ANGLES PODCAST

John sits down with Tom Eoannou, one of the most celebrated criminal defense attorneys in Western New York with 44 years in practice and a reputation built on taking the cases nobody else would take, giving money back when it was the right thing to do, and caring deeply about the human beings behind the charges. Tom is also the man responsible for saving the North Park Theater, restoring the Cornell Mansion on Delaware Avenue, acquiring Ulrich’s, and currently finishing a ceramic artist’s house in Bradenton, Florida that he has been restoring for three and a half years.

The conversation is extraordinary. Tom talks about the 22-caliber killer, the Wonder Bread vice president who killed his wife and got the fee returned, the mobster who threatened him with a ball-peen hammer when asked about cooperating, the FBI hitlist that had his name second on it, and the wrongfully accused man who walked free because Tom hired an FBI agent to reinvestigate at his own expense. He also covers the seven-year community-funded restoration of the North Park, how Brokeback Mountain put the theater on the map, and why he worries deeply about the future of Buffalo’s commercial real estate market.

Business/Organization: Tom Eoannou criminal defense attorneys in Western New York

John sits down with Beth Machnica, Director of Health and Wellbeing at Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus and registered dietitian whose big hairy audacious goal is to make Buffalo a blue zone. Beth grew up in Cheektowaga on pizza, wings, and Hamburger Helper, started a cooking blog at 16 after a high school nutrition class exposed how badly she was eating, and has spent the decade since bringing $1 million in grant funding to Buffalo’s East Side, building a coalition of 180 organizations, and running a Food as Medicine symposium that has made Buffalo a nationally recognized model.

The conversation covers the 13-to-20-year life expectancy gap between Buffalo zip codes, the difference between a food desert and a food apartheid, what the 40 Days to Wellness program actually did for 108 chronically sick East Side residents, and why the number one cause of death and disability in America is food – before smoking, before genetics, before anything else. Beth also shares her unfiltered take on GLP-1s, the sugar industry’s manipulation of decades of research, why the tobacco industry now owns most of the food supply, and what food as medicine actually looks like when it’s being practiced in health systems today.

Business/Organization: Director of Health and Wellbeing at Buffalo Niagara Medical Campus and registered dietitian

John sits down with Christen Civiletto, Niagara Falls-born environmental attorney and author of Thundering Waters: The Toxic Legacy of Niagara County, published by Princeton University Press. Christen has spent 23 years researching the 89-plus documented hazardous waste sites in Niagara Falls after her father was diagnosed with a rare ionizing radiation-related cancer. The conversation is timely: recorded in early August 2026 as radioactive contamination is being confirmed in homes across the Town of Niagara in real time.

Christen walks through the full arc of how Niagara Falls became one of the most contaminated places in the country: the industrial visionaries who turned cheap hydroelectric power and salt deposits into a chemical manufacturing hub, the companies that knew their workers were getting sick and kept producing anyway, the 21,800 tons of hazardous waste dumped into Love Canal, the liner that is now in year 42 of a 20-year warranty, and the waiver residents in the Town of Niagara were handed before anyone would test their yards. She also gives practical guidance for anyone living in the area right now: what to look for in your basement, who to call, and how to use her interactive map to understand what is buried near your home.

Business/Organization: Environmental Attorney, Author

John sits down with Jonathan Borden, double bassist for the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and a Juilliard trained musician who chose to build his career in Buffalo. Jonathan walks through growing up in a musical family, the teacher who changed his path at 16, and the leap of faith that sent him to Juilliard instead of Northwestern. He also breaks down what it actually takes to survive an orchestra audition, including the professional audition he bombed with the Boston Symphony before landing the BPO job eight days before his 21st birthday.

The conversation covers JoAnn Falletta’s collaborative conducting style, the BPO’s efforts to shed classical music’s elitist stigma through events like Up Close concerts and Musicians’ Nightcaps, and the backstage ping pong games that happen minutes before a Mahler symphony. Jonathan also talks about teaching private lessons and why he believes everyone is more musical than they think, whether they ever picked up an instrument or not.

Business/Organization: Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra

John sits down with Jim Sandoro, founder of the Pierce Arrow Museum in Buffalo, for a conversation that spans nearly seven decades of collecting cars, buildings, and history. Jim traces his obsession back to age three, when he pulled back a tarp in his neighbor’s garage and found a Pierce Arrow up on blocks. That moment sent him on a path from restoring Model A Fords as a teenager to running one of the largest personal collections of automotive history in the world, with more than a million pieces now cataloged at the museum.

Jim also talks about his decades as an expert witness for the IRS, US Customs, and courts around the world, appraising cars in high stakes divorce cases and fraud investigations, including a case that took a 400 million dollar tax assessment against the Imperial Palace casino down to three million. He walks through the story of tracking down the original Frank Lloyd Wright filling station plans, his 56 year marriage to Marianne, and the museum’s plans to nearly double in size over the next five years.

Business/Organization: Pierce Arrow Museum in Buffalo

John sits down with Catie Stephenson, Executive Director of the Buffalo Olmsted Parks Conservancy, the first nonprofit in the country to manage an entire historic urban park system. Catie oversees 850 acres, six parks, seven parkways, and eight circles – the first complete park system Frederick Law Olmsted ever designed, conceived a decade after Central Park but as an interconnected network of parks and parkways rather than a single park, and still functioning mostly as he intended. The conversation is one of those that starts with history and ends up somewhere deeply personal.

Catie walks John through why Olmsted came to Buffalo, why he proposed a connected network, what each of the original three parks was designed for, and what he would say today if he saw highways cutting through two of them. She talks about the Delaware North $1 million endowment gift, what the endowment model changes for the conservancy’s future, and what she wants to leave for whoever holds her job 50 years from now. She also gives her honest position on the Route 33 tunnel fight, the 198, and what full restoration of Olmsted’s vision would actually look like. Then the conversation turns to leadership, parenthood, guilt, delegation, and how she manages being a high-performing executive director while raising three boys under nine on the West Side.

Business/Organization: Buffalo Olmsted Parks Conservancy

John sits down with Lisa Smith, President and CEO of the Buffalo Zoo – the third oldest zoo in the United States, a 151-year-old institution that has survived two world wars, the Great Depression, and 115 days of Covid closure, all starting from a donated pair of deer in 1875. Lisa spent nearly 30 years as a zookeeper and curator before becoming what she calls the Accidental CEO: an interim appointment that turned into a permanent role after a national search of over 100 candidates. She is one of the most grounded and genuinely interesting guests the show has had.

The conversation covers everything you never knew about what happens inside a zoo: AZA accreditation and why only 10% of animal exhibition facilities in the country qualify, Species Survival Plans and how Lisa personally coordinates the global breeding program for 50 East African black rhinos, the Khora mud turtle that wasn’t even known to science until a few years ago and is now being researched in a secret room at the Buffalo Zoo, Tashi the rhino who is the only animal in the world known to have delivered two calves via artificial insemination and raised all five of her offspring. Lisa also walks through the new campus development plan, the first project (an outdoor gorilla habitat), what conservation actually means in practice, and how to get the most out of your next visit.

Business/Organization: The Buffalo Zoo

John sits down with Joseph Gramaglia, Retired Commissioner of the Buffalo Police Department and President of the Major City Chiefs Association – the organization representing the 70 largest urban police departments in the United States and nine in Canada. Joseph spent his entire career in Buffalo policing, rising from the Buffalo Housing Police at 23 to the commissioner’s chair in 2022. He retired in early 2025 and now runs a consulting practice working with police departments and technology companies across the country.

The conversation is a genuine insider account of what it means to lead a major urban police force through sustained crisis. Joseph became commissioner and within days was managing an officer-involved shooting, within three weeks a Hollywood-style chase across three municipalities with two officers shot, and a month and a half later the Tops Friendly Markets massacre on Jefferson Avenue. He talks about how the department responded, the expansion of the peer wellness program that followed, and the data-driven violent crime reduction strategy that produced three consecutive record lows in shooting victims through 2023, 2024, and 2025. He also covers the leadership lessons that took 30 years to learn, what working with Mayor Brown and partner Keith Vona was actually like, and why communication is the single most important thing any leader can do.

Business/Organization: Retired Commissioner of the Buffalo Police Department and President of the Major City Chiefs Association

John sits down with Mike Shatzel, second-generation owner of Cole’s and one of the most respected figures in Buffalo’s bar and restaurant industry. Mike grew up busing tables at Cole’s at ten years old, played D3 basketball at Johns Hopkins and the University of Rochester, got an MBA, and came back to Buffalo to take over the family business. What he built from there – Blue Monk, ABV, Moor Pat, Moor Room, Colter Bay – defined an era of craft beer culture in this city.

The conversation is exactly what you want from someone who has spent 40 years watching everything happen from behind the bar. Mike covers how he brought craft beer to Buffalo before almost anyone else, what it was like taking over his father’s institution, why ABV closed and what the restaurant industry is actually dealing with right now, the cook who stabbed him (and stayed to talk to the cops), how he thinks about theft prevention, what it takes to hire and manage the cast of characters that make a bar run, and the most important lesson he learned the hard way: spreading yourself too thin will cost you the thing you built.

Business/Organization: Cole’s – a Buffalo bar and restaurant

John sits down with Kevin Heffernan, Executive Director of Go Bike Buffalo, the 16-year-old nonprofit operating community bike workshops, education programs, and a planning and design department that is actively reshaping how Buffalo thinks about its streets. Kevin came up through advertising and college admissions before founding Rise Collaborative, a creative agency, and eventually finding his way to Go Bike – first as a collaborator, then as a staffer, and now as the person running the whole thing. The conversation is a masterclass in understanding why the city looks the way it does. Kevin walks John through how cars were given the street at the expense of everyone else, how the auto industry invented the term jaywalking, how streetcars were deliberately purchased and shut down, and how Robert Moses-era highway building destroyed Black neighborhoods and disconnected Buffalo’s East Side. Then he makes the economic, public health, and quality-of-life case for doing it differently.

He talks about the 198 and the 33, the bike bus movement exploding in East Aurora, why kids who bike to school score higher, why older adults losing their ability to drive leads to isolation and depression, and what Buffalo could look like in 2051 if it actually committed to the vision.

Business/Organization: Go Bike Buffalo

John sits down with Matthew DiCamillo, fourth-generation co-owner of DiCamillo Bakery in Niagara Falls – one of the most beloved and enduring food brands in Western New York. Matthew’s path to the bakery was anything but direct. He spent a decade as a classical voice major, adjunct professor at Elon University, and aspiring opera performer before the 2008 financial collapse closed the door on arts funding and forced a reckoning. He came back to Buffalo, got his MBA at UB while baking bread at night, and eventually found himself staring at ten years of profit-and-loss statements that told a story the family had been careful to hide.

Business/Organization: DiCamillo Bakery

John sits down with Kyle Zappia, President of the Edward M. Cotter Conservancy. The E.M. Cotter is the oldest active fireboat in the world – built in 1900, docked at 155 Ohio Street since the day it arrived in Buffalo, and still breaking ice and responding to fires on the waterfront today. Kyle retired after 20 years with the Buffalo Fire Department, got restless, showed up at the boat to volunteer a few hours a week, and a year later was running the whole conservancy.

Business/Organization: Edward M. Cotter Conservancy