Dominic Chianese

After decades of honing his acting skills on stage and screen, and eventually carving out a niche for himself as a "gangster," Dominic Chianese came upon his most widely recognized role as Uncle Junior on the hit HBO mob series The Sopranos beginning in 1999. Born in 1931, in Bronx, NY, Chianese attended Brooklyn College. In 1950 he and his father, both bricklayers, worked in Buffalo N.Y. In 1952 upon his return to New York City he began appearing on-stage. He would appear on and off-Broadway in theater for over 45 years before his famous role on The Sopranos, adding film and television to his repertoire along the way.

After his first film role in 1972, as a panhandler in a drama called Fuzz, he embarked on what would become the trademark of his career with his first gangster role, as Johnny Ola in Coppola's The Godfather Pt. II (1974), the classic, starring his dear friend, Al Pacino. Chianese also appeared in All the President's Men in 1976, and would work with Pacino again in the 1979 thriller ... And Justice for All.

Joseph G. (Joey) Giambra

Joey was born on Georgia Street in Buffalo’s lower West Side in 1933. He is a graduate of PS #2, a brick and stone edifice that graced the Lower Terrace and West Genesee Street. There, under the stern but inspirational tutelage of Ann Rodenhoffer he was taught music, drama and stage acting. In 1963, after a lengthy career as a trumpeter-bandleader, composer, and New York City stage and TV actor he returned to join the Buffalo police department. At age forty-four he graduated from Buffalo State College with a degree in Criminal Justice.

In 1964, he wrote No One is Us, a stage play in which he details the ill-effects of Urban Renewal on the lower West Side of Buffalo New York and on a singular Italian American family from that area. In 1971, while a police detective he launched a career as a restaurateur with The Rib Crib a BBQ on East Chippewa Street. IN 1974 he started the Hard Times Café, a specialty Italian restaurant on Allen Street. Later that year he was hired by SUNY to teach the History of Organized Crime at SUNYAB; a course that endured for four years. In 1976 the Hard Times Café moved to Hertel Avenue.

Upon his retirement from the Buffalo police in 1983 he acted in various major movies and TV productions in New York City and Los Angeles: Unsolved Mysteries, Slave Master, Minges Alley, Hide in Plain Sight, Dreamers and Desperados, Joey G, First Deadly Sin, Night Hawks, Happy Birthday Gemini, Buffalo 66, and others. He has written seven stage plays that have been mounted in various venues.

In 1986 he left Buffalo for California to act in films and to see his play, No One is Us that was produced at the Actors Studio in Hollywood and held over for several weeks at the insistence of board members-producers, Martin Landeau, and Marc Rydell.

Many have called Joey Giambra a renaissance man more often than not. In 1997 after critiquing Giambra’s Bread and Onions, a verbal odyssey on the social mores on Buffalo’s lower West Side beginning in the 1930s, Terry Doran of the Buffalo News dubbed him the area’s Poet Laureate. In 2007 he wrote and directed the critically acclaimed docu-drama, La Terra Promessa. Today, with Joe DiLeo, Michael Giallombardo, and Ken Giangreco he is editing Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow, a movie that depicts the lives of Buffalo’s Italian Americans from 1939 to the present. In addition to which he continues to act, write, and play brass instruments with his ten piece jazz-oriented band.