Button Guys Exclusive: This story is about a Cosa Nostra network that operated in a major city that few researchers, if any, have ever focused on. Yet, for over a century, this criminal underworld played a deceptively large role in the overall organized crime landscape in the United States.
Anthony DeStefano, better known to his underworld associates and the police as “Tony Whispers” and “Babyface,” would rise to the top of the heap to arguably become the most notorious racketeer and acknowledged Mafia leader within Syracuse.
This unique article also includes the only Mafia hierarchy chart ever created for this particular section of the country. It lists 263 known members and associates of the “Syracuse Regime” operating under or in conjunction with Magaddino “acting caporegime” Anthony DeStefano on behalf of the Buffalo Family. In addition, the chart features a “rogue’s gallery” of 42 associated mugshots.
The City of Syracuse is located in Onondaga County in Upstate New York. With a geographic footprint of approximately 25 square miles, it is considered to be the 10th largest city by area in the state and is well-known as a city with a vibrant history.
Located in the northeast corner of the Finger Lakes Region and with a population hovering around 200,000 residents, Syracuse has always been a popular destination for people looking to settle down and plant roots upstate. By comparison, the nearby cities of Buffalo and Rochester have a population of 275,000 and 210,000 residents, respectively.
Dating to the area’s earliest days, the “Onondaga Nation” of Native Americans, considered to be part of the Iroquois Confederacy, spanned across most of Upper New York State.
Syracuse has always had a very diverse ethnicity and population but by at least the late 1800s, Italian immigrants from Southern Italy and Sicily started gravitating to the area with the promise of work, and eventually stayed and settled down, claiming the city for their own. By the turn of the century, the Italians were firmly entrenched in the area.
Little Italy
These early immigrants were attracted to Syracuse because of the many jobs being created with the expansion of several industries there, not the least of which was providing manual labor for the construction of the West Shore Railroad system. This system ran from Weehawken, New Jersey across the Hudson River, from New York City, north along the west shore of the river, all the up to the City of Albany then on to Syracuse, with a final stop in Buffalo.
The first Italians who arrived in the city settled on the Northside of Syracuse in a neighborhood along North Salina Street that soon became known as “Little Italy.” Soon, people of Italian extraction comprised a good chunk of Syracuse’s total population.
In fact, even to this day, more than a century after they first arrived in Syracuse, Italians still make up one of the city’s largest ethnicities representing approximately 15% of its overall population.
But along with their hardworking fellow countrymen who gravitated to the area, so, too, had Southern Italy’s criminal fraternity. Specifically, elements of three ancient and feared criminal societies known as the Camorra based in the Campania region; the Societa’ Onorato of Calabria; and the Mafia, based on the island of Sicily.
The nearby City of Utica, only 50 miles away, with a population of almost 300,000 residents, and its much smaller neighboring town, aptly named Rome, were also rife with racketeers and hoodlums from these same regions of Italy. Those cities also became hotbeds of organized crime activity. But by at least the early 1920s, those two territories eventually fell under the purview and sole control of Utica’s notorious “Falcone Brothers.”
