Tony Grosso: Numbers Kingpin (from PA Crime Commission Report on Organized Crime in Western Pennsylvania 1990)

Pennsylvania's undisputed illegal lottery kingpin, Anthony "Tony" Grosso, 76, dominated Pittsburgh's numbers-betting community for more than 40 years and built a large illicit gambling organization which grossed more than $30 million annually. In October 1986, he pled guilty to 68 counts of a federal grand jury presentment. The charges alleged that Grosso, of Mt. Lebanon, operated a numbers organization with several thousand writers scattered throughout the Western Pennsylvania region. Grosso was sentenced by a federal judge in January 1987 to 14 years in prison and later to 10 to 20 years in prison by an Allegheny County Court judge. During one hearing, Grosso testified that he had not filed a tax
return since 1973. Grosso agreed to testify against a State Police corporal who had been charged by a state grand jury with receiving more than $100,000 over several years in bribes and other illegal gratuities from Grosso. The corporal, who committed suicide shortly before he was scheduled to stand trial, was in charge of a State Police vice detail operating in Southwestern Pennsylvania. Grosso has been arrested over 20 times between 1938 and the present. Relatively few of those arrests have resulted in incarceration. Prior to the 1980s, he served short jail terms for gambling-related convictions in 1943, 1950, 1964, and in the mid-1970s. Grosso, who never used a bank account, testified that he did not know how many individuals were in his gambling operation because he had established it in a pyramid fashion with himself at the top. He said he did not know the identity of "runners and writers" near the bottom of the pyramid, nor did they necessarily know his identity. He said that his operation had many telephone girls who each made about $500 per week and that each phone girl would have 10 to 20 writers "working the street." Grosso paid his writers on a percentage basis. Should a writer offer 500-to-one odds to a customer, the writer would get 40 percent. A 600-to-one odds bet would provide the writer with 30 percent. On the average, a writer who turned in about $1,000 per week in business would earn about $300 per week, tax free. Grosso said his organization would gross at least $400,000 weekly. His annual income, estimated by the IRS, was $1.5 million to $2.1 million. Grosso apparently operated without paying "direct" tribute to the Pittsburgh LCN, primarily because of his
political contacts. Because of his favorable affiliation with local political and police officials, however, Grosso
was expected to do "favors" for the LaRocca/Genovese Family-such as providing information on an ongoing investigation or an upcoming raid. Grosso's incarceration, in turn, has contributed to the Family' s dominance of illegal gambling in the Greater
Pittsburgh area. Today, the bulk of Grosso's numbers business has beentaken over by Robert "Bobby I" Iannelli; and two brothers, Adolph "Junior" Williams and Salvatore "Sal" Williams, all of Pittsburgh. Iannelli and the Williams brothers are associates of the LaRocca/Genovese LCN Family.