Categories for News

Nov 26

2025

City to pay $3.3 million to settle Molly’s Pub lawsuits

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Defense attorney Joel Daniels and Jeffrey Basil. Photo courtesy of WKBW 7 News. It’s been more than 11 years since Jeffrey Basil, bar manager of the now-defunct Molly’s Pub on Main Street, pushed William Sager down a flight of stairs, then enlisted off-duty Buffalo police officers working security for the bar to try to cover up what he’d done. Sager, 28, suffered a traumatic brain injury and died on July 31, 2014, after two-and-a-half months in a coma. Basil was sentenced to 18 years in prison for manslaughter in 2015.  The following year, Robert Eloff, one of the off-duty cops,[...]

Posted 4 days ago

Nov 24

2025

Dozens arrested in recent WNY immigration raids

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ICE agents arrest a man on Elmwood Avenue. Photo submitted by Diane Hinman. Immigration agents have arrested and detained 44 people in raids across Western New York so far this month. At truck stops along the New York Thruway in Angola, Clarence and Corfu, U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents conducted “immigration inspections” during a four-day operation that swept up 30 drivers and seven others. On Elmwood Avenue, four Hispanic men were arrested Nov. 13 in front of the Aquacates restaurant by agents with Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Homeland Security Investigations. And this week, three men working at a[...]

Posted 6 days ago

Nov 19

2025

Across the state, discipline for police misconduct varies widely

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The Yates County Sheriff’s Office. Photo by Lauren Petracca for the New York Times. A teenage girl came forward in May 2023 with a horrifying complaint: Her adoptive father had been raping her since 2021, she told police officers in an interview at her school. After some of the assaults, according to a police report, he would give her soda, candy or blueberry iced tea. The abuse started when she was 13. The teen was removed from the home, and the case was assigned to Megan Morehouse, an investigator in the Yates County Sheriff’s Office who had met the girl[...]

Posted 2 weeks ago

Nov 13

2025

Bills custodian, a migrant, jailed by ICE

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For two months, a young Venezuelan woman who had been hired to clean the Buffalo Bills’ Highmark Stadium has been detained by ICE. The woman, Yusgleidy Villa Alvarez, 18, has no criminal history. Until September, she’d been a legal resident of the United States, was on the path to obtaining a green card and had been granted a work permit. Yet without warning, a federal lawsuit alleges, ICE agents arrested her after a shift Sept. 19, the day after the Bills beat the Miami Dolphins at Highmark Stadium. For more than a month, she was held at the Niagara County[...]

Posted 2 weeks ago

Nov 12

2025

Real estate firm settles housing discrimination lawsuit

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The NAACP Legal Defense Fund has settled a lawsuit filed earlier this year against a Western New York real estate agent accused of racial steering, a practice that violates local and federal fair housing laws. The organization accused Avant Realty founder Charles Glander of directing white homebuyers away from “unsafe” neighborhoods on Buffalo’s predominantly Black East Side, “a practice he did not apply for Black homebuyers,” according to a statement the Legal Defense Fund issued in January. The Legal Defense Fund — representing Housing Opportunities Made Equal, a nonprofit watchdog organization  — in April reached a settlement with Glander that[...]

Posted 3 weeks ago

Nov 11

2025

“TreeGate” involving Niagara Falls mayor, engineer

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Niagara Falls Mayor Robert Restaino at a recent press conference. Photo via the Niagara-Gazette. The City of Niagara Falls paid a private contractor to remove trees in front of houses owned by the city’s mayor, his neighbor, and the city’s lead engineer, according to city documents obtained by the Niagara Gazette. City Engineer Robert Buzzelli included his own property and the home of Mayor Robert Restaino on a list of four addresses where trees were targeted for removal under a $20,000 contract change order authorized by city lawmakers in July, according to the documents. The documents, obtained through a pair[...]

Posted 3 weeks ago

Nov 7

2025

The consequences of Trump’s immigration crackdown

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From left: Jennifer Connor, Brittany Triggs, Pam Kefi and Ba Zan Lin. Photo by I’Jaz Ja’ciel. Ba Zan Lin spent his first 18 years living under authoritarian regimes in his native Burma before coming to Buffalo in 2006 seeking political asylum. He says he and others in the region’s immigrant community recognize the Trump administration’s heavy-handed tactics in pursuit of detainment and deportation of non-citizens it characterizes as “illegal.”  The raids, the street grabs, family members disappearing into a byzantine network of federal detention centers — “the masked men waiting for them at night” — all these feel traumatizing and[...]

Posted 3 weeks ago

Nov 5

2025

Niagara Falls cop blows whistle on nepotism, OT abuse

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Niagara Falls Police Department. Photo by James Neiss, Niagara Gazette. Claims that Niagara Falls police officers abused departmental overtime and padded their pensions. Allegations of civil service law violations and nepotism involving administrative unit supervisors. Questions about employees’ use of public grant funds provided by the state to curb gun violence in the city. Concerns that a “completely absent” police chief has turned a “blind eye” to administrative “thievery.” In a six-page message dated Sept. 1, Niagara Falls Police Lt. Troy Earp unloaded a litany of complaints about the inner workings of the Falls police department. A copy of Earp’s[...]

Posted 4 weeks ago
Investigative Post