John Sebastian Larocca
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John Sebastian LaRocca (December 19, 1901-December 3, 1984) was a Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania mobster who controlled illegal gambling in Southwestern Pennsylvania from the 1950s until his death in 1984.
Born in Sicily, Larocca and his family immigrated to the United States in 1910, settling in Indiana County, Pennsylvania. As a young man, Larocca went to work in the coal mines. In 1922, at age 20, he was arrested for assaulting a young woman and sentenced to three years in prison.
In 1956, Larocca succeeded longtime crime boss Frank Amato as head of criminal operations in Pittsburgh and Southwestern Pennsylvania. However, since the early 1900s, vice, prostitution, illegal gambling, and the numbers rackets had been controlled by the city's political machine. Although Larocca had his own lucrative gambling operations, he was unable to develop new operations and was long regarded as a minor organized crime figure. Larocca continued to control his territory until his death from natural causes on December 3, 1984, at age 82. Larocca was succeeded by Michael James Genovese.
[edit] Further reading
- Moldea, Dan E. The Hoffa Wars. New York: Charter Books, 1978. ISBN 0-441-34010-5
- Scott, Peter Dale. Deep Politics and the Death of JFK. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. ISBN 0-520-08410-1
- Pennsylvania Crime Commission. St. Davids, Pennsylvania: DIANE Publishing, 1984. ISBN 0-8182-0000-6
[edit] References
- Sifakis, Carl. The Mafia Encyclopedia. New York: Da Capo Press, 2005. ISBN 0-8160-5694-3
