The Post Gazette recently had a 6 piece article on old Art Rooney actually acquiring much of his wealth from mob activities such as gambling (https://newsinteractive.post-gazette.com/investigation-art-rooney-steelers/). When I was 18 in undergraduate school (many years ago) the majority of my friends from Western Pennsylvania knew all about Rooney as mobster and we laughed about it. In fact, a couple of the guys said their grandfathers were in the rackets with Rooney.
Basically each group ran a different section of Pittsburgh. You had the Irish Mob, the Italian and Sicilian Mob, the Jewish Mob and even a Black Mob. Yet few people in the mainstream media seemed to know anything about it WINK ..WINK.
"The documents show he was involved in illegal operations from the mid-1920s through at least the late 1940s, although he was only publicly named in connection with any of them twice.
During those years, due to to a loyal-to-the-bone cadre of powerful political friends, and smart, well-placed alliances with law enforcement, Rooney managed to navigate his way through a potentially dangerous, illegal underworld and build a fortune that allowed him to sustain his wealth until the Steelers and racetracks could eventually turn his family into one of the wealthiest in America. Multiple FBI documents show that Rooney did more than brush shoulders with some of the Pittsburgh region's best known mobsters: He struck deals in the 1940s with five of the most notorious organized crime figures in Pennsylvania to split up the region’s lucrative slot machine operations.
Though Rooney was never publicly connected to the rackets — other than a brewery making illegal beer during Prohibition — details of his involvement first began to trickle out in a book by Pittsburgh historian Rob Ruck in 1993 that outlined Rooney’s numbers operation, then again when a couple of FBI documents about his role running the slots and working with the mob were first reported in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review in 1996.
But the dozens of previously unreported FBI records obtained by the Post-Gazette — including documents released by the National Archives in 2017 and 2018 — combined with contemporary news stories and additional interviews, show for the first time in far greater detail the breadth and scope of his operations that made him one of the city’s leading racket figures and the role of law enforcement in tracking his movements."
The series makes good reading I would suggest you read it. You don't believe he got all his money to buy the Steelers from winning that money on a horse race do you? This was the time of Prohibition. Gambling, number rackets, horse racing and booze were underground everywhere. How did Joe Kennedy make his fortune? If you don't know look it up. What seems to be interesting and not stated in the article unless I missed it is that all these different mobster groups some how got along.
Check out Nancy Pelosi's father. "President John F. Kennedy requested that Speaker Pelosi’s father, Thomas D’Alesandro Jr. be investigated by the FBI for his connections to organized crime." The related FBI documents were quietly released on January 6th, 2021. Compared to Pelosi's Father they should make Art Rooney a Saint...really.
