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If Rod Serling didn’t write this episode of the “Twilight Zone” he should have.One St. Valentine’s Day holds a special place in my mind eye, Feb. 14,1929. No one was ever convicted of the famous gangland murders among the suspected of the shooting found themselves playing golf and socializing with Steubenville’s own Dean Martin. Yea I heard this a thousand times at Rex’s Cigar Store.So, I look information made available under the Freedom of Information Act and a few obituaries from the local papers matched to create a backstory of the violent years.My mother’s family was among the very first to secure land at the land office in Steubenville.A James Mancini, married Lucy Durandetti in Steubenville on March 24,1914. James would settle in Warren, Ohio, and rise to become a highly successful bootlegger and gaming operator. ClarenceMICHAEL TRAUBERTDarrow was Mancini’s legal counsel one time over a scrape with state and local officials — 27 years later, in 1941, Thomas Viola was convicted of killing Mancini and his nephew that night and is believed to be the same person who the early 1960s photo will appear on the Post Office wall on FBI’s 10 most wanted list on the run from a murder conviction.The second hitman was Charles Monazym, and the reason given for never putting him on trial was he was already in federal prison in Kansas.Under the FOI Act we find the Moe Dietz is recorded as saying that Steubenville belonged to Meyer Lansky — this confirms a verbal conversation, I had with the former wife of one leading Steubenville mob figures who said, “My former husband worked for Lansky.”The whispering Jew told those who needed to know that Wheeling belonged to the crime family out of Buffalo whose Don was featured on the cover of Sport Illustrated. Everything above the Ohio County Airport belonged to the Pittsburgh Mafia and the Ohio River was controlled by the Cleveland syndicate non-Italian.The FOI Act provides informants help in painting color on Steubenville, the 4 p.m. usher at weekend Mass is its memo to the director of the FBI dated Feb. 14,1964. Guisseppi Pindilli, who was living in Buenos Aires, Argentina, was the reason that a “whore house was coming to Steubenville after the approval of James Tripodi, aka., Vincenzo Tripo-di, who granted the house as an exception is because of his long-standing relationship and friendship with Pindilli. By letter dated Feb. 5,1964, the bureau advised that inasmuch as Pindilli was deported on two-occasions in 1931 and 1947 and has had his application for re-entry rejected by INS on several occasions subsequent to that time, that it would appear that he had been away from the United States when he was living in Ohio.It also pointed out that Pindilli, prior to being deported in 1947, was in constant contact “ ... throughout the United States with members of the organization,” and still is to this day — through correspondence. An informant stated that from the time the Pindilli family moved to Warren from Pennsylvania, in about 1933, until Pindilli’s’s departure in 1947, Pindilliin an almost constant travel status for the “organization” throughout the United States and an informant pointed out that Pindilli did still have and did still exert influence.The FBI memo sets the record straight that Vincenzo Tripodi was overlord of Steubenville did not answer to the Cleveland mob, more likely other wire taps suggest only to Lansky. Later, a vice president of Caesars Palace obituary will tell that he got his start working with the church usher and worked his way up to Rex Cigar Store like Dean Martin and others. The church elder will be the go-between of the many partners, including local police.Another Mancini, Ray, will fight an ill-fate bout against Duek Koo Kim, the South Korean boxer who will die after the fight broadcast on CBS Nov. 11,1982.(Traubert, a resident of Wellsburg, is a local boxing enthusiast.)
Newspaper Details
Herald Star
Steubenville, Ohio, US
Sun, Feb 13, 2022
Page 5
Full Page
Clipped by
Cincinnati A.
OH, USA 28 Oct 2023
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