What is it about the early New York Mafia figures—both real and fictional—that are so compelling? Is it that they’ve been depicted as glamorous gents sporting cashmere overcoats, felt fedoras and silk suits with hot showgirls on one arm and a machine guns in the other?
Or maybe it was because they’re always fictionalized as street wise big city gangsters who mesmerized the city, owned the cops and controlled the bootleg?
What if I told you that some of the earliest of the bootlegging Mafiosi lived and formed “families” not in big cities but in Colorado—primarily in the city of Pueblo? Or that they rode horses, wore cowboy duds and made a fortune off Prohibition-era bootlegging, four years before the rest of the country?
The fact is that hundreds of Sicilians were lured to Pueblo by John D. Rockefeller, Jr.’s paid “padroni” who were themselves Italian. They scouted Sicily for strong young bucks willing to come to America with the promise of land and a great life.
Instead, they were taken to the coal mines of Colorado and put into bondage. They were paid in company scrip, so they had no American money, they neither spoke the language nor could read in any language.
In 1914 the United Mine Workers came to Colorado and the workers struck. It turned into the deadliest labor strike in American history. The fired workers and their families were living in a tent city set up by the UMW, so Rocky Jr. hired thugs as well as the Colorado National Guard. They drove around the tent city at night in an armored car with a machine gun mounted on top. They called it their “Death Special.”
To save the women and children, the strikers dug trenches under the tents for the women and children to hide in when the shooting started. On April 20, 1914, Rocky’s thugs went around pouring oil on top of the tents setting them ablaze killing dozens of people—women and children included. The officials said it was twenty-three, but one female reporter put the death toll at closer to fifty.
Some of the immigrants fled into the mountains, others eventually went back to the back-breaking mines. They were desperate and dying with no way out—until Colorado gave them not just a way out but a way up in 1916, by declaring prohibition four years before it became federal law in 1920.
Well, hell, the Sicilians realized. They knew how to make wine, they knew how to make Sugar Shine—a potent brew made from sugar beets. This gave them four years to perfect their craft—and form bootleg “families” before the rest of the country.
The government deputized scores of prohibition agents, many of whom were members of the Ku Klux Klan. They were literally given a license to kill. They already hated the Sicilians and this was like an all-year round Christmas present to the KKK “prohis.”
Mob families formed for protection against the prohis, and once prohibition became the law of the land, they were already well established bootleggers and distributors. Soon enough however the Sugar Moon wars broke out with Sicilian Mafiosi killing Sicilians.
And here’s where it gets personal—and suspicious. My family, the Barberas, were Colorado cowpokes and bootleggers, yes, and they were aligned with the Carlino family—the toughest, biggest of the so-called Mountain Mafia families.
My Aunt Carrie Barbera married the handsomest of the Carlino brothers, Carlo “Charlie” Carlino. On September 10, 1923 when their only child, Charlotte was just ten days old, Charlie and his bodyguard Dominic Ingo were traveling in Charlie’s car on the Baxter Bridge in one direction while members of the rival Dana clan were driving on it at the same time. The Dana’s attacked, machine guns blasting Charlie and his bodyguard to death.
It wasn’t until I hooked up with my long lost relative, Sam Carlino, who wrote a fantastic book Colorado’s Carlino Brothers on the history of his family and the whole bootlegging era in Colorado, that I started to make a weird connection between The Godfather and my own extended family, the Carlinos.
Think about it: The Carlinos/the Corleones. Each with four children and gangster brothers. Vito Carlino is the father in real life vs. Vito Corleone in The Godfather. Both of the Vito’s sons were killed in ambushes in similar situations. Charlie was ambushed on the Baxter Bridge at the Arkansas River, Sonny on the Jones Beach Causeway at Jones Beach, both by rival families.
Either Mario Puzo was channeling the Carlinos or he’d managed to read some of the many, many newspaper accounts that I was able to dig up from the time. It just seems way too similar to be mere coincidence.
Even though my grandfather who was way dead by the time I was born, I recently discovered he was a wanted assassin in the files of the federal Bureau of Investigation (as it was listed in the federal files of 1918). But since the feds considered Southern Italians as scum and not hard working people who’d been in bondage, they could never figure out how to spell the name (Barber, Barieri, Barbarian?) and so never caught up with him.
The family, with ten kids and a mother stronger than steel, managed through bootleg bounty to buy land for a cattle ranch, and go legit. My uncles drove cattle, and my mothers and aunts were genuine cowgirls.
So no, despite the mythic big city Mafia in cashmere topcoats and fedoras, these Mountain Mafia wore chaps and ten gallon hats.
***
