A Thrilling Lost Chapter of Mob Rule
From the Publisher: “Western Pennsylvania’s New Kensington was in the grips of Mafia control throughout the 1950s, with a bevy of bookie joints, gambling casinos and brothels. An outgrowth of the Pittsburgh mob, New Kensington’s Costa Nostra ordered a group of Mafiosi to break into a National Guard station in Ohio and steal a shipment of weapons. The guns were destined for Fidel Castro, who was waging guerrilla war in Cuba. The Pittsburgh Mafia was hoping to get on Castro’s good side if he won the war to secure the reopening of gambling casinos. From a daring heist in Canada to Swiss bank accounts and CIA informants, this infamous gunrunning scheme was a high-speed saga of international intrigue. Join author Richard Gazarik as he presents a harrowing historical narrative of the criminal underworld of Western Pennsylvania.”
More info About the Author: Richard Gazarik spent more than four decades as a journalist writing about the courts, crime, corruption and politics. He covered the Sept. 11, 2001 attack on United Flight 93 in Shanksville, the 2002 rescue of the Quecreek miners, the downing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, corruption in local and Pennsylvania government as well as corporate fraud. He published the first of his six books in 2011, Black Valley: The Life and Death of Fannie Sellins, while he was working as a reporter. Since then, he has written biographies and books on the Prohibition era in Pittsburgh, a history of corruption in Pittsburgh and true crime. His seventh book, Guns, Castro and the Pittsburgh Mob goes on sale on Jan. 7. He is currently working on a book about McCarthyism in Pittsburgh that earned the city the title “Mecca of the Inquisition” because of the abuse of civil liberties and due process.
Start reading Gun Smuggling, Castro’s Cuba and the Pittsburgh Mafia by Richard Gazarik:
The twin-engine Beechcraft revved its engines and slowly taxied onto the grass airstrip at a rural airport near Tarentum, Pennsylvania before lumbering down the 1,800-feet runway at the Allegheny Valley Airport located 12 miles northeast of Pittsburgh on Nov. 4, 1958. The plane’s tail wheel was nearly flat from the 1,200-pound cargo inside the fuselage causing the plane’s wings to wobble on takeoff. The plane pierced through the ground fog and climbed for six minutes to an altitude of 1,025 feet before the pilot, Stuart Sutor, began hedge-hoping to avoid the radar at the Allegheny County Airport thirty miles away in West Mifflin.
Sutor was piloting a Beechcraft 18-D, a large lumbering aircraft that was outfitted to carry passengers or cargo. He was trying to avoid being tracked on radar because the plane was loaded with stolen military weapons destined for Fidel Castro in Cuba who was waging guerilla war against dictator Fulgencio Batista.
When the aircraft landed a short time later in Morgantown, West Virginia to refuel, Sutor was arrested and the contraband weapons cache was seized by federal agents triggering an international investigation stretching from Ohio to Pennsylvania, Chicago, New York, Florida, Canada, Switzerland, Lichtenstein, Italy and Cuba. Six men, all with ties to the Mafia in New Kensington, were arrested but that wasn’t the end the story. It was just the beginning.
The gun-running operation is detailed in declassified FBI files contained in a 1977 report issued by the House Select Committee on Assassinations which reinvestigated the 1963 Kennedy assassination. During the congressional probe, the names of Sam and Kelly Mannarino surfaced as committee investigators examined whether any members of the Mafia, including members of the LaRocca clan, were involved in Kennedy’s murder because of the Mannarinos links to gambling in Havana and their ties to mobster Norman “Roughhouse” Rothman. Rothman fronted a casino for the brothers in Cuba and was a close associate of Tampa mob boss Santo Trafficante Jr., who government investigators suspected may have been involved in Kennedy’s murder along with Louisiana mobster Carlos Marcello and Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa.
Did the Mafia kill Kennedy? Was there a government coverup? Was the CIA involved? Investigators ruled out Soviet, Cuban and anti-Castro exile involvement in the assassination but there is circumstantial but no direct evidence linking the CIA to the killing but the committee concluded “La Cosa Nostra had a strong motive for taking drastic action. Yet it is extremely unlikely that it would have considered such a major and dangerous act as assassinating the president … but the evidence does not preclude the possibility individual members may have been involved,” read the report. The committee’s chief counsel, G. Robert Blakely, was more candid telling the New York Times in 1979, “I think the mob did it.”
The House Select Committee’s probe discredited the Warren Commission investigation which concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman and discounted any evidence of a conspiracy. The Warren Commission failed to question important witnesses and the FBI and the CIA withheld evidence. The Commission concluded that Oswald shot the president from a sixth story window of the Texas School Book Depository as he traveled through Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. After shooting Kennedy, Oswald killed Dallas Police Officer J.D. Tippit and was subsequently killed by Dallas strip club owner Jack Ruby who had ties to the Mafia and may have been involved in gun running.
The Church Committee, named after Idaho Senator Frank Church, was formed in 1975 to investigate the assassination of foreign leaders by the CIA and abuses by the FBI. It conducted a limited probe into the Kennedy assassination. The Church Committee’s formal name was the Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities which reviewed CIA attempts to kill Castro, and the use of the Mafia to carry out the assassination. The House Select Committee did a deeper dive into the assassination and its investigators concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald and a second gunman killed Kennedy but they were unable to identify the second triggerman.
The House Committee examined the possibility that Sam Mannarino and Norman Rothman were involved because of allegations that Tampa Mafia boss Santo Trafficante Jr. told anti-Castro activist and exile Jose Aleman that Kennedy would not be reelected president “because he was going to be hit.” Committee investigators wanted to know whether Aleman ever heard Mannarino and Rothman use the same phrase in his presence. Aleman was the son of Jose Aleman who was Cuba’s Minister of Education under President Ramon Grau San Martin.
The committee knew Louisiana crime boss Carlos Marcello of New Orleans hated Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy who deported Marcello to Guatemala. Marcello was born in the North African county of Morocco but claimed he was a citizen of Guatemala and produced a bogus Guatemalan birth certificate which led Kennedy to deport Marcello to Guatemala as an undesirable alien.
In its final report, the House Select Committee believed Marcello, Trafficante and Hoffa “had the motive, means and opportunity” to assassinate the president, wrote attorney Ronald Goldfarb in the Washington Post in 1993. Goldfarb worked for Robert Kennedy in the Organized Crime Division at the Department of Justice.
The Mannarinos had an interest in gambling in the mob’s Havana playground in the 1950s thanks to their friendship with dictator Fulgencio Batista who permitted the brothers to place 2,000 slot machines throughout the island and run the gambling concession at the Sans Souci, a nightclub and casino located on the outskirts of Havana. The Mafia had landed in Cuba building hotels and operating high-end casinos and night clubs raking in millions of dollars but the Mannarinos were small fry compared to their fellow mobsters like Trafficante and Meyer Lansky, a Jewish gangster considered the mastermind of the Mafia’s Cuban gambling empire.
While the Mafia enriched themselves, it failed to see trouble on the horizon in the form of a young, bearded cigar-smoking revolutionary named Fidel Castro who was threatening to upend Batista’s cozy relationship with the Mafia by waging guerilla warfare against his regime. Castro launched his revolution and from the hot, steamy jungle and the Sierra Maestre mountains, killing and bombing his way to Havana.
Castro was cast as a mythic figure by journalists, mainly by New York Times reporter Herbert Matthews, who portrayed him as an iconic, romantic figure. Castro was thought to be dead but Matthew’s interview with Casto at his mountain base on Feb. 17, 1957 proved he was very much alive and was considered a journalistic coup at the time. His articles portrayed Castro’s ragtag army as a force to be reckoned with at a time when Castro’s rebels were at their weakest point in their revolutionary struggle and in need of weapons. Matthews was openly sympathetic toward Castro and told his readers that Castro was no communist and wanted to free Cuba from Batista’s corrupt, ruthless rule. After taking power, Castro presented Matthews with a medal for conducting the interview but his work was discredited after Castro embraced Communism.
Castro attacked army garrisons and organized an underground resistance network across the island. Batista responded with measures that were so brutal that the U.S. instituted an arms embargo while the CIA began secretly funneling money to Castro and turning a blind eye to gun smuggling by Castro supporters from Florida. Rebels sabotaged rail lines. They disrupted communication. They stole arms from the military and assassinated government officials. Eventually, Batista was forced to flee, and Havana surrendered to Castro on Jan. 1, 1959.
Sam Mannarino watched the revolution spread across Cuba and envisioned himself as the new gambling czar in a Castro-led government if he could help arm Castro’s forces. Norman Rothman advised Mannarino to place his bets on Castro predicting Castro would continue to allow the casinos to remain in operation under Mafia control after he ousted Batista and would be grateful to those who helped him. Mannarino decided to arm Castro and put into motion a plan to supply him with weapons. But Mannarino, Rothman and the CIA misread Castro’s true intentions.
Mannarino told an FBI agent during a casual conversation that he expected to be in the “driver’s seat” when Castro assumed power. During a meeting at his New Kensington home on March 14, 1958, Mannarino mentioned to his guests that he was going to Havana for three weeks to study the pineapple industry with the intent of investing but the true purpose of his visit was to meet with Rothman and formulate a plan to obtain guns, according to FBI records.
What Mannarino failed to understand was that Castro loathed the Mafia as much as former rulers Spain and the United States for what they had done to Cuba by profiting from the island’s natural resources and turning the island into the “brothel of the Caribbean.”
The Mannarinos were never major players in the gaming industry. Their operation at the Sans Souci lost money so they sold their interest to Trafficante in a deal reportedly brokered by Lansky. Life Magazine published an article in its March 10, 1958 edition that reported Batista funneled money mobsters paid him for gambling concessions to his wife’s charities when in reality, the money went into Batista’s pockets. The article also warned how Castro’s guerilla war against the Batista government could mean that Batista’s days as Cuba’s leader were numbered. Castro’s boldness shook Batista after Castro’s forces kidnapped an Argentine race car driver who was supposed to drive in Havana’s Gran Premio auto race. Then his rebels robbed the National Bank in Havana, burned a sugar warehouse, wrecked a railroad station, raided a passenger train, blew up a military vehicle and hanged a father and son who were government informers.
Still, Mannarino could not be persuaded to stay out of Cuba’s internal politics and went ahead with plans to supply Castro with guns. The plan sounded simple but turned out to be more complex. The plan was supposed to work this way. Guns were stolen from a National Guard Armory in Ohio then shipped to New Kensington and flown to Cuba. The scheme would be financed from the proceeds of a bank heist in Canada of millions of dollars in negotiable securities which would be used as collateral for loans in Switzerland to buy more guns.
Interview with Richard Gazarik, author of Gun Smuggling, Castro’s Cuba and the Pittsburgh Mafia:
How did you come across the idea for his book?
I grew up in the Alle-Kiski Valley area not far from the small airport where the plane began its journey south. I was a boy when the story broke about the arrests. It was big news. I had heard of the suspects and knew of their reputation. I came from Tarentum just across the Allegheny River from New Kensington which was ruled by Sam and Kelly Mannarino who were part of the Pittsburgh Mafia controlled at the time by John LaRocca. FBI agents referred to New Kensington “as Las Vegas of the East” because of the heavy gambling that went on. Part of my misspent teenage years was wasted in a pool room surrounded by gamblers, bookies and hustlers. My mother sometimes would give me money and tell me to go to the poolroom and place a bet on a number. When I was in my 20s, I sometimes frequented the after-hours clubs in New Kensington operated by the Mannarinos. I covered two murder trials at one of the clubs they were behind when I was a newspaper reporter. In the mid-90s, I visited the National Archives when the records of Kennedy’s assassination and possible mob involvement were opened to the public and published a series entitled, “Mob Rule.” The records related to the stolen guns were not available at the time but were released later so I decided to revisit the records.
Why would the mob want to arm Castro?
The plot was the brainchild of Sam Mannarino. His brother wanted no part of the scheme. The Mafia had a lucrative relationship with Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista until he got greedy and things cooled between him and the mob. When Castro began his guerilla war against Batista, Mannarino decided to bet on Castro thinking Castro would be appreciative of the support and grant him the gambling concession in Havana. What Mannarino failed to realize was that Castro hated the mob as much as he despised Batista because they turned the island into the brothel of the Caribbean.
Did you ever meet any of the characters in the book?
No, but I covered the 1980 funeral of Kelly Mannarino and there were some rough looking characters there. Everybody knew about them. In reading these old FBI files it was interesting to discover how little the FBI knew about the Mafia. It was also interesting to note how deeply embedded the mob was in the political, cultural and social fabric of New Kensington and Westmoreland County. They owned everybody from the mayor to police to county judges who were willing to do favors for the mobsters for a price. Another interesting aspect was that the Mafia’s financial survival was linked to Alcoa, which was headquartered in New Kensington. While Alcoa thrived, the Mafia thrived. When Alcoa closed up shop, gambling revenue dropped drastically. New Kensington was a dead town.
Did any one character stand out?
Sam Mannarino was a character. He was listed in FBI files as an informant. His brother grew tired of his antics and “retired” him. It also mentioned his addiction to cocaine. One of the gun runners who was close to the Mannarino brothers turned out to be an FBI and CIA informant and was one of the top jewel thieves in the country. He ratted out the brothers. One aspect of their lives that I found amusing was how the FBI remarked on their eating habits. Both brothers were short men and well overweight. They referred to Kelly as a glutton. They also followed them to trysts at motels with their mistresses and noted how they seemed drawn to unattractive women.
So, what happened to the Mannarino brothers?
Despite years of investigations by the FBI, surveillance, digging into their personal lives and placing an illegal wiretap, the government never achieved a successful prosecution against them. They both died of colon cancer.
Arcadia Publishing is publishing Gun Smuggling, Castro’s Cuba and the Pittsburgh Mafia in January 2025 and it’s now available to pre-order. This excerpt and interview are published here courtesy of the author and should not be reprinted without permission.
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