Department Store, one of Youngstown’s two department stores that closed in the 1980s.

Phar-Mor was run by a man named Mickey Monus, who was also one of the initial buyers of the Colorado Rockies baseball team, and ran the World Basketball League. Nobody seemed to pay for tickets to watch the Youngstown Pride play in that league, and Mickey Monus managed to keep the league afloat by cooking the books of Phar-Mor, demonstrating great capitalistic sense a full decade before Enron or WorldCom. Monus went to jail and the league and the store ultimately went belly-up, creating more empty buildings downtown.

Through it all, the one constant that remained was Jim Traficant. He continued to serve as Congressman, facing little opposition within his party and token opposition in November. He would win re-election every two years with at least two-thirds of the vote, and on one occasion, got more than 90 percent of the vote.

Traficant had served more than a decade in Congress, but had little to show for it. He served on only a few committees, and was denied a spot on the House’s powerful Ways and Means Committee. The chairman of the committee at that point was a man from Chicago named Dan Rostenkowski, who later went to prison. I guess Traficant wasn’t Rosty’s kind of thief.

The word most commonly used to describe Traficant was “maverick.” He
marched to the beat of a different drummer within the Washington power
structure, and maintained that he was ostracized because of it. He made no secret of the fact that he despised the Internal Revenue Service, and was no fan of the FBI.

Traficant was a Democrat, but he railed against the Clinton administration. He went so far as to call Janet Reno a treasonous mob-controlled Communist lesbian. At this point, it’s worth repeating that Traficant was caught on tape accepting money from the mob in Youngstown, and although he said it was for purposes of a sting, the money was never impounded.

Finally, in 2000, Traficant sold his soul for $25 million. Congress passed a bill that allotted $25 million to Youngstown to create a convention center on the bank of the Mahoning River downtown on a site formerly used as a steel mill. Traficant was so grateful to the Republican leadership in the House that he announced his support for Illinois Republican Dennis Hastert as Speaker of the House, which so
incensed the Democratic Party leadership that they stripped him of his committee assignments.

Traficant was in a bind. He couldn’t switch affiliations to Republican, because the district he served, with the highest concentration of Democrats in Ohio, would look askance at him. However, as a Democrat, he was persona non grata within his party. But his problems were just beginning. On April 4, 2001, he was
indicted on charges of bribery, racketeering and theft in office.

Only the faces will change.
--Don Hanni Jr., on efforts to unseat him as Mahoning County Democratic
chairman

In Youngstown, Jim Traficant was regarded as the city’s favorite son or biggest embarassment. However, because of his low position on the political totem pole, he was fairly anonymous on the national scene.

That all changed when he went to trial. He pleaded not guilty by reason of sanity and once again he was determined to defend himself. This time, he wasn’t as lucky. Almost a year to the day he was indicted, Traficant was found guilty on all charges, and was sentenced to eight years in prison.

Because he was a convicted felon, Congress decided that he was giving the rest of them a bad name. Of course, it couldn’t have helped when he suggested in front of live television cameras that House Minority Leader Dick Gephardt, who called for Traficant’s resignation, should go fuck himself.

Jim Traficant was expelled from Congress, one of only two men since the Civil War to suffer that ignominious fate. But he remained defiant. While he was in front of the House Ethics Committee, he suggested that he was going to break out of jail, get a sword and start stabbing people in the crotch.

Traficant spent Election Night as a guest of the federal prison system. Members of the national media, whom Traficant said were so stupid that they could throw themselves at the floor and miss, have descended upon Youngstown in the past year, trying to figure out the culture from whence he sprang. Bumper stickers, T-shirts and coffee mugs appeared, saying “Free Jim!”

Many of those people doubtless feel that they’re victims of the system as well. While Columbus is expanding, the entire southwest corner of the state is booming, downtowns in Akron and Cleveland are coming alive, Youngstown continues to sink into the mire, unable or unwilling to recover. The $25 million for a convention center sits unused. Youngstown is now smaller than Parma, one of the suburbs of Cleveland. Its youth depart for other cities and towns like a generation of Diogenes looking for an honest man, or at least a downtown with
something to offer.

The November election chose the next person to represent the Youngstown
area, which has since been divided among a couple of Congressional districts. It offered a fresh start to a city looking for its renaissance. Tim Ryan, a Democratic state senator from nearby Niles, ascended to the seat formerly held by Traficant. Ryan, who previously worked in Traficant’s office and was a high school quarterback himself, promised an end to politics as usual. He wants to lead Youngstown to a rebirth, but it could be more of the same.

I tend to think it’ll be the latter, but growing up in Youngstown has made me a cynic.