In the wee hours of April 4, police raided a former funeral home on Niagara Street, busting up the after-hours juke joint operating in the building at the corner of Portage Road.
The next day, an elderly Niagara Falls resident was convicted of violating federal weapons charges for having a couple of high-priced shotguns in his home and whisked off to jail.
At first glance, the two news items offer little connection beyond their proximity on the calendar and Niagara Falls links, but in combination, they offer a coda to an era long since passed.
The empty building that hosted the illegal bar once sat at the center of a criminal empire that stretched from Southern Ontario to Ohio. At the time, it was the Magaddino Memorial Chapel, its proprietor known as Don Stefano, or simply The Old Man, possibly the longest-reigning kingpin in the history of the American Mafia.
Convicted in Buffalo's federal court -- Benjamin Nicoletti Jr., the son of one of Magaddino's key lieutenants, himself a reputed mobster better known as "Sonny," even as a septuagenarian.
Magaddino died in 1974, the organization he headed steadily decomposing in the ensuing decades. While sources differ on how much influence Nicoletti still holds in Niagara Falls, he's spent much of the past decade battling for his freedom, rather than control of the city's rackets.
He was convicted of state racketeering charges in 1993, and still faces other federal felony counts. Last week, a federal jury agreed that possessing the shotguns found in his home during a probation department inspection constituted another felony.
Stefano Magaddino and Sonny Nicoletti successfully beat back federal bookmaking charges following an FBI round-up that snared both in 1968. The group, known in the press as "The Niagara Falls Nine," also included Peter, The Old Man's son, and Sonny's father, Benjamin Nicoletti Sr.
The federal charges were eventually dropped when a judge ruled that wiretaps used in the investigation were illegal. Most authorities agree, however, that the late-November raids caused a disruption from which Magaddino and his empire never really recovered.
Most of the men who did his dirty work are either dead, long since moved to Florida or Las Vegas, or still aren't talking.
The stories of the good old days -- or bad old days, depending on which side of Don Stefano you landed -- remain alive and well, though.
Those tales rarely deal with the murders attributed to Magaddino and his henchmen, or even the violence and intimidation that kept the machine running smoothly. Such unpleasantries took place out of the public eye, and even if the recipients lived to tell about them, they usually knew better.
But if Magaddino's soldiers conducted their campaigns in secrecy, their professions were well known to the public.
"When we were kids, we used to go to the Esquire Restaurant on Falls Street, eat French fries and drink Cokes and watch those guys," said one businessman now pushing 50. "That was our entertainment on a Friday night."
Wearing expensive suits and driving fancy cars, some of Magaddino's men dominated the Niagara Falls social scene -- or at least the parts of it they chose to frequent.
But they also worked at the legitimate businesses they owned -- including stores and restaurants, many of them along Pine Avenue. And many led quiet lives with their families, not all that different from thousands of others in the city in the mid-20th century.
One man recalls working as a boy at a hardware store, from which The Old Man bought a lawnmower.
"All the money he had, and he'd come in every Friday to make his $5 payment on that lawnmower," the man remembered.
A mechanic recalls working on the car driven by Vincent Scro, another Magaddino lieutenant.
"He'd call me up screaming," the mechanic said. "'Ten dollars for a brake rotor? What are you trying to do to me?' he'd say."
The Magaddino Memorial Chapel itself was a source of dark humor to kids growing up near Niagara and Portage, particularly given the owner's other job.
"When we'd see pallbearers coming out of there, we'd elbow each other and joke, 'Boy, that coffin sure looks heavy. I wonder how many bodies they've got in that one,'" said one former resident of the neighborhood.
But alongside the anecdotes recalling a time when downtown Niagara Falls actually existed lives the city's greatest myth, one that some fervently believe to this day. That fiction holds that Magaddino's command of the city from the 1920s to the '70s -- he was "the man who ran everything in Niagara Falls but the Cascades," gushed his 1974 obituary in the Niagara Falls Gazette -- somehow made life better.
No doubt, things were better in Niagara Falls for most of Magaddino's reign. But that was in spite of him and his criminal empire, not because of it. Certainly, he and his men were at the least human, and at the best likable.
They were also parasites, getting rich from the vices of others. The boom times of Niagara Falls resulted from the factories along Buffalo Avenue and the thousands of tourists who populated downtown's hotels and ate at its restaurants, not from the cheap hoods who ran poker games and extorted protection money from merchants.
The city's legitimate businesses made Magaddino's version of commerce possible. The paychecks their employees left work with every Friday fed the mob, whether they were spent on bootlegged booze during Prohibition, bet on poker or football games with The Old Man's network of bookies, or wasted on the drugs that he shepherded into the city in the later years of his reign.
Revisionist history offers Magaddino as a benevolent Don, one who had the best interests of his neighbors in mind, who wished only to wet his beak once in a while.
Right. And construction will begin on AquaFalls this summer.
People who got in the way of Magaddino's insatiable greed didn't just go out of business, or get forced to leave town. They died.
Albert Agueci, a native of Sicily, had a drug connection in Montreal, but needed The Old Man's protection to get the heroin into New York. Agueci and his brother paid Magaddino for his help until they got busted, when he washed his hands of their deal. After Agueci mortgaged his home to pay his bail, rumors spread that he would turn state's evidence to get even with Magaddino for denying him.
Agueci never got the chance. His body was found outside Rochester in late 1961, 30 pounds of flesh carved from his body, his jaw shattered. What must have been a horrific death finally arrived via strangulation, before his body was soaked in gasoline and set on fire.
Agueci's end was one of the few untimely demises documented during Magaddino's reign, but authorities believe there were dozens more, at the least.
Niagara Falls did not plunge into the civic cesspool because Magaddino died, or because his sons and lieutenants were too inept to keep his empire together. That downturn resulted from the flood of industrial jobs out of the city, compounded by the imbecilic series of decisions that destroyed the core of the tourist district and made Urban Renewal a 12-letter obscenity in these parts.
A parasite needs a healthy animal to keep it fed. Niagara Falls' economy, the beast on which The Old Man's mob supped, was headed for the morgue long before he ended up there.
For all their flash and color, he and his men were nothing more than criminals, no better than the drug dealers of today who buy toys for neighborhood kids to keep their parents from calling the cops.
As for Sonny, the feds seem determined to make sure he spends the rest of his days either in jail or trying to stay out of it, even if doing so means they have to use relatively petty charges even they would have snickered at years ago.
The state has almost completely usurped the lifeblood of Magaddino's illicit family -- gambling. Anyone wanting to gamble can do so legally at the Seneca Niagara Casino.
Only sports betting remains for the small handful of people willing to take the big risk of prosecution in exchange for the relatively meager take still available.
It will be at least another generation before the exploits and influence of The Old Man and his underlings are forgotten -- though it's doubtful that many, if any, of the early-morning revelers at the juke joint at Niagara and Portage knew where they were standing, or who used to run the place.
But there's no disputing that their day is gone forever.
Good riddance.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | April 13 2004 |