Ah Rochester, my hometown. The weather is harsh. The people are chronically ill tempered and unfriendly as wellas insular, provincial, and myopic. One of Rochester’s nicknames is Smugtown. The most popular food here is the Garbage Plate. It’s the eastern edge of the Great Midwestern Rustbelt. It’s the kind of place that produces serial killers like Arthur Shawcross and the Hillside Stranglers; Timothy McVeigh was living in the suburb of Webster when he decided to go to war against the US government. It’s the city where Jimi Hendrix got booed offstage, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, and Buddy Rich got arrested for possession of cocaine, and Billy Idol got arrested for attempted sexual assault. It’s also a haven for record collectors boasting of legendary stores like the House of Guitars, the Record Archive, Lakeshore Record Exchange, the Bop Shop, and Buzzo’s in Geneseo. We’re also the birthing ground for such musical luminaries as Cab Calloway, Wendy O. Williams, Kim Gordon, Lydia Lunch, the Chesterfield Kings, and Mitch Miller. Road construction is endless and we’ve got potholes in the road the size of elephant heads. It was once the hometown of Rob Black of Extreme Associates, a pornographer who made such extreme content that Larry Flynt told him to tone it down a few notches; he went to prison on obscenity charges. On the brighter side, Mt. Hope Cemetery has got to be one of the most beautiful boneyards in the country and a great place for drug parties and sexual trysts in the moonlight; it is the burial ground of Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass. There should be no surprise that such a sordid place would have its own arm of La Cosa Nostra, especially with its sizable population of ethnic Sicilians.
If you were around here in the 1970s, you are probably aware of the car bombing that killed Sammy G Gingello and the string of shootings which are documented in Blair T. Kenny’s The Rochester Mob Wars. The author does a historical service to this small town with a big attitude, documenting a side of life that wouldn’t surprise anybody from this region. But beyond simple documentation, this short book is a chore to read.
The story of this band of Goombatas is nothing unique. The Mafia demanded protection money from a handful of illegal gambling dens while involved in various other forms of crime. When the local big boss, Frank Valenti, was given an all-expenses paid vacation up the river courtesy of the local police force who, as we all know around here aren’t a whole lot different from other gangs, the Mafia split into three factions dubbed by the police as the A Team, the B Team, and the C Team. The A Team controlled all the rackets while the B Team rebelled against them and tried to seize control. The C Team was just around to cause more trouble.
Frank Valenti rose up in the ranks, having ties to the mob in Pittsburgh and the Bonanno Faimily in New York City. When he went away for a while, he put the slow-witted and unimaginative Tom Didio in charge of the B Team, thinking he would be easy to control from prison and ready to step down upon the boss’s return. But Didio wouldn’t budge and all hell broke loose. Didio was gunned down in the parking lot of the Blue Gardenia restaurant in Irondequoit. This was followed by car bombings, arson, and lots of shooting.
The book also mentions some ties to Hells Angels chapters from as far away as Tennessee and Georgia and Mafia infiltration of the Teamsters Local #398 which eventually was liquidated by the government for being mob controlled, although Blair Kenny doesn’t say a whole lot about what the paisanos did when they ran the labor union rackets.
I suppose it all sounds interesting, especially if you come from the great city of Rottenchester. However, this book is so poorly written that any excitement you might get from it is beaten down like a day at Charlotte Beach that got ruined by a heavy rainstorm or possibly even by the stench from the polluted water, making the air around Lake Ontario smell like a sewer. The whole thing reads like paperwork from a police department’s filing cabinet. Actually, the author just seemed to indiscriminately throw together a bunch of newspaper clippings from the local rag known as the Democrat & Chronicle, merely summarizing them as he went along without any effective narrative scheme or organization. You get the same stories, largely lacking in detail, repeated over and over again without much information about who any of these people are or why we should even be interested in them. Finally at the end, Blair Kenny rewrites the whole story into a coherent narrative as some sort of summary, but at that point it is too little too late to save the entire book from itself.
As someone who grew up in Rochester, this book is mildly interesting. I know all the neighborhoods and suburbs where the action took place; most of them are in neighborhoods you should avoid these days. I recognize the names of some police officers and journalists in the story, including Gordon Urlacher, the police commissioner who went to prison for embezzling money from the police department in the 1990s. I can remember hearing rumors about Charlie the Ox when I was a teenager. Several of the people here share last names with kids I was friends with in grade school. And yet there is no mention of the Garibaldi Gardens or the Rio Bamba. But other than that, this is such a poorly written book that it won’t be of much interest to most readers; it probably will appeal only to those fascinated with the most obscure elements of Mafia lore or those with especially low standards in reading materials. Any time you see that a book is self-published, proceed with caution.
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