Prohibition Pittsburgh by Richard Gazarik

Author:Richard Gazarik
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing Inc.
Published: 2017-03-14T04:00:00+00:00

7

Murder and Mayhem

Joseph LoBianco; his pregnant wife, Josephine; and his brother, Carmen were working in their Braddock store, ten miles east of Pittsburgh, one day in the fall of 1930. Josephine LoBianco was waiting on Louis Tomani, who had just walked into the store. Carmen was stocking shelves when the mom-and-pop grocery was riddled by a hail of machine gun fire.

A maroon-colored sedan sped up to the front of the small grocery and stopped. Gunmen sitting inside the vehicle opened fire, and Carmen LoBianco fell to the floor with ten bullet holes stitched across his stomach. The killers got out of the car and calmly walked into the store and raised their guns at Joseph. His wife tried to save her husband by lunging at one of the gunmen, who shot her twice before killing her husband. The only survivors were twelve-year-old Clarence Moore, who ran errands for the LoBiancos, and their seventeen-month-old son, who was asleep in another room.

“There were so many shots and people falling dead. I ducked out and ran home,” said Moore in an interview with the Pittsburgh Press in what became known locally as the “Braddock massacre.”

Carmen LoBianco was taken to a hospital, where a priest administered the last rites and asked him if he knew who the killers were. All Carmen could answer was “He wanted a pound of sausage, then boom, boom, boom” before his voice trailed off, according to the story.

Police chased three men and a woman in the car as they headed toward Pittsburgh. Witnesses later saw the four individuals jump out of the vehicle and into some nearby bushes. Investigators wondered why a small, mom-and-pop grocery store would be the target of such a shooting spree. When police searched the store they found their answer.

The store’s stock contained large quantities of yeast and sugar, and a search of Joseph LoBianco’s home revealed a five-hundred-gallon still and ten thousand gallons of mash, along with a number of checks made out to James Volpe, the brother of the biggest bootlegger in the Turtle Creek Valley, John Volpe. Investigators suspected the store was a front for the Volpe bootlegging operation. Detectives found five checks totaling $1,800 from LoBianco to James Volpe over a five-week period. Volpe told suspicious detectives that he had loaned LoBianco money to open his store

“This is plainly a racket murder,” Allegheny County coroner W.J. McGregor told the Pittsburgh Press.

Detectives ran out of clues, reaching a dead end in their probe. The case never was solved.

Even the man tasked with enforcing the Volstead Act, Treasury secretary Andrew Mellon of Pittsburgh, took a lax approach toward enforcement of Prohibition. Mellon owned a whiskey distillery, making him suspect in the eyes of the drys and temperance groups. Mellon was the third-richest person in the United States at the time, behind John D. Rockefeller and Henry Ford. His wealth was estimated at $400 million. He had interests in stalwart Pittsburgh financial institutions, such as Mellon Bank, U.S. Steel, Gulf Oil, Alcoa, Koppers, the Pittsburgh Coal Company, Pittsburgh Plate Glass and the Carborundum Company.

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