Legend of Lucchino, Part IV: Last Stand
In booming Pennsylvania coal country, immigrant Italians were exploited by corporations and terrorized by mafiosi. One brave insider turned against them, risking everything to stand up for workers.
This is the final section of our four-part series, “The Legend of Lucchino: The Man Who Took on the Mob.” If you haven’t read Parts I, II and III yet, click here to dive in.
Life in America rolled on. In November 1911, Lucchino involved himself in a political effort to allow Pittston’s Italian immigrants to vote in local elections. In December, he became an American citizen.
In 1912 and 1913, he and Nellie had two more stillborn children, which was incredibly tragic but hardly uncommon at the time, as parents regularly lost children to disease, hardship or accidents.
The deaths in his family and attempts on his own life had a mellowing effect on Lucchino’s character. During the Rizzo trial, he had come across as brash, cocky and violent. But the picture of him that emerged in this later period was more taciturn, if no less defiant in nature.
Lucchino continued to work as a “special detective” in Pittston, where he kept his friends close — and his enemies closer. Remarkably, he served as a witness for Charles Consagra’s citizenship petition in 1913. The two men were practically neighbors, underscoring how tiny and tight-knit Pittston’s Italian colony really was.
Perhaps an elder mafioso like Charles Bufalino — uncle to future boss Russell, the infamous “Quiet Don” — brokered a temporary peace. Lucchino’s shooting had surely roiled Pittston’s underworld. A need to preserve powerful interests likely made it imperative for the two men to keep out of each other’s way — or, in Lucchino’s case, to turn an occasional blind eye.
Consagra moved forward by becoming a hated subcontractor for the Pennsylvania Coal Company, alongside a shadowy figure named Santo Volpe — marking the Mafia’s first infiltration into the anthracite mines.
An experienced sulfur miner from Montedoro, Volpe became known as the “King of the Night.” He ran the Men of Montedoro through the 1920s and ’30s, ruthlessly crushing any and all opposition. The PaCC’s No. 6 shaft, where he and Consagra oversaw brutal, old-world subcontracting operations, would soon become involved in a number of high-profile murders, putting Consagra at odds with Sam Lucchino once again.
By 1915, Pittston was hitting its stride. “Sanitary sewers were being laid, the city was being wired for electricity and streets were being paved,” notes the Greater Pittston Progress. “Automobiles were taking over for horses … the Bell ‘Hello Girls’ handled 24,000 calls from the 3,000 telephones.”
In March, Lucchino made a rare appearance in a humorous news story: “‘Flowers and no council meeting,’ remarked Mayor M. N. Donnelly as he entered the council chamber in the city hall last evening at eight o’clock and beheld a potted plant in full bloom adoring the council table, but no commissioners.” The mayor then asked Lucchino to put newspaper under the pot, but “not understand[ing] English very well,” he covered them with broadsheet instead.
In May, Nellie finally gave birth to a healthy, breathing child. They named her Pasqualina in honor of Sam Lucchino’s mother, and called her Esther for short. But as always, their joy was short-lived. Only two months later, bullets again flew in Sam Lucchino’s direction.
The initial reports stated that the third attempt on his life occurred when Nellie woke up in the middle of the night to attend to a “sick baby.” As Sam “lighted a lamp and started to dress,” a man named “Joe Shandro” — aka Giuseppe Sciandra — who had been arrested and freed after the first attempt on Lucchino’s life — took aim at their bedroom window.
Hearing the shots fired, a policeman engaged Sciandra in a winding foot chase through nearby streets, which ended when Sciandra “step[ped] into the arms” of an “awaiting blue-coat” while attempting to climb out of the window of a nearby boarding house.
At least, that’s how the episode was originally reported.
Later, it was reported that Lucchino had advance warning of the plot and was preparing to board a midnight train after learning that a “mysterious stranger” had come to town — supposedly a Lupo-Morello affiliate — offering $800 dollars for his life. According to this story, when Nellie learned about the bounty on her husband’s head, she begged him to flee.
Later still, it would be claimed that the entire family had already split, and that Sciandra was in fact taking aim at a dummy that Sam had propped up as a decoy.
Whatever version of the story was actually true, the press agreed on one thing: Sam Lucchino had finally been run out of town.
“On good authority,” it was reported that he would “never return.” A newspaperman visited his “aged mother” and “anxious and tired-eyed wife,” writing “they are tired, very tired.”
Just a few weeks later, Lucchino returned to Pittston after reading in an Italian-language newspaper that attempts would be made on the lives of his family. “That was enough for me,” he said. “We go away together, soon, and then it’s for good.”
But true to his unbending, iron-willed form, he was back in Pittston with Nellie and Esther just five months later, investigating another vendetta murder, this one related to a miner employed at Consagra and Santo Volpe’s No. 6 shaft, which the authorities believed traced all the way back to Tomasso Petto’s 1903 barrel murder.
Lucchino continued to work high-profile cases. That April, he provided intel to detectives from New Jersey that resulted in the arrest of a Pittston man who had committed a murder in Newark.
The detectives sang Lucchino’s praises and expressed “keen surprise” to find out he was only employed as a “special detective,” similar to a freelancer.
In May, a petition with “hundreds of signatures” was presented at Pittston City Hall to name Lucchino an official city detective. But the measure failed. It had recently been reported that “certain political interests” were “opposed to his appointment.”
Meanwhile, mineworker discontent continued to grow. By 1916, United Mine Workers of America leadership had weakened — or fallen into the pocket of management, as it were — and an unlikely heir apparent emerged: a radical, socialist labor union called the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).
The labor radicalism was particularly appealing to Sicilian immigrants, especially for those familiar with old-world sulfur mining experience. Local membership swelled as an Italian anarchist named Luigi Galleani organized scores of momentous and often violent strikes throughout the spring and summer, which included interunion feuds at Consagra and Volpe’s No. 6 shaft.
The authorities responded by arresting IWW members, who were charged and harshly sentenced for “inciting riots, unlawful assemblies, vagrancy.” The federal government soon joined in on the crackdown. In 1917, under the Espionage Act, President Wilson jailed and deported much of the IWW’s immigrant leadership, dealing a decisive, crushing blow to its influence nationwide.
By 1918, World War I was raging and young men from Pittston were being sent to the front lines, where reports of a “strange malady” were circulating.
That spring, the Pittston Gazette reported on a “big sale of war stamps” in town, noting that Lucchino had purchased $1,000 worth. It marked the first time that he was ever referred to in print as an “Italian-American.”
In May, Lucchino helped organize a mass rally at the state armory in downtown Pittston to celebrate Italy’s third anniversary as an Ally power. Santo Volpe, who increasingly sought to involve himself in community leadership roles, also helped organize the event.
A procession marched through Pittston’s streets toward the armory, where 10 years earlier an anti-Italian hate fest had been held following Parke Clelland’s murder. “Seldom, if ever, has there been such frequent and enthusiastic outburst of patriotism,” it was reported. The armory, which was festooned with Italian and American flags, was “hardly large enough” to fit the thousands in attendance. “Several hundred Italian children, dressed neatly in white, added much to the appearance.”
Prominent politicians made riveting speeches, and when the Montedoro Band played “The Star-Spangled Banner,” then the Italian national anthem, the hall “fairly shook” with cheering and yelling.
Later that fall, a devastating wave of the Spanish Flu hit Pittston. Deaths from “the grip” quickly eclipsed those in the mines. In West Hazleton, an entire family, including four children, was “wiped out.” In and around Pittston, “foreign speaking people” were reportedly hit hardest.
Schools, cinemas, saloons, churches and “stores and shops of every kind” were shuttered, as Red Cross workers toiled relentlessly. The community came together, with private residences converted into canteens and large garages functioning as open-air day cares.
But there was no respite for the coal miners in Pennsylvania, where the governor urged mine companies to “speed production” and “keep ablaze the fires that win the war.”
Lucchino, for his part, contributed in no less an impactful way by assisting a local woman who tended to the welfare of Pittston immigrants.
Miss Emily Johnson later wrote: “[During] the influenza epidemic I went to him many times for advice [on] how to help families of the Italian colony who had suffered from the disease to the point of destitution and despair. He never failed to find the best thing to do, and never was too busy to help the sufferers take the first steps back to independence. I have no idea how many times he took a dollar from his pocket and sent it by me to some widow or some prisoner’s wife or children.”
When World War I ended, “pandemonium broke loose in Pittston.” Steam whistles blew. Church bells rang. Citizens cheered in the streets, giving “vent to their feelings of joy.” Impromptu street parades took place throughout town, and Lucchino marched as a community dignitary, alongside — uncomfortably — Santo Volpe.
By 1920, Pittston’s city population had peaked, totaling over 18,000 people, and Lucchino had finally been named an official “city detective.”
An “insurgent” labor movement was brewing, which returned the United Mine Workers of America to its revolutionary roots. Local membership swelled when two anti-subcontracting firebrands were elected to represent the workforces of the PaCC and other nearby mining companies. A general strike was called on July 16, with subcontracting listed as a point of no compromise.
It was Lucchino’s moment of truth. In advance of the strike, he had aligned himself unequivocally with the rank and file, in direct opposition to the Mafia’s interests.
“It was Lucchino who took the first step against the contractors,” District 1 Vice President Joseph Yannis later claimed. “He worked among the Italian miners of this city and organized them.” Additionally, Lucchino secured affidavits from employees of subcontractors who received pay “for work never performed” — or no-show jobs as they were known, a form of labor corruption typically practiced by the Mafia. He referred to Consagra’s “crowd” as the “most vicious element in the city,” and urged the strikers to remain resolute.
It seems he had finally chosen his side.
On the morning of July 21, Sam Lucchino awoke next to Nellie, made coffee in their kitchen on Railroad Street and kissed their 5-year-old daughter goodbye.
Lucchino traveled to Scranton, where he had been “summoned” by the PaCC’s general superintendent, William P. Jennings. Shortly before the meeting, Lucchino had been offered money to break the strike, but he refused. What he discussed with Jennings remains unknown, but he was likely asked to stand down.
Around 7 p.m., back on duty in Pittston, he reported to a colleague “that there were some strangers in town whom he did not know.” Sgt. Anthony Reddington said he would investigate and made plans to reconvene with Lucchino at the end of his shift.
Around 10 p.m., Lucchino began to make his way home. He walked down Main and turned left onto Railroad. Meanwhile, Emily Johnson, the social worker, was desperately trying to find him. She was “trying to head it off,” claimed labor historian William A. Hastie Sr., an ex-Pittston mineworker himself. “She knew it was coming.”
Bang! … Bang!
After the shooting, a carpenter named Ora White saw a man run down Railroad Street. He chased after him for a few blocks before calling the police.
Sgt. Reddington found Lucchino lying prostrate on the pavement, with Nellie wailing beside him.
He was rushed to Pittston Hospital, where doctors and nurses worked on him, as he drifted in and out of consciousness. The chief of police in Pittston at the time, Leo Tierney, arrived soon after. He approached Lucchino and asked him who had fired the shots.
“A stranger,” he weakly replied.
Tierney asked Lucchino again, with more force: “Who shot you?”
“A stranger shot me,” he reportedly gasped. “But it came through the hands of Charles Consagra.”
There would be no recovery this time. His life slipped away shortly before midnight.
“This has been a very quiet day in the miner’s strike,” the Pittston Gazette reported on July 22. “There is universal mourning – mingled with intense indignation.”
Thousands of striking miners milled about in the streets. A mass rally had been planned, but it was canceled out of “great respect,” in recognition of Sam Lucchino, who had given his life to their cause.
That morning, a Colt .45 pistol was found in a nearby field. Two men had been arrested the previous night, hours after Lucchino was shot: Peter Enrico and Tony Puntariro, hitmen for hire from Trenton, New Jersey.
At 11 p.m. that night, they were escorted to Lucchino’s house, as a “terrifying” thunder storm raged. In handcuffs, they were led to Lucchino’s casket, which was open, and told to “take a good look” inside. They reportedly “never quivered or showed any signs of emotion.” Through flashes of lightening and peels of thunder, Nellie studied their faces, then reportedly pointed to Puntariro as the man who she saw shoot her husband.
Peter Lucchino was in Buffalo when he received word of his brother’s death. He raced home as fast as he could. When his train arrived at the station, a large crowd was gathered, waiting for him, and he “collapsed into the arms of his relatives.”
Lucchino was eulogized in the papers as a “tower of strength.” William Gillespie, the former mayor of Pittston, referred to him as “fearless” — a word that popped up over and over during the roughly 20 years of reporting that exists on his life.
Emily Johnson, whom Lucchino had worked with during the pandemic, wrote a powerful tribute to the fallen officer in the Pittston Gazette:
“He never had a price,” she wrote, “and he could never be scared off from something he undertook.” Her tribute went on to state:
“The respectable Italian people often told Sam Lucchino items of news about murder cases and important prosecutions, that they would not come to the police station or to the Court House and report openly. … Sam Lucchino’s death does not prove that hiding facts about crime is the only safe way to get along in Pittston. It does prove, to my mind, that we have some men in this region so bad, so vile, so bloodstained, that they were desperately afraid of this honest Italian officer.”
In the following days, intriguing details from his life story emerged in the press, casting an almost mythological sheen over his memory. One newspaper claimed that Lucchino had deliberately prevented his Iron Head friends from escaping after their prison van flipped over on the way the court in 1907, where they were set to be sentenced for harassing the Rizzo brothers.
Another account related a previously untold fourth attempt on his life, which one newspaperman said he was “in constant fear of losing.” A visit to Lucchino’s bedroom revealed that he had lined his window curtains with giant pieces of sheet metal.
His house became “a shrine to which scores of men and women, most of them Italians, humbly came to pay homage to the slain detective.” Their “grief-stricken” faces showed the “assassin’s bullet had taken a man who was beloved by a host of people.”
The articles noted that his home bore “evidence of refinement” and showed that the Lucchinos “were assimilating.” They had become “real Americans,” as one paper put it. In death, he finally received full acceptance.
On July 24, between 4,000 and 6,000 residents marched “in a body” through Pittston’s streets to Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church, as the Montedoro Band played Chopin’s “Funeral March.” It was the largest funeral procession in the city’s history, with “what seemed to be the entire Italian population of Pittston and surrounding towns.”
Members of the police force somberly carried Lucchino’s casket, as a delegation of striking miners followed behind with floral pieces. Included among that delegation was none other than Charles Rizzo, whom Lucchino had terrorized as a Black Hand member more than a decade before.
His death “hardened the strikers,” write labor historians Robert Wolensky and William Hastie in their book, Anthracite Labor Wars.
The miners knew that “Consagra, Stefano La Torre, and the alleged top boss, Santo Volpe, wielded strong influence over the subcontracting system.” They knew, “it was highly unlikely that the murder could have occurred without the approval of the main crime leaders.”
Charles Consagra was “was plainly nervous when arrested” on suspicion of ordering Lucchino's death. One of his sons appeared in tears at the police station when Consagra was brought in, asking to take his father’s place. Not long after, Lucchino’s dying words pinpointing Consagra were reported in the press.
Puntariro and Enrico initially claimed that they didn’t know each other, which was directly contradicted by a witness who said he had played cards with both of them just hours before the murder. Another suspect, Sebastian Rombolo, who had hosted the card game, told police that Consagra had hired Puntariro as a killer.
In court, Rombolo — a relative of the man Lucchino had helped the Trenton detectives arrest in 1916 — claimed he had been instructed to send Puntariro a telegram requesting his presence in Pittston. He said that Puntariro had a gun wrapped in newspaper at his house, and that as the two men walked down Main Street together a few hours before the shooting, Puntariro told him that he had been offered $3,500 to kill Lucchino by Consagra. Puntariro had reportedly expressed nervous apprehension, telling Rombolo: “I don’t want to kill him, because I’m too young to go to jail.”
It looked as though the walls were finally closing in on Consagra. But then Rombolo recanted, probably after being threatened, and Consagra was set free yet again. A “sensation occurred” following his release, when Peter Lucchino approached Consagra in the courthouse halls and related a message in Italian. “Did you hear that?” Consagra exclaimed. “That man threatened to kill me!”
Meanwhile, chaos was breaking loose in Pittston.
Santo Volpe had been in Italy when Sam Lucchino was killed. That August, he boldly showed up at a mass rally of striking miners and got into it with District 1 Vice President Joseph Yannis. Yannis called the PaCC a “highway robber,” to which Volpe shot back, “Prove it!” and a fracas ensued. When a group of miners rushed at Volpe, the police had to intervene.
The next month, Stefano La Torre’s house was dynamited. The blast was almost surely set by the striking miners, and shortly afterward La Torre applied for a passport to travel to Italy.
Puntariro and Enrico were prosecuted in separate trials by future Pennsylvania state governor Arthur H. James, who had worked as a breaker boy as a child.
Puntariro’s trial began in late September 1920. “Dressed in mourning,” Nellie wiped tears from her eyes as she testified, claiming “she was seated on a porch swing at her home with her 5-year-old daughter,” at the time of the murder. When asked who shot her husband, she said: “I don’t know his name, but I see him here.” Nellie then stepped down from the stand and “in a breathless silence” approached Puntariro: “Dramatically pointing an accusing finger at him, she said in a clear distinct voice, ‘This is the man who killed my husband.’”
Puntariro reportedly “smiled at her in a sort of sneering manner … his dark eyes flashed sharp glances at the jurors, as if to seek their thoughts.”
He was sentenced to death by electrocution on October 4. On November 16, Enrico, his accomplice, was condemned to the same fate.
The strike ended a few days after Puntariro’s sentencing, when prominent subcontractors issued a public letter of resignation.
“Thousands of elated mineworkers returned to their workplaces with the belief that the subcontracting system was, at last, gone,” write Wolensky and Hastie. But their victory was short-lived. Labor violence and rebellion again boiled over in early 1921 when 13 subcontractors were rehired by local mining companies. That spring, 1,000 PaCC men walked off the job at the No. 6 colliery, after it was discovered that Santo Volpe had secured another contract.
Along the way, tens of thousands of dollars were spent to appeal Puntariro’s and Enrico’s convictions, reportedly paid for by Consagra. After three stays of execution, both men met their maker in September of 1922.
Enrico “had to be led from the cell room to the death chamber as he refused to open his eyes,” it was reported. “He would not look at the chair and kept his eyelids down until the death cap covered his features.”
Puntariro clutched a crucifix tight to his chest. His eyes “passed quickly beyond the chair” and “rested a while” upon a detective who had helped convict him. “There was no malice in his look.” He left behind a wife and two children in Italy.
The first men to be executed by electrocution in Luzerne County’s history, they were buried outside the prison’s walls.
Nellie Lucchino asked to be present at the execution, but her request was denied. “I’m glad it is over,” she said. “Some of my friends have warned me to be careful, but I am not afraid. They tried to make me change my story, but the blood of my husband was my blood, and when they killed him, all pity to his slayers left my heart. He was a wonderful husband, kind and loving to me and to his family, and it was only right and just that the men who killed him should pay in full.”
Nellie continued to raise her daughter, Esther, in Pittston, despite receiving numerous death threats. She never remarried.
A few days before the execution, Charles Consagra “mysteriously left town,” and never returned. In 1924, he was reportedly seen in Buffalo, New York. When his clothes were found “along the banks of Lake Erie,” it was assumed that he had “met with foul play,” perhaps in return for his failure to save Puntariro and Enrico from the chair.
The labor wars in northeastern Pennsylvania continued to intensify. With oil overtaking coal as the nation’s dominant energy source, demand for anthracite plummeted, prompting the coal companies to tighten their grip. Throughout the 1920s and ’30s, massive strikes led by insurgent union movements shook the region. But the movement was ultimately crushed following a string of shocking, high-profile bombings and shootings that demoralized the resistance — acts almost certainly ordered by Santo Volpe.
In 1947, oil sales surpassed anthracite for the first time in northeastern Pennsylvania, and the anthracite industry began to lag behind nationally in demand and innovation. The final nail in the coffin was driven in the form of a horrific disaster in 1959, when the Susquehanna River flooded a coal shaft outside of Pittston, sending billions of gallons of water down through the underground regional maze of interlinked mines.
An investigation later found that the miners had been illegally instructed to dig too close to the riverbed, in order to extract every last bit of coal. The recklessness was driven by greed and Mafia influence — a tragic representation of the sordid legacy of subcontracting itself.
In the disaster’s wake, capital and political power began leaving northeastern Pennsylvania, while entrenched forms of local corruption remained. As men struggled to find work, women picked up the slack by working in the local garment industry, which was also controlled by the mob. Then, as deindustrialization and depopulation set in, the descendants of the men and women who championed workers’ rights in the 1910s and ’20s increasingly found that there were no jobs left to fight for. Amidst a fog of amnesia, so-called “white working class” anger and pain slowly mushroomed.
In the 2016 presidential race, Luzerne County flipped red for the first time in half a century, when 58 percent of votes went to Donald Trump. Luzerne was subsequently profiled in a book of political journalism titled The Forgotten: How the People of One Pennsylvania County Elected Donald Trump and Changed America.
A walk down Railroad Street today belies Pittston’s violent past.
Much of the street was renamed Columbus Avenue in the 1960s. Quaint Victorian houses sit next to 1970s-era duplexes with distinctive aluminum awnings, and rusty railings lead into sunken backyards. Older, boxy, red brick buildings have Italian names faintly painted on the windows.
A car passes by. A neighborhood man mows his lawn.
At St. John the Evangelist Cemetery, there are footstones for infants and babies scattered about, as well as countless markers for men who died young in the mines or later from black lung. Birds chirp on a chilly spring morning as someone plays drums to “Two Tickets to Paradise,” blasting from a speaker in a distant garage.
Sam Lucchino’s grave can be found in the farthest reaches of the cemetery, next to his wife, Nellie. He is removed from the Irish and Welsh graves, in a mostly Italian section near the woods by the suburb of Browntown, where he first settled in 1903.
The stones that surround him are etched with many of the names you came to know in this story — Lucchino’s friends, his enemies and his foes — eternally caught between Old World and the New, the Mafia and the miners, on Railroad Street in Pittston, Pennsylvania.
Vinnie Rotondaro is a journalist and researcher based in Greater Washington, D.C. He studies how culture and history shape political belief, with a focus on the Italian American experience, and recently launched The In-Between, a platform dedicated to exploring identity, culture, politics and polarization. Vinnie’s grandparents were children in Pittston during the events of this story — his grandfather, a breaker boy at the time, was later one of the last men rescued from the Knox Mine Disaster. They are buried just a few meters from Sam and Nellie Lucchino in St. John the Evangelist Cemetery.
Brendan Spiegel, the co-founder of Narratively, is the publication’s longtime editorial director and currently leads Narratively Academy, the site’s education wing.
Julie Benbassat is an award-winning illustrator, painter and animator.