Malice’s Restaurant

By Tom Robbins

Village Voice, April 4, 2006

Most nights Ron Straci helps run Rao’s, the city’s most exclusive restaurant, a place favored by society swells and hoodlums alike, where you’ve got a better chance at getting a table if your name is Frankie Brains than if it’s Madonna. But in his day job, Straci is a labor lawyer and the work is far less glamorous. For instance, one of his recent tasks has been to handle a group of dissidents who challenged their union’s recent election as undemocratic and unfair.

… Those are stories that get told regularly and with gusto at Rao’s (pronounced Ray-ohs), the restaurant that constitutes Straci’s second job. Together with his better-known cousin, restaurateur turned actor Frank Pellegrino, Straci is co-owner of the much-coveted East Harlem bistro, which they have made into a destination for everyone from presidents to movie stars and Wall Street tycoons. Bill Clinton has tucked in a napkin there, along with New Jersey’s Jon Corzine, George Pataki, and ex-senator Al D’Amato, who wooed a girlfriend or two over dinner. But the pols get fewer glances than celebrity regulars like Woody Allen, Leonardo DiCaprio, Billy Crystal, and Rob Reiner. And the stars make room for such corporate titans as Jack Welch and Ron Perelman, and the steady stream of moguls who dine with tough-talking ex-detective turned private eye to the stars Bo Dietl, who holds down a weekly table.

For sure, part of the attraction is a reputation for excellent red sauce, chicken limone, and seafood salad. There is also the fact that Rao’s is a charming and cozy little place, with just 11 tables, lit by perpetual Christmas lights. It is located on a remote corner at East 114th Street and Pleasant Avenue, across from Thomas Jefferson Park and the old Benjamin Franklin High School.

But even more important than its ambience and clam sauce is the unmistakably strong aroma of Cosa Nostra. As the late author and Rao’s regular Dick Schaap wrote in his preface to Rao’s Cookbook: Over 100 Years of Italian Home Cooking, one of the lures is “the suspicion that every other diner is the Godfather of something or other.”

Actually, it’s more than suspicion. On a lovely spring evening last June, Rao’s co-owner Pellegrino leaned over Fran Drescher and Dan Aykroyd and crooned his version of “My Girl.” Pellegrino, who plays an FBI supervisor on The Sopranos, often serenades guests lucky enough to finagle a seat at his restaurant, and the Post’s Page Six gave his warbling a boldfaced mention. Not that he or his place needed the plug. A couple of days earlier there was a much better item in the papers, one guaranteed to prompt more eager reservation requests from Wall Street types. That was the news that an aging mob loan shark named Frank Tramontano had tried to bribe police by splitting $160,000 in cash they found hidden in his Staten Island home, and then sweetened the pot by suggesting the matter be discussed over his table at Rao’s.

A few weeks before that, there was even better publicity when the FBI busted an organized crime ring headed by a venerable Gambino crime family capo named Greg DePalma, who had gotten doctors to give him huge quantities of Viagra and other free prescription drugs in exchange for Rao’s reservations. “You got to tell me if you need some tables,” the feds heard DePalma tell one doctor. “I gave up from May already. I still got the rest.”

That was only the most recent Rao’s boost by DePalma, whose gangland fame was sealed when he appeared in an arms-around photograph with Frank Sinatra and late godfather Carlo Gambino at the old Westchester Premiere Theatre. In a 2002 trial, prosecutors charged that DePalma, already doing six years for racketeering, had tried to hire a hit man to murder a rival who had tried to swipe his regular Rao’s table.

DePalma beat that case, but he wasn’t the only gangster allegedly driven to distraction by the threat of losing a reservation there. A few years ago, city detectives listened in as Steven Crea, the acting boss of the murderous Luchese crime family and a Rao’s regular until he was dispatched to prison, angrily dismissed a plea from other gangsters that he give up some of his nights there. “What the fuck is it they want?” Crea was heard to say. “They want the table,” answered mob soldier Dominick Truscello.

Then there was the time, as later revealed by federal prosecutors, that a crew of Albanian thugs jousting for territory with a weakened Gambino crime organization bullied their way into the restaurant and claimed a table that had been passed along like a cherished heirloom from John Gotti Sr. to his son and namesake and thence to acting boss Arnold Squitieri.

Topping all of those “allegeds” and “reputeds” was the Christmas Eve 2003 shooting by one pistol-packing Rao’s diner of another in a dispute over a patron’s singing talents. Luchese soldier Al Circelli was shot dead beside his bar stool. A friend dining with Straci caught a bullet in his foot. The incident prompted front-page tabloid spasms of delight and consternation among wiseguys with dinner reservations. “Listen, Rao’s closed?” a desperate-sounding Anthony Megale, a Gambino underboss, was heard to ask on his FBI-monitored cell phone the day after the shooting. “Because I got a table there tonight and I’ve been trying to call all day.” Ultimately, shooter Louis “Lump Lump” Barone pled guilty and ended up with a 15-year sentence. But it didn’t hurt business. Rao’s wound up with an episode of TV’s Law & Order about the incident, and a reservation list that went from unattainable to impossible.

When a 30-year friend and business associate called Straci recently to ask what the chances were he could get a table to celebrate his son’s birthday, the lawyer responded, “Not with a shoehorn.”

… Although he graduated from Fordham Law School and served as a JAG in the Air Force, Straci had a head start when it came to representing unions. The edge was courtesy of his father, an infamous gangster named Joseph “Joe Stretch” Stracci (the son dropped the second C). A major power in the garment industry, Joe Stretch was said to control the head of the city’s Teamsters joint council. But he made his biggest splash in 1950 when he and his brother-in-law “Tough Joey” Rao were used as strong arms by Frank Costello to keep city commissioners and Democratic Party leaders in line. Rao and Joe Stretch became the targets of a special grand jury convened by Manhattan District Attorney Frank Hogan after a group of Democrats said they’d been intimidated into dumping an anti-Costello official after Tough Joey and Joe Stretch showed up at a meeting. Hogan said that the presence of the two “notorious underworld characters,” as the papers routinely dubbed them, was like pointing “guns at the heads” of the politicians, but the D.A. brought no charges.

It was Tough Joey’s brother Vincent who ran Rao’s restaurant for years, the restaurant serving as a friendly outpost for wiseguys around the city, but mostly for the benefit of the tight-knit hoods affiliated with the Genovese and Luchese crime families who still kept a foothold in the old neighborhood. The place stayed low-key for years until Times restaurant critic Mimi Sheraton slipped into a seat one night in 1977 and wrote a column hailing it as “a genuine find.”

After praising “the tenderest squid and slivered scungilli” she’d ever tasted, the critic described the diners as “a mix of rough and ready habitués” of the neighborhood, and suggested readers consult a recent book called The Pleasant Avenue Connection “to get an interesting glimpse into the area’s history.” The book was written by David Durk, the former police lieutenant who, with Detective Frank Serpico, blew the lid off corruption in the NYPD. Durk’s co-author was investigative reporter Ira Silverman. The title referred to the fact that the avenue just west of the FDR Drive, running from Jefferson Park to 120th Street, was city central for heroin importation. Major dealers flagrantly marketed their goods on the strip. City anti-narcotics squads remained oblivious to the merchants until Durk, urged on by a local resident who didn’t want his son to become a junk salesman, pressured authorities to take action. Up to then, Durk and Silverman wrote, it was a place where, “if you knew the right people, you could go there at three in the morning to borrow $50,000, buy a machine gun, fix a judge, or pick up three kilos of heroin.”

Those were the years when heroin was flooding the ghettos, a plague that was ultimately to carry away several generations. While it’s easy to wax poetic about such mob escapades as running sports books, there’s little romance about needles and overdoses. But that was the main and highly profitable industry of Pleasant Avenue. And the biggest names in heroin distribution at the time were local royalty. They included Carmine “Mr. Gribbs” Tramunti and Ralph “The General” Tutino, a pair of high-level Luchese hoodlums and Rao’s regulars.

In 1979, two years after the swell crowd from downtown started flocking to the restaurant in response to Sheraton’s rave, an embarrassing thing happened to owner Vincent Rao: He was arrested along with six other gangland figures, charged with laundering millions of dollars in cash, much of it from local H dealers. The elder Rao argued that he was simply cashing checks, helping out locals who had no nearby bank to use. But those who knew his operation had few illusions. “He had a room full of money there,” recalled one regular. “There’s no question what he was up to,” said another.

Ultimately, Vinnie Rao pled guilty to criminal facilitation. At his death, the restaurant passed to his widow, Anna, and then to his nephews, Pellegrino and Straci. After the cousins turned the restaurant into a phenomenon, they began marketing the Rao’s brand name, selling sauce, roasted peppers, even CDs of the tunes on Rao’s jukebox. “You may not get a table at Rao’s, but now Rao’s brings it home to your family,” goes the pitch.

In addition to the unions and the restaurant, Straci has another business as well, a bus company called Whitehall Transportation that has a contract with the downtown business improvement district to provide a free shuttle for tourists. Straci is president of the company and owns it together with family members of his original law partners. It operates nonunion.

Why would the lawyer for the school bus drivers’ union run a nonunion bus company?

“It’s a fair question,” Straci said. “But since I am a small minority owner and don’t have anything to do with the day to day, that’s why it’s that way.”

As for the Local 1181 dissidents he has been battling in and out of court for the past few years, Straci said they’ve gotten fair treatment. “They had their run, they got some votes, and lost,” he said. “Their challenges were really unsupported.”

Sitting in his bus in Brooklyn, Simon Jean-Baptiste said he wasn’t surprised at Straci’s comments. “The lawyer is not there to defend the members. He is there to defend his friends, the delegates,” he said. “They see us as outsiders coming into their business. They do everything they can to keep us from sitting at their table.”

http://www.villagevoice.com/nyclife/0614,robbins,72743,15.html