Scoundrel Time 200 years of dirty tricks, dark deeds, and other shenanigans Compiled by Ron Ehmke 1790s: Joseph Ellicott’s visionary radial design for “New Amsterdam” upsets some of its earliest settlers, including Cornelius Winne and Jesse Skinner (described in the public record as “a person of no note”), who disappear and are never heard from again. Another, Asa Ransom, is offered a chance to buy property for a tavern in nearby Clarence Hollow, thus becoming the first Buffalonian to flee to the ’burbs. July 1802: John Hewitt, killed on the front porch of his cabin, becomes one of Buffalo’s earliest murder victims: a Seneca Indian identified as “Stiff Arm George” is convicted, despite hiring Red Jacket for his defense. George is sentenced to death by hanging but pardoned by Gov. Dewitt Clinton when the tribe protests that he has not received a fair trial and they threaten to riot. 1803: Erastus Granger, brother of Thomas Jefferson’s postmaster general, is appointed postmaster, port collector, and superintendent of Indian affairs—all of which are largely honorary positions, making him the first local beneficiary of political patronage. 1812: General Porter calls Brigadier General Alexander Smyth “a coward, devoid of judgment.” With friends, seconds, and physicians in attendance, they duel, each firing a shot at the other, and each missing. 1815: In Erie County’s first murder trial, soldiers Charles Thompson and James Peters are convicted of killing resident James Burba during a quarrel and publicly executed. 1821: After an unidentified Seneca Indian dies, a female tribe member named Kauquatan is accused of having cast a spell on him. A Seneca court tries and convicts her of murder by sorcery, sentencing her to death. When she flees to Canada, Chief Soonongise, AKA “Tommy Jimmy,” is appointed her “secret executioner.” He catches her, and as soon as they cross the border back into the States, he cuts her throat. The U.S. Army arrests Tommy Jimmy (who is again represented by Red Jacket); he is acquitted, but the state soon passes a law that Indians are subject to state laws, even on their own territory. 1824–25: After sailor/peddler John “Scotchman” Love—known for his generosity to people in need—disappears, brothers Nelson, Israel, and Isaac Thayer are seen riding his horse and collecting debts owed to him. Love’s body is found in a shallow grave behind Israel’s house in North Boston—so shallow his toes are visible. The Thayer brothers are convicted of robbery and murder and hanged in Niagara Square in June 1825 in front of an audience of 25-30,000 people (ten times the population of Buffalo at the time). September 1826: Freemasons “disappear” William Morgan. July–August 1832: The first reported case of cholera occurs on July 16, when “an Irish laborer, an habitual drunkard,” succumbs within eight hours to the disease that has already ravaged Europe. While some accounts report as many as a hundred cases in a single day, by the end of the two peak months of the epidemic, there are between eighty and 120 total deaths. Citizens begin diluting their drinking water with brandy, leading to “a prolonged saturnalia of bibulous indulgence” in the words of one member of the city’s first board of health. 1836: Eagle Tavern proprietor and master builder Benjamin Rathbun—the man behind two hotels, multiple office buildings, fifty-two stores, and thirty-three private residences—is arrested on forgery charges and awaits sentencing in the very jail he has built. Rathbun has recruited his fourteen-year-old nephew to forge the signatures of some of Buffalo’s wealthiest citizens, netting more than a million and a half dollars in ill-gotten gains. The nephew and his father both evade arrest, leaving Rathbun to serve five years of hard labor at Auburn Prison. 1852: William Darry strikes his wife of three months with an ax handle, and “for three days afterwards, … perpetrated … the most inhuman cruelties, knocking her down with chairs and clubs, and beating her in a frightful manner with his fists” (according to the Buffalo Courier, December 23, 1900). She dies three days later, and “in pronouncing sentence of death the judge suggests that this case presents a new chapter in the history of the human heart.” Darry is hanged on December 1, 1854. “He presented a most pitiable sight on the scaffold, shaking like a man with the palsy, and crying aloud to the bystanders not to kill him,” notes the Courier fifty years later. 1863: Rev. Judson Benedict of East Aurora preaches pacifism to his congregation, urging members to make up their own minds about whether or not to serve in the military but suggesting that they “cheerfully submit” to any punishment for avoiding the draft. He is arrested, briefly released through a writ of habeas corpus, rearrested when the writ is suspended, and finally sent to jail in Washington. 1874: During his campaign for the presidency, former Buffalo mayor and Erie County sheriff Grover Cleveland is accused of fathering a child out of wedlock twelve years earlier during his days as a lawyer. Cleveland admits paying child support to the mother, Maria Halpin, purely out of concern. While the story is already widely known locally, it provokes a national scandal and inspires the opposition’s chant, “Ma, Ma, where’s my pa? / Gone to the White House, / Ha ha ha.” 1874: Ben Ballard, one of America’s biggest counterfeiters, is arrested on Ferry Street with more than $10,000 in counterfeit bills after allegedly circulating more than $1 million in fake money nationwide. August 1881: Buffalonian Lemuel Smith, evading police to pay a drunken visit to the newly installed Brush Electric Company generators, becomes the first American to be electrocuted, inadvertently inspiring Buffalo dentist Alfred P. Southwick to invent the electric chair. 1883: Thomas Waldron, AKA “Brother Frank,” president of St. Joseph’s College downtown, is accused of raping a seven-year-old girl. The trial becomes such a spectacle that police bar the doors and prevent women from entering the courtroom. Waldron is expelled from his religious order and sentenced to five years in jail (later commuted to one year). May 1893: According to a map printed by the Christian Homestead Association, a ten-block region of downtown along the Erie Canal contains seventy-five “houses of ill fame,” a hundred saloons, and nineteen prostitution-friendly “free theatre saloons.” Canal Street is dubbed “the wickedest street in the world.” 1900: Over the course of a single year, Buffalo police make more than 17,000 arrests for public drunkenness or disorderly conduct. September 1901: Leon Czolgosz shoots President McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition. A lynch mob forms outside his jail cell. Within fifty-three days, he is indicted, tried, convicted, sentenced, and executed by electric chair at Auburn. 1903: Doctors discover that “Harry Gorman,” a heavy-set “man-cook” employed by the New York Central Railway hospitalized for a broken limb, is biologically a woman and has been living as a male for more than twenty years. “Gorman”—whose real name is never revealed—claims there are at least ten other cross-dressing women also working for the railroad. The case is included in an important 1908 defense of homosexuality, The Intersexes, by Edward I. Prime Stevenson (writing as “Xavier Mayne”). February 1903: Socialite Edwin L. Burdick is found nearly naked with his skull bashed in by a golf club, provoking some residents to decry the “immoral contingent, that Elmwood Avenue set.” November 1903: Franz and Johanna Frehr, both in their eighties, are rumored to have stashed away their life savings in their Jefferson Street house. One day a moving truck pulls up and Charles Bonier, seventy-four, settles into the house. When neighbors and relatives inquire about the Frehrs, he explains they have moved away abruptly after selling him their house. When the police finally investigate after repeated complaints, they dig up the back yard in the middle of the night and discover the frozen, fully clothed bodies of the missing couple. Bonier is tried, found guilty, and executed in July 1907. 1906: Blackmailers threaten the lives of butcher/labor contractor Domenico Bellisimo and his family, placing a bomb on his doorstep after he fails to pay $600 to Mafia precursor “the Black Hand.” The family survives the blast, thus ensuring the creation, a few generations later, of the Anchor Bar and the chicken wing. February 1911: A gunfight erupts outside a tavern on Trenton Avenue, leaving both men dead. The cause of the duel? A spilled beer. May 1918: Pete Vukram sings a song in Munich’s Saloon on Abbott Road in South Buffalo. Another patron, Mike Milckovic, yells at him to shut up. When Vukram ignores the heckler, Milckovic shoots him in the chest and kills him, earning a three-to-ten-year prison sentence. December 1919: On the last night of the year, the East Side News reports, “There were probably more hopeless drunks to be seen reeling on downtown streets in the middle of the night than had been seen for years.” Even after the Volstead Act becomes law a few weeks later, Buffalo grows notorious as “one of the wettest towns in the country.” 1922–23: Police Commissioner Austin J. Roche arrests Williamsville roadhouse co-owner Joseph Di Carlo, who is then released on $50,000 bail. During his trial, Di Carlo’s powerful friends attempt to bribe witnesses, and then threaten the key witness, Joseph Pattituccio. On New Year’s Day, 1924, Pattituccio is shot in the chin and the back. Di Carlo is arrested again, gets a federal indictment, and serves six years in a federal prison in Atlanta. 1922–23: John Kwatowski, AKA “Big Korney,” leads a gang on the East Side that begins with small burglary jobs and then builds an illegal brewery in Depew. Armed with a machine gun and other weaponry, they kill a security guard and a patrolman. Gang member Victor Chounicki, sought by the police, is shot by his former comrades and buried in a shallow grave behind a barn at the brewery, after which his assassins literally dance on his grave to level the ground. The two gang members who do the shooting are given the death penalty (later commuted to life imprisonment) and Big Korney is acquitted, although he eventually serves twenty-five years. November 1929: The Coast Guard captures the Uncas, an armored Russian vessel used to smuggle alcohol out of Canada across Lake Erie. Rum running has been a common activity throughout Prohibition, with boats painted white and their crews similarly garbed to blend in with the winter weather. February 1930: Twenty-year-old Sally Joyce Richards, branded the “Blonde Bandit,” is found guilty of first-degree robbery and sentenced to twenty years to life in Auburn. Richards, along with Peter Dombkiewicz, twenty-one, and Stanley Przbybl, twenty-seven (dubbed “the Millionaire Kid”), are accused of robbing a jewelry store on Broadway. When a lovestruck Richards attempts escape from prison in April, her story is covered in the New York Times. The case eventually inspires a heavily fictionalized B-movie, The Blonde Bandit. March 1930: Clotilde Marchand is found dead in what the Buffalo News, nearly seventy years later, will declare “perhaps the most sensational [murder case] in the city’s history.” 1936: A candlelight search for wine in a gas-filled basement sparks an explosion on New Year’s Day that turns part of the waterfront district known as Dante Place into rubble, killing five people in a tenement and ultimately leading to the razing of the Italian immigrant neighborhood. 1937: Sixteen-year-old Frank Swiatek of Wilson Street hacks his older brother (who is asleep at the time) to death with an ax. He pleads guilty to manslaughter; the judge sends him to a reformatory rather than state prison, and he is released on parole in two years. Five months later, he kills his ten-year-old brother and twelve-year-old sister (both also asleep) with a hammer. A new jury finds him innocent by reason of insanity and he is sent to a mental institution. 1947: Dunkirk-born kidnapper and holdup man Charles “Little Mosco” Falzone steals the payroll of a Town of Tonawanda company and becomes the first Western New Yorker to make the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list after it is created in 1950. He evades capture until he is identified by his photo in a post office in New Bedford, Penn., in 1954. 1953: Hooker Chemical Corporation, which has been dumping industrial waste into the partially dug “Love Canal” since 1920, fills in the canal and sells the land to the Niagara Falls Board of Education for a dollar, with the deed stipulating that the company will not bear responsibility for physical harm or death because of the buried materials. Fifteen years later, thanks to citizen activism, the state finally begins to investigate the numerous claims of health and environmental problems linked to the site. May 1956: Fights break out among the thousand passengers of the Canadiana taking Buffalonians, many of them teenagers, to Crystal Beach in Ontario. The incident is branded a “race riot” in the national press. May 1958: The New York State Investigation Commission (SIC) launches a seven-year nonpartisan investigation of corruption in central and western New York, culminating first in a 1961 report on syndicated gambling and the complicit role the police have played in this half-billion-dollar operation. Cops are revealed to have issued “courtesy cards” to fraternal organizations and even honorary membership in the Buffalo Motorcycle Division of the police department to upper-echelon gamblers; they also conceal criminal activity from the public record while retaining the true facts in so-called “Pittsburgh books” (suggesting that the crimes took place far away). Over the years, the SIC discovers police turning a blind eye to burglaries, larcenies, assaults, and robberies, as well as prostitution, leading report authors to decry an “absolute see-nothing, know-nothing attitude toward enforcement” at all levels of the police. November 1962: Albert F. Nussbaum, a Buffalo-born salesman turned multicity bank robber and one of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted, is arrested after a high-speed chase beginning outside the former Statler Hilton Hotel. Along with partner Bobby Randall “One Eye” Wilcoxson, he maintains an arsenal of antitank guns, hand grenades, and machine guns in a Wyoming County barn. After he is released on parole in 1976, Nussbaum writes a number of thrillers, mystery novels, and TV scripts under several pen names. September 1965: Town of Tonawanda real estate salesman Charles Gerass is found hogtied in the trunk of his Cadillac in a parking lot at the intersection of Sheridan and Delaware; the murder, believed to be linked to the mob, remains a cold case for over forty years. 1967: Pascal “Paddy” Calabrese, convicted of the armed robbery of the treasurer’s office in City Hall, testifies against local Mafia figures, then becomes the first informant to be given a new identity by the federal government under what will become known as the Witness Relocation Program. He leaves town with his wife and four children, two of whom are fathered by his wife’s first husband, Thomas Leonhard. Leonhard’s search for the children is detailed in the book and film Hide in Plain Sight. 1967: After six weeks of surveillance by the narcotics squad, UB professor Leslie Fiedler is arrested on charges of maintaining premises where banned substances were being used, although it is later revealed that marijuana and hashish have been planted in his house. Initially found guilty, Fiedler loses his home insurance and a teaching position in Amsterdam, then writes the book Being Busted about the experience. The conviction is reversed in 1972 after multiple appeals. 1968: Planning begins on a new domed stadium to be built in Lancaster, spurring a debate (and accompanying series of court cases) which rages for thirteen years, during which two major players die of heart attacks, several politicians resign, two go to jail, and the county ends up owing hundreds of thousands of dollars in attorney fees. August 1968: Draft resister Bruce Beyer seeks sanctuary from the police in the Unitarian Universalist Church on Elmwood Avenue, joined by eight supporters. After a violent confrontation with the police, the “Buffalo Nine” are arrested, leading to a highly theatrical trial in the city’s first draft-resistance case. August 1971: Time magazine runs a scathing story on the delayed construction of the Thaddeus J. Dulski Federal Office Building, calling it “a monument to the power of the Buffalo Mafia” and focusing national attention on mob control of Laborers Local 210 and the eccentric strong-arm tactics of “job coordinator”/Mafia lieutenant John Cammillieri. August 1971: Five young people break into the draft board headquarters in the post office on Ellicott Street intending to destroy the records of local draftees, but the plot is thwarted by FBI infiltrators of other anti-war groups around the country. The handling of the case against the “Buffalo Five” (who refer to themselves simply as “The Buffalo”) ignites local controversy for months. September 1971: Inmates at Attica Correctional Facility riot, leaving thirty-nine inmates and hostages dead and eighty-eight injured. The resulting court case will span decades. 1972: The federal Clean Waters Act begins to address the decades of dumping of sewage and other hazardous materials in the Niagara River and Lake Erie, responsible among other things for the high rate of typhoid in the city. 1974: Mayor Frank Sedita’s commissioner of streets, Carl Perla, Sr., is indicted for assigning public employees to work on his private properties on the West Side. 1974: It’s a big year for mob deaths. Stefano Magaddino, boss of the Buffalo Mafia and described as “the grand old man of Cosa Nostra,” dies without ever going on trial. Frank D’Angelo is shot as he leaves Mulligan’s Café and Nightclub on Hertel. John Cammillieri is murdered outside the Roseland, on his way to celebrate his sixty-third birthday. 1976: The FBI and state police operate a pair of antique shops on Elmwood as part of a sting operation, leading to the arrest of Charles “Chuckie” Carlo and the return of hundreds of thousands of dollars in stolen property, including a Rembrandt. 1977: Two policemen and a friend beat eighteen-year-old Richard Long to death after a traffic incident. April 1979: Hairstylist Peter Piccolo is gunned down in his Allentown salon in one of the city’s most notorious unsolved murders. March 1980: William “Billy the Kid” Sciolino is gunned down in broad daylight by hitmen in a Metro Rail construction trailer on the corner of Main and Ferry. Despite multiple witnesses, no one will identify the killers. 1983: Mayor Jimmy Griffin orders the first of several raids on the downtown gay bar City Lights, referring to its customers as “faggots and fruits” and attempting to deny the establishment a liquor license. 1984: Artist Billy Lawless unveils a new public art sculpture, which does not impress the mayor. Winter 1987: Parks Commissioner Robert E. Delano embellishes the water in Delaware Park Lake. February 1990: John C. Sacco, longtime member of the mob, breaks the code of silence and begins naming names to the FBI. 1994: Ninety-two homicides are reported in Buffalo during the year, a 165-year record. 1994: Former Buffalo Bills star player O. J. Simpson launches an interesting new phase of his multi-faceted career. 1998: Dr. Barnett Slepian is assassinated in his Amherst home; a worldwide manhunt eventually leads to the capture of his killer, James Kopp. June 2000: Country music superstars Kenny Chesney and Tim McGraw are arrested outside Ralph Wilson Stadium after Chesney rides away on a Mounted Reserve deputy’s horse and McGraw attacks deputies trying to stop him. Charges are later dropped. 2001: Rapper DMX is arrested on the Kensington Expressway for traffic violations and possessing marijuana and is sentenced to fifteen days in the Erie County Correctional Facility in Alden. After spending two weeks of national notoriety as a fugitive from justice, he turns himself in. Sources: Brown and Watson, Buffalo: Lake City in Niagara Land; The Buffalo Courier; The Buffalo News; Mark Goldman, City on the Lake; Vogel, Patton, and Redding, America’s Crossroads: Buffalo’s Canal Street/Dante Place; and www.buffalonian.com, plus miscellaneous items from the Grosvenor Room in the Central Branch of the Buffalo and Erie County Public Library. SUBSCRIBE NOW Back to the Table of Contents Back to Top