This is the eighth and final installment in our ButtonGuys series on the Utica mafia. This expose has been a story of immigrants. It was also a story of criminals and the story of the American dream. A skewered version of “The American Dream” to be sure. But over the course of nearly a century, a small band of Calabrian and Sicilian immigrants and their families settled the city of Utica.
They would eventually come to dominate the territory and make it their own. They had tremendous success in their chosen fields of endeavor, whether it be in the areas of criminality, legitimate business, and politics, or both. They did what they felt they had to do in order to elevate their blood brood and ‘amici’ to a level of financial success and social acceptance that as poor, uneducated immigrants, they may not have otherwise been able to accomplish.
