The conviction in New York earlier this month of three men involved in the Al Bruno shooting in 2003 brings back memories of the night the mob leader was blown away in the parking lot of the Mt. Carmel Social Club in Springfield’s South End.
In a city whose organized crime leaders had long preferred to keep things quiet, the Bruno murder was an event that briefly transformed one neighborhood into a setting reminiscent of Prohibition-era Chicago in the days of Al Capone.
The Bruno assassination, like the flower-bedecked funeral of Big Nose Sam Cufari that was splashed all over the papers in 1983, was a reader grabber. Yet for some, especially in the upper Valley, the stories seemed hackneyed. How can a true story, reported straight, seem hackneyed? To explain, we have to take a step back.
One of the best and the worst things about journalism is that all publications, from Vogue to the New York Times to the Valley Advocate, are packaged. To find their market, they have to have an aesthetic: a certain patina comprising language, values, and the sense of language and values in relation to time, present or historic, that makes the publication “hip” (or not hip).
The trouble is that the imperative to be hip can get in the way of sustained reporting on important subjects. Aesthetically, most mob stories seem retro even when they’re current. The Al Capone stereotype is so pervasive that if you write about the Bruno murder, your news may be only hours old, but aesthetically you’ve thrown yourself back into a Jimmy Cagney or Paul Muni movie. The Sopranos helped update our sense of mobsters as characters with personal lives, but when a writer is reporting what happens in court—in the recent trial in New York, for instance—it’s hard to be sure the audience won’t fall back into Prohibition-era movie mode and hear the news as obsolete rather than urgent.
But the mob is not unimportant; where it has connections, it corrupts governments, especially local governments. For over 30 years the Advocate watched as public money in Springfield was siphoned off to mob enterprises, public institutions were tainted by gangland influences, and local businesspeople were intimidated by mobsters. It may have been the stuff fiction is made of, but it was really happening, and really causing harm.
People bent on making money don’t care whether their activities seem dated to their more aesthetically conscious neighbors. If bribery, extortion, assault and murder are still working for them, they’ll still do those things. And once in a while their activities become a public menace, like the time a Springfield area electrician decided to speed up collections from slow-paying customers by hiring a local legbreaker.
Brothers Ty and Fotios Geas and Art Nigro, allegedly acting at the behest of Anthony Arillotta, have been convicted of hiring confessed shooter Frankie Roche to kill Bruno; they’ll be sentenced in June. Arillotta and longtime local mobster Felix Tranghese have also pleaded guilty to charges related to the murder. What the next generation of mobsters will look like in Springfield, what enterprises they will engage in and what level of violence they will tolerate in the city, is not as clear as it seemed in the days when Bruno and the Scibelli family were running things. Some of their younger relatives are more educated now, as the Valley learned when one or two of them stepped out of line at UMass a few years ago and the Amherst police cracked down. With these convictions, it seems that the mob in Springfield has been seriously weakened. But that remains to be seen.
