It was only a matter of months after Dick Long began working as a reporter for the Herald-Journal that he began to suspect the cops were on the take.
It was 1951, and the men in blue were colluding with gamblers — sports bookies and operators of high-stakes card games and craps — lucrative rackets primarily based on Syracuse’s North Side. The bookies did business at places like the 721 Club, Genesee Billiards and the Allied Crafts Club.
“Gambling was illegal, but there were about 30 cigar stores where horse bets could be placed,” Long told me a couple years ago. The determined old Irishman died Dec. 5 at age 85. “There were five illegal gambling spots on North Salina … Syracuse in the 1950s was considered a wide open gambling town.”
‘Too controversial’
Long’s newsroom mentors, Post-Standard reporters Bill O’Driscoll and Dick Page, told him the gamblers enjoyed police protection. “They were both frustrated because the Post-Standard wouldn’t print their stuff,” Long said. “It was ‘too controversial.’” Long ran into the same roadblock with his editors at the afternoon Herald.
Then the nationally known “Casey” Jones, former executive editor of the Washington Post, was hired as head man at the Herald.
“He wanted to know what was going on in Syracuse,” Long remembered. “So Casey assigned five of us reporters to scour the city in disguise, not letting anyone know who we are. We were to place bets, hang out with prostitutes, talk to anyone who could fill us in on what’s going on.”
For three days straight the reporters took a walk on the wild side before filing a confidential report with Jones.
“Here’s what we found out,” Long recalled. “We knew about the gambling — 30 cigar stores and five big North Side games going all the time. But we also found out about prostitution in Syracuse operating through taxi cabs. The girls were taken to their ‘johns’ through a secret radio code system.”
But he still couldn’t tie the activity to a national crime syndicate.
Apalachin meeting
In 1957, however, Vito Genovese called a top-level Mafia meeting in nearby Apalachin, N.Y. Nearly five dozen leading gangsters from around the country attended and were famously apprehended by vigilant State Trooper Edgar Croswell. No one from Syracuse showed up.
But that didn’t stop Dick Long from nosing around. He found himself in good company. Bobby Kennedy, then the top attorney for the U.S. Senate’s McLellan Committee, began to focus on Upstate New York hoodlums.
In the summer of 1958 in his role as counsel to the Select Committee on Improper Activities in the Labor or Management Field, Kennedy questioned Rosario Mancuso, president of Local 186 Hod Carriers and Common Laborers Union and an alleged enforcer for Joseph Falcone’s criminal empire in Utica. Mancuso had attended the Apalachin meeting.
Mancuso took the Fifth to essentially every question posed, but Kennedy forged on.
Mr. Kennedy: According to our information you have been calling Darling Ice Cream Co. of Syracuse, N. Y.
Mr. Mancuso: I decline to answer on the ground it may tend to incriminate me.
The Chairman [Sen. McLellan]: What is incriminating about ice cream? Can you tell us?
Mr. Mancuso: I decline to answer on the ground it may tend to incriminate me.
What was incriminating about Darling Ice Cream is that the business located at the corner of North State and Ash streets was owned by Salvatore “Sam” Scro, identified by government investigators as a known associate of Apalachin host Joseph Barbara, Auburn boss Sam Monachino and Utica’s Sam Falcone.
Darling Ice Cream
Kennedy also asked Mancuso about Scro, and despite Mancuso’s non-answer, the cat was out of the bag.
By ’58, Long’s new editor, Bill Cotter, gave him and reporter Howard Carroll carte blanche to go after the crooks. (Carroll died in November 2010 at age 87.)
Within a few days of Mancuso’s testimony on Capitol Hill, Long tried to interview Sam Scro at his Darling Ice Cream office. Scro angrily denied knowing any of the people Kennedy was talking about and, using no uncertain words, told Long to leave the premises.
But Kennedy had blown Scro’s ice-cream-coated cover.
Long and Carroll wrote about the Scro family’s relationship to Stephano Maggadino’s criminal activities in Buffalo and identified Joe Barbara as the man who installed Sam Scro in business here and became godfather to one of Scro’s daughters.
Five years later Patrick Murphy was appointed chief of Syracuse Police specifically to clean up the bribe-riddled department (Murphy died last week at age 91), and state crime commissions were established to rein in the mob.
Scro may have thrown Dick Long out of his ice-cream factory back in ‘58, but the young reporter got his story… and the last laugh.
