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Gary Jenkins: [00:00:00] Hey, Wiretappers. It’s good to be back here in studio Gangland Wire. Welcome to everybody, and this
is Gary Jenkins, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective, with another mob story from up north, way up north. But first, don’t forget, I have this new podcast, Murder Blueprint, and it’s all the kinds of stories that we don’t cover on Gangland Wire. It’s like serial killers and those kind of horror crimes, kidnappings.
And I just did a story, a friend of mine was a, an extortion victim, or extortion attempt victim, where they cloned his daughter’s voice and then tried to extort money from him, acting like they’d kidnapped her. So you know, all kinds of different stories like this. But today, again, we’re back at Gangland Wire, so we’re gonna talk about the mob in the United States, or international, as you will.
We’re gonna be up right along the Canadian American border. So I have an author here, David Kenney. Welcome, David.
David Kinney: Thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it.
Gary Jenkins: All right, so David wrote a book called Mobbed Up in Batavia. So David, I had [00:01:00] not heard of Batavia. Tell us where Batavia is.
David Kinney: Okay. Batavia is the county seat of Genesee County, which is about halfway between Buffalo and Rochester. So it’s pretty close to to Lake Ontario, and it is in the the frozen, we’re the frozen chosen-
Gary Jenkins: Batavia, because that geographic location in mob history,
It was really important. Tell me, about why it was so important.
David Kinney: Sure. In, in general, take a step back any, anytime for instance in prohibition, when liquor had to be imported from Canada, it would come through Niagara Falls, and it would come through Buffalo.
And in order to get to New York City or anywhere else in the country, it would have to come through the town of Batavia. Route Five became the the route that, that everybody took, and that goes right through town.
Gary Jenkins: That real far northern area, at one time, in the early days, that was controlled by Stefano Magaddino, who was, a-
New York City transplant that went up [00:02:00] north there and established- … himself up there. As we all know, prohibition is what really formed the modern organized crime, the national crime syndicate, because it had to be organized, and you had to make these international connections.
And these mob guys from Sicily knew how to do that. So they had made all these international connections and bringing all that booze down out of Canada. It was still… there’s no- … prohibition in Canada, no prohibition in England. It all came down through Canada. Pretty interesting history there.
And so you wrote a book about this, Mobbed Up in Batavia. So tell us a little bit about the real life circumstances that, that caused you to write this book
David Kinney: It’s actually nonfiction. Everything in the book is true. Everything in the book really happened.
And, I may editorialize a little bit, but I don’t fictionalize it at all.
Gary Jenkins: What’s the genesis of this story?
David Kinney: I think the media would have you know that. As prohibition was, mother’s milk to the mob. And and so even Magaddino was the one who established the Bootleggers Union. So you could go ahead and smuggle booze from Canada into the [00:03:00] country, but you had to pay your union dues to to Stefano Magaddino and his organization in order to get it in here.
The the genesis of the book actually came from a story that’s been floating around town, kind of the town lore about the the murder of Alfred Panepinto in 1937. And I I have breakfast every Thursday morning with a bunch of guys over at a diner here in town, and they’re called the ROMEOs, the Retired Old Men Eating Out.
Okay. And they, And to give you an idea, I’m the youngest guy there. Most of these guys graduated from high school the year I was born.
Gary Jenkins: Okay.
David Kinney: So the, we’re… and I’m pushing 70 now so most of these guys are getting up there, and they have got… They know everybody.
They’ve been here since, they were born, and they know stories. They know everybody in town, and they tell stories. And one of the stories that came up consistently was that that when Alfred Panepinto was gunned down in La Tempio’s pool hall, that a [00:04:00] man came into the pool hall with a Thompson submachine gun, with a Tommy gun, a Chicago typewriter, and filled the place with lead and killed Alfred Panepinto and made his escape.
And that’s the story that goes around town all the time. And so they told it enough times that I started to think I’m gonna look into this.” It’s pretty, pretty wild sounding crime. And as I looked into it, I found out that’s not how it really happened.
And that once I started looking into to Panepinto and his background and what he was all about, then the story absolutely exploded into a series of murders that were most likely conducted by the Magaddino organization in form of a vendetta.
And so that’s… So for a year and a half, I did some research and stumbled in, down that path and wrote a book about it.
Gary Jenkins: So I also was [00:05:00] researching a little bit about this, this guy that owned that pool hall, Frank LoTempio was killed up in Buffalo. Why the vendetta?
David Kinney: Here’s how it went. PenaPinto was really the final killing in a series of killings of Batavia bookmakers. What started it all appears to be the bombing of
Arcangelo Longo’s home. And Arcangelo Longo lived next door to Stefano Magaddino, and happened to be Magaddino’s sister. And so somebody threw some dynamite through the front window, blew up the home, killing her and injuring her three daughters. And so this, as you might expect, made an impression on Stefano Magaddino, and being a a cold and calculating mob leader, he decided to take revenge on those he believed caused it.
And even though the press played it off [00:06:00] as completely unrelated events, and the police seemed to be fumbling around quite a bit, The connection was obvious to me. Now, you gotta remember in the, this is in the, the ’30s. And so Magaddino, he was a member of the original commission.
People always talk about the five families of New York, but there were really seven, and if you include Capone and Stefano Magaddino. And Magaddino, he controlled the entire western New York area, parts of Toronto in Canada, parts of Pennsylvania, and Ohio. So he had a wide reach.
So that’s a lot of territory to cover. In 1931, when he was established as a commission his power base was completely solidified. All of the internal fighting, the Castellammarese War between the different families was declared over. And at the same time, a guy named Joe DeCarlo came out of jail and formed the DeCarlo gang, which, was really the enforcement [00:07:00] arm for the Magaddino family.
And so this is, where all of the elements came together for for Magaddino to begin to expand his reach through to other small towns.
Gary Jenkins: Also up there, there’s Rochester. How did Rochester fit in with this? Were they totally under Stefano Magaddino?
David Kinney: They were, but I tell you the truth, I’m not as well-versed in the Rochester lore because it’s extensive, And I was focused in on this particular story. But, obviously the organized crime was centered in Buffalo, then it moved under Magaddino to Niagara Falls, and they did control the Rochester organization.
Gary Jenkins: Yeah. That’s what I thought. There’s a guy named Frank Valenti who was seemed to be the boss up there.
David Kinney: Sure, sure
Gary Jenkins: this mob war how did this develop out? Did nobody else outside of Magaddino’s people got involved, but how did that continue to develop in Batavia?
David Kinney: I don’t point the finger directly at him
what I [00:08:00] try to do is line up the events such that I believe that it’s pretty obvious what happened. Magaddino’s organization was hundreds if not maybe, to some estimates, over 1,000 people if you count all the associates. The captains and the the soldiers and the associates.
He had people everywhere, all over the area. Unlike an investigator Magaddino didn’t have to have proof. He really just had to believe what happened. I believe that his people informed him that it was the LoTempio gang that that bombed his sister’s home.
The family lore of the LoTempios and the Panapentos is that they were never violent, but somebody did it. Stefano Magaddino clearly believed that it was them.
Gary Jenkins: Wow, now bombing his sister’s home, were they intending on getting Magaddino and just screwed up the addresses or something?
David Kinney: . That’s one of the theories. That’s one of the theories, but honestly, [00:09:00] the they’re dead either way, right? You kill his sister, you’re gonna die. You kill him, you’re gonna die. The reason that I think it wasn’t a mistake, and it was a popular opinion that it was a mistaken identity, the wrong house.
For, a contract hire that came from out of town, that certainly is plausible.
Gary Jenkins: Yeah.
David Kinney: What happened to Alfred Panapento, he grew up in, in Batavia. He was a Southsider. He grew up with all these guys, but he got his mortuary license. And so he was a funeral director, and he moved to Niagara Falls opened up a funeral home.
Magaddino and Joe DeCarlo came to power, they began to take notice of the Batavia group of bookies, that they were making a lot of money. They were riding around town, they were flashing cash, driving new cars, wearing fancy clothes. They were living the dream. This got a lot of notice, and they decided to tax the bookies.
The LoTempios, they didn’t want to be taxed, and they fought it a little bit. They [00:10:00] went to Magaddino’s organization, complained about it, and said they didn’t want it. And that resulted in Nick Longo, Arcangelo Longo’s husband, who was up there in the Magaddino organization. He went to Alfred Panepinto, the funeral director in Niagara Falls, and he asked for his tax.
It appears that Panepinto refused, and Nick Longo beat him up severely. And we can tell this from the interrogation of his wife, Rose Panepinto. She talks about the event, and he was, of course, very upset. He ended up with a partner named Paul Palmeri, who was also big time into the Magaddino family, and they eventually pushed him out of business.
So here he is, he’s been beaten by the Magaddino family, by Nick Longo. He’s been essentially driven out of business by the, the mob. He ends up coming back to Batavia. I believe that at some point somebody made a phone call somebody did [00:11:00] something and they ended up initiating this bombing of the Longo home in order to get Nick Longo.
Nick Longo was out of town at the time. He was in New York City, and whoever did this didn’t bother to check.
Gary Jenkins: Yeah, now it makes sense that Longo was the one that attacked Panepinto and ran him out of business. It just happened to be- Magaddino’s sister who got in the middle of all this.
So that’s that really- … makes sense. So now they do that, then Magaddino and Nick Longo is gonna come back big time. Is there any good stories about them coming back after other Magaddino people?
David Kinney: No, I don’t think they had that kind of ability. But the, the first thing that happened was that that Frank LoTempio, who was the leader of the Southsiders gang, he was gunned down at a wedding in Buffalo, and he was actually he was there to to celebrate the wedding, but he also, at the end, when he was headed back to his car, he was met by his his cousin they shook hands and he walked away Frank LoTempio turned [00:12:00] around and there were two guys there, they gunned him down at point-blank range in front of 100 people in the street. That was the first killing of what they called the Bookie War.
Gary Jenkins: Wow. It’s interesting, this was, how they went into gambling after, this was right at the end of prohibition, then they go right into- Sure … gambling, which is all the mob families throughout the United States did this. Since they didn’t have speakeasies out there kicking them up, but some tribute all the time and selling booze for them.
Now they gotta go make the bookies kick up money and giving them tribute all the time.
David Kinney: Sure, sure. It’s just another revenue stream for them. You got, you got liquor, you got extortion, you got gambling prostitution. It’s just another revenue stream.
Gary Jenkins: Panepinto and LoTempio, was that all they did?
Or did they have a lot of different rackets in that Northern New York area, up in Niagara Falls and Rochester and Buffalo. Did they have other rackets, other… that they were doing?
David Kinney: Frank LoTempio, he was mostly a bookie for the horses. He ran a lot of dice [00:13:00] games.
He ran a lot of poker games in town. So there was a number of different kinds of gambling, but he ran gambling and and sports betting almost exclusively. But he had two brothers. Russell was his younger brother, and Joseph was also his younger brother. And they were orphaned when they were teenagers, and so they grew up together in the same neighborhood with the Panepintos.
Matter of fact Anna Anna LoTempio married Anthony Panepinto, and Rose LoTempio married Alfred Panepinto. So they were brothers and sisters-in-law- … coming up. They were in the same bowling leagues. They played baseball together. All of this was reported, in the various newspapers because they were also, like many other Batavians that were involved in illegal activities, were very philanthropic.
They were heavily involved in the neighborhood. They were heavily involved in the church, St. Anthony’s Church, and they helped raise funds for the church, and build on extensions and things like that. And so they were quite involved in the community. But [00:14:00] Russell, he was involved in prostitution operating a disorderly house.
He was he was involved in white slavery. He ran a lot of dice games, and he ran football pools and sport betting pools in neighboring towns, and things like that. So he was involved in a lot. Joseph not as much. Joseph would run the the pool halls, and and he would participate some.
But he was… seemed like he was a little bit more on the outside of the LoTempio brothers’ schemes. He participated, but not heavily.
Gary Jenkins: Who were their clients? I’ve interviewed a guy from Saratoga, New York about things that happened in Saratoga. All New Yorkers went up there a lot for the races.
Now were in the summertime especially, a lot of people coming up to Niagara Falls? Were they dependent on the tourist trade up in during the summertime up in Upstate New York, or was it just all local people?
David Kinney: It was local to a point. They eventually got the Annenberg wire, and so they were running the wire.
And so they had, they had the betting room with the [00:15:00] chalkboards, and the chalk boy, and the guy on with the headphones on the wire posting race results and all of that stuff, and that stuff wasn’t cheap. And and so they had access to national information. And when Rochester really clamped down on the illegal gambling Frank LoTempio, he arranged for his patrons to take the train or the bus free of charge on him to come and gamble at his establishments.
And so he was called, quite the innovative bookie because he was drawing people in from Buffalo. He was drawing people in from Rochester, from, all, all the town Medina all the little towns around. So there was plenty of business, and I think in modern terms, I think we could easily say that he was doing about $2 million a year.
Gary Jenkins: Wow. Man, that’s, These guys were… They were entrepreneurial to the max, weren’t they? That’s amazing.
David Kinney: When you start talking about 1930s small town-
Gary Jenkins: Yeah …
David Kinney: that kind of [00:16:00] money makes a huge difference. Yeah. And during the Depression, it was amazing.
Gary Jenkins: That’s why I was wondering, who are these clients?
Because they’re mainly rural people, farmers, and small business town businessmen and everything like that. So where did their client base come from? But he was pulling from the other cities around. He was smart enough, when they clamped down someplace, he was wide open. He’s more out in the country like that.
David Kinney: Absolutely. When he started running the wire, he was taking bets over the phone just any other- Yeah … bookie.
Gary Jenkins: Yeah.
David Kinney: He was extending credit to, known gamblers most of these people were return gamblers. Unless there was some- Yeah … special race going on, then the housewives get involved and everything like that.
But, it’s mostly the same people over and over again, it’s probably a lot of $2 bets, $2, $5 bets, that kind of thing. A $200 bet, what would that be? About, 1,900 bucks, $2,000. A single bet, that just simply wouldn’t happen in a town like Batavia. That would be called in from who knows where.
Could be anywhere.
And also other bookies want to lay off the action, so [00:17:00] they might lay it off to somebody like Tempio.
Or a piece of it.
Gary Jenkins: And Magadino, he probably, he saw that. He saw how these
David Kinney: guys were operating. Oh, absolutely.
Gary Jenkins: He saw how much money they were making, so he needed an excuse to come move in on them.
But they, they gave it. He can move in and take it all over, I would imagine by the end.
David Kinney: Absolutely. And but the, the funny thing is the reason that when I don’t think, the police and the authorities, they called a bookie war that these guys refused to pay their tax, and that’s what got them killed.
The reason that I think it was not that is because it violates the cardinal rule of extortion, right? You don’t kill the golden goose.
You never collect a dollar from a dead man.
Gary Jenkins: Yeah.
David Kinney: They killed Russell or they killed Frank, then they killed Sam Izzo, Sam Yates, and then they they car bombed Russell in Medina, tried to kill him.
He lost a foot in the process, and then they came along and they killed killed Alfred. And you just don’t kill, you don’t kill the people that are gonna pay, that you, th- that you want to pay.
Gary Jenkins: Really. No, that’s crazy. That’s, [00:18:00] mobbed
David Kinney: up. So there had to be something else. There had to be some other motivation and- Yeah
What better motivation that somebody killed your sister? Oh,
Gary Jenkins: yeah. That… they probably would’ve just eased on and moved in on and eventually taken it over as best they could, but left everybody in place to, to run the thing. Sure. But kill the guy’s sister- They
David Kinney: would beat them up and-
Gary Jenkins: Yeah …
David Kinney: yeah, beat them up until they until they relent, it’s like, “You’re gonna pay us.” Yeah. And yeah, and then you’d, you take their car, take their home, take whatever. With the threat of physical violence and things like that, most people after a while are gonna give in and begin to pay.
Gary Jenkins: Yeah.
David Kinney: But kill a- And that’s, that was the general method
Gary Jenkins: kill a guy’s sister, this is old school Sicilian vendetta time, isn’t it?
David Kinney: I tell you what. It’s whoever thought that plan was gonna work- Yeah, really … really wasn’t thinking. They weren’t thinking long-term
Gary Jenkins: All right, David Kenney, Mobbed Up in Batavia. Thank you so much for coming on.
This is a really interesting book, and guys, I’m gonna have [00:19:00] a link in the show notes down below for you to buy it. You’re doing a talk on it, and a book release party here in the near future?
David Kinney: I did one a couple of weeks ago. Okay. So I just launched the book on the, on the 15th, on the the anniversary of the Alfred Panepinto killing, oddly.
Yeah. It was a book fair, and it went really well. I’ve got a couple of presentations coming up. A couple of book signings coming up. Things are going along pretty good.
Gary Jenkins: Good. David, thanks so much for coming on the show and telling us these stories.
David Kinney: I appreciate it. Thank you very much.