One of the most notorious sin cities and gambling meccas in America was little ole Steubenville, Ohio. It was the hometown and birthplace of renowned singing sensation Dino Crocetti, better known the world over as beloved Italian crooner Dean Martin.
From the 1930s through the 1970s, the town’s total population averaged only 30,000 to 35,000 residents. Steubenville was a small city that always maintained its small-town feel and appeal. Yet, for many decades, Steubenville had a notorious reputation as a wide-open cesspool of backroom gambling casinos, prostitution, and rampant official corruption that allowed local underworld figures to flourish unimpeded by arrest and prosecution.
The laissez-faire attitude and rampant corruption in their local government and police department enabled a small band of Calabrian-born racketeers known as the “Black Hand Gang” to virtually take over the town lock, stock, and barrel. In fact, Steubenville became so notorious for vice, violence, and its corrupt police force that it was given the nickname “Little Chicago.”
The Calabrian underworld came to prominence in the early 1920s after waging vicious street warfare with other racketeers for control of the illicit bootlegging trade, gambling, and other rackets. Local authorities say there was a long string of killings within the city’s “Argonne” and other Italian districts over several years until a Calabrian racketeer named Vincenzo (Jimmy) Tripodi finally rose to power. Together with his brother-in-law Cosmo Quattrone, these two notorious hoodlums would become the recognized underworld powers in Steubenville for the next sixty years.
