Recent criminal cases show the Buffalo Mafia never really disappeared

The obituary for the Buffalo Mafia was prematurely written in the 2010s.

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the Todaro Mob empire continues to reign supreme in Western New York today, despite earlier comments by the press and local politicians celebrating the supposed abolition of the region’s Mafia. Those comments were bolstered by the lack of public information about the Buffalo Mob available in traditional media and culture circles.

But the once-monolithic borgata never actually went anywhere after all.

Over the past decade, bulldoggish federal prosecutor and Buffalo native Joe Tripi has brought the Magaddino crime family out of the shadows with a series of cases exposing the organization as still active and quite powerful in Western New York. Most recently, Tripi successfully convicted Buffalo mobster Peter Gerace Jr., nephew of reputed Buffalo Mafia don Joseph “Joe Pizza” Todaro Jr., and retired DEA agent Joe Bongiovanni in a federal case that set off deadly reverberations.

Shockingly, several people, either directly or indirectly involved in the investigation, have been murdered or died under suspicious circumstances since the first day the case was filed in late fall of 2019. Four witnesses in the case lost their lives to drug overdoses—at least two of which were investigated for foul play—in the last three years alone. New York Supreme Court Judge John Michalski, an unindicted co-conspirator in the case, died by apparent suicide just days after the feds raided his home. A year earlier, he was injured in a train-track accident shrouded in mystery following Gerace Jr.’s arrest in the winter of 2021.

Tripi, 48, is from the north side of Buffalo. He played football and hockey in his youth in nearby Tonawanda, developing a reputation for determination and grit. That reputation translated to his role as a prosecutor.

“Joe’s a hometown kid. His attitude and approach echo the city’s traits. … He’s scrappy, just downright dogged in going after crime and corruption around here,” says veteran Buffalo News crime reporter Dan Herbeck. “He’s made the topic of Italian organized crime a thing around here again. He went looking where people had stopped looking.”

Even Todaro Jr., in a “respect your adversary” kind of way, can appreciate the effort.

“Tripi is just doing his job. You can’t blame a man for doing his job,” Todaro Jr. told Herbeck in a 2022 story for the Buffalo News on Tripi’s pursuit of cases against men with Italian last names and alleged connections to the secret society (to which Todaro Jr.’s family has long denied any ties).

According to the government, Gerace Jr. hails from the Buffalo Mafia’s royal family. His grandfather was longtime alleged Buffalo boss Joseph “Lead Pipe Joe” Todaro Sr., whose son (and Gerace Jr.’s uncle), Joe Pizza, was the suspected underboss and successor. Gerace Jr.’s father, reputed Buffalo Mob soldier and former labor union chief Peter “Big Pete” Gerace Sr., married Lead Pipe Joe’s daughter.

However, neither Todaro Jr. nor Gerace Sr. has been implicated in any of Gerace Jr.’s criminal affairs. The jovial, seemingly easygoing 80-year-old Todaro Jr. owns the La Nova pizza and wing franchise in New York, has no major criminal record, and has denied allegations of involvement in the Buffalo Mafia. Todaro Sr. died from cancer in 2012 at age 89, after nearly 30 years on the throne.

With Todaro Sr. gone, Buffalo’s citizens and press corps both assumed the Mafia in Western New York was history, a scourge of a societal illness cured by time, changing cultural patterns, and general manpower and resource attrition. But Tripi, the jurisdiction’s top organized crime drug buster, and the feds called their bluff. They shifted their focus back to the Magaddino clan in the mid-2010s when Todaro Jr. was reportedly reasserting himself at the forefront of the organization after some years of delegating responsibilities without seeing satisfactory results, according to federal court records. He allegedly reached out to the Mob bosses in New York City with whom he and his dad did business back in Lead Pipe Joe’s heyday, reestablishing a support network to grow and diversify the Buffalo Mafia.

First, Tripi’s squad aided Canadian authorities in the 2017 takedown of Todaro Jr.’s second-in-command, Dom Violi, and his younger brother Joey in a drug and weapons trafficking case out of Hamilton, Ontario, where the Magaddinos had always maintained a satellite faction. Dom was caught on a police wire bragging that Todaro Jr. promoted him over 30 other candidates to the Buffalo Mob’s underboss position at a 2016 ceremony in Florida. According to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, he was the first and only Canadian to ever serve in an American Mafia administration. The intercepted comments on the state of the Magaddino clan strengthened Tripi and Buffalo law enforcement’s argument to their superiors in Washington, D.C., that the Mafia in Buffalo was alive and well. Further, it had a leader, Todaro Jr., and was not the feckless, benign street organization that many thought was long past its prime.

When Todaro Jr. came back under the microscope, so did his bloodline. Almost immediately, Gerace Jr. became the main target. Previously the owner of the now-shuttered Pharaoh’s Gentlemen’s Club in the Buffalo suburb of Cheektowaga, Gerace Jr., 59, was found guilty of drug and sex trafficking offenses stemming from the local “strip joint to the stars” in December 2024. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison last May.

In a separate trial, Bongiovanni, who was Gerace Jr.’s childhood friend, was found guilty of fraud and being a government mole for the Magaddinos in his capacity as a federal narcotics investigator. The feds accused him of protecting Buffalo Mafia drug crews and shielding them from busts for almost two decades. He was slapped with a five-year sentence last January.

Anthony Gerace, Gerace Jr.’s little brother, and mobbed-up Buffalo marijuana wholesale distributor Ron “Greeny” Serio, were busted in 2018 and 2019, respectively, for narcotics trafficking. Serio flipped and gave up Buffalo Mob soldier Mike “The Gorilla” Masecchia. Prosecutors went on to prove that Bongiovanni was running interference for Masecchia and Gerace Jr. All three were indicted shortly thereafter.

The original star witness in Gerace Jr. and Bongiovanni’s case was Gerace Jr.’s personal assistant and strip club “den mother,” Crystal Quinn. She was discovered dead from a fentanyl overdose on August 1, 2023, months before the trial was initially scheduled to begin. A few months earlier, Gerace Jr. was jailed and his bond revoked for ordering rats to be placed on Quinn’s car windshield. By January 2024, Gerace Jr. and six others, including the international president of the Outlaws Motorcycle Club, John “Tommy O” Ermin, were indicted for homicide in what Tripi and his team of lawyers called an intentional overdose to silence Quinn. Ermin, 56, was the general manager at Gerace Jr.’s strip club. The indictment accused him and Gerace Jr. of planning and ordering Quinn’s murder in a pair of meetings held in a Niagara County Jail visiting room when Ermin came to see Gerace Jr. in April and June 2023, respectively.

Quinn, 37, died in the private residence of low-level Buffalo Mob associate Simon “Greeky” Gogolack in Wellsville, New York, about 90 miles southeast of Buffalo. Just days before, Gogolack, a friend from high school with whom she recently reconnected, had promised to hide her from her enemies, whisking her away from her apartment and taking her to his home in rural Allegany County. On the night of July 31, 2023, Quinn ingested a pill containing a fatal dose of fentanyl allegedly provided by Gogolack after attending a party with Outlaws Motorcycle Club affiliates at a local firemen’s lodge.

Hours before her death, Quinn sent text messages to family and friends questioning Gogolack’s loyalty and worrying he was setting her up to be killed by the Outlaws Motorcycle Club. Portions of Quinn’s grand jury testimony linked Ermin and the Buffalo Outlaws Motorcycle Club to drug activity involving Gerace Jr. at Pharaoh’s Gentlemen’s Club and the nearby Outlaws Motorcycle Club clubhouse. In a surprise decision from the bench last month in the week before jury selection was expected to begin, U.S. District Judge Elizabeth Wolford tossed the text message evidence from the case.

In a further mind-blowing announcement from the government, Tripi told the court of the death of two additional witnesses. One was Bobby Kaiser, a drug dealer working with Bongiovanni and the Buffalo Mob, who dropped dead on a jog from an apparent overdose a week after testifying at Bongiovanni’s first trial in the spring of 2023 that ended in a hung jury. Kaiser had accused Bongiovanni of outing him as a confidential informant.

Within days of the ruling and announcement from Tripi’s team, the murder charges against four of the co-defendants were dropped after they entered guilty pleas. Only Gerace Jr. and Gogolack still face charges related to Quinn’s cooperation and eventual death.

Already a convicted felon, Gogolack, 43, will stand trial later this month for distribution of a drug that resulted in a death. Then, in November, Gerace Jr. will go back in front of a jury for obstruction of justice in relation to witness intimidation regarding the rats on the car windshield, but not for the homicide. Gerace Jr.’s defense team describes Quinn’s death as an accidental overdose, citing her battle with addiction and mental health issues, and has repeatedly alleged prosecutorial misconduct in the case against him. Quinn’s mother, Sharon Quinn, has publicly stated that her daughter was driven to a dangerous level of self-medicating because of the pressure from Tripi and the FBI for her to testify.

It doesn’t appear that Tripi has any intention of de-escalating his assault on the Mafia in Buffalo, especially now that it’s pretty clear there is a formidable Mob family to hold to task. The status of the Buffalo Mob differs from that of Mafia organizations in other major American cities, where they have faded from prominence in the 21st century.

“The Todaros—the Buffalo Mob—was never a thing of the past,” one-time Buffalo Mafia associate and labor union player Ron Fino remarked. “As much as people wanted to make it so or believed it, the Mob didn’t disappear in Western New York—it only got a little quieter. [The] Magaddinos, as a group, is an organization that’s built for durability.”

Scott Burnstein, a member of The Mob Museum’s Advisory Council, is an investigative reporter, author, executive producer and podcaster from Detroit. He runs the web magazine The Gangster Report, hosts the Original Gangsters podcast and is the author of six books on organized crime, including Mafia Prince.