A week after a gunfight in front of Dante's Ristorante left two men dead and four people wounded, police were still struggling to find clues pointing to who killed Josh Hunt and Shaloin Smith, and why.
The bloodshed also left authorities wondering how the nightclub's owners got a liquor license in the first place.
Sources close to the investigation told the Niagara Falls Reporter that Sal Gianporcaro, who fled Niagara Falls on July 6 within a few hours of the gun battle that left Hunt and Smith dead and four others wounded, has a lengthy criminal record dating back to the 1980s -- including a felony bookmaking arrest -- that should have made him ineligible to own a legal bar in New York State.
Gianporcaro apparently failed to mention this portion of his past on the liquor license application, and the State Liquor Authority obviously failed to do any digging of its own.
"If the state would have done its due diligence, this never would have happened," said Dante Cipollitti, who owned the restaurant at Pine Avenue and 29th Street for 12 years, until selling it to Gianporcaro and partner Kin Lau in April. "Those two kids would be alive today."
Gianporcaro and Lau moved to Niagara Falls from Connecticut after buying Dante's. Soon after they opened, they teamed up with Pat McCune, a longtime promoter of nightclubs around the city, whose own sketchy past should also prevent him from having any connection to a licensed facility, a police source said.
"This guy had a bar and lost his license years ago," said one veteran downtown bar owner. "He watches for new bars to open, then goes to the owners and tells them, 'I can bring you a crowd if you give me a cut.' You get the crowd, all right, but you get a face full of trouble with it."
That scenario played out within weeks of Gianporcaro and Lau taking over at Dante's. They converted a downstairs room -- used to host political fund-raisers, weddings and other large events during Cipollitti's tenure -- into a nightclub.
Raucous gatherings on Saturday nights, featuring loud hip-hop music and little apparent security, drew complaints from the neighbors and calls to the police in the weeks leading up to the shootings. According to an SLA inspection four days after the shootings, Gianporcaro and Lau never bothered getting a license for the downstairs bar.
McCune has served in a similar capacity at a series of clubs around Niagara Falls, most notably the former Bedrock's on Third Street. Bedrock's, a frequent source of late-night mayhem, including stabbings and drug dealing, was open periodically under a series of owners throughout the 1990s before the SLA shut it down for good last year.
After Dante's new owners teamed up with McCune, they began running advertisements that sported a logo reading "The original Bedrock's" and referred to the unlicensed portion of the facility as "Beddy's Lounge" to attract former Bedrock's regulars (for those unfamiliar with cartoons, Betty Rubble was a character on "The Flintstones," a popular 1960s cartoon set in the town of Bedrock, and the exterior of the former Bedrock's building was decorated with pictures of characters from the show).
Within weeks of Dante's reopening, the former Bedrock's was reborn as Club 427. Managed by Nirmal Singh Kandola of Five Brothers International -- which also owns the Taj Mahal India and Crown India buffet -- Club 427 was heralded as a New York City-style dance club featuring techno music and a dress code.
Kandola hired Lesli Casal, who operates Casal's School of Fighting Arts on Hyde Park Boulevard with her husband, Ray, to handle security at the new club, which opened May 8.
With a staff of at least five security officers, most of them boxers who train at Casal's gym, she said the first few weeks passed with no major incidents.
But there evidently weren't enough customers for management's tastes, either. By the end of May, the dress code and techno music were history, replaced by hip-hop.
Casal, with extensive experience working security at The Mirage casino and hotel in Las Vegas, said problems escalated quickly with the format change, and were exacerbated by management's growing reluctance to pay for the needed security.
She said that, on several occasions, her security guards spotted drug dealers brazenly working the crowd.
"When you see one guy walking around and approaching everybody in the place, and some of them follow him into the bathroom, there's a high probability that something criminal is going on," Casal said.
She stressed that the small group of troublemakers fell into no particular ethnic category.
"It has nothing to do with white or black," Casal said. "It has to do with a certain element. There were just as many white guys as black guys trying to sell drugs."
Security guards would eject the suspected dealers, she said, but as management cut payroll, the situation became untenable. By June, Casal's security team had been replaced by a single doorman and one bouncer.
At that point, local businessmen familiar with McCune and his track record started seeing his vehicle outside Club 427 on weekend nights. Throughout June, street brawls became a near-weekly ritual on Third Street and in the alley behind the club.
But management called Casal for help shortly after midnight on July 5, little more than 24 hours before Hunt and Smith were killed on Pine Avenue.
"They said all hell was breaking loose, and asked if I could get some of our guys together and come help break it up," she said. "When my boys got there, they couldn't park on the street -- somebody had jackknifed two cars on each side of Club 427. It was obvious something was going to go down, and whoever was planning something didn't want the cops to be able to get in there quickly."
A club employee told one of Casal's guards that, earlier in the evening, patrons were openly smoking "blunts" -- hollowed-out cigars filled with marijuana -- on the dance floor, and when told that wasn't allowed, one man said "stop me" and patted his pocket, implying he had a gun.
Casal's security guards defused the situation and cleared the club. She said there won't be a return engagement, though, and sent Kandola a letter last week severing the business relationship.
"Everyone's leaving because their lives are in danger because of the criminal element they're letting in," Casal said.
Learning the news of the shootings outside Dante's a night after the chaos at Club 427 sealed her decision.
"When I saw it in the paper, I said, 'Club 427 is that waiting to happen,'" she said. "We're lucky it didn't happen that night. Because my guys broke it up and got it out of there, it may have wound up over there."
Constant cuts to the Niagara Falls Police Department make a bad situation worse, a police source said.
"Ten years ago, there would have been 28 cops on duty on a weekend night between 8 p.m. and 4 a.m. -- 14 on their regular shift and 14 from the street crimes unit," the source said.
On the night of the shootings, there were six.
At press time, detectives working on the case were sifting through tips they've received over the past week, but still lacked enough information from witnesses to even settle on a motive.
On Friday, a Niagara Falls Reporter reader walking his dog spotted six empty shell casings near the sidewalk in front of St. Stanislaus Church on 24th Street between Niagara Street and Welch Avenue. After he notified the Reporter, a staffer was dispatched to collect the .40 caliber Smith and Wesson shells, which bore hammer marks indicating that they'd been fired. The shells -- found less than 10 blocks from Dante's -- were turned over to city police for testing.
With Gianporcaro nowhere to be found late last week, Lin surrendered the facility's liquor license and reopened the restaurant portion of Dante's.
Anyone with information on the shootings on Pine Avenue, or the murder of Jamel Jackson on Highland Avenue a day later, can contact city detectives at 286-4553.
| Niagara Falls Reporter | www.niagarafallsreporter.com | July 15 2003 |