At 7 p.m. on the evening of September 21, 1991, a veteran FBI agent named Robert Marston received a phone call at his suburban Connecticut home from Al D’Arco, the acting head of the Lucchese crime family. “I was told you were someone I could talk to,” D’Arco said.
D’Arco began to speak in anxious, disjointed phrases about unnamed Lucchese associates trying to kill him. “His tone was highly agitated, very stressed and aggressive sounding,” Marston said. “I’m sure he was sizing me up, and I was trying to size him up and figure out what the phone call was about.” After a brief break to consult with supervisors, Marston called D’Arco back to say that he now had approval to bring him to a safe location, if he wished to cooperate.
Marston and three other FBI agents pulled up in front of D’Arco’s mother’s modest house in Bayville, Long Island a little before midnight. The agents drove D’Arco and his son to a hotel in southern Connecticut. At week’s end, D’Arco signed a cooperation agreement. They moved him to a rented home, a “safe house,” in Northern Westchester, where he lived under guard for months while agents debriefed him. After long, tedious days of questioning D’Arco relaxed by cooking the agents dinner from his repertoire of Sicilian recipes inherited from his grandparents.
D’Arco knew his way around a kitchen. When he wasn’t occupied with extortion and loan sharking, he had helped prepare wild rabbit-stuffed ravioli, veal pizzaiola and other specialties in the kitchen of his family restaurant, La Donna Rosa, in the Soho neighborhood of Manhattan. La Donna Rosa was one of a dozen restaurants where oblivious tourists ate stuffed calamari while gangsters spoke in hushed tones at the next table.
After his long debriefing, D’Arco and his family vanished into the witness protection program. Before leaving, D’Arco gave Marston a few handwritten recipes, including a dish he called “Al’s zuppa di pesce.”
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Has there ever been an occupation, legal or illicit, more food focused than La Cosa Nostra? Over the course of reporting two books about organized crime I found that most mob meetings convened to discuss hits or hijackings, extortion or drug smuggling, take place over platters of fettuccine bolognese or fried calamari, by espresso poured out in Brooklyn cafés and cannoli or sfogliatelle fetched from a corner pasticceria. Mobsters eat while waiting to commit a crime, and while discussing it afterwards. Gluttony, it seems, is as central to the Mafia as murder and betrayal. Food is a form of diversion: it allows the assembled to avoid difficult topics.
“Any meal might be their last one,” the former Gambino soldier Joseph (Joe Dogs) Iannuzzi wrote in “The Mafia Cookbook,” a compilation of recipes and underworld anecdotes. “Crime may not pay, but it sure gives you a hell of an appetite.” Iannuzzi became an FBI informant after his Gambino friends tried to kill him over an unpaid $8,000 loan shark debt at, of course, an Italian restaurant on Singer Island, Florida.
“The guys in my new club asked me to spy on the guys in my old club who had tried to kill me,” Iannuzzi wrote. “I had no problem with that. Revenge, like my Cicoria Insalata (Dandelion Salad), is best eaten cold.”
Why is racketeering the hungriest profession? My theory: the red-sauce menu conveys ancestry, and ancestry carries meaning for a brotherhood built on Old War codes and traditions. If you live by rules inherited from Sicily and Naples, you must also honor the carbonara recipe.
Of course, all the sweet sausage and parmigiana resulted in a gut-heavy body type familiar on the streets of Canarsie or Bensonhurst. None of the mafiosi weighed more than Fat Pete Chiodo, a Lucchese capo who was, Jimmy Breslin once wrote, “the fattest guy in world mafia history.” At his heaviest, Chiodo weighed close to five hundred pounds. He was said to weigh himself with an industrial scale at a Staten Island freight terminal. A federal prosecutor flipped him, in part by bringing pizza to his hospital bed after an assassination attempt.
Hollywood has done its part to stoke the mob’s reputation. When Americans think of the Mafia, for example, they likely think of Tony Soprano pulling leftover prosciutto and pasta from his refrigerator. Barely an episode passes without him feeding his belly like an insatiable brute.
Tony’s son apparently inherited his father’s appetite. In the pilot episode, Anthony Jr., learns that his grandmother will not attend his birthday, and therefore won’t bring her signature dish .“So what,” he says “No fucking ziti now?”
Martin Scorsese and Nick Pileggi cast their 1990 mob classic, “Goodfellas,” at Rao’s, an Italian outpost and former speakeasy in East Harlem where John Gotti dined and Dutch Schulz (supposedly) planned the city’s first numbers racket. Scorsese hired its owner, Frank Pellegrino, to play Johnny Dio, a gangster who, in a memorable scene, pan-fries steaks in a prison cell while smoking a cigar.
“Jesus,” a minor Sopranos character told her family while visiting her father in jail, “can we ever talk about anything in this family besides food?”
