Mountain Mafia by Betty L. Alt & Sandra K. Wells

Author:Betty L. Alt & Sandra K. Wells [Alt, Betty L. & Wells, Sandra K.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781984585202
Publisher: Xlibris US
Published: 2020-06-30T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 5

The Brothers Smaldone

Gosh, it made great headlines in the ‘40s and ‘50s with ‘Smaldone this’ and ‘Smaldone that.’ . . . gambling, booze, horse racing—if it was a racket, the Smaldones were accused of it.

—Stan Oliner, Colorado Historical Society

in The Denver Post, 1998

In the preceding chapter, Pueblo’s Blanda, Colletti and Spinuzzi successively have been listed as the bosses of Colorado’s crime syndicate from the mid-1930s through the 1970s. Even though Denver eventually would be considered Smaldone territory, the leaders in southern Colorado oversaw the state. For example, business contacts were kept between the two areas, and Blanda had helped Clyde and Eugene Smaldone set up their slot machine rackets. Social contacts were also maintained between the northern and southern factions, and the Smaldones frequently were seen in Pueblo, dining at local restaurants, visiting friends, and gambling.

While the operation in southern Colorado was kept fairly low-key and over the years had a minimum of problems with law enforcement, this was not true of the mobsters in the Denver area. Often of a violent nature, the organization’s illegal activities came to the attention of the police and made page-one headlines in the press. This could not have been good for Mafia enterprises. Why, then, did the Pueblo bosses not call a halt to the ongoing violent activities in northern Colorado, particularly those of the Smaldones? Was it because Pueblo took a big cut of Denver operations? Did the violence keep law enforcement concentrating in the northern part of the state rather than Pueblo? Did Pueblo not wish to become involved in another series of gang wars? Whatever the reasons, for the most part the Smaldones appeared to be ignored by the Pueblo leaders.

Although they were considered to control northern Colorado, the Smaldone’s power may have been exaggerated. They never were considered “bosses” in the state, and this may have been due to the fact that their heritage was from northern Italy instead of Sicily where most Mafia leaders had roots. As far the national syndicate was concerned, one source indicated that the Smaldones “were punks,” and that they stayed out of Blanda’s territory in Pueblo as well as Walsenburg and Trinidad because “there was a mood of cooperation between the gangs who held power in each of the four cities, but it was mainly a matter of ‘you don’t tread on me, I won’t tread on you’.”(1)

The Smaldone brothers were not particularly well-known until the 1940s, but they had been slowly moving up the gangster ladder since the 1920s. From the beginning of prohibition, the family had been involved in illegal activities as the father, who had emigrated from Potenza, Italy, was a small-time bootlegger in Denver. By the time they were in their teens both Clyde “Flip Flop” and Eugene “Checkers” Smaldone14 were already familiar figures to local police.

Members of a family of six (seven) boys and three girls, Clyde was born in 1907 and Eugene in 1910. Indications are that young Clyde was “personable and brimming with ideas.” On the other hand, Eugene was a “chill-eyed, calculating youngster.

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