"Someone has said, in referring to the Canadian boundary, that you cannot keep liquor from dripping through a dotted line," U.S. Prohibition Commissioner Roy Haynes told The New York Times in 1923.
But three years into the foolish experiment we know today as Prohibition, the federal agents who found themselves battling the bootleggers along the Niagara Frontier discovered that booze coming across the river from Canada came hardly in drips so much as a rushing torrent.
Explosions and gunfire punctuated the night here as the lawmen battled in vain to turn off the faucet. Aided by Protestant preachers, assorted do-gooders who resembled nothing so much as the anti-smoking zealots of today and, strangely it seems now, the hooded thugs of the Ku Klux Klan, the lawmen raided illegal drinking establishments and arrested hundreds of suspects.
And the war between the bootleggers and the Prohibitionists wasn't all that the law abiding citizenry of Western New York had to fear, as the Calabrese gangsters based in Hamilton, Ont., and the Sicilian Mafia -- centered in Buffalo and Niagara Falls on the American side -- became locked in a deadly struggle to control the liquor trade created by the government with passage of the infamous Volstead Act.
Rocco Perri, known as "Canada's Al Capone," reigned supreme. As early as 1917, Perri consolidated his power, using members of the Buffalo mob to do the dirty work. On May 22, 1922, Perri and another Canadian mafia chieftain, Domenic Scaroni, were invited to a sit-down in Niagara Falls. Shortly before midnight, a bus driver discovered Scaroni's bullet-riddled body on Lewiston Hill, apparently tossed from a speeding car.
With his competition out of the way, Perri soon bragged he was running 1,000 cases of hooch a day across the border.
But having read his Machiavelli, Perri quickly turned on his former New York allies, and more bloodshed ensued. Following the death from natural causes of Buffalo boss Joseph "Old Joe" DiCarlo in July of 1922, Perri sensed a weakness in the American organization, which had been taken over by a young killer only recently arrived from New York City -- Stefano Magaddino.
It was a grim mistake on the part of the Canadian. Having made short work of Buffalo's bungling Polish mob headed by the clownish John "Big Korney" Kwatowski, Magaddino was also looking across the Niagara River. He realized that, by eliminating Perri, he could control all of Western New York and Southern Ontario, thereby gaining control of much of the nation's rumrunning business.
It wouldn't be the first time he'd crossed over into Canada on a mission of murder. In 1921, when he was still a traveling assassin with the Brooklyn-based Good Killers gang, Magaddino had visited Hamilton to dispatch Nunzio Corazzo, aka "Jimmy Saunders," whose stabbed and beaten body was found on June 21.
Soon, Perri's top lieutenants, Freddy Tedesco, Angie Fucca and Ron Mandoro, began turning up missing.
Magaddino wasn't just good at creating corpses, he excelled at getting rid of them as well, a modus operandi he'd picked up running the infamous Good Killers crew and one he'd continue to employ during his 52-year tenure as mob boss here.
Perri hit back, and hard, but his tactics more closely resembled those of the old "Moustache Petes" of the Camorra, the Black Hand and other early Italian-American organized crime groups.
When Perri killers whacked Buffalo capo Maurizio Bochimuzzo in 1923, they left a note taped to the dead man's chest.
"Look out. Murder!" it read.
But as much as Magaddino had to gain by taking over Perri's Ontario operation, there was still pressing business on this side of the border. Speakeasies, stills and warehouses were being raided on a regular basis, and shipments across the river and the eastern basin of Lake Erie were being intercepted with depressing regularity. Magaddino decided to send Washington a message, and not by helping to elect a new congressman.
At 3:15 on the morning of Nov. 11, 1923, a Prohibition agent by the name of George A. Stewart was sipping a beer at a cabaret at the corner of Hertel and Vestal avenues in Buffalo. He was only human, after all, and had had a hard day chasing bootleggers in Niagara Falls.
As he was getting ready to leave, he was confronted by a waiter, Ralph Pinnavia, who called him a stool pigeon. Stewart pulled his service revolver and ordered Pinnavia to stand back, when a deadly fusillade of automatic pistol fire erupted.
The first shot hit Stewart in the back. Falling, the agent whirled around and attempted to fire back, but the shot went wild and ended up in the tin ceiling directly above his head. Eight more bullets slammed into him before he could fire again, and Stewart was dead before he hit the ground.
"Two of the bullets pierced the heart," The New York Times reported in its morning edition. "At the sound of the first shot, the merriment in the cabaret was stilled and the patrons began fighting their way out. More than a hundred customers trampled over the dead agent's body in their rush for the doors when the firing ceased. Members of the orchestra dropped their instruments in their flight."
The kitchen staff, management and everyone else with a brain in their head fled the scene as well, leaving only a few confused waiters, none of whom spoke much English, to face the police.
"They are all held in the county jail, without bail, as witnesses," the Times concluded.
The violence on all fronts was unceasing. By 1924, Magaddino had wrested much of Perri's Ontario bootlegging empire away from him, not just by murdering his top men, but by giving those he didn't kill even better jobs than they had under their Canadian boss.
Santo Scibetta was a made guy from Buffalo who took up residence in Ontario, ostensibly to get away from the police here, but in actuality to recruit from the remnants of Perri's mob. Charlie Bordenaro of Hamilton, Tony Silvestro of Guelph, and Tony Papaglia, the father of future Canadian don Johnny Papaglia, all secretly pledged their allegiance to Magaddino.
Perri could still hit back. In a 1924 interview with the Toronto Star, the gangster bragged about his power and influence in the underworld. And on the Niagara River, no American rumrunner was safe from a deadly fusillade erupting from the lonely shoreline, or pirates looking to hijack their precious cargo.
July 9, 1924 was a particularly bad night to be involved in the bootleg wars in Niagara Falls. Paddy Burke, a low-level Magaddino associate who ran a speakeasy, was gunned down by feared Perri killer Frank Pizzuto, who fired from a passing car as the Irishman stood on the front porch of his Third Street home.
At around the same time, shortly after midnight, a rookie immigration inspector named Floyd Ault had the misfortune of being in the wrong place at the wrong time as he was patrolling along the bank of the upper river, looking for illegal immigrants. Instead, he stumbled across four men who'd just landed a small cargo of good Canadian whiskey, and were in no mood to surrender it to a 24-year-old kid with a badge.
City police said a witness to the shooting saw the four men surround the rookie officer, who had only been assigned to the river 10 days earlier, and let fly with sawed-off shotguns when he went for his gun. He was still alive when cops arrived at the scene, but died the next day in the hospital.
Shortly after that, a gang of men drove up to the North End home of the Rev. W.C. Crofts, a Presbyterian clergyman with close ties to both the Prohibition agents and the local Ku Klux Klan. One of the men, Crofts said, ran toward the house while attempting to light something he had in his hand with a match, but the men were scared off before the suspected bomb could be thrown.
Whether the attempt at the Crofts place had been real or not, Magaddino's enemies had good reason to fear the bomb, a relatively new weapon he'd added to his already deadly arsenal. A few months earlier, the Buffalo home of the Rev. L.E.H. Smith was blown up. Smith had been a leading crusader "in the fight against vice and violators of the dry laws," the newspapers reported.
As far as Magaddino was concerned, the Protestant preachers, with their Temperance League, ties to the Klan thugs and service as government snitches, were getting to be as much of a problem as Rocco Perri. And as far as he was concerned, their efforts to put him out of business made them fair game.
Early on the morning of Aug. 14, a month after the incident at Rev. Crofts' home, a bomb wrecked the First Baptist Church on North Main Street, causing considerable damage to a number of surrounding buildings in the neighborhood. The bomb was placed near the church's main entryway, and the explosion shattered all the windows, ripped a cornice off the building and tore through the Sunday school classroom and the roof.
Nearby, the Masonic Lodge, the old YMCA building and dozens of private homes had their windows shattered by concussion from the blast. The Niagara Falls City Council called a special meeting and decided to offer $5,000 for information leading to the arrest and conviction of the bombers, safe in the knowledge that no one would ever come forward to collect, and the Council of Churches called upon the good and decent residents of the city to participate in a mass demonstration the following Sunday.
The church's pastor, Rev. Arthur Mercer, was a well-known fanatic whose fiery sermons often led to violence at the city's illegal drinking establishments.
By 1925, a new twist on an old standby had been developed. Somebody in the Magaddino family had figured out how to wire a bomb to an automobile's ignition.
This time the target was Orville A. Preuster, a federal customs agent and the brother of Lucas Lee Preuster, the Grand Kleagle of the Niagara County chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. It was a twofer that was too good to pass up.
On March 1, Preuster and a friend, Elmer Whitacre, left Preuster's home around 4 p.m., with the intention of going downtown for dinner. Preuster took the wheel while Whitacre went to the front of the car to crank it up but, as soon as the agent stepped on the starter, there was an explosion that shook the neighborhood. Whitacre was blown 40 feet away and Preuster became a part of the wreckage that had, just moments before, been his automobile.
The newspapers reported that Preuster's head had been blown off, and that both legs were torn from the body. Buildings were shaken for blocks around, and various automobile parts were found embedded in the sidings of nearby houses. Whitacre was taken to the hospital, where he died a short while later.
Magaddino had picked his target carefully. In addition to his Klan ties, Preuster was a member of the Niagara Falls Council of Churches and had been particularly aggressive in his enforcement of the federal liquor laws. Shortly before his death, when he was unable to convince his superiors to close down a Grand Island hotel he claimed was serving whiskey, he led a mob into the place and started a melee in which more than a dozen people were injured.
Preuster's assassination was followed by a series of federal raids in Niagara Falls and Buffalo in which 90 arrests were made, mostly on smuggling and conspiracy charges. Perhaps the most comical raid occurred at the city's Third Ward Political Club on 19th Street, where more than 12,000 gallons of denatured alcohol and 5,000 gallons of whiskey were seized. Numerous city officials were implicated, proof positive that some things never do change in Niagara Falls.
While the feds crowed to gullible newspaper reporters that the raids and arrests marked "the breaking up of one of the most important illicit liquor operations in Prohibition history," it was anything but. Most of the bootleggers were back out on the street in a day or two, and none of the bosses had even been picked up. The flow of cheap hooch in Western New York was as unstoppable as that of the mighty Niagara.
The government denied it at the time, but Prohibition was the best thing that ever happened to organized crime in this country, and at least some of the men assigned to enforce it had to have realized that obvious fact. Despite the bloodshed, Magaddino and other urban gangsters all across the country -- Italian, Irish and Jewish alike -- were making money hand over fist. The profits were so huge that the risks were worth taking, and indeed provided the startup capital for an underworld that is still going strong today.
It is doubtful, however, that an uneducated man such as Magaddino knew he was helping to found a dynasty that would still be powerful so many years after his death. In his overstuffed autobiography, "A Man of Honor," Magaddino's cousin, Joe Bonanno, never misses an opportunity to remind the reader of the don's lack of sophistication in such matters.
For him, it was the day-to-day business of staying alive and putting bread on his family's table.
Had he been able to read, he might have gotten a laugh out of some of the newspaper stories concerning his business, like the one about two lawmen who seized a motor launch he'd been using to bring small lots of booze across at the mouth of the Niagara River.
Prior to being taken away, the four smugglers nabbed near the old fort wired the boat's engine to ignite the flammable cargo as the lawmen sailed her into port, and they barely escaped with their lives before she exploded in flames.
Magaddino used his fortune in the late '20s to branch out into legitimate business and help his most trusted associate and consiglieri, John Montana of Buffalo, launch his political career. In 1927, Montana, owner of that city's largest taxicab fleet, ran on the Republican ticket and won a seat on the Buffalo Common Council. It was a big breakthrough for the Italian community in Western New York, which had previously been ostracized by the region's WASPy elite.
Years later, the ties between the two men would become even stronger, when Magaddino gave the hand of his eldest daughter, Josephine, in marriage to Montana's nephew, Charles. The lavish reception afterward made national news, with a feature article in the Saturday Evening Post.
"The Statler Hotel in Buffalo was taken over for the affair and was decked out more lavishly than Buckingham Palace," the article read. "The guests of honor were 100 thugs from all over the country and for each one there were two Federal Agents and Detectives casing the crowd. Even Frank Costello was there, the last time he showed up at an open mafia clambake. He held court in the best suite in the house, and when he went down to the lobby the underlings bowed and scraped as though he was giving Christmas baskets to the peasants."
As the '20s came to a close, it seemed that there was just one piece of unfinished business nagging at Magaddino: His old Hamilton nemesis, Rocco Perri.
Tony Papaglia was chosen for the job, spurred by the promise of becoming the next Canadian don. Along with Domenic Pugelese, he found himself crouched behind a limousine in the garage of the Perri mansion one sultry night in August 1930.
Perri and his wife, Bessie, had been out for the evening, returning home at around 11:30. Rocco backed their Marmon coupe into the attached garage and went to close the garage door, while Bessie walked toward the door leading to the house. Suddenly gunfire erupted as Papaglia and Pugelese sprang up and opened fire. Rocco fled into an alley outside the garage, while Bessie bore the brunt of the gunfire.
Perri was found a short distance from the house in a state of hysteria by a neighbor, David Robbins, who had been out walking his dog. When they returned to the garage, they found Bessie's crumpled body covered with blood. She'd been hit by at least two shotgun blasts, police said later.
With Perri lapsing into shock, Robbins had to call the Hamilton police.
The Canadian papers all carried the sensational story on the front page. "BOOTLEG QUEEN SLAIN!" read one. Perri went into hiding and suffered a mental collapse. As it turned out, it was his Jewish wife who did most of the thinking for the Hamilton mob, a fact that had to be kept well hidden from the maschio gangsters of the Calabrian mafia.
Bullets, bombs and booze. Consider them the "Three B's" that made the '20s roar on both sides of the mighty Niagara.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | June 10 2008 |