♪ MAN: When you think
organized crime in Denver, you think Smaldones. MAN: You know, they were
well liked in North Denver. It was hard to develop
an informant on them. MAN: My dad knew what
they did was wrong, they knew bootlegging was wrong,
but that's what they did, that was their job, that's
what they learned how 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's become part of
the lore of Denver now. We tend to glamorize and we want
to downplay some of the hijinks, some of the criminal
activity that does go on. MAN: In time, they committed
crimes to cover up their earlier crimes,
such as jury tampering, and this led them farther and
farther down this criminal road. <i> "Colorado Experience"
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and viewers like you.</i> <i> Thank you.</i> ♪ ♪ MAN: The Smaldones were the most
prominent crime family in Denver between the 1930's
and the 1980's. MAN: The Smaldones were not
much different than any other organized crime figures
throughout American history or local histories. America's always been fascinated
with the Robin Hood mentality, whether it's Jesse James who
was an alleged philanthropist although he had shot people. We always have this fascination
we want to look for the good side of everyone. So you have the Smaldones,
who on a local level, were family people. They enjoyed their grandkids
just as much as anyone else, their family get-togethers, yet they ran an
organized crime ring. They ran gambling for
years and years here and were a huge force
in North Denver. They built schools and helped
out the churches and helped people on the street
and made a lot of money. ♪ MAN: Clyde was the head guy,
Checkers was more the muscle. Checkers was his brother and
my dad and they were the main two and they had a lot of other
guys that worked for them. Particularly Clyde was
an interesting character. He was the brightest
of the brothers and he was the guy who
actually ran the operation. MAN: Ralph and Mamie Smaldone,
these Italian immigrants, raised a large family
in North Denver. They ultimately
had nine children including Chauncey,
Eugene, and Clyde. WOMAN: Ralph Smaldone came with
his parents from Potenza, Italy, and they settled in
Denver in the 1890's. Italians came to Colorado really
beginning in the 1850's and that has to do with the Gold Rush,
the Colorado Gold Rush, and they're coming for a variety
of reasons but in the beginning, Italians are coming to Colorado
from the north of Italy and they're coming
for opportunity. They're coming because
they can travel more. Some are coming because of
political unrest in Italy. Primarily, Italians
coming in the 1850's are not coming
as far as labor jobs. They're coming with more
resources, so they're coming from the north and they
are opening businesses. For example, the Garbarino
brothers come and they open an oyster saloon. DR. CONVERY: They created small
garden plots in the bottoms along the South Platte River and
they sold vegetables and fruit on the streets of Denver
as peddlers. 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
happens in the late 1800's and after that, once there's
enough Italians in the community to support their own parish,
then there's more businesses moving in, and then slowly,
it moves out. These enclaves are built to the
protection of the immigrants. It's where they can
speak their language, they can practice their
traditions, their social and religious customs,
so neighbors know each other. There's a lot of
outdoor bread ovens, there's community celebrations,
feast day celebrations. People know each other. They know their neighbors and
they look out for one another. Italians bring to Colorado
cultural traditions -- food, it's art, it's family. And they raised these kids very
traditional Catholic Italian family, and they always
stayed close like that. Nine kids all living in this
little house in North Denver. The mom and dad slept downstairs
and the kids slept upstairs in two rooms -- the boys in one
room and the girls in another. They weren't living in great
circumstances, I mean, so they did what they could
to help the family. They sold newspapers downtown. Clyde tells the story about how
one day he and Checkers were downtown selling papers
and a woman gave them a five dollar bill... Early on, they were sort of
in petty crimes. You know, they stole
a pair of pants because the door of the store was open. The seeds of discrimination for
Italians and Italian-Americans really starts in that 1890's era
and by the 1920's, it's really in full swing, this idea that
Italians are really not assimilating fast enough. DR. CONVERY: The Italians were
mistrusted and disrespected and were considered perhaps
the lowest ethnic group in the social ladder
of early Denver. Mother Cabrini, herself an
Italian, who came out to help these poor Italian workers,
wrote back home and said that people in Colorado value a mule
more than they value an Italian. ALISA: Prohibition is something
else that comes about that's significant as far as really
the intense discrimination that starts to happen for Italians
in the '20s is that Prohibition becomes really the reason or
it's how 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 1st, 1916. National Prohibition
began in 1919. The consumption of alcohol in
the United States was considered one of the major social problems of the mid and late
19th century. Reformers decried the evils
of alcohol for domestic abuse, for workplace injury. DEAN: We're becoming
a modern nation, a lot of things coming out,
a lot of progressive ideas. So you had Carrie Nation,
for example, traveling around the country smashing beer kegs
with her hatchet, and chopping up bars and
scaring the crap out of just about anybody
that had a saloon. DR. CONVERY: This led to,
ultimately, to the passage of the 18th Amendment --
an amendment which authorized Congress to make the
manufacture, consumption, and possession of alcohol
illegal and have criminal penalties. Prohibition made an activity
that many people considered part of their unremarkable
day-to-day life illegal, and so by definition, it created
a class of new criminals. ALISA: For Italians in Colorado,
wine is part of their daily life, and so when really
Prohibition comes around, it's very hard for them to
understand that something that is sacramental, but also
daily use becomes illegal. DR. CONVERY: It was no big deal
and now suddenly, to possess it or to consume it and certainly
to make it, made you suspect in the eyes of law enforcement,
but it was also very lucrative and the Smaldones and others
realized that if they could supply this amazing thirst,
they were going to do very well. They used to go have places up
in the mountains where they'd make it and everything and bring
it down and then they started going and getting
the good whiskey. Real liquor was where the money
was so they started going to Canada to get
carloads of liquor. And then that's where he met
somebody and eventually started getting it
from Al Capone. DR. CONVERY: They were running
through territory controlled by Capone, so they certainly
needed to get on his good side. "Decorating the mahogany"
was just bribes. They knew that the most sure way
to avoid arrest was to make sure that the law enforcement
officials were looking the other way and so they had very cozy
relations with law enforcement officials who worked
in their neighborhood. It was a very difficult time
for an honest policeman because he would be walking around and
he'd realize that he could barely feed his family,
yet he'd see all this money freely being thrown around. It became a pretty good
temptation for a lot of officers to step over and
to turn a blind eye to a number of different issues. DR. CONVERY: Criminals,
organized criminals, and Denver politicians created
a very tight alliance. What that allowed was sort of
an understanding about who was going to be victimized
and who wasn't. Clyde had a lot of relationships
with prominent politicians. He was very proud that he had
met Herbert Hoover when he came to town and he went to the 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 took liquor on board. He was very proud of
those connections. I think in part because of
his humble upbringing and there suddenly he is mingling with
politicians and famous people. MAN: Early on, the real mafia
guys were in Pueblo. Southern Colorado's faction in
organized crime was the true mafia, and the Smaldones
in Denver were not Sicilian and they were not mafia. The two groups -- one in
Denver and one in Pueblo -- were fighting for
the liquor business. Like everybody else during
the Depression, they were short of money and so it got pretty
competitive, so finally this guy they worked for, Joe Roma --
known as Little Caesar because he was only about 5-foot-2
and weighed about 120 pounds -- got shot to death. (gunshots) L.H.: His death elevated them
to the head boys in Denver. DR. CONVERY: Clyde was a man who
looked out for the people in his community, like an old-fashioned
Italian padrone. He felt it was his obligation
to look after the welfare of people who were less
fortunate than he was. The first time they
got in real trouble was when they were running
liquor for their dad. DEAN: In 1933, their parents
were arrested, I believe, on a Prohibition violation. Actually, they were going to put
my grandma and grandpa in jail for bootlegging, and then they
made a deal with the police and whoever it was
and they went instead. That was a short time. That was like 18 months
or something like that. L.H.: When Prohibition
went out in '33, they were out of business and so
they started looking around 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 the Blakeland. It was a restaurant, gambling
casino, and entertainment, kind of like they do
in Las Vegas now. That was the Leo Barnes
car bombing. He had a local gambler by the
name of Leo Barnes who tried to take over and open up a club
and start muscling his way in. He thought he could
run the operation better and that was a problem. He went to Canon City. When I used to go visit him with
my mother, they told me it was a hospital and that he was
working there and I didn't know anything different, you know,
so I think when I got older, I probably realized
that he went to prison. He was there for
four or five years. One of the interesting things to
me was that Clyde's wife Mildred was essentially a single mom. You know, he was gone to jail
for like 17 years of their marriage off and on. GENE: I think --
well, I know he did -- he always felt bad, I think,
when he went to prison that he didn't spend more time
with my mother, his wife. She had a pretty rough time,
you know, with him in and out of jail,
lawyers, police. L.H.: I guess it kind of
broke her down later on. She had some mental problems,
and taking care of the boys by herself, trying to
run things on her own. They got eight years at Canon
City and they served about not even quite half that,
and then their friend Governor Ralph Carr
paroled them. GENE: Ralph Carr was a lawyer,
he actually defended my dad at one time on some kind
of case and everything, and then they got to be friends. I mean, they were very
good friends, you know. RICHARD: When they got out,
Clyde came back to Denver and began running the bar
on Pecos, up in North Denver and he, during the war,
as he always did, he knew people and he started getting gas
stamps and he had great sources for -- he had his own sources
for liquor, of course, but he was getting food and all the
stuff he needed, and the bar was hugely successful and so
he kind of took off from there. ♪ GENE: You know, they were
involved in gambling and loan sharking,
absolutely they were. Never prostitution, never drugs. Never. They actually hated it. L.H.: They were going along with
the old traditional organized crime view that if you're
going to be involved in crime, stay with the crime that
doesn't incite public wrath, something that has tacit
approval of the public. Prohibition? Well, we know that
experiment failed. People wanted to drink
regardless of the law. Same way with gambling. It wasn't hurting anybody. It was a victimless crime. They were also involved in
loan sharking as an adjunct to their bookmaking operations. RICHARD: They made more money
loaning money out than they did gambling. At one point, when they
were running the gambling up in Central City,
they didn't do very well, you know, it was OK. They made money on the slots,
but the whole idea of casino gambling was way off
in the future for them, but interestingly, Clyde was
a plenty smart business guy. GENE:
My dad was good with numbers. When he was older,
he'd look at a license plate, look like that and say 42. He'd add all the numbers up. He could do it just like that. In fact, at one point, he says,
once the state finds out how much money there is in gambling,
they're going to jump in, and he was absolutely right. If they had money for gambling
and they claimed it, they would get in trouble, and then if they
didn't claim it, they had to be careful because they'd get
in trouble that way, too, so they did most of the stuff
in cash. When he would come home he would
always have three piles of money and one was for gambling,
one was for loans, and one was his own money and
he used to keep them separated and there would be quite
a bit of money there, into the thousands of dollars. ♪ RICHARD: And in '55,
when they got in real trouble, first for tax evasion, Checkers failed to pay his taxes
for some several years in a row. GENE: So they brought him up
for tax evasion and they had the trial and it was a hung jury
and then later on, somewhere that they said that they had
talked to some of the jurors. They said there
was jury tampering. RICHARD: They got caught trying
to bribe jurors and then they got in big trouble and that's
when they got ten years. They think they got robbed
by the federal government, that they had agreed to plead
guilty if they got 12 years to be served, different charges,
to be served concurrently and when the judge handed down
his verdict, it was consecutive years so they got the whole 12
years, but they'd already been in jail for a couple of years
during the course of the trial so they got ten,
they served ten. When Clyde got out in 1962,
he was no longer a young man. He was in his late 50's by then
and he went to the other guys in the family, the ones who
were involved, and said listen, the feds are now
getting into this. By the 1960s and 1970s, there
are government policies and even agencies set up to fight
organized crime so what was once a secret kind of protection for
each other starts to change. The bookmaking operation
then was kind of split up. Gene "Checkers" Smaldone
and Clyde had had a little bit of a falling out. RICHARD: He said, the FBI
is keeping track of you guys and you better stop,
and they didn't listen and so he kind of began
to back out of it. He could see where this
thing was going and that, you know, their time was up. L.H.: We were able to find out
who was who, how to attack and how the bookmaking operation
operated, just how everything went down, so we were able to
infiltrate and get into that operation and really attack
the bookmaking operation. DR. CONVERY: There were 30
murders in the period between the late 19-teens and 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 was what they did,
and you know, that's probably the only thing they knew really. The Smaldones had an
opportunity, they took it, they rode with it. They picked up the notoriety
even in the years later when their power and position
was waning, but inevitably, it's not much of a lifestyle to
spend looking over your shoulder your whole life. ALISA: I think there is
something about organized crime that people find appealing. They became the name of
organized crime in Colorado that people wanted
to read about. RICHARD: People liked that
connection of being close to these mob guys. If they put those guys on page
one, it would sell papers. The Smaldones were our link to
the organized crime history in the United States
and I think that's why they're still fascinating. DR. CONVERY: The Smaldones
represent the different avenues by which immigrants were able to
get ahead in the United States, and ironically, it translated
for the Smaldones into a form of legitimacy. RICHARD: They were around
from the '20s to the '70s. That's 50 years of Denver
history, and people who knew them still talk about them
in reverential terms. They were small-time mobsters,
but they were our mobsters. ♪
My great grandfather did time for the Smaldones many years ago (my grandmother was raised by his sisters).
When he died in about '95 or so when I was in high school, we went to his funeral at I think it was St Dominic on Federal. It felt like a scene straight out of The Godfather. I had no idea about his involvement with the Smaldones back then, but I could tell there was something more going on for all these hundreds of slick dressed guys to be showing up to a funeral for some old guy that lived in a small house and didn't have a large family.
The book Smaldone: The Untold Story of an American Crime Family by Dick Kreck is well worth a read if you're into this stuff. He's interviewed in this doc.
Very interesting. Thanks for sharing!