By Jessica Wasmund/intern@gnnewspaper.com
For more than four decades, Stefano Magaddino was as much a part of the fabric of Niagara Falls as the cataracts themselves.
A member of the famed Mafia Commission, “Don Stefano” was skilled at expanding his reach and his power even beyond Niagara County. Though federal and local law enforcement knew what Magaddino was up to, the general public seemed shocked by the revelations that surrounded his arrest in 1968.
“For a long time Magaddino was under suspicions,” said Lee Coppola, Dean of the School of Journalism at St. Bonaventure University and a long time investigative reporter for Buffalo area newspapers and TV stations. “Yet the immediate affect of his arrest was the public knowing that he had control in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Ontario. He had a much greater grasp in the Cosa Nostra than many people realized.”
While many residents of Niagara County might have suspected that Magaddino was more than a local funeral parlor operator, the arrest revealed the full extent of the “Buffalo Boss’” connections and influence.
In addition to “legitimate” business like Power City Distributing, and out growth of his former bootlegging operations, and Camellia Linen Supply, Magaddino controlled gambling and loan sharking operations north into Canada and into Ohio and Pennsylvania.
However, the family truly “made its bones” with labor racketeering. Elements of the Magaddino family infiltrated Laborers Local 210 , in Buffalo, in the 1960s and effectively controlled the union until a federal racketeering indictment and the defection of the local’s business manager into the witness protection program, in the 1990s, cleaned out the hiring hall.
The arrest of Magaddino, his son and heir apparent Peter and seven other Cosa Nostra members began to unravel the fabric of the family and its influence.
“Magaddino’s arrest was basically the first nail in the coffin as far as the area’s Mafia,” Coppola said. “To catch the overlord was big in terms of bringing everything else down.”
During the arrest, federal agents seized a suitcase containing $521,000 from under Peter Magaddino’s bed. The discovery led some family members to conclude that Don Stefano and his kid were taking more than their fair share of the family business profits.
With Magaddino’s age, a history of heart aliments and the arrest all working against him, the family began to splinter. As it did, it’s influence on life here splintered too.
Traditional organized crime began to recede.
“Today we have burglaries and petty crimes,” Coppola said. “Not racketeering, bookmaking; those aren’t your basic crimes.”
Armed with increasingly sophisticated tools to monitor organized crime activities, new federal racketeering laws and a willingness by a new generation of mobsters to turn their back on the traditional family “code of silence”, law enforcement has been able to largely dismantle the mob as Magaddino, and those like him, ran it.
“The day he was captured spelled doom on the Mafia,” Coppola said. “It marked the end of organized crime in the Niagara Falls and Buffalo region.”
Today, despite rumors that what was once the Magaddino family still operates here, federal organized crime investigators say those tales just aren’t true. They say small numbers of loosely associated individuals may still get together to commit what once were Mafia style crimes, but it’s not like the old days.
The arrest and death of Don Stefano began the death watch for the Mafia in the Falls.
