Posted on 01/04/2004 8:48:15 PM PST by NYC GOP Chick
t can be hard for certain New York City neighborhoods to lose their reputations. To some people, the South Bronx is still burning and Hell's Kitchen is still a place filled with gangsters with Irish names and a taste for sadistic violence. And while gentrification can tame parts of Brooklyn, it cannot rewrite their rap sheets.
Such is the plight of Pleasant Avenue — a six-block stretch in East Harlem that is one of the most famous gangland stretches in mob history. The avenue, which runs from 114th Street to 120th Street, just east of First Avenue, is an Italian enclave dating back more than a century and has been immortalized as a Mafia stronghold by movies and mob reporters. It is where Sonny Corleone beat up Carlo in "The Godfather" and where a real-life godfather, Anthony Salerno, known as Fat Tony, ran the Genovese crime family.
Law enforcement crackdowns squashed much of the mob, and Mr. Salerno was sent to prison for racketeering. The old neighborhood began losing its mob reputation; wiseguys no longer got their Cadillacs and Lincolns hand-washed at the hydrant in front of Jimmy Chiarucci's hot dog store, and fewer residents got their merchandise off the back of trucks.
And it became gentrified, its old tenements and brownstones renovated and rented to urban professionals. There were still low-level wiseguys, but Pleasant Avenue was beginning to live down its outsize reputation.
But on Dec. 22 at Rao's, a restaurant at Pleasant Avenue and 114th Street with a reputation for exclusivity, a man described by the police as a low-level local mobster shot another man — whom the police said may have had mob ties — for heckling a Broadway soprano who was entertaining diners. Suddenly, Pleasant Avenue was back in the headlines for all the old reasons.
"It set the neighborhood's reputation back 30 years," said Albert V. Luongo, 58, a board member of the Giglio Society of East Harlem, which raises money for Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church on East 115th Street. "That Pleasant Avenue died a long time ago. The young Italian people who live here now are educated."
The pastor at Mount Carmel, the Rev. Peter J. Rofrano, 87, dismissed the Rao's incident as a silly dispute, but said that people "immediately come to conclusions when there are no conclusions to be made."
The gangland stigma is hard to shake, he said. "It's been embedded in the neighborhood from 40, 50, 60 years ago, but you have the same sinners here as anywhere."
"The only godfather in this neighborhood," he added, leaning back in a chair in his rectory, "is me."
But even as many residents denounce the past, they celebrate it. Residents criticize the infatuation of the public and the press with their neighborhood's mob heritage. Then they begin telling ribald tales about Angelo Cheesecake or Tommy Salami.
Clearly, Pleasant Avenue has a lot of lore to live down: Its pedigree as wiseguy central is well documented in books, newspapers and films.
This is the place Al Pacino cites in "Carlito's Way," that Robert DeNiro, in "Analyze That," recalls growing up in. It was the subject of books like "The Pleasant Avenue Connection" (Harper & Row, 1976) and "Blue Domino" (Putnam, 1978). Where a neighborhood fella named Johnny Roast Beef met Martin Scorsese in Rao's one night and landed a role in "Goodfellas."
But to Gary Lombino, all of that is the Pleasant Avenue his father once knew.
"It's all sensationalized," said Mr. Lombino, 46, a doorman in Manhattan who grew up and still lives on the avenue. "This isn't the Pleasant Avenue of 40 years ago. This neighborhood now is all working people and I'm one of them. I don't run around wearing a pinky ring."
Mr. Lombino, known to friends as Gary the Lamb, said the goodfella life did have a certain appeal growing up. "Who were our idols?" he asked. "It wasn't Mickey Mantle, it was Fat Tony. Look what we grew up with. Guys on the corners dressing nice and wearing nice clothes who didn't have to go work."
The Pleasant Avenue that he knew in the 1960's and 1970's, he said, was so protected by the mob that residents did not lock their doors. On the avenue he knew, merchandise would regularly fall off the backs of trucks and was sold cheaply around the neighborhood. One summer, it seemed as if every man in the neighborhood wore the same bright orange terry-cloth T-shirt.
There were the late-night poker games in Charlie Ding-Ding's candy store, on 118th Street and Pleasant. Legend has it that when he ran out of cash, Ding-Ding began throwing chocolate bars into the pot until his shelves were bare.
And there was Eddie the Butcher, whose shop on 119th Street and Pleasant Avenue was rumored to be a front for illicit activity. Locals still joke that he did not sell a pork chop in 40 years, and that the blood stains on his apron never changed.
Everyone on Pleasant Avenue had a nickname that usually stuck till death. (Except for Johnny Lend-Me-Twenty, whose nickname changed over the decades with inflation. Now he's Johnny Lend-Me-Thirty.)
Some guys were named after body parts: Alfred Ears, Gary High-Eye, Vinnie and Frankie Head (no relation), Frankie Nose and Danny Legs, for example. Others were named for food: Charlie Cream Cheese, Freddy Eggs, Tommy Salami (currently a busboy at Rao's), Joe Olive and Mary Knish. Still others were named for animals: Jimmy the Cat, Vito the Bat, Johnny Fox and Gary the Lamb. Rats? They never lasted long on Pleasant Avenue.
And sometimes the nickname was all there was. An elderly guy named Waffles was taken one day to the hospital, but when his lifelong friends tried visiting, they could not find his room because none of them knew his real name. "If you didn't have a nickname, no one knew who you were," said Joseph Camerlingo, 77, a retired doorman.
Everyone knew Angelo Cheesecake, a mob soldier. He is dead now, however, and his son, Joey Cupcake, is in prison. But Claudio Caponigro, the barber, is still in business in the neighborhood after 53 years, and a few other Italian establishments remain, including Patsy's pizzeria on First Avenue, Morrone and Sons bakery on East 116th, and Rao's. Some traditions are also alive, like the annual stickball game and the July feast at Our Lady of Mount Carmel, although it no longer rivals the Feast of San Gennaro in Little Italy.
Many longtime residents say the community has lost much of the tight-knit character it had built over a century, since Italians from an overcrowded Little Italy began moving uptown.
The remaining Italian population of Pleasant Avenue is aging. There are many gray hairs among those who frequent the few remaining social clubs, the kind Fat Tony favored before he was convicted of racketeering in 1986 and sentenced to 100 years in prison.
On a recent afternoon, in a tired storefront on 115th Street, a dozen men sat in a smoky room with a bar on the side and a large table in the middle. None of the men were eager to interrupt their pinochle game to discuss Rao's, or any other neighborhood business for that matter.
"We all like each other here," said a man peeking over his cards. "This is a great neighborhood. Now go away and write a nice story."
Even Mr. Caponigro, who likes waxing nostalgic as he snips, clammed up when asked about the mob and Pleasant Avenue. "I got nothing to say on that subject," he said. Was it true he was Fat Tony's personal barber? "What are you, a D.A.?" he snapped.
One local banking on gentrification is Michael Widing, 38, who in July opened the Pleasant Café, a sleek restaurant at 118th Street, where Charlie Ding-Ding's candy store once stood. It is the spot where the James Caan fight scene in "The Godfather" was filmed; the cover for the book "The Pleasant Avenue Connection" was shot down the block.
Mr. Widing, who grew up on Pleasant Avenue, said that he got his share of local patrons, including Mr. Barone and Mr. Circelli, but that his clientele also included young professionals and people who cannot get a table at Rao's.
"I'm banking on change coming to this neighborhood," he said. "I wouldn't have invested otherwise. Everybody knows Pleasant Avenue."
Last week, Mr. Luongo sat in his small office on First Avenue, next to a recently shut espresso machine business. On his walls are photographs of Brando, Sinatra and DiMaggio, as well as snapshots of politicians and religious leaders who have visited the neighborhood. There was a bit of romance in his recollection of Mr. Salerno. For one thing, criminals steered clear.
"I have good memories of Fat Tony. He wasn't a Robin Hood, but in the Fat Tony days, you took care of your own problems here," he said. "There were no shootings. If you had a problem with your landlord, you didn't need a court of law."
As infuriated as they are with the media attention over the Rao's shooting, residents here debate the case incessantly themselves. The gunman, the police say, is Louis Barone, an older man known as Louie Lump Lump for his bilevel paunch. He is charged with shooting Albert Circelli, 37. He has told The New York Post and The Daily News that he is not connected to organized crime.
The two men squabbled after Mr. Circelli loudly insulted a female singer who was entertaining diners. Danny Day, 53, who since 1976 has run a clothing shop on East 114th Street, several doors west of Rao's, called it a classic case of a younger guy not deferring to an older, well-known man in the neighborhood. "It shows that in any era," Mr. Day said, "disrespect can still be punishable by death."
Many residents know Mr. Barone, and many still speak affectionately of him, including Anthony Santo, 97, who sat in the Friends of Victory social club on Pleasant Avenue near 118th Street. Mr. Santo said he preferred the neighborhood of today to the mobster's paradise that Pleasant Avenue once was.
"Sure, I could go to Hawaii, go to the shows, see that Don Ho Ho Ho guy," he said. "But I got to be in the neighborhood because I have friends here I can talk to, friends who can take me to the track."
On Pleasant Avenue, a man named Mo walked his pit bull. Asked about the neighborhood's mob heyday, he said, "It was better back then." Then he tugged at his pit bull and added: "But what do I know? I did 26 years."
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