Last week Allison had a great post about research.
I’ve been drinking deep from those waters myself for a project I’m currently working on.
Picture it. Pittsburgh in the early 1980s. The steel mills have collapsed, gutting the local industry. The Pittsburgh region’s unemployment peaked in February of 1982 at 18%. An industry that provided a pathway to middle class security was gutted. From 1970-1980, the city of Pittsburgh lost almost 100,000 people, representing over 18% of the population.
Johnny LaRocca was the aging patriarch of the western PA organized crime operations. In Pittsburgh, organized crime was deeply rooted at the neighborhood level and revenue primarily came from illegal gambling (whether sports betting or the numbers game), loansharking, extortion, and labor racketeering. When my dad was growing up, he knew the local numbers guy who owned a bar and had cash on hand. He described him as a respected guy who people went to for help.
But during the 1980s this infrastructure was also disrupted. The RICO Act (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) was passed in 1970. By 1982, prosecutors were successfully using RICO to target individual and criminal enterprises. In October of 1982, Reagan announced the creation of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces (OCDETF). This Taskforce brought together prosecutors and multiple federal agencies to target the financial infrastructure of major criminal enterprises. Finally, in 1982, under the RICO Act, the federal government filed a lawsuit against the Teamsters Local 560 in New Jersey which resulted in a court-ordered trusteeship while also removing individual defendants from control.
I could get into a wild story about the origins of the Pennsylvania lottery and its connection to organized crime or the infamous “Triple Six Fix” of 1980, but I’ll save that for another post.
Today, I’m going to focus on the largest and most famous heist in Pittsburgh which took place on St. Patrick’s Day in 1982.
The target, a Purolator depot in Brentwood, a borough just south of Pittsburgh, was a concrete and brick block of a building in a semi-desolate industrial strip.
James Powers, the single guard on duty, was in the middle of his graveyard shift when two men dressed in trench jackets and fedoras ducked under the descending door as a Purolator truck was leaving. The men declared themselves as FBI agents, flashed badges, and warned him there was a robbery planned.
The two men taped his arms, legs, and mouth and left him in the employee lounge.
They then proceeded to make off twenty-six bags of cash, totaling roughly $2.5 million and weighing around 500 pounds.
As of today, the money hasn’t been recovered and the two men have never been identified.
My parents were young and in love and just starting out in the early 1980s. My dad worked in healthcare and my mom was a social worker working with refugee resettlement. Even with everything in the major shifts in Steel City, they remember how alive things felt.
What were you doing in the early 1980s? What are some things you remember from that time?
Those were the early years of getting sober and being a parent, not enough time to rob a place, although the cash would have been nice.
So no massive heists, John?
Amazing story. Those ‘perps’ sound like caricature robbers! In the early 80s I had recently relocated to Miami and loving life in the tropics with a part-time job of running a friend’s company in St. Maarten while working full time in Miami. Good memories.
Busy times for you, Kait!
The ’80s were the heady days of high school and then college. I was invincible!
Still are, Matt.
In the 70s, I was a kid in Morgantown, WV, just down the road. Pittsburgh was “the big city,” the land of prosperity where field trips took us to see the aquarium and other exotica. With our big round elementary-school eyes full of wonder, we had no idea Pittsburgh itself was a place teetering on the rim of disaster.
I know, for the first time in years Pittsburgh had gains in the population this last census.
I graduated from college in Boston and moved to Maine in 1980. I was getting started in the newspaper biz in York County, covering arguments about management of the Cape Porpoise Pier in Kennebunkport and a few years later the famous Moody Beach case, which limited public shoreline access to colonial-era activities (fishing, fowling . . . ). Oh, and I sat through about a thousand meetings and court hearings about the whether amplified music was appropriate in bars, which actually was an effort by those who feared Ogunquit was becoming another Provincetown to shut down the gay clubs. Good times!
That sounds fascinating, Brenda!
I’ve recently started a new P.I. series (the Tales of the 3M Detective Agency) set in the late 80’s/early 90’s in an unnamed Southern state. I did this because I wanted to write about a time not a tech heavy as today, when the detectives had to find their clues with legwork and brain power was used instead of Internet searches. Truly, I don’t remember a lot about the 80’s but it’s easy enough to find info about the current events of the day and use those as a springboard for further research.
Agreed! The best part for me has been asking my parents, aunts, and uncles about what it was like to be in Pittsburgh at the time. Some of my best details came through those conversations.