Veteran crime reporter Anthony M. DeStefano doubles as Mafia author

In the mid-1970s, New York reporter Anthony M. DeStefano didn’t know much about the Mafia. But working at Fairchild News Service, he and two other staff members, at an editor’s request, wrote a 10-part series for Women’s Wear Daily on organized crime’s control of the Garment District.

“It created a stir,” DeStefano said in a telephone interview. “I was a little stunned.”

The series led to criminal investigations and prompted other news outlets to chase the story. It also launched DeStefano’s career as a crime-and-courts reporter and author of 10 nonfiction books on the Mafia. His latest, Broadway Butterfly, was released last summer. Subtitled Vivian Gordon: The Lady Gangster of Jazz Age New York, the book delves into the unsolved mystery of Gordon’s death. Her battered body was found in a Bronx park in February 1931.

In addition to making a name for himself as an author, DeStefano, 78, is a special writer for the New York newspaper Newsday, where he first went to work in February 1986 after a stint at The Wall Street Journal. He has no plans to retire.

“I’m still having fun,” the Bronx native said.

Although he stays busy working for the newspaper, DeStefano finds time to research and write true crime books. “You just do it on weekends and time off,” he said.

‘A force to be reckoned with’

As an Ithaca College graduate in media studies, DeStefano joined the Army during the Vietnam War. Serving in the enlisted ranks, he was sent to Vietnam with the 1st Aviation Brigade, assigned to a press office north of Saigon, assisting civilian reporters. Those reporters, he noticed, “had quite the life.” He decided he wanted a job like that.

From there he spent time in Europe, freelancing for American newspapers. “It wasn’t a way to make a solid living,” he said.

He returned to the United States, graduating from New York Law School and finishing a master’s degree he had begun earlier at Michigan State University in the film and media program.  But his desire to get back into the news business was strong.  He wanted to keep digging out stories.

“I never lost interest in journalism,” he said.   

His work at The Wall Street Journal included a story co-written with Jonathan Kwitny linking the real estate business of vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro’s husband to certain Mob figures. The story further cemented DeStefano’s reputation as an enterprising reporter.

“That was my baptism in big-time political journalism,” he said.

Around this time, Long Island-based Newsday was starting a New York City edition. DeStefano was contacted. He spoke with Newsday investigative stalwarts Bob Greene and Thomas Renner. They wanted him on board. DeStefano was told, “You can have a nice career here.” 

They were right.

At Newsday, DeStefano has reported on a long list of sensational stories in the nation’s most-populated city, where newsworthy events are a daily occurrence. Working under Greene, he played a role in covering the 1986 Mafia Commission trial. Soon afterward, he was the lead reporter for the trial of subway gunman Bernhard Goetz. “Both the Commission coverage and the Goetz trial gave notice that Newsday was a force to be reckoned with in the media world,” DeStefano said on the paper’s website.

DeStefano’s résumé includes many more major stories like those for Newsday. Recently, he has contributed to coverage of the Gilgo Beach serial killings and the arrest of a suspect, Rex Heuermann, a 60-year-old Long Beach resident and Manhattan architect.

Over the years, DeStefano’s work has resulted in accolades for the newspaper and himself. He was on the Newsday team that won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for spot news in the coverage of a Manhattan subway crash, and, more recently, was awarded an Emmy for his work on the video presentation “Gilgo Beach Investigations, 10 Years, 10 Bodies, 0 Arrests,” now available on the Newsday YouTube channel.

From printed page to silver screen

Covering cops and courts, DeStefano interacts with people who give him inside information on big stories. This has included the family of Joseph Massino, the first New York-area Mafia boss to become a government informant. DeStefano even once gave up a couple of Mets tickets to interview Massino family members. His coverage of this high-ranking mafioso led to his first Mob book, King of the Godfathers: “Big Joey” Massino and the Fall of the Bonanno Crime Family.

Other true crime books followed, including one that journalist and author Nicholas Pileggi suggested while digging into the life of mobster Frank Costello.

“There’s a book there,” Pileggi told DeStefano about the man once known as the underworld’s “Prime Minister.” By then, Pileggi was the author of two highly acclaimed Mob books, Wiseguy and Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas. These books became the basis for the now-classic Mob movies Goodfellas and Casino, which Pileggi co-wrote with director Martin Scorsese.

The Costello idea hit home with DeStefano. He contacted his publisher and soon was on his way to writing what became the biography Top Hoodlum: Frank Costello, Prime Minister of the Mafia. Pileggi used that book and another by DeStefano, The Deadly Don: Vito Genovese, Mafia Boss, in researching the script for an upcoming movie, Alto Knights, set in 1950s New York. Starring Robert De Niro in dual roles as Costello and Genovese, the movie is scheduled to be released in March.

Book underway on ‘Jimmy the Gent’

DeStefano is not slowing down. Now that a lot of information is online, the research that goes into putting a project together is less time-consuming. The Garment District series he and others wrote in the 1970s took about six months to complete but probably could be done in two months these days, DeStefano said.

As he notes in his book Gotti’s Boys: The Mafia Crew that Killed For John Gotti, previously unobtainable FBI archives also have become available since the 1990s. These developments speed up the research process and help in finding new angles to historical stories. 

DeStefano has a biography in the works on James “Jimmy the Gent” Burke, the Lucchese associate who orchestrated a brazen December 1978 armed robbery at John F. Kennedy International Airport in Queens. One of DeStefano’s earlier books, The Big Heist: The Real Story of the Lufthansa Heist, the Mafia and Murder, explores that “obsessively covered news event,” but now the author is zeroing in on the mastermind, Burke.

According to DeStefano in The Big Heist, Burke was a sinister individual who ran Robert’s Lounge, a Mob bar with “a dark reputation,” crawling with “killers, highjackers, cigarette smugglers, credit card scammers, overall thieves and assorted outlaws.” Criminal plots such as the Lufthansa heist were hatched in settings like this.

In Goodfellas, De Niro portrays a character based on Burke, described by DeStefano in The Big Heist as “a complex man who mixed homicidal terror with smoothness and courtesy as he served his Mafia bosses.”

During the Lufthansa heist, Burke’s crew came away with more than $5 million in currency and nearly $1 million in jewels, equal to more than $29 million today. The haul has never been recovered.

DeStefano’s biography of Burke is expected to be published in late 2025 or early 2026.

Reflecting on why the public is drawn to stories about mobsters like Burke, DeStefano said these tales have “become part of the American folklore,” with some bad characters and some good.

“Certain crime stories create a lot of impact,” DeStefano said, adding that “the Mob because of Gotti became a very big story” that still attracts attention.

Over time, critics and psychologists have given different reasons for why this appeal exists — the primal need to understand danger, is one theory — but a reader once speaking with DeStefano defined it in simpler terms: “I just find it interesting.”

Larry Henry is a veteran print and broadcast journalist. He served as press secretary for Nevada Governor Bob Miller and was political editor at the Las Vegas Sun and managing editor at KFSM-TV, the CBS affiliate in Northwest Arkansas. Today, he is a senior reporter for Gambling.com.