"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.
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