Syracuse had a long history of things going on : A hot spot on East Coast for gambling. A history of police and pilitical orruption known about nationwide.Prostitution. Loan sharking .. Huge gambling raids on a regular basis which were dseemingly just for show ,since as fast as the big shots could bail guys out,they'd go from jail right back to their establishments. There was evidently a lot of evidence that they were part of some kind of "mob" or "syndicate" They words mafia and cosa nostra were not used much,if at all.
Supposedly the newspapers there eventually hired some reporters whose mission was to prove that guys there in Syracuse were mob connected. These reporters evidently even did some undercover type work,obsessed with proving a connection.

Although in earlier times there were mafias , during Prohibiotion, those types of early days crimes were replaced by bootlegging,ewhich was also multi ethnic,and so the words like mafia ,camorra,etc were not used and they early "mafia" was thought to be long gone. That is except by certain people,like the reporters who wanted not only to prove the mob connection with things like gambling,but also to show the level of corruption

Then the mobsters,all Italian,were raided in Appalachia,and the nation pretty much accepted that the mafia never disappeaed.But that didn't necessarily mean that Syracuse was part of it. So over the next couple years investigators put together what they could find by examing the guys caught at Appalachia. A couple of men caught were from Utica.If any guys were there from Syracuse they must have been some of those that got away.

It wasn't long until investigators found phone records of Utica guys caught at Appalachia,that showed calls to certain people in Syracuse,who themselves were later shown to have friends,families of known gangsters in places like Buffalo,Penndylvania,etc.
Did that prove that those records meant that there was any connection to those running gambling in Syracuse and the people in Syracuse who were they ones called? Not in my opinion.Whether it was true or not,just because somebody at Appalachia has something to do with people they called in Syracuse does not mean those Syracusans had anything to do with the Syracuans operating gambling

But the reporters figured they'd made their case and as a result the governmen t did crack down on the biggest of the guys involved in gambling and other organized crime in Syracuse.Shut them right down after decades of running gambling like they had a record.Some guys disappeared,others died,and everything was never wide open again.
After awhile DeStefano . must have come to Syracuse.Evidently he was from Fulton and somehow already involved with the "cosa nostra' as a soldier.
His Boss must have then told him to go to Syracuse and reorganize the gambling there. And continue to recruit independent bookmakers,etc into the fold

. I'd imagine that before the crackdown and the arrival of DeStefano,that the reporter was probably right. That some of the biggest operators were connected to different mafia families,although probably Maggadino was the head of a big chunk of it,if not all of it,even before DeStefano. But there may bhave been some of the previous Syracuse gambling kingpins who had or at least once had old connections to other families ,possibly in NYC, or Chicago or elsewhere