Crimetown USA: The Car Bomb Wars

If steel was the public identity of mid-twentieth century Youngstown, organized crime was the private operating system running underneath it. The city had been labeled Crimetown USA by the national press, and that label reflected something real. Four separate Mafia organizations, those based in Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Detroit, and Buffalo, all claimed interests in the Mahoning Valley. They competed and cooperated in managing gambling rackets, numbers operations, and other illegal enterprises. Local politicians and law enforcement were often on the payroll.

For a time, the valley had its own autonomous boss. Sandy Naples ran the local operation with an independence that the Cleveland and Pittsburgh families found irritating. In March of nineteen sixty, Naples and his companion were shotgunned to death on a porch. Cleveland wanted control of the territory, and Naples would not yield, so he was removed.

What followed was a decade-long bombing campaign of startling brazenness. In July of nineteen sixty-one, a Cleveland mob soldier was blown up in a car bomb outside his restaurant on a busy Youngstown street. The following year, Billy Naples, Sandy's brother and successor, was killed when his car exploded in his own garage. That same year, a bomb meant for a mob figure known as Cadillac Charlie killed his eleven-year-old son Tommy. His twelve-year-old son Charlie Junior, who had not yet reached the car, survived with severe injuries.

The bombings became so frequent that locals began calling the explosions Youngstown tune-ups. That phrase, darkly comic, tells you something about how normalized the violence had become. Law enforcement was so compromised by payoffs that investigations rarely led anywhere.

The car bomb era wound down in the late nineteen-sixties, then reignited in the late seventies and early eighties before finally fading as the steel economy collapsed and the valley's wealth dried up. Without the steel, there was less to fight over.