Aside from the notorious Falcone brothers, Rosario (Russ) Mancuso was one of the few mafiosi ever written about extensively from the Mafia faction based and operating up in Utica, New York.
Russ Mancuso was born on January 29, 1907, in Buffalo, New York. This is the city where he was first raised and started his criminal career.
By the early 1930s, he had relocated to the nearby city of Utica. This was an area very heavily influenced by the Mafia since at least the early 1910s.