Bread, Bombs, and Prohibition in Niagara Falls
These 1920s and 1930s newspaper clippings tell the dramatic story of Niagara Falls’ “Bread Wars.” In the Prohibition era, when smuggling, rackets, and organized crime ruled the streets, the DiCamillo family bakery was bombed and raided for refusing to pay protection money. Yet the ovens kept burning, the Scaletta loaves kept rising, and the family business endured. A century later, DiCamillo Bakery stands not as a victim, but as a cherished Western New York institution—proof that bread, family, and resilience outlast bombs and bullies.
Prohibition didn’t just outlaw alcohol. In border towns like Niagara Falls, it unleashed a shadow economy that blurred the line between law and lawlessness. With Canada just across the bridge—and already wet again by 1927—the Falls became one of the busiest smuggling corridors in America. Whiskey, beer, and gin moved across the Niagara River by boat under cover of mist, hidden in sacks of flour, stashed in coffins, even driven over the frozen ice in winter.
Niagara was already an industrial powerhouse, home to hydroelectric plants, Carborundum, and Shredded Wheat. But when the liquor trade went underground, organized crime surged to fill the gap. Local businesses became easy targets for “protection” rackets—pay the mob, or risk vandalism, arson, and bombs. The newspapers of the time are filled with lurid headlines: “Bread War Vandals Ruin Bakery,” “Gangsters Continue Drive of Terrorism in Falls Bread War,” and “Niagara Falls Bakery Bombed.”
Into this combustible atmosphere came the DiCamillos—immigrants from Abruzzi, Italy, with eleven children and a simple promise: “We will always have something to eat and a place to work.” Tomaso baked wholesale loaves in the cellar, delivering bread by wagon to the city’s countless bars, restaurants, and corner stores. Two years later, Addolorata opened a storefront with her daughters, selling rolls and Italian groceries. It was survival through flour and family labor.
But in Niagara Falls during Prohibition, even a bakery wasn’t safe from the long arm of organized crime. Protection rackets spread like wildfire. Pay, and your business survived. Refuse, and you risked fire, bombs, or worse. Tomaso quietly paid at first, ashamed, handing cash to a collector known only as “Don Dedo.” But one day, his teenage son Thomas Jr. threw Don Dedo out of the store. Threats followed. And then, one winter night in December 1925, dynamite shattered the cellar windows.
A young Tomasso and Addolorata, newly married in 1902 and beginning their life together in Niagara Falls.
Remarkably, the DiCamillos kept going. They rebuilt, kept baking their signature Scaletta bread—five-foot ropes of dough curled into ladders, dusted with sesame seeds, baked golden on cornmeal boards. Six years later, in 1931, they were attacked again: gunmen stormed the cellar, tied up bakers at gunpoint, and doused the flour with gasoline.
That might have been the end of the story, but Addolorata changed it. Tired of fear, she put on her good hat and marched across town to speak with an influential man connected to her religious society. She asked for the attacks to stop—and they did. From that day forward, the DiCamillo family never paid another cent in protection money.
Through it all, Niagara Falls remained a city of contradictions: a honeymoon capital and a smuggler’s highway, a place of daredevils and dynamiters, of bakers and bootleggers. The DiCamillo story is part of that fabric. Their bread wasn’t just food. It was defiance. It was continuity. It was survival in a city where Prohibition made crime and community collide.
And yet, more than a century later, what endures isn’t the fear or the bombs—it’s the bread. The Scaletta loaf still curls into golden ladders, its crust still cracking with that unmistakable aroma, its taste still rooted in Old World tradition and Western New York grit. DiCamillo Bakery has endured where others vanished, not only as a business but as a cherished institution. It is woven into the life of this region, a place where generations have stopped for bread, cookies, and tomato pie, carrying forward a legacy of resilience and community. In every loaf, you taste history, survival, and the pride of Niagara itself.