Shortly after 9:00 AM on March 11, 2005, Judge Robert Restaino took the bench in Niagara Falls City Court. Approximately 70 people filled the courtroom—46 defendants in a domestic violence diversion program, plus attorneys, court staff, and counselors.
For 45 minutes, proceedings went normally. Then a cell phone rang.
“Everyone is going to jail,” Restaino announced. “Every single person is going to jail in this courtroom unless I get that instrument now.”
No one came forward. What followed was an hours-long descent into collective punishment that would end Restaino’s judicial career—and reveal a temperament that should concern every resident of Niagara Falls today.
One by one, Restaino called defendants to the bench. Each denied knowledge of the phone. Each was jailed anyway.
“You know I just got a job, and I love the job,” one defendant pleaded. “I don’t have $1,000. I really don’t.”
Jailed.
One man spoke quietly of his mother, already prepped for surgery, lying beneath harsh hospital lights.
Jailed.
Another—his voice breaking, though he tried to hold it steady—mentioned a small girl due home at precisely three o’clock.
“My little girl is coming home at 3:00,” a father said. “Can I be sanctioned next week so I can get my girl?”
Jailed.
Fourteen defendants who couldn’t make bail were shackled—wrists handcuffed to lockboxes attached to waist chains—and bused to the county jail in Lockport.
They rode together, bodies close, wondering how a day like this had happened. They were there in Restaino’s court for domestic violence and its hoped-for remedy, anger management.
They arrived around 3:30 p.m. They were released after 5:00 p.m.
They were not provided transportation back to Niagara Falls. No apology followed.
Restaino never found the phone. He never found its owner. The judge, however, was found wanting, and power, briefly and cruelly exercised, finally turned on its wielder.
Judge Restaino later admitted he had acted without legal authority.
The New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct would describe it as “an egregious and unprecedented abuse of judicial power.”
But most damning was this: The Judicial Commission wrote, “It is undisputed that he took no steps to arrange for the defendants’ release until he learned that the press was inquiring into his actions.”
The Commission removed him from the bench in November 2007, writing: “It is sad and ironic that in repeatedly berating the ‘selfish’ and ‘self-absorbed’ individual who ‘put their interests above everybody else’s’ and ‘[doesn’t] care what happens to anybody,’ Judge Restaino failed to recognize that he was describing himself.”
Twelve years later, the voters of Niagara Falls made him mayor.
The temper did not change. In 2023, he put his hand in front of a Channel 2 camera when he didn’t like a question. He reportedly did it again in 2024.
I encountered that volatility years earlier at a fundraiser. He confronted me over coverage that was not hostile, merely neutral, regarding his daughter’s judicial campaign. He tapped my head. He disordered my hair. His face flushed crimson; his eyes burned. His voice was low and calm, a common companion to intimidation.
I challenged him to step outside. He followed. I called him a coward. He apologized.
That is Restaino: capable of retreat, capable of remorse. Yet a man who must routinely retreat from the brink is ill-suited to guide a city toward a $200 million precipice.
In November 2024, Restaino stated on his YouTube channel that his administration was ignoring legal public records (FOIL) requests from the Niagara Gazette because he objected to the newspaper’s coverage.
“We’re not refusing. We’re just ignoring,” he said.
The New York Coalition for Open Government put him on their annual “naughty list”—his third appearance. Attorney Paul Wolf, the coalition’s founder, was blunt: “It’s just a terrible way for a public official to handle FOIL requests.”
Restaino described his administration as “the unfortunate recipients or victims” of a newspaper that “simply doesn’t want to present the best of our city.”
This is the language of a man who believes accountability is persecution. Who believes oversight is attack. Who jailed 46 people because someone’s phone rang—and only released them when the press called.
This is the man now betting $200 million of taxpayer money on an arena without financing, without an anchor tenant, without a feasibility study that wasn’t reverse-engineered to match his predetermined conclusions.
This is the man blocking a $1.5 billion private investment that would bring 550 permanent jobs to one of the poorest cities in New York.
The Commission on Judicial Conduct saw what Restaino was. They removed him. They wrote that he was “oblivious to the enormous injustice caused by his rash and reckless behavior.”
Niagara Falls is learning the same lesson—at a cost the city cannot afford.
