John Bazzano was, for less than a year, the leading figure in Pittsburgh’s Prohibition-era rackets, and he is remembered for the most notorious gangland killing in the city’s history and for his own murder two weeks later. His story is often told with a strongman’s swagger, but the best documented account, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s long-form history “The Dark Years: Prohibition in Pittsburgh” by Steve Mellon (2013), describes something quieter: a confectioner and coffee-shop owner from Mt. Lebanon whom newspapers of the day called unassuming. Much of what follows rests on that account, which draws on the Pittsburgh Press, the Sun-Telegraph, coroner’s records and census records. Where gangland motives are concerned, it reports what police suspected and what newspapers and later writers said, not what any court found.
Who he was
The Post-Gazette says Bazzano immigrated from Italy in 1909 and as a young man lived in West Virginia and then Johnstown, working as a laborer and a clerk. He became a U.S. citizen in 1916, served in World War I, then married and moved to New Kensington, where people later remembered him as a good citizen and a shrewd businessman who imported olive oil and Italian foods. By 1930 he and his wife, Rose, had moved to the Pittsburgh area. The census that year listed him as a retail merchant and confectioner, and he owned the Rome Coffee Shop at 704 Wylie Avenue in the Lower Hill District. He lived with his wife and five children in a stone house on Washington Boulevard in Mt. Lebanon.
His birth is less settled. The website American Mafia History (mafiahistory.us), a secondary source that I read only in search excerpts, gives his birthplace as Palizzi Marina in Calabria, but gives his birth date as May 22, 1889, on one page and May 22, 1888, on another. Older versions of this article said Sicily and 1890. I have not seen a primary record that settles it.
How he rose
Pittsburgh’s bootlegging years were violent. The Post-Gazette describes a run of killings from 1927 to 1932, including the 1929 and 1930 deaths of the North Side’s Monastero brothers. By 1931 the leading racketeer was Joseph Siragusa, whom newspapers called the “Yeast Baron” because he supplied the sugar and yeast that moonshiners needed. Siragusa was shot to death in the basement of his Beechwood Boulevard home in Squirrel Hill on September 13, 1931, and the racketeer Jack Palmer was shot in front of a grocery at 717 Wylie Avenue, across the street from the Rome Coffee Shop, on October 7. After those deaths, the Post-Gazette says, “a quiet, unassuming man named John Bazzano” rose to the top of Pittsburgh’s racket scene.
American Mafia History adds that the Pittsburgh Mafia’s leaders chose Bazzano as boss after Siragusa’s murder and that, like Siragusa, he made his money supplying sugar and yeast to moonshine operations. An earlier version of this article said Bazzano overthrew a boss named Salvatore Calderone in 1929. That is not supported: American Mafia History says Calderone is believed to have moved gradually into retirement and gives his death as April 16, 1933, in Apollo, after Bazzano’s own death. The Post-Gazette account does not mention him.
The Volpes and the Rome Coffee Shop
The Volpe brothers were from Wilmerding, the Westinghouse Air Brake town, where the Post-Gazette says they ran a wholesale grocery, sold bootleg liquor and delivered votes. After the family lost control of Wilmerding’s politics in 1931, the brothers moved into Pittsburgh, taking over rackets in the East End and moving into Downtown, Oakland, Bloomfield, East Liberty, the Hill District and the Strip District. Bazzano chose to work with them. Newspapers, the Post-Gazette says, identified him as the “executive head” of the Volpe organization, and the Rome Coffee Shop served as the Volpes’ headquarters.
Around midday on Friday, July 29, 1932, John Volpe stepped out of the Rome Coffee Shop onto Wylie Avenue and was shot five times from behind. Gunmen then entered the shop and killed his brothers James and Arthur. Police found one witness inside: Santo Bazzano, John Bazzano’s brother, crouched under a counter. Witnesses described one of the gunmen as a large man with bushy eyebrows, whom the Post-Gazette identifies as Giuseppe “Big Mike” Spinelli, a former Volpe friend and bodyguard. The Pittsburgh Press, which was keeping a tally, counted the Volpe killings as bringing the city’s unsolved gang murders to 100.
John Bazzano met detectives the day after the killings, with his lawyer and brother-in-law Frank Zappala, and said he had been on business in Midland, Beaver County, at the time and that the Volpes were his friends. Police let him go. The Post-Gazette writes that “gangsters knew all along who was behind the Volpe hit: Bazzano.” That is the newspaper’s conclusion from the record, not a court finding. Bazzano was never charged.
Red Hook, August 1932
Bazzano left home on August 4, his wife said, without saying where he was going. The Post-Gazette says he and two other men had been summoned to New York by the recently formed Mafia Commission, which arbitrated underworld disputes, and that they checked into the Hotel Pennsylvania. What happened next is told two ways. A 1935 Pittsburgh Press report, as summarized by the Post-Gazette, said Bazzano was the guest of honor at a banquet celebrating the Volpe killings and was then given a ride by men secretly loyal to the Volpes. Other reports said he was brought before the Commission to explain an unsanctioned killing and failed to convince it.
Before dawn on August 8, 1932, a young man found a burlap bag near a dump called Tin Can Mountain in Red Hook, Brooklyn. The Post-Gazette says the body inside was bound with rope, had a bloodstained handkerchief in its mouth and rope burns on the neck, and had been stabbed up to 20 times with an ice pick; a summary on another site gives 22 or 27 wounds. It was identified on August 11 as John Bazzano. New York police arrested 14 men they suspected but, the Post-Gazette says, charged them only with loitering, and the murder was never solved. An older version of this article said his mouth was stuffed with canary feathers. No source I read supports that.
Bazzano’s funeral was held at his Mt. Lebanon home on August 13, with a procession of 75 cars to a cemetery in Arnold. Spinelli, according to newspaper reports cited by the Post-Gazette, fled to Italy, was arrested there in November 1932, was refused extradition and was convicted in an Italian court in December 1935 and sentenced to 30 years.
What came after
The Post-Gazette says the mob remained a presence in Pittsburgh after Prohibition, headed by men like Vincenzo Capizzi and Frank Amato Sr., but that the era of open street violence was largely over. The Rome Coffee Shop’s furnishings were seized for $585 in unpaid rent. The building later served as a junk shop, a numbers joint and a fortune-telling studio, and was torn down when redevelopment came to the Lower Hill in 1956. For the wider story of the period, see Pittsburgh’s notorious gangsters and crime stories and our Pittsburgh Mafia and crime history collection.
