Stefano Magaddino - Buffalo Crime Family

Buffalo Crime Family

Magaddino eventually moved to Niagara Falls, New York, then in later years further north to Lewiston, another town on the Niagara River facing the Canadian border. Although he was a successful mortician operating his legitimate Magaddino Memorial Chapel funeral home business in Niagara Falls, with Prohibition in effect in the United States, Maggadino made his real money running a profitable bootlegging business by smuggling wine and spirits across the Niagara River into New York State, thereby supplying the needs of speakeasies located in Buffalo and the very "Honky-tonk" Niagara Falls. After Prohibition ended, Magaddino and his crime family made their money by means of loan sharking, illegal gambling, extortion, carjacking and labor racketeering as well as other legitimate lucrative businesses such as linen service businesses that served the needs of most of the hotels located throughout the region as well as taxicab companies and other service oriented businesses.

Magaddino's crime family held power in the underworld territories of Upstate and Western New York, namely, Buffalo, New York, bordering Canada and situated on Lake Erie, Rochester and Utica, along the Mohawk River as far east as Amsterdam, New York; from Eastern Pennsylvania as far west as Youngstown, Ohio, and in Canada from Fort Erie (opposite Buffalo, NY) to Toronto, Ontario as far north as Montreal, Quebec. Magaddino led his Buffalo family through its glory years and its most powerful and profitable era in La Cosa Nostra. He was an old-style boss who preferred to stay in the background and not draw any attention to himself or his criminal activities if possible. Due to his territory's remoteness yet the vast amount of it he controlled and being geographically insulated from the inter-family squabbles of the New York City-based families, he was held in high regard and was at times called upon to be an arbiter involving territorial disputes between crime families based there.