North Meadowcroft Avenue in Mt. Lebanon, south of Pittsburgh’s city limits, is a quiet tree-lined suburban street. In 1965, the street became ground zero for testimony before a U.S. Senate committee investigating federal agency surveillance practices. Joseph “Frank” Grosso was racketeering kingpin Tony Grosso’s older brother and he was living in a home near the southern end of the street and around the corner from a home where his younger brother had lived in the 1950s. Cresson O. Davis was the Internal Revenue Service’s chief investigator in Pittsburgh and he lived five blocks north of the Grossos.
Frank Grosso had owned the stone-faced home since the 1930s. Davis was renting a ranch home that has had only two owners since it was built about 1952. There’s nothing remarkable about either home in a subdivision filled with period-revival and ranch houses. Neither house blares “the mob lives here” nor “fed in residence.” Perhaps that’s what made the street an attractive place that brought both men — on opposite sides of the law —together.
Former Grosso home.
Former Davis home.
Silver Spring, Maryland, is one of several suburbs just across the District of Columbia state line where racketeers operating in the nation’s capital lived and had satellite operations. It is an unincorporated area that abuts Northwest Washington in a sprawling county that until the 1950s was mostly agricultural. Suburbanization attracted throngs of government workers moving to the District of Columbia as well as Washingtonians moving away from Blacks buying homes in previously segregated all-white neighborhoods. Sam Morgan was one of several District racketeers who ended up in the suburbs. This is his story.