Transcript
Speaker: Hello, everyone, and welcome to All in La Familia, episode three. I'm Chloe. I'm Guy. And today we're going to be looking at our great grandmother's side of the family and how they went from being an unassuming Italian family and Jesus Christ, why did my air condition go off just now? And they went from being an unassuming Italian family in Pittsburgh to having to escape the mob.
Speaker: Seems to be a fairly normal thing for Italian immigrants among the time. Unfortunately. In fact, I think a police officer who was an Italian -American got shot by a very distinct or alleged organization, which you talk about a little bit.
Speaker: Yeah, there's I found while doing some like basic research on the black hand, like a bunch of different accounts of like people who like they cross the black hand or they didn't pay up or like black and was mad at them. And they just did it. They just got killed. It's kind of messed up. But you know, welcome to
Speaker: Gangs, uh, preying on people, you know, that's just, that's just what happens when. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I guess we can talk about the black hand a little bit since we already get started with that. Or do you want to? I was going to talk about Pittsburgh first, actually. Uh, yeah, let's talk, let's, yeah, let's get to the city before we get to the,
Speaker: murder stuff, I guess. I just want to get I just want to get into the murder, I guess, which sounds weird. But hey, I mean, you and every single true crime fanatic that's ever existed, right? Like, just give me all the dirty details of all the murder. Not a big fan of true crime, but you know, I'm not either, honestly. But yeah, you know, I look, all I'm saying is that
Speaker: there was way too many things called the Black Hand in like the 20th century. That's all I'm saying. I agree. When I was originally sitting dad down to do these, like have him tell these stories metaphorically at gunpoint, not actually at gunpoint, metaphorically at gunpoint. Yeah, the Black Hand made you do that. Yeah, I was like, it's the Serbian, how did the Serbian terrorist organization come to America? And he was like, it's just the mob, Chloe. And I'm like, oh,
Speaker: Like, why? If you look up like Black Hand on Wikipedia, you give you like, oh, here is the fucking Black Hand, the Serbian Black Hand that started World War One. And here's a Palestinian front that existed in the 30s. And then there's concurrently a Jewish Black Hand that also existed at one point, which is weird, but don't ask questions. They just
Speaker: you know, everyone just really like be calling themselves the Black Hand or the Black Dragon or whatever the fuck. We are the Black organization. I don't know. It's weird. Also, I want to mention before we get started that I've already gotten a few feedback messages from a couple different people on our first and second episode. So I went at some point when I'm not
Speaker: dealing with my current job anymore, I will go back and fix those whenever I get a chance. So thank you for everybody who gave their critique. I very much appreciate it and I need to implement it. Anyway, let's talk about a magical faraway land known only as Pittsburgh, PA.
Speaker: Pittsburgh started existence in the Anthropocene as a crossing point between three rivers, the Allegheny, I believe I'm pronouncing that correctly, the Ohio, and the Monanongahila. There is also another river called the Potomac that connects the Monanongahila to the Atlantic Ocean and a piece of land just south of the three river crossing point known today as the state of Virginia.
Speaker: the Allegheny Mountains lie just behind this plot of land. The indigenous Americans who inhabited were the Iroquois slash the Haudenosaunee nations, one of the longest -running democracies in human history, according to history civilians. I think that's the YouTube channel. It's more of a republic, I would say. Yeah, more of a republic. But still, one of the longest -running
Speaker: people -led orgs in human history. That's pretty impressive. And so it was the Haudenosaunee and the Delaware's. Now the two nations had a contentious history together, quoting from the history of Pittsburgh here, getting into petty fights and such. Also, I did get a note from somebody who said that they had a friend growing up who was indigenous American and that person considers themselves American Indian, which I figured was an important correction to make. I know that dad,
Speaker: interacted with a lot of people who considered themselves American Indians. So I just wasn't sure if it was just like, I don't know. Anyway, I just felt like I needed to mention that. Good thing to note, I'm still going to use indigenous American because, you know, white people, white people, white people. On top of the local indigenous nations, there are also French and English people who wanted to lay claim to the land and use it for trading.
Speaker: It was also thought to be a very, and I'm not making this up, a clean and disease free area at the time. Pittsburgh was thought to be a clean and disease free area at the time. We truly have fallen.
Speaker: Oh, apparently historian Neville Craig wrote in his Histories of Pittsburgh published in 1851 that, dropsies, dysentery, diarrhea, and cholera diseases which are influenced by causes of a malaria surgeon have never prevailed to any extent. Again, I would probably not say that today.
Speaker: Now, because of how unpolluted it was and its useful location, people were willing to fight for this piece of land. Virginian English military aristocrats took charge of the area back when the U .S. was still a bunch of colonies. Lawrence Washington, AKA George Washington's half -brother, and a bunch of other rich Englishmen established the Ohio Company and were awarded a grant of 300 ,000 acres by the English Crown. The French got mad and established Fort Le Buffon's response.
Speaker: Various bats and protests resulted, many of which either led up to or became part of the Seven Years' War, otherwise known as the French and Indian War in the United States. After a series of losses, the English were able to get Fort Duquesne, it's spelled G -U -Q -U -E -S -N -E, after the French abandoned it.
Speaker: General John Forbes renamed the fort after William Pitts the Elder, who was the Prime Minister of England at the time, and 1758. And thus, Pittsburgh was born. After the American Revolution, the Whiskey Rebellion took place there. It started from some new taxes that the young federal government imposed on whiskey, a product that one in every five farms in Western Pennsylvania would have produced at the time.
Speaker: Since everyone bartered their whiskey instead of selling it, putting a tax on whiskey distilling would hurt people financially. Now time passed and the industrial revolution took the city by storm with Pittsburgh's natural resources and strategic location making it a very popular place to do a lot of factory stuff.
Speaker: River shipbuilding, iron factories, oil refining, steel were all made here at some point or another. Westinghouse invented the rail break in Pittsburgh because of the cheap iron and its ideal spot as a rail hub. There were factories galore, including a print factory, lead factories, window glass manufacturers, and metal goods producers for things like access and silverware. A lot of the more skilled trades were dominated by white US -born citizens.
Speaker: white collar work was largely woman dominated, which started these little gender micro divisions within the white collar work environments. Of course, men were more what, of course, men were more likely to be higher ups or middle management than women were. Whereas unskilled workers, they were more often than not Southern and Eastern European Americans and immigrants, aka not US born, wasp folks.
Speaker: This is the part where we start to talk more about coal mining. Now coal has a very long history in Pittsburgh and its surrounding areas. The earliest Western knowledge of coal in the area comes from maps dating as far back as 1761, noting a coal pit on what would become Mount Washington. After the now downtown area of Fort Pitt was deforested to build the damn thing, they decided it was easier to climb quote unquote coal hill,
Speaker: to get coal for fuel than it was to try and chop down more trees. There was so much coal that not only did you not have to dig deep to find it, you could also just take a pickaxe and dig it out from the side of a hill, which is what a lot of people ended up doing in the mid 19th century to heat their homes before the railroads came in.
Speaker: To quote Zadok Kramer in his 1814 edition of The Navigator, fuel that indispensable necessity of life is so cheap here that the poorest rarely suffer for the want of it. He also mentioned that there was so much collated smoke in the air that, quote, even snow can scarcely be called white in Pittsburgh.
Speaker: Obviously we know coal for its use as a really disgusting, smoky energy source, but more importantly, high quality coal could be used to make something called coke. Not the drug, nor the beverage, but a coal -based product, I guess, that could be used in the production of steel.
Speaker: Victor Collot, an engineer the French government sent to survey and map the land, wrote, call quality is equal to the best kind in England. Pittsburgh Steel was used to make the Brooklyn Bridge, which tells you just how much goddamn call there was for making Coke and Steel.
Speaker: Huge coal mining town, huge coal mining area. Although the average Joe could just scoop up coal from the hills to the heat their home in the surrounding counties like Westmore, Green, and Fayette, the coal industry was a bit more structured in the 1800s and there were a ton of coal mines.
Speaker: One historian by the name of Carmen Desicchio noted that Pennsylvania had almost a third of America's abandoned mines, most of them in the southwestern portion of the state, or I guess commonwealth, enter the Italian immigrants and the Atragnas. While great -grandfather Gaspare and his mother were settling into the US in the nearby metro area, the Atragnas were, according to family legend,
Speaker: operating a corner deli in Pittsburgh. Most of the big delis in grocery stores at the time were ran by Eastern European Jewish Americans, but that does not mean that they couldn't have run their own store.
Speaker: Our great -grandmother, Francis, and her brothers, Vito, George, and Peter, were all born in the United States. Francis herself was born in the borough of Brooklyn and NYC. Her father, Salvatore, immigrated to the U .S. on April 1st, 1903, via the Rome Mall. He was from Karim, which I Googled and could be one of any three northern central cities on the mainland of Italy.
Speaker: They did take off from Napoli, so possibly the southernmost Karim, but I'm honestly not sure. Her mother, on the other hand, I don't know really much about her. I can't find anyone with her name before 1905 when she gave birth to Francis, according to the Ellis Island database. I cannot find much about this woman. Salvatore's immigration records showed that he was married at the time, but Anna
Speaker: who was our great -great -grandmother does not show up on the ship manifest at all. So it's almost like a ghost gave birth to our grandmother. I don't know how that happened. It wasn't like they were undocumented. If you weren't Asian American, you weren't targeted by immigration laws until the 1910s. Very violent system nonetheless, but we were kind of spared from that until like the early 20th century.
Speaker: So I don't know anything about this woman besides a name and that she shoved her great grandmother out of her couch. So yeah, it's great. I love piecing together historical records so much. Yeah.
Speaker: Tell me a fucking about it. You're like, well, I listen, I get paid to dig up like artifacts. I don't even I'm trying to get paid. Yeah, exactly. Fucking. But yeah, the very hard job. I can see why like half the historians I talk to are fucking alcoholics, including me. Oh, my God. Well, make sure you balance out some of that alcohol with non alcohol.
Speaker: Yeah, I had a stake earlier. Don't worry about it. Oh my god, okay. Anyway, Italian immigrants were recruited to Western PA straight from Ellis Island if they had experience with stone quarrying. Many, many immigrants and first generation US citizens were blue collar workers. Although they had steady, albeit grueling work, they had to deal with a lot of xenophobia.
Speaker: There were various lynchings against Italian Americans, mostly in the Deep South, where Southern Italians were, by some miracle of the WASP system, considered Black and subject to Jim Crow laws. That's actually why we have Columbus Day. It was to placate us after they killed 11 Italian Americans. I feel like we can do better than Columbus Day now, but you know, that's a conversation for another day. As if that wasn't enough. They also had to deal with the Black Hat.
Speaker: No, not the Serbian terrorist group that caused World War I. No, not any of the other groups, militant groups that popped up in the early 20th century. The Black Hand style black male groups. They operated primarily in places such as Hillsville and Lawrence County, PA, where over half of the modern population is at least part Italian. In other words, they operated in places where there were a lot of Italians.
Speaker: The original Black Hand Mob was appropriately the Black Hand Society, arguably the oldest organized crime group in the United States. They followed the Italian immigrants from Ellis Island to the coal mines surrounding Pittsburgh and Western PA, from Bell Acres Borough. Secret societies once played a role in the Italian society, but over time, as their actions became increasingly violent, they were no longer tolerated by Italian authorities.
Speaker: Following a government crackdown in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, many members left the country, immigrating to North America, where they continued to feud and extort cash with threats of death, kidnapping and arson. Most of their victims were fellow Italians, but not all.
Speaker: Extortion produced revenue for gang members until prohibition was introduced in 1920, and bootlegging became a more profitable enterprise. Although extortion was still practiced. Allegheny County's high number of gangland -related killings in the 1920s and 30s were not unique. They were a local reflection of the rise of organized crime nationwide.
Speaker: So very common, very common in the United States, originated back in Italy, but the Italian government didn't want them there. So they kicked, they ended up moving to the United States and then they started preying on people here, mostly their own people. Lovely. So it should be noted that this like black male that the black, well, the black hand was usually just, it probably was just like a,
Speaker: like a loosely knit group of fellow criminals just to extort people for money. And they had a very ingenious extortion method that they brought over. So what they would do is that they would find a target that had money or had something that they wanted. They sent that target a letter. The letter could ding debts of fiscal harm or death and had a black hand on it.
Speaker: And if they didn't give you the money, they would just be killed outright. So, you know, a very genius extortion method, which is if you don't give me money, I'm going to kill you. Which is so fucking cruel. Like, excuse my language to the one uncle who complained about my cussing. But what the fuck, man? What the absolute fuck? Well, you know,
Speaker: You know, it, I guess like back then when the mob was smaller and like less, I don't know, like outward, maybe not outward, but like, yeah, it was just popular. You could just do that. And we don't know a lot about it. We still, we know some things because there was a lot of like, substantial like newspapers, like, Oh, the black hand strikes again.
Speaker: like all that type of stuff but it's like it probably wasn't like this like you know the entire game be no crime crew like with like 2 ,000 members just like going around like sending it was probably more like 10 to 12 people maybe
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, I did read while looking up the black hand that there was a before the Gambino crime family became really big, there was a extortion racket
Speaker: that was led by a Calabrian Neapolitan group that itself was ran by a guy named Ferdinand O 'Morrow and a Johnstown, Pennsylvania resident by the name of Fortunato Calabro. And apparently there was this one underling by the name of Nick Gentile in his autobiography. Conte financially benefited from the extortion rackets and they were led against fellow Sicilian immigrants.
Speaker: and Gentile himself waged an unofficial gangland war against this like blackmail group and convinced them to join the Pittsburgh Mafia instead of preying on their own people. So like there was, it really was just like these small groups of like people that were tolerated by the higher ups in the gangland because they got money from it. I guess like the easiest thing to say it's like think less like
Speaker: Al Capone like Chicago outfit type shit and more like Gangs of New York Bowery Boys type of shit, you know where they just Kind of it's like a threat of violence that people always that like gangs always had but like less sophisticated and in a way I guess like they didn't like and bribe like the
Speaker: They didn't bribe delivery drivers to give them things. They just threatened to kill them because they figured, God, it's more for me. Yeah. That's just so messed up. It reminds me of how
Speaker: Um, in Chicago, here in Chicago, where I live, like people talk about like, Oh, there's gangs everywhere. And it's, yeah, there are gangs and they prey on the people in the neighborhoods that they live in. It is very messed up. Um, yeah, it's definitely like, you know, like two different, like there it's like in LA, there's like two different, like there's tiny like sex of like a crypt gang, right? Yeah. Like,
Speaker: You know, sometimes they, a lot of it, they do work together sometimes, but other times they kind of, you know, kill each other. You know, like Greek cities, states. Yes. Yeah. You know, honestly, I think like that whole violent behavior in like the, uh, in like the early mafia group, probably still, because it still had like close roots to like the Sicilian culture at the time, which was, well,
Speaker: I guess, kind of violent, you could say. Well, it wasn't like the government was doing them any favors. Next episode. Exactly. Yeah. Next episode, we'll be talking more about how Sicily got very screwed over by Mussolini and his black shirts. And I've been preemptively doing some research on that because it's going to be a very big episode. I might have to split in two, honestly. And it's very messed up.
Speaker: It's always fucking black. Black shirts, black hands, black dragons, black whatever. Yeah, and they, and they considered Cecilia's black, which, hmm. Anyway, anyway. Um.
Speaker: Now, this is the environment that the dragon has ended up dealing with as the siblings all grew up. The black hand would come and try to extort money from them. Their father would refuse to pay them despite the dangers that we both just talked about now. And one day one of them said, I'm going to come back here with my men and we're going to kill you if you don't pay.
Speaker: The three brothers saw, not Francis, but her three brothers saw the Blackhead members walking down the street.
Speaker: And that was when they jumped into action. They ran into the family grocery store, grabbed some guns, ran out back, and circled behind the black hand guys as they walked into the grocery store. And the brothers assassinated all of them. After that, the whole family migrated back to Sicily to escape the black hand above the law, which I'm sure after that, you gotta go back home.
Speaker: I mean, just for just just for like context, like these guys like killed like a very famous police officer for basically like shit. What was the police officer's name? It was they killed like Joseph Petrosino. And yeah, yeah, they killed that guy. He was a very famous officer. He basically invented modern like organized anti organized crime tactics and techniques.
Speaker: and police force work. And they killed him for it. Yeah, they killed that guy. Like, what do you think you're going to do to like a bunch of deli kids? Yeah, like, time to leave. Well, anyway, they ended up as we will see in the next episode, they jumped out at the frying pan and into the fiery depths of hell. So that's
Speaker: I don't know if you have anything else to add on to this, but that's all I really have for this episode. Yeah. I mean, I guess, uh, I guess I can leave this on an old sealing proverb. I don't know if it's accurate because it comes from the book, the rovers of the sound. Uh, who was the guy that wrote that again? He was like a British travel historian or something like that.
Speaker: Yeah, I think I know what you're talking about. I think you quoted him on the first episode. Yeah, but this is what he says. It is regarded as a dastardly and contempt and contemptible and a wounded man to betray the name of his assailant. Because if he recovers, he was naturally expected to take vengeance himself. A rhyme to seal in proverb sums this principle. The supposed speaker being the one who has
Speaker: been stabbed. If I live, I will kill thee. If I die, I forgive thee." That's metal, to be honest. Like, yeah.
Speaker: Oh, Southern Italians. Oh, they're so fucking crazy. Anyway, thanks for listening to Alla La Familia. If you want to find me, my website is chloeadamo .com. Updated links on that. Guy, do you have anything else that you want to plug or say? Uh, no, I will continue to be a ghost in the machine.
Speaker: Oh, come on. I'm not right. Come on. Join the real world. I am in the real world. All right. Well, love you guys. Talk to you soon. Talk to you soon. Have a good recording session. Bye. Bye.
Speaker: Hi everyone, thank you for listening to our new podcast. It is a labor of love on behalf of my brother and I. If you have any feedback for us, please email me at chloeadamma at gmail .com and I will make sure that it either gets fixed then and there or later in the future, if not next episode. Thank you.
