Few organized crime networks have ever operated as smoothly and internally peaceful as the Mafia Family based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. But it wasn’t always that way. During the 1920s and 1930s era, the City of Pittsburgh saw more than its fair share of gangland killings and underworld power plays.
In fact, during this fledgling period of underworld competition for supremacy, no less than four succeeding Mafia Family leaders were assassinated until New York’s Mafia Commission stepped in to finally quell the warfare once and for all. From that point forward, underworld “peace” prevailed, and Pittsburgh would slowly turn its unstable underworld reputation around. Within a few years, the Pittsburgh Family would gain an enviable reputation for its quiet stability and profit-making abilities, while generally avoiding police scrutiny and a public outcry for law and order.
Over the next sixty-odd years, what became known as the John LaRocca Family successfully operated behind the curtains, so to speak. Although always one of the smallest Families numerically by Cosa Nostra standards, the LaRocca Family, nonetheless, engaged in most organized crime rackets like gambling, alcohol bootlegging, labor-union racketeering, extortion, jukebox and coin-machine monopoly rackets, police bribery, and political corruption.
At their 1950s-1960s peak, the “inducted” rank and file membership of the LaRocca Family probably never exceeded more than 25 to 30 mafiosi who served as “soldiers” and “capo regimes,” or at the “administration” level within Pittsburgh’s borgata. But these two dozen or so “made” men oversaw an extended group of LaRocca “associates” that numbered several hundred additional hoodlums and racketeers.
