I really appreciate you posting all these Buffalo pages. I read DiCarlo and I became interested in Buffalo when I realized just how many regimes they had. I can't comment on the Violis as the mob war has outpaced my expertise.

1. Do you think Magaddinos ties to Canada pre-date his reign, back to DiCarlo Sr. and Palmieri's reign? If not that would mean he expanded north to CAnada and most likely west towards Ohio (Buffalo soldiers were killing Porrello soldiers in the Prohibition era, and probably took some turf as spoils of victory).
2. Do you know of any Buffalo activity i Pennsylvania, or is that a myth propagated by Wikipedia?

Before succumbing to the political witch hunts that crimped many law enforcement operations nationwide in the early 1970s, the Forest Avenue Boys’ efforts produced numerous successful State Police operations, alone and with other law enforcement agencies, against Magaddino’s Niagara Falls-based operations whose criminal tentacles spread north to Toronto, west to Cleveland, south through northwestern Pennsylvania and east into Utica in Central New York.

”Sam” Pieri would regularly drive to the Mayfield Heights area of Cleveland to talk with the heads of the Cleveland mob, the Forest Avenue Boys set up a wire in a motel that Magaddino “lieutenant” James “Westfield Jimmy” Salamone operated at the New York-Pennsylvania border. Salamone, one of Magaddino’s key Pennsylvania operatives, controlled the illegal numbers racket in Erie, Pennsylvania. The wire on “Westfield Jimmy’s” led to the periodic seizures of stolen property Magaddino was shipping to Cleveland for sale or that the Cleveland mob was trucking to Buffalo and Pennsylvania for sale by either Magaddino’s men or Russell Bufalino.

Credited with being the first real “boss’’ of the Buffalo crime “family,” Palmeri aligned himself with the Castellammarese Clan, a Mafia group known to have operations in New York City, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago and in small towns in Eastern Pennsylvania such as Scranton. Later, when it became Magaddino’s crime family, the group used Buffalo, New York as its base but expanded through satellite groups or “crews” throughout upstate New York, including the Rochester and Utica areas and into northwestern Pennsylvania, Youngstown, Ohio and the southern Ontario cities of Niagara Falls, Hamilton and Toronto.

During the Roaring 1920s Magaddino was just starting out on his own to become one of the top Mafia dons the United States was ever to see. He and his boys had something of a free-play on bootlegging and other criminal enterprises. Buffalo police and other Western New York law enforcement agencies concentrated on the Wild West-style tactics and antics of a gang of young Polish-American thugs operating out of Buffalo’s heavily-Eastern European East Side and led by the blond and good-looking John “Big Korney” Kwiatkowski, aka Kwiatowski. Due to routine American ethnic hatreds of the early part of the 20th Century, the Irish-German-led police in Buffalo targeted the so-called “bad seed” products of Eastern Europe. That gave Magaddino what amounted to a free rein to set up what for decades would prove to be moneymaking operations throughout Western New York and into southern Ontario, Canada and branching out towards Cleveland and northwestern Pennsylvania through alliances with Magaddino relatives.