The Mob in Youngstown: Organized Crime in the Mahoning and Shenango Valleys (Informer, November 2022)
About this ebook
Through decades, the City of Youngstown, Ohio, has been branded with such painful nicknames, due in large part to the rackets, violence and corruption of organized crime in the region. The streets of Youngstown and other communities in the Mahoning and Shenango valleys of northeastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania have been bloodied through numerous shootings and stabbings and, during an especially disturbing period, a series of gruesome car-bombings. In too many cases, public officials and officers of the law were complicit in the criminal activity, profiting through bribery and graft. Some authorities who resisted corruption and attempted to perform their public duties found themselves the targets of underworld violence.
In this November 2022 issue of Informer: The History of American Crime and Law Enforcement, we tackle the history of organized crime in Youngstown region, from the earliest reports of the 1890s through the apparent dissolution of the Mob presence more than a century later. It is a complex subject, as elements of at least four regional Mafia organizations and a persistent non-Mafia Calabrian organization, in addition to other criminal elements, all collided, cooperated, combined and clashed with each other at different times. This resulted in a wealth of interesting but often uncoordinated stories and personalities.
Our strategy for dealing with the subject is to present a number of individual standalone articles on the more interesting of these stories, bringing to light the significant personalities, groups, areas and eras. The effort might be compared to the photographic “stitching” of a collection of images into a panorama. Readers will discover the secret criminal organizations behind names like "Society of Honor," "Sacred Circle" and "Society of the Banana" and will encounter such characters as "Fats" Aiello, Ernie Biondillo, Frank Cammarata, "Cadillac Charlie" Cavallaro, Joe Cutrone, "Tony Dope" Delsanter, Vince DeNiro, "Wolf" DiCarlo, "Big Jim" Falcone, Mike Farah, "Red" Giordano, "Big Dom" Mallamo, Dominick Moio, "Two-Gun Jimmy" Prato, Rocco Racco, Rocco Strange, Lenny Strollo, "Zebo" Zottola, along with the Barber brothers, the Carabbia brothers, the Naples brothers, the Romeo brothers and many more.
While it is our hope that a coherent image of the history of Youngstown-area organized crime (and its connections to criminal entities outside the region) will emerge, we are concerned by the fact that some of our individual historical “snapshots” do not overlap with or even touch each other while others may overlap quite a bit. We hope that the obvious voids and repetitions will not be a great distraction and that, with some patience, our readers will be able to “get the picture.”
Contributors to this Informer issue: James Barber, Justin Cascio, Margaret Janco, Thom L. Jones, Michael A. Tona, Edmond Valin and Thomas Hunt
About the author
Editor/publisher of Informer since 2008 and publisher of The American Mafia history website, MafiaHistory.us, since 2002, Thomas Hunt is the author of Wrongly Executed? The Long-Forgotten Context of Charles Sberna's 1939 Electrocution, coauthor (with Martha Macheca Sheldon) of Deep Water: Joseph P. Macheca and the Birth of the American Mafia, coauthor (with Michael A. Tona) of DiCarlo: Buffalo's First Family of Crime, contributor to Mafia: The Necessary Reference to Organized Crime. His articles have appeared in On the Spot Journal, Tampa Mafia Magazine, Cigar City Magazine. He has moderated online discussion groups on subjects related to American Mafia history. He holds a bachelor's degree in History and Journalism from Charter Oak State College in Connecticut. He and his wife reside in central Vermont.
James Barber was born in Youngstown, Ohio. His Barbaro family roots extend back to the province of Reggio Calabria in southern Italy. The maternal side of the family originated in the communities of Cirella and San Nicola Ardore; the paternal side in Santa Cristina, Casignana, Bianco and Benestare. While in college, James discovered that his great-grandfather, Domenico Barbaro, was shot to death in 1924. It was a subject his grandfather - thirteen at the time of the killing - refused to discuss. James dug through newspaper microfilm collections at Youngstown Library to unearth long kept family secrets. His research has since expanded into related areas of organized crime history. James is married with two children. He is a resident of Cape Cod, where he owns a breakfast-lunch restaurant.
Justin Cascio is a nonfiction writer and genealogist whose popular works use genealogy to tell the history of the Mafia in Sicily and the United States. His interest in Mafia history sprang from awareness of his family’s roots in Corleone, Sicily. His famous “cousins” from Corleone include Jack Dragna, Giuseppe Morello and Al Pacino. Justin appears in the 2022 documentary, Pasqualina of Springfield, as an expert on the Prohibition-era bootlegger in Massachusetts. He has been a regular contributor of articles to Informer. His work can also be found on the Mafia Genealogy website (mafiagenealogy.com) and on social media (Facebook, Twitter, Patreon).
Margaret Janco is a longtime researcher into the organized crime history of the western Pennsylvania area, where she resides. She has assisted with Informer issues since 2015 and was a contributor to the Nick Gentile issue of 2020. A lifelong resident of western Pennsylvania, she relocated from New Kensington to Pittsburgh in her college years and made that city her home. An early interest in genealogy was aided by the arrival and expansion of online databases. Margaret became curious about the underworld history of her region and has applied a genealogical approach to investigations of the criminal past. She has explored the family links of historic crime figures from Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Maryland, New York and elsewhere.
A retired businessman, Thom L. Jones has had a long interest in organized crime, in particular the Sicilian and American Mafia. The interest was triggered by a book he read while studying at university, God Protect Me From My Friends - a biography of Sicilian bandit Salvatore Giuliano. That launched a hobby of amassing a database of books, articles, reports and internet sources relating to the people and events that have changed the face of international crime over the past eighty years. A resident of New Zealand, he has traveled the world extensively. He has contributed articles to CrimeLibrary.com, BostonMafia.com and Mafia-International.com. For more than a decade, he has built a collection of crime-related non-fiction articles and short stories in the Mob Corner section of GangstersInc.org. This is his second article for Informer.
Michael A. Tona has researched organized crime history for decades. Raised in a Sicilian-Italian family in the Buffalo area, he became familiar with gangland history and legend at an early age. During college, his interest naturally turned toward this subject and focused on underworld figure Joseph DiCarlo. DiCarlo became the topic of his college research project, which earned some interest from FBI special agents investigating the same subject. Mike earned his bachelor's degree in criminal justice from the State University of New York College at Buffalo. He collaborated with Thomas Hunt on a series of articles and the two-volume work, DiCarlo: Buffalo's First Family of Crime, released in 2013.
A Toronto-based organized crime historian, Edmond Valin's interest in Mafia history was piqued by reading The Valachi Papers as a teenager. Informer readers may recall his previous articles, in which he used clues in government documents to determine the identities of underworld informants. Seven of those articles appeared in Informer issues between July 2011 and August 2017. A collection of articles relating to informants may be found in the "Rat Trap" section of The American Mafia history website, MafiaHistory.us. Ed is married with two university-aged daughters. He and his wife enjoy traveling, visiting old churches and researching family history. Valin completed the Camino Frances pilgrimage in Spain in 2016.
