LIBERTY — There’s enough organized crime history in the Mahoning Valley that Cleveland author Allan May said he’ll probably have written five books about it by the time he’s finished.

May, author of several books that include “Crimetown U.S.A.: The History of the Mahoning Valley Mafia,” spoke to a crowd of more than 50 people at Kravitz Delicatessen Saturday as part of a William Holmes McGuffey Historical Society presentation.

These aren’t stories of fictionalized men from a Hollywood movie or television drama, but real-world criminals who for 100 years ran organized crime operations in the Mahoning Valley and used intimidation and murder as a means of maintaining power and silence.

The Saturday Evening Post originally dubbed Youngstown “Crimetown U.S.A” in 1962 after a car bomb left mob boss Charles Cavallaro and his son Thomas, 12, dead, and another son maimed. May said former Youngstown police Chief John Terlesky told him during an interview the article and nickname “left a legacy on the Valley for generations to come.”

The Valley had mob ties for decades prior to the Cavallaro murders and for decades after it.

Famed mobsters like Charles Arthur “Pretty Boy” Floyd, who was killed in the area, and Alvin “Creepy” Karpis, who robbed the Youngstown Sheet and Tube Company in Warren during the Midwest crime wave of 1933-34, are linked to the area, May said.

From 1935 to 1943, lottery houses were run by Greeks, Italians, Croatians and the Irish in different parts of Youngstown until these operations were raided and shut down, May said.

In 1948, Charles Henderson was elected mayor of Youngstown and he brought in police Chief Eddie Allen, who was recommended by J. Edgar Hoover, and they went after rackets in the area. Henderson was voted out in 1953 and organized crime activities resumed with the area seeing bombings that were designed to scare, but not kill, May said.

By March 1960, things started to get bloody and people started to die, May said. In 1962, the day after Thanksgiving, the Cavallaros were killed, which led to the “Crimetown” designation that continues to hang over the region.

May said he’s always asked why Youngstown has a long, rich history with the mafia. The answer is because it is a smaller city and organized crime structures weren’t toppled by the feds until organizations in larger cities across the country were shut down.

“The activity that took place here lasted about 100 years,” May said.

The Valley’s deep ties to organized crime essentially came to an end in the 1990s with investigations conducted by Assistant U.S. Attorney Craig Morford, who prosecuted numerous cases in northern Ohio that resulted in convictions of elected officials, police, three judges and Youngstown mob boss Lenny Strollo, May said.

“Morford worked with the FBI to get all these people indicted,” May said. “That was really the final blow because at the same time they brought down Strollo’s operation and the key figures in that started ratting on one another. It’s gone, but it’s not to say crime doesn’t exist here anymore, it’s just not on that organized basis it had operated on for decades on end.”

Also in attendance at Saturday’s lecture was former Mahoning County prosecutor Paul Gains, who was shot in his home in 1996 by Mark Batcho, hired by Strollo, during a botched mob hit. Gains said he enjoyed the presentation and he’s looking forward to more books by May.

“It brought back a lot of memories,” Gains said. “The same people who killed Ernie Biondillo were supposed to kill me.”

jwysochanski@tribtoday.com