The Good Son: The Life of Ray "Boom Boom" Mancini - Hardcover

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Mark Kriegel is the author of two critically acclaimed bestsellers, Namath: A Biography and Pistol: The Life of Pete Maravich. He is a veteran columnist and a commentator for the NFL Network. He lives with his daughter, Holiday, in Santa Monica, California.

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The Good Son

Chapter 1 | Lenny Mancino

Not long after his release from prison, Nick Mancino pulled aside his stocky ten-year-old son, Lenny:

“I have to go,” he said.

“I’ll go with you,” said the boy.

“No,” said Nick. “You have to stay here and take care of your mother.”

Lenny cried all that day and through the night. He cried so much that by the next morning, he knew he’d never cry again.

Nicola Mancino, son of Leonardo Mancino, of the Sicilian fishing village of Bagheria, left his ancestral home in the summer of 1913 and arrived at Ellis Island aboard the SS Palermo1 on September 5. He was eighteen, and slightly built at five foot two. After assuring the immigration officer he could both read and write, Mancino, a surname that translates as “lefty” or “southpaw,” was designated a “labourer” in the ship’s manifest. With twenty-five dollars left, he was headed for the stretch of mill towns that pocked the land from western Pennsylvania to northeast Ohio.

Youngstown, Ohio, the city in which he would settle, was home to U.S. Steel’s Ohio Works, Truscon Steel, and the Youngstown Sheet and Tube on the east side. Trumbull Steel, eventually absorbed by Republic Iron & Steel, was in nearby Warren. Not long after Mancino’s arrival, the Mahoning Valley had become second only to Pittsburgh2 in the production of pig iron, those rectangular ingots liquefied in a furnace to make steel.

The by-products of such mass production included slag heaps and a permanent cloud of smoke and soot hovering about six thousand feet above the city. Pilots landing in Youngstown3 typically did so with dirty faces. There were also regular bouts of industrial violence. For example, shortly after 4 P.M., on January 7, 1916, a single revolver shot from a crowd of well-armed, though not sober, picketers elicited a volley of rifle fire from guards stationed at Sheet and Tube’s Poland Avenue entrance.

“What followed,” according to one account, “was sheer anarchy4 . . . the torch was put to building after building by a frenzied mob that poured gasoline on the fires to intensify the flames. Building fronts were battered in to provide draft to speed the blaze. . . . Not until 2,100 infantrymen and machine gunners were brought in toward morning was anything like order restored.”

•   •   •

On December 12, 19175, at Our Lady of Mount Carmel Catholic Church, Nick took a wife. Annie Cannazzaro was American by birth, but her family also hailed from the village of Bagheria. Her mustachioed, broad-faced father, Beneditto, drove a horse-drawn cart bearing fruits and vegetables. She grew up with brothers named Michael, John, and Paul, and an older sister, Margaret, at 410 Lansing Avenue, on the east side, where children were bathed in a zinc basin in the kitchen. Annie was fifteen.

Though the groom is again described as a laborer in their marriage license application, Nick would soon discern new and more profitable opportunities. The Volstead Act was passed in 1919, the same year his son Lenny was born in the Cannazzaro home on Lansing Avenue. Better known as Prohibition, it would prove a windfall for men with the inclination and balls to violate it.

Youngstown’s immigrant classes, most of them from southern and central Europe, didn’t share the Anglo-Saxon concept of vice. They played the numbers, known locally as the bug. They played a dice game of Turkish origin called barbut. And they drank. In 1910, a city with a population of 79,066 had 324 grocery stores6 and 345 saloons. By 1930, ten thousand gallons7 of illegal beer were being brewed each day in Youngstown.

The typical mill worker did twelve-hour shifts8, six days per week, at twenty cents per hour. Strikes were periodic occurrences, like changing seasons. Hence, it didn’t take much for Nick to figure he’d do better as a bootlegger. Not only would the new family man have money in his pocket, he’d have respect.

Family photographs show a man unlike his Cannazzaro in-laws: no pork-pie hat, no rolled up sleeves, no work boots. Nick Mancino has the unmistakable air, by stance, demeanor, and attire, of a padrone. His suit is three pieces and well tailored. His tie is fastened by a stickpin. His hands are clasped behind his back, his gaze calm but unnaturally direct.

One can imagine what an outsized presence Nick Mancino was to his son. Even as an adult himself, Lenny would often remind his own children. “Grandpa Nick,” he’d say, wagging his finger, “what a great man he was.” On the east side, there was little stigma making a living from liquor or numbers. The only shame was in doing it dishonorably. Nick’s progeny would take great pride in the fact that he never snitched.

There were two kinds of illicit activities in Youngstown: those committed under the aegis of mafia interests in Pittsburgh or Cleveland, each of those cities being approximately 75 miles away. Nick was affiliated with the Cleveland crew, which could count on him for months at a time of reliably discreet incarceration. If only his young bride had been so loyal.

In 1929, upon his last release, he’d learned that Annie, variously described as “a free-spirit,” “kind of a flapper type,” and “one of those women who liked to party,” had become involved with another dapper man. His name was Valentine Pavone, better known as Slick, sometimes known as Slick Marino. Slick wore suits and ties and kept his hair parted and plastered back like one of the Dorsey brothers. For an aspiring patriarch like Nick, Annie’s dalliance was an intolerable blow, the resulting complications and shame outweighing even the tearful supplications of his now-ten-year-old son who begged him to stay.

Lenny never spoke of the circumstances that led to his dad’s departure, at least not to any of his pals at Gumbo’s pool room or the Pearl Street Mission or the bare-ass beach, as it was called, down by Jackson Hollow. All they knew is every once in a while he’d go off to Buffalo to visit, as John Congemi, a friend of Lenny’s, put it, “his real father.”

“My father was basically a bootlegger in Youngstown and came to Buffalo to work in the same capacity, probably numbers, too,” says Vincent Mancino, the first son of Nick’s second marriage. “He used to always say the judges were his biggest customers. Anyway, once the country went back to drinking, he went into construction.”

Neither the separation nor his father’s new family did anything to diminish him in Lenny’s eyes. If anything, the boy became more awestruck by the great man. “Lenny loved my father more than anything else,” recalls his stepbrother.

Meanwhile, custody of Lenny was effectively awarded to a committee of Cannazzaros: mother, grandparents, aunts, and uncles, the most memorable of them then known on the east side as “Firpo.” Paulie Cannazzaro’s namesake was Luis Firpo, the Wild Bull of the Pampas. Famous for knocking Jack Dempsey through the ropes in their 1923 title bout at the Polo Grounds, the real Firpo was six foot two and a half. Uncle Paulie was about the same, another heavyweight, and caught rail at Truscon Steel, literally catching pieces of railroad track as they came off the line. If any man were naturally suited for such a vocation, it would be Firpo, whose nephews would recall his hands the size of baseball mitts9. He could hold a...