Colorado's Carlino Brothers by Sam Carlino

This was an eye-opening story.Īfter that encounter, Sam never saw the old-timer again. Then the old-timer told Sam about Sam’s own grandfather, Pete Carlino, who, unbeknownst to Sam, had run a bootlegging empire in Pueblo, Colorado, during Prohibition, and had been assassinated in a mafia hit job in 1931. One day at the flea market, an old-timer sauntered up out of nowhere, sampled the Italian sausage and recognized it as the legendary Carlino recipe from way back when the family owned Time Deli at Bascom and San Carlos.

Instead of going out with my buddies, I’m making sausage until midnight, and then I got to go out to the flea market and sell it on Saturday and Sunday.” “He always had aspirations of me owning my own business, so when I was 18, he offered an opportunity to me if I wanted to open up a little sausage shop,” Carlino recalled. In the spring of 1985, when Carlino was just a teenager, and long before he rose up the ranks in his family’s food and grocery empire which to this day includes Sam’s BBQ, he peddled Italian sausage at the Berryessa Flea Market, where his father oversaw 26 snack bars. Sam Carlino’s new book, Colorado’s Carlino Brothers: A Bootlegging Empire, is the best argument for saving the San Jose Flea Market I’ve ever come across.Īs we learn in the book, thanks in part to the flea market, Carlino discovered secrets about his grandfather’s criminal empire in Colorado, including previously unreported connections from that state’s mafia underworld straight back to the notorious Salvatore Maranzano in New York City. MOB RULES: Pete Carlino (second from left, middle row) pictured here with a gathering of early bootleggers in 1929.

Colorado's Carlino Brothers by Sam Carlino