In Part 2, I discuss what happened during and after this famous raid. Don’t forget to buy me a shot and a beer on your Venmo app at ganglandwire.  Edgar Croswell was a detective sergeant in the New York State Police. He had some problems with a resident named Joseph Barbara Sr. Sgt. Croswell had done an extensive background check on Barbara and paid close attention to the Barbara estate. Croswell was in a good place to do this because he worked as an investigator for the State Criminal Investigation Bureau. He worked out of the Vestal substation near Binghamton, New York. Sgt. Creswell had found that Joe Barbara was a suspect in the 1931 murder in Wyoming, Pennsylvania. Months later, Pennsylvania police found a Thompson submachine gun in Joe’s car, which was linked to a gangland shooting in New York City. In 1933, Barbara was again arrested for double murder linked to Mafia activities.  Later, in 1933, he was a suspect in a brutal torture-murder of a Scranton, Pennsylvania bootlegger named Albert Wichner.

Sgt. Croswell learned that in the 1940s, Barbara had built an 11-room home with five outbuildings on fifty-three acres of land surrounding it. Barbara formed a small group of mobsters in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Joe established a legitimate business running a soft drink bottling plant, and somehow, through some political pressure in Albany, New York, received a district beer distribution license and was also awarded a franchise by the Canada Dry Company to bottle and distribute their products.

Knowing all this background would propel Sgt. Croswell to take the action that led to mob bosses fleeing through the upstate New York woods in their expensive suits and alligator shoes.

On November 13, 1957, an area motel called the State police substation and complained about someone passing a bad check. Sgt. Creswell and his partner, Trooper Vincent Vasisko, drove to the motel late in the afternoon. While they were talking to the owner’s wife, Helen Schroeder, Croswell noticed a cocky young man he knew as Joe Barbara Junior pull up in his Cadillac. The sergeant and the trooper ducked into a small lounge off the office area as Junior entered the motel office. They listened as Barbara Junior booked three double rooms for two nights. He mentioned that his father was hosting a meeting with folks involved in the soft drinks industry. However, he refused to tell the manager the names of the guests or when they were arriving. He paid a deposit and left. Sgt. Croswell smelt something fishy was up, and they left to check out Barbara’s bottling plant to see if anything suspicious was going on there. The plant was closed, and no cars were in the lot. They drove half a mile to the Barbara estate. Here, they sighted four automobiles.

The next day, November 14, 1957, the mafia bosses, their advisers, and bodyguards, approximately one hundred men, met at Joe Barbara’s 53-acre estate in Apalachin, New York, about 200 miles northwest of New York City. Sergeant Croswell thought Barbara may have been involved in some kind of bootlegging operation so he called in treasury agents, Arthur Rustin and Kenneth Brown. They agreed to come from Binghamton, a 30-minute drive, and help. Croswell called his boss and got permission to set up on surveillance of the Joe Barbara estate.

Croswell and his partner Vincent Vasisko and the two treasury agents drove up to McFall Road where the estate was located. They smelled a strong order of meat cooking over an open flame with dozens of men standing around the outdoor barbecue pit.  They saw the area in front of Joe Barbara’s garage was filled to capacity with parked cars, expensive cars like Cadillacs, Imperials, Lincolns, and Chryslers. There were so many that they were parked in an adjoining pasture as an overflow lot. The officers quietly exited their cars and entered the field and started writing down license numbers. A small group of men from the barbeque pit area walked away and into this field,