Colorado Experience:The Smaldones, Family of Crime

♪ MAN: When you think of organized

crime

in Denver, you think of Smaldones. MAN: You know, they were very well-liked in north Denver. It was difficult to develop an informant on them. MAN: My dad knew that what they did was wrong, they knew that smuggling was wrong, but that's what they did, that was their job, that's what they learned to do. They also helped with the poor, they helped with orphanages, they gave money anonymously to people, so the community, on the one hand, really valued what they brought, but also, I think, feared it in some ways. It has now become part of Denver lore.

We tend to embellish and we want to downplay some of the mischief, some of the criminal activity that goes on. MAN: Over time, they committed

crime

s to cover up their previous crimes, such as jury tampering, and this led them further and further down this criminal path. "Colorado Experience" is in partnership with History Colorado. Inspire generations to find wonder and meaning in our past and participate in creating a better Colorado. HistoryColorado.org. With funding provided by the University of Denver, celebrating 150 years; the Denver Public Library; the Colorado Film, Television and Media Office; with additional funding and support from these great organizations and viewers like you.

Thank you. ♪ ♪ MAN: The Smaldones were the most prominent crime

family

in Denver between the 1930s and 1980s. MAN: The Smaldones were not much different from other organized crime figures throughout American history or local history. America has always been fascinated with the Robin Hood mentality, whether it was Jesse James, who was an alleged philanthropist even though he had shot people. We always have that fascination of wanting to look for the good side of everyone. Then there are the Smaldones, who locally, were

family

people. They enjoyed their grandchildren as much as anyone else, their family gatherings, but they ran an organized crime network.

They ran gambling for years and years here and were a huge force in north Denver. They built schools, helped churches, helped street people and made a lot of money. ♪ MAN: Clyde was the boss, Checkers was more the muscle. Checkers was his and my father's brother and they were the two main guys and they had a lot of other guys that worked for them. Clyde particularly was an interesting character. He was the brightest of the brothers and the one who really ran the operation. MAN: Ralph and Mamie Smaldone, these Italian immigrants, raised a large family in north Denver.

They eventually had nine children, including Chauncey, Eugene and Clyde. WOMAN: Ralph Smaldone came with his parents from Potenza, Italy, and settled in Denver in the 1890s. The Italians came to Colorado really in the 1850s and that has to do with the gold rush, the gold rush. of Colorado gold, and they come for a variety of reasons, but at first, Italians come to Colorado from northern Italy and they come looking for opportunity. They come because they can travel more. Some come because of political unrest in Italy. Mainly, Italians who arrived in the 1850s are not finding jobs.

They come with more resources, so they come from the north and are opening businesses. For example, the Garbarino brothers come and open an oyster parlor. DR. CONVERY: They created small garden plots in the bottoms along the South Platte River and sold vegetables and fruits on the streets of Denver as street vendors. The heart of Denver's Little Italy is really Navajo Street and a big part of that is the construction of Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church, which occurs in the late 19th century and after that, once there are enough Italians in the community to maintain its own parish, then more companies come in and then slowly they leave.

These enclaves are built for the protection of immigrants. It is where they can speak their language, they can practice their traditions, their social and religious customs, so that neighbors get to know each other. There are a lot of outdoor bread ovens, there are community celebrations, holiday celebrations. People know each other. They know their neighbors and look out for each other. Italians bring cultural traditions to Colorado: food, art, family. And they raised these kids in a very traditional Italian Catholic family, and they always stayed that close. Nine children live in this small house in north Denver. The mother and father slept downstairs and the children slept upstairs in two rooms: the boys in one room and the girls in another.

I mean, they didn't live in great circumstances, so they did what they could to help the family. They sold newspapers downtown. Clyde tells the story of how one day he and Checkers were downtown selling newspapers and a woman gave them a five-dollar bill... At first, they were involved in petty crimes. You know, they stole a pair of pants because the store door was open. The seeds of discrimination for Italians and Italian Americans really start in the 1890s, and in the 1920s, it's really in full swing, this idea that Italians aren't really assimilating fast enough. DR. CONVERY: Italians were distrusted and disrespected and considered perhaps the lowest ethnic group on the social ladder in early Denver.

Mother Cabrini, herself Italian, who went out to help these poor Italian workers, wrote to her country and said that people in Colorado value a mule more than an Italian. ALISA: Prohibition is another thing that comes up that is significant to the extent that the intense discrimination that starts to happen for Italians in the '20s is that Prohibition really becomes the reason or it's the way that people can justify that, in fact, Italians are more prone to criminal activity. DR. CONVERY: Prohibition began in Colorado three years before the rest of the nation. Colorado went dry on January 1, 1916.

National Prohibition began in 1919. Alcohol consumption in the United States was considered one of the major social problems of the mid- to late 19th century. Reformers denounced the evils of alcohol such as domestic abuse and workplace injuries. DEAN: We are becoming a modern nation, there are many things emerging, many progressive ideas. So Carrie Nation, for example, traveled around the country breaking beer kegs with her axe, chopping down bars, and scaring anyone who owned a tavern. DR. CONVERY: This ultimately led to the passage of the 18th Amendment, an amendment that authorized Congress to make the manufacture, consumption and possession of alcohol illegal and to impose criminal penalties.

Prohibition made illegal an activity that many people considered part of their daily lives and therefore, by definition, created a class of new criminals. ALISA: For Italians in Colorado, wine is part of their daily life, so when Prohibition really hits, it's very difficult for them to understand that something that is sacramental, but also for daily use, becomes illegal. DR. CONVERY: It wasn't a big deal and now, suddenly, possessing it or consuming it and certainly producing it, made you suspicious in the eyes of the authorities, but it was also very lucrative and the Smaldones and others realized that if they could to satisfy this incredible thirsty, they were going to do very well.

They used to go to places in the mountains where they would do it and everything and take it down and then they started going and looking for the good whiskey. The real liquor was where the money was, so they started going to Canada to buy wagonloads of liquor. And that's where he met someone and eventually started receiving it from Al Capone. DR. CONVERY: They were passing through territory controlled by Capone, so they certainly needed to get on his good side. "Decorating the mahogany" were just bribes. They knew that the surest way to avoid arrest was to make sure law enforcement officials looked the other way and so they had very close relationships with the law enforcement officials working in their neighborhood.

It was a very difficult time for an honest police officer because he would walk around and realize that he could barely feed his family, but he would see all that money wasted freely. For many agents it became quite a temptation to step aside and turn a blind eye to a number of different issues. DR. CONVERY: Criminals, organized crime and Denver politicians created a very close alliance. What that allowed was a kind of understanding about who was going to be a victim and who wasn't. Clyde had many relationships with prominent politicians. He was very proud to have met Herbert Hoover when he came to town and went to Brown Palace and went up to his room, and then when Roosevelt came to town when he was running for president, in his private car and they had liquor on board.

He was very proud of those connections. I think partly because of his humble upbringing and suddenly he mixes with politicians and famous people. MAN: At first, the real gangsters were in Pueblo. The southern Colorado organized crime faction was the real mafia, and the Smaldones of Denver were not Sicilians nor were they gangsters. The two groups, one in Denver and the other in Pueblo, were fighting over the liquor business. Like everyone else during the Depression, they were short of money and so it became quite competitive, so finally this guy they worked for, Joe Roma, known as Little Caesar because he was only about 5 foot 2 inches tall and weighed about 120 lbs. -- was shot dead. (gunshots) L.H.: His death elevated them to the status of leaders in Denver.

DR. CONVERY: Clyde was a man who took care of the people in his community, like an old Italian padrone. He felt it was his obligation to look after the welfare of people less fortunate than himself. The first time they got into real trouble was when they brought liquor for his father. DEAN: In 1933, his parents were arrested, I believe, for a violation of Prohibition. They were actually going to jail my grandmother and grandfather for smuggling, and then they made a deal with the police and whoever it was and left. It was a short time. It was like 18 months or something like that.

L.H.: When Prohibition came out in '33, they were out of business and they started looking for a new business and gambling was the obvious alternative and they got into gambling with a guy named Smiling Charlie Stevens. GENE: They had a gambling casino they called Blakeland. It was a restaurant, a casino for gaming and entertainment, something like they do now in Las Vegas. That was the Leo Barnes car bomb. I had a local player called Leo Barnes who tried to take over, open a club and start making his way. He thought he could carry out the operation better and that was a problem.

He went to Canon City. When I went to visit him with my mother, they told me it was a hospital and he was working there and I didn't know any different, you know, so I think when I grew up, I probably realized he went. to prison. He was there four or five years. One of the interesting things to me was that Mildred, Clyde's wife, was essentially a single mother. You know, she was in jail for about 17 years of marriage on and off. GENE: I think... well, I know he did... I think he always felt bad when he went to prison for not spending more time with my mother, his wife.

She had a pretty tough time, you know, with him in and out of jail, the lawyers and the police. L.H.: I guess that destroyed her later. She had some mental problems and was taking care of the children alone, trying to handle things on her own. They got eight years in Canon City and didn't serve half of that, and then their friend Governor Ralph Carr put them on parole. GENE: Ralph Carr was a lawyer, he actually defended my father at one point in some kind of case and everything, and then they became friends. I mean, they were really good friends, you know?

RICHARD: When they got out, Clyde came back to Denver and started running the bar in Pecos, north of Denver, and he, during the war, as he always did, met people and started getting gas coupons and had great sources. because...he had his own sources of liquor, of course, but he was getting food and everything he needed, and the bar was a huge success, so he took off from there. ♪ GENE: You know, they were involved in gambling and loan sharking, they absolutely were. Never prostitution, never drugs. Never. In fact, they hated it. L.H.: They agreed with the old traditional view of organized crime that if you're going to be involved in a crime, stick with the crime that doesn't incite public anger, something that has the tacit approval of the public.

Prohibition? Well, we know that experiment failed. People wanted to drink regardless of the law. The same goes for games of chance. I wasn't hurting anyone. It was a victimless crime. They also participated in usury as a complement to their gambling operations. RICHARD: They made more money lending money than they did gambling. At one point, when they were running the game in Central City, they didn't do very well, you know, it was okay. They made money from slot machines, but the idea of ​​casino games was far from being a future for them, but interestingly, Clyde was a very smart businessman.

GENE: My dad was good withthe numbers. When she was older, she looked at a license plate, it looked like this and it said 42. She added all the numbers. He could do it like this. In fact, at some point, he says, once the state finds out how much money is in the game, they're going to intervene, and he was absolutely right. If they had money to bet and they claimed it, they got in trouble, and if they didn't claim it, they had to be careful because that way they would get in trouble too, so they made most of the money. cash stuff.

When he came home he always had three piles of money: one was for gambling, one was for loans and the other was his own money and he used to keep them separate and there would be quite a bit of money there, thousands of dollars. ♪ RICHARD: And in '55, when they got into real trouble, first for tax evasion, Checkers didn't pay his taxes for several years in a row. GENE: So they charged him with tax evasion and they had the trial and he was a hung juror and then somewhere they said they had talked to some of the jurors.

They said there was jury tampering. RICHARD: They got caught trying to bribe the jurors and then they got into big trouble and that's when they were sentenced to ten years in prison. They think that the federal government robbed them, that they had agreed to plead guilty if they had 12 years left to serve, different charges, which had to be served simultaneously and when the judge handed down his verdict, they were consecutive years, so they got the full 12 years, but they had already been in prison for a couple of years during the course of the trial, so they gave them ten, they did ten.

When Clyde came out in 1962, he was no longer a young man. By then he was in his 50s and he turned to the other family members, the ones who were involved, and said, listen, the feds are getting into this now. In the 1960s and 1970s, there were already government policies and even agencies created to fight organized crime, so what was once a secret type of mutual protection is beginning to change. So the betting operation split up. Gene "Checkers" Smaldone and Clyde had had a small fight. RICHARD: He said, the FBI is following them and they better stop, and they didn't listen, so he started backing up.

I could see where this was going and that, you know, they were out of time. L.H.: We were able to figure out who was who, how to attack and how the gambling operation operated, how it all happened, so we were able to infiltrate and get into that operation and actually attack the gambling operation. DR. CONVERY: There were 30 murders in the period from the late 1919s to the early 1930s, and although they were questioned in several of them, the Smaldone brothers were never implicated or charged in any of them. They did some bad things and they did a lot of good things and that's what they did, and you know, that's probably the only thing they really knew.

The Smaldones had an opportunity, they took it and took advantage of it. They gained notoriety even in later years when their power and position were declining, but inevitably, it's not a great lifestyle to spend your entire life looking over your shoulder. ALISA: I think there's something about organized crime that people find attractive. They became the name of organized crime in Colorado that people wanted to read about. RICHARD: People liked that connection of being around these mafia guys. If they put those guys on the front page, newspapers would sell. The Smaldones were our link to the history of organized crime in the United States, and I think that's why they remain fascinating.

DR. CONVERY: The Smaldones represent the different ways in which immigrants were able to get ahead in the United States and, ironically, that translated for the Smaldones into a form of legitimacy. RICHARD: They existed from the '20s to the '70s. That's 50 years of Denver history, and the people who knew them still talk about them in reverential terms. They were small-time gangsters, but they were our gangsters. ♪