Stefano Magaddino
Oct. 10, 1891, to July 19, 1974.
Magaddino, born in Castellammare del Golfo, Sicily, was an established Mafioso when he arrived in Brooklyn in the early 1900s. He and Gaspar Milazzo led a group of Castellammarese Mafiosi in Brooklyn.
Milazzo and Magaddino were sought by police after an apparent vendetta murder of a rival gang leader named Bucellato in 1921. Milazzo fled the city for Detroit, where he established another Mafia family. Magaddino left for Buffalo but maintained close ties to the Brooklyn group.
Cola Schiro served in a leadership position of the Brooklyn Castellammarese clan after Magaddino's departure, but he might have been no more than a puppet ruler for Milazzo and Magaddino.
Magaddino reached the top of the Buffalo-Niagara Falls area underworld shortly after his relocation there and lingered atop the regional Mafia into the 1970s.
At the start of what became known as the Castellammarese War, "Joe the Boss" Masseria, ruler of the New York City underworld, reportedly had Milazzo killed for not supporting his efforts to control events in Chicago. That left Magaddino the senior member of the Castellammarese Mafiosi in the New World.
Schiro vanished and was replaced in the Brooklyn Castellammarese family by Salvatore Maranzano, a Mafia warrior from the Old Country.
In 1931, Charlie Luciano planned the assassinations of both Masseria and Maranzano. He then invited Magaddino and other Castellammarese leaders to halt the gang warfare and to join a Mafia ruling Commission. The Castellammarese and their allies were given a majority of the seats on the Commission and found Luciano's offer irresistible.
Magaddino, a cousin to New York crime boss Joe Bonanno, remained an influential player in American organized crime until his death of natural causes. It is believed that he arranged, at the suggestion of Vito Genovese, the Mafia's convention at Apalachin NY in 1957.
Initially a Bonanno ally, Magaddino and Bonanno developed into rivals. Bonanno insisted that Magaddino was responsible for kidnapping him in the 1960s.
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