Italian Organized Crime in St. Louis
From Sicily to Chicago to Detroit, Italians have long used St. Louis as a stronghold for organized crime rackets - which have now been exploited by foreign enemies.
I love The Hill in St. Louis, citadel of the Italians, still going strong after all these years. Half of my family hails from Avellino outside of Napoli, I grew up with the dialect, and garlic-infused olive oil courses through my veins. The Hill, or “Dago Hill” or “La Montagna” for the old-timers, is the place I feel most comfortable here, and they have always been the most welcoming.
You can go down to Eovaldi’s, get one of their delicious sandwiches (GET THE SPECIAL) and sit down with a copy of Il Pensiero, one of America’s few remaining Italian language newspapers. Catch up on what’s going on with Il Papa, the Italian embassy, and a local story or two. The Hill is the safest neighborhood in the city of St. Louis, and has been for more than a century, because it is tightly controlled and any messing around will be met with a swift, potent rebuke. You need to ask permission before you even as much as rent around there, much less buy a house. It is clean. Church is on Sunday. Or Saturday night.
They have the best food in town, but you already knew that.
The Hill is the only bullshit-free place in St. Louis. It knows what it is, they know who they are, they have standards, and they act like professionals. Frankly, I think the Chinese, Israeli, and Russian influence in the city has disturbed what was otherwise fairly functional. Warts, casinos, nuclear material, and all.
You went into J. Viviano’s grosseria and they had posters of The Sopranos on the wall. These things are not a mystery, you know?
One issue where these kinds of Italians have clarity is around William Faulkner’s famous aphorism, “The past is never dead. It's not even past.” Families have meaning, a couple of generations isn’t a very long time, and neither is cent’ anni. As such, I’d just like to talk about where the St. Louis Italians come from, which other cities they’re tied to, and why the incursion of foreigners has been a net negative for everybody.
The olden days
Let us go back to the roots of Italian primacy in St. Louis, which even predated the biggest “self-own” in the history of the rule of law, outlawing beer. Of course, creating a black market for the single most popular product in the history of the world - booze - put an untold amount of cash into the pockets of organized crime. The raging torrent of cash not only literally filled up every single laundromat and car wash in the Midwest, but then spilled over into Caribbean banks, and then on to Switzerland, where Midwesterners helped write the banking laws.
I’m not going to do the whole history here, though I might mention that I have the ship’s manifests of when certain “Italians” or “Germans” made their Vito Corleone-era journeys, just as I know who my family sailed with.
In fact, I’m going to be brief and just get started.
Domenico Giambrone, whose underboss running the capidecimi was Vito Giannola from 1912 until 1923, got into a bit of an issue when a guy got a hatchet in his skull up in Giambrone’s saloon.
These kinds of things do attract attention of course.
OK if we’re going to talk Giambrone we’re going to talk Palazzolo, going to talk Agrusa (or D’Agrusa) going to talk Buffa, Chiapetta, and Tony Lap.
We’re going to talk Quelli Verdi, Egan’s Rats, Pillow Gang, Hogan Gang, Shelton Gang, Cuckoos.
Paul Manafort might join us, we’ll see.