From at least the early 1910s, a variety of racketeers were operating within the City of St. Louis, Missouri. By the “Roaring Twenties” and the advent of Prohibition, the city was rife with organized gangs of bootleggers, strong-arms, thieves, and other types of hoodlums.
Criminals and hoodlums of varied ethnicities were all actively plundering various sections of St. Louis, the Italian criminal underworld among them. A fledgling group known as “The Green Ones” were indeed among the first criminal seeds and vestiges of what would later become an officially recognized Mafia “Family” over the city’s criminal fraternity.
Through the years, the St. Louis Mafia or “Outfit” included such notorious figures as the deported Francesco (Three-Finger Frank) Coppola, Vincenzo (Sugar Vince) Filippello, Francesco (Frank) Agrusa, Anthony (Tony the Pip) Lopiparo, and Raffaele (Shorty) Caleca, to name but a few.
And although they would never gain the national prominence of some of their contemporaries such as their Missouri counterparts in Kansas City, the Chicago Mob, or the Joseph Zerilli Family of Detroit, despite a small Family membership, nonetheless, the St. Louis crowd, under the auspices of Family boss Anthony (Tony G) Giordano were able to hold their own and control several lucrative criminal operations within the city for many decades.
