Old School Italian Organized Crime in St. Louis
Who was running the rackets in St. Louis prior to Prohibition? Sicilians and Italians with ties to Chicago and Detroit.
I don’t mean to associate my fratelli — the Italians and Sicilians — with organized crime in an unfair manner. Only in a fair manner.
Incidentally, I have just received a rather charming rebuke for referring to Sicilians as “Italians” in past articles, to which I reply, I don’t know what this person means by “Italians,” because that wasn’t the term anyone used around me, either. My family, for example, didn’t “speak Italian” they “talked the Nnapulidan.” So trust me, I’m not trying to make equivalent Italians and Sicilians, because I don’t really believe in Italians.
Also, what are Sicilians? Francis Ford Coppola and Robert DeNiro toured around the island to choose the precise location of the young Vito Andolini’s language — because there isn’t just one “Sicilian” language, either!
I love these little details, but they also matter. The unification of people and borders and language gave rise to the calculus around the 20th Century’s geopolitical stability, but those differences still define our lives. Spies and Mob bosses know it. The rest forget or pretend not to know. But this is how it all works. So if you want to play the game at the high level, you must study.
Which is why you must return to 1912, around the time when Domenico Giambrone in St. Louis linked up with his underboss, Vito Giannola. To my knowledge, the Giannolas had quite a lot of juice in the Midwest. Like, a lot. Vito’s cousin, Antonino “Tony” Giannola was of course a major player in the Detroit rackets.
Tony Giannola, like many men of his profession, didn’t receive a regular retirement, but rather a quick one that has long been attributed to the beef with the Bosco and Vitale families. They were running mano nera-type extortion rackets in Detroit, shaking down merchants and manufacturers. Vito split off from Tony when times were still good and established himself in St. Louis. Gianni Giannola, if I have this correct, went to Chicago.
Now, did Tony Giannola whack any of the Kaiser’s spies during World War One?
What an interesting question!
No Relevant Intel, Continuing to Monitor. (NRI-CTM.)
Now kids, this was all prior to the massive policy failure of outlawing beer and putting the nation’s entire booze budgets into these guys’ pockets. This is kinda how it went in America when men, women, and children escaped the Italian peninsula (and Sicily, which is not Italy!) to avoid starvation.
Those people arrived in New York or Boston; got exploited by more established criminals; logically and out of necessity, employed a manner of survival learned in their homeland where empires rose and fell. That was a land where Greek/Maltese/Whatever (literal) pirates had enough money to eat. And my people noticed. That was important.
You gotta eat. Everybody gotta eat. That’s the genesis of all this stuff. You gotta be a pirate to eat, whatever, everybody gotta eat.
So Vito Giannola takes over as Boss in St. Louis in 1923 or so, just when the Treasury is stuck with trying to enforce this dumb “Prohibition” thing.
Oddly, this one German brewery figures out how not to go out of business. The crew was composed of two families, Anheuser and Busch. Very interesting story there, of course. They weren’t like the other Germans in multiple ways.
Vito takes on Alfonso Palazzolo, a “zip” from Sicilia who got to New York City around 1913, and who is underboss in St. Louis at the height of Prohibition by the age of 28, which is a pretty damn impressive career arc.
And they all are, you’ll find.
Guys, I ain’t even into the Coolidge era!
You see how much there is to cover?
Ciao amici.