The Mafia Chef: Anthony Bourdain

Dubbed "the bad boy of cuisine" for his rock-star look and blunt observations about the world of restaurants, chefs and cooking and the "Mafia Chef" because of his crime and cookery novels, Anthony Bourdain is not your typical celebrity chef. A 28-year veteran of professional kitchens, Bourdain is currently the executive chef at New York’s famed bistro, Les Halles.

Bourdain entertains and educates with his exotic tales of travel and lessons learned from the kitchen trenches. He shares his passion on topics ranging from "Great Cuisines: The Common Thread" to the celebrity chef phenomenon and the culture of cooking. He also imparts his drill-sergeant approach to running a kitchen, which he shared with the Harvard Business Review Magazine, in "Management by Fire: A Conversation With Chef Anthony Bourdain." "The fantastic mix of order and chaos," he says, "demands a rigid hierarchy and a sacrosanct code of conduct, where punctuality, loyalty, teamwork and discipline are key to producing consistently good food."

His exposé of New York restaurants, Don’t Eat Before Reading This, published in The New Yorker Magazinein 1999, attracted huge attention in the U.S. and the United Kingdom. It formed the basis of his critically acclaimed 2001 book, Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, which described in lurid detail his experiences in kitchens and became a surprise international best-seller.

In late 2000, Bourdain set out to eat his way across the globe, looking for, as he puts it, kicks, thrills, epiphanies and the "perfect meal." The book, A Cook's Tour: Global Adventures in Extreme Cuisines, and its companion 22-part television series chronicle his adventures and misadventures on that voyage, during which he sampled the still-beating heart of a live cobra, dined with gangsters in Russia, and returned to his roots in the tiny fishing village of La Teste, France, where he first ate an oyster as a child.

Bourdain is a contributing authority for Food Arts Magazine. His novels include The Bobby Gold Stories: A Novel, Bone in the Throat and Gone Bamboo. His work has appeared in such publications as The New Yorker, Gourmet Magazine and The New York Times. He describes his recent book Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook: Strategies, Recipes, and Techniques of Classic Bistro Cooking, as "Julia Child meets Full Metal Jacket."

His latest book, The Nasty Bits: Collected Varietal Cuts, Usable Trim, Scraps, and Bones, is a well-seasoned hellbroth of candid, often outrageous stories from his worldwide misadventures.

Anthony Bourdain was born in New York City in 1956. After two misspent years at Vassar College, he attended the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, followed by nearly three decades of working in professional kitchens. He lives — and will always live — in New York City.

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The Second Burial of John Gotti

Four girls in black ponytails and Sunday dresses are laughing and chatting in Spanish as they walk toward Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the orange brick church that towers over Ozone Park, Queens. They cross a famous intersection. Do they know it was here, 15 years ago, that mob henchmen gunned down Thomas and Rosemarie Uva, the daredevil couple who made a career of robbing Italian mafia social clubs? It seemed unlikely. Nowadays, Indian pop music blares from cars more often than gunshots, and West Indian grocery stores line the streets near the ex-headquarters of this neighborhood’s most famous denizen: late mafia boss John Gotti.

The notorious Gambino crime family honcho ran his affairs here, from behind two bright red metal doors of the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club. He died in prison in 2002. Now, new immigrants are moving in, the Italians are leaving and the neighborhood seems to be forgetting him.

“This whole place was Italian-American. But they just started moving,” said Angelique Kayani, 69, who was born in Panama and moved to Ozone Park from nearby Richmond Hill in 2006. “As a matter of fact, the house over, they moved away on Sunday. And a lot of Indians moved in.” Kayani says she doesn’t know much more about Gotti than what she’s read in the papers. This is a quiet place where neighbors look out for one another, and children play on their scooters in the street, she said.

Down the block, a woman in a bright pink sari tended to her garden.

“I don’t speak English,” she smiled, apologetically. “I speak Bengali.”

“John Gotti? No, I don’t know him,” said Luis Rivera, who emigrated from Mexico. Rivera said his Liberty Avenue block is mostly Indian.

An aura of omertá seems to prevail, even among the old-timers, and even now only seems to hasten the forgetting. Hardly anyone talks about the 20-plus years of extravagant Fourth of July block parties Gotti used to throw for the neighborhood, complete with Boar’s Head burgers, ice cream cones, and illegal firework displays. (In 1995, then-mayor Rudolph Giuliani, who made his prosecutorial reputation by cracking down on wiseguys, banned these bashes.)

“Oh, no, I don’t speak English. I only speak Italian,” said a gray-haired woman who was rocking in a chair in the front yard of her 97th Street home, beside a tomato plant and a statue of the Virgin Mary. “But talk to them,” she said, gesturing toward her Hispanic neighbors across the street. “They’ll talk to you.”

Larry Varano, 74, an Italian-American who has lived in Ozone Park for 50 years, admits to remembering the Gotti days. Gotti’s brother Frank once lived up the block (though the Dapper Don himself only worked here — he lived in nearby Howard Beach). “They were nice people,” he said. “What they did in their private life, I don’t know. I don’t care.”

He said the neighborhood had changed a lot in recent years. “When I first came out here — let’s put it this way — the block I lived on was 99 percent Italian. Now it’s 4 percent Italian,” Varano said. He explained that most of his current neighbors are Puerto Rican. “They’re nice,” he added. “In fact, the neighbor I have now is Puerto Rican, and he’s the best neighbor I’ve had.”

Developers carved Ozone Park out of farmland in the 1880s, when the Long Island Railroad began service through the area. Italian-Americans were early settlers. The neighborhood mostly consists of one- and two-family homes, with some condos and small apartment buildings, said Betty Braton, chairwoman of Queens Community Board 10. The 2000 U.S. Census lists 43 percent of residents as white, 40 percent as Hispanic or Latino and 14 percent as Asian.

Buried in an overgrown junk-strewn lot, behind the house where Christopher Tirado, 22, lives with his brother and nephews, are the bones of the mafia’s past. Police excavations here in 2004 uncovered two pelvic bones, a set of teeth, skull fragments, and shoes full of skeletal remains, later confirmed as belonging to Bonnano family capos Philip “Phil Lucky” Giaccone and Dominick “Big Trin” Trinchera. Also believed to be buried here are hit man Tommy DeSimone, portrayed by Joe Pesci in the movie “Goodfellas,” and John Favara, a Queens man who accidentally struck and killed Gotti’s son with his car, then disappeared months later while the Gottis were vacationing in Florida.

“I don’t know pretty much, other than they were digging our backyard,” Tirado said.

“I haven’t heard about it,” said Leon Kennedy, 67, who recently moved into a house close by.

This is the seedier part of town: some nearby homes are vacant, the windows boarded shut. Broken-down cars and piles of junk lay scattered in the weeds. “No dumping” and rodent bait warning signs hang on the fence.

Even Gotti’s old block has changed. Down the street from his former headquarters, the Sunrise Chinese Restaurant, El Viejo Yayo Restaurant, and Tiffany’s West Indian Deli have moved in. The Bergin Hunt and Fish Club is gone, the storefront has been taken over by a pet-grooming salon.

Varano plans to rent a car and travel Europe, starting in Rome. Will he be leaving Ozone Park, too? “Yeah,” he said, “When I die.”

Thanks to Gaetana Pipia

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Are New York Gangsters Basically Teenage Girls with Guns?

Someone once said that New York gangsters are basically teenage girls with guns. Looked at from the proper angle, it does seem there is something particularly adolescent about a group of grown men for whom gossip, betrayal and a hair-trigger sense of loyalty runs deep in the blood.

Take, for instance, Vincent Basciano, the former hair salon owner and former acting boss of the Bonanno crime family, whose jailers — not coincidentally — once accused him of having an “unusual sophistication” at passing notes. In a legal dust-up that, beyond its violent elements, could have taken place in the girls’ locker room after field hockey practice, Mr. Basciano has accused a man, who once accused him of murder, of trying to implicate him in a phony plot to take the man’s life.

That probably bears repeating with a bit more explanation.

The trouble started in July when Mr. Basciano (known as “Vinnie Gorgeous” because of the hair salon he used to own) and his former best friend, Dominick Cicale, were both inmates at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, the huge federal jail in Lower Manhattan. Mr. Basciano was being held there during his racketeering trial in Brooklyn on charges of, among other things, having killed a gangland wannabe named Frank Santoro. Mr. Cicale, who pleaded guilty to racketeering in the same case, had double-crossed him and was, at that point, a main government witness at the trial.

According to court papers filed Tuesday evening, Mr. Cicale — in what some described as an attempt to get his former friend into further trouble with the law — reached out to a handful of fellow inmates in the super-secure witness section of the jail and asked them to tell the authorities that Mr. Basciano had recruited them through a jail guard to murder Mr. Cicale. Even the government acknowledges that there was no real plot beyond the vengeful, imaginary one that Mr. Cicale sought to pin on his onetime friend.

Ephraim Savitt, Mr. Basciano’s lawyer, said Mr. Cicale may also have been trying to get out of jail by hatching the phony plot. “What he was trying to convey was that there’s no place within the prison system that’s safe for him,” Mr. Savitt said. “I think he wants to convince the government and the court to let him out of jail to some undisclosed location.”

It was Mr. Savitt, in his legal papers, who first brought the plot to the court’s attention. He is hoping the allegations against Mr. Cicale will taint him to the point the judge in the case, Nicholas G. Garaufis of Federal District Court in Brooklyn, will grant Mr. Basciano a new trial. Mr. Basciano was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder and racketeering at the trial, which ended in July, largely on the basis of Mr. Cicale’s testimony.

To further discredit Mr. Cicale, Mr. Savitt says an inmate from the jail has claimed that Mr. Cicale liked to order other inmates to “create mischief” and was known for “acting out.” He once told an inmate to throw water on the cable box, for instance, Mr. Savitt’s papers say. He also — on purpose — spilled his coffee on the kitchen floor.

The notes Mr. Basciano was accused of having passed in jail were mentioned in the defense’s recent filing to suggest that the government has a track record of watching its inmates closely and therefore must have known of Mr. Cicale’s plot. One of them was more momentous than your average teenage note, including as it did the names of five men the government says Mr. Basciano wished to kill. But, according to Mr. Basciano’s wife, Angela, who was interviewed by the government, the note was not a murder list but a “Santeria list.” She says that Mr. Basciano wanted to place the men — among them, a prosecutor and a federal judge — under a voodoo spell. Mrs. Basciano told the government that she went so far as to take the list to a “Santeria priestess” in the Bronx, court papers say.

Judge Garaufis has yet to rule on Mr. Savitt’s request for a new trial, which is contained in the court papers that are full of the he-said, he-said back-and-forth that makes up a large part of Mafia talk. One paragraph, in particular, catches the flavor. The names involved are less important than the air of gossipy disagreement.

“Cicale testified that Anthony ‘Bruno’ Indelicato initially was the person who called him about a ‘piece of work’ in which Cicale could ‘make his bones’ by killing Frank Santoro. Yet, P. J. Pisciotti testified that Indelicato told him that he was surprised to hear, just prior to the murder, that Santoro would be killed and that, in his view, it was a mistake to kill Santoro. Cicale testified that he had enlisted P. J. Pisciotti to kill Michael Mancuso and throw him off a boat. Pisciotti testified that, to the contrary, there was never a plan to kill Mancuso and throw him off a boat.”

Thanks to Alan Feuer

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Reinstatement of Mafia Cops Convictions Sought by US

The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act — known as RICO — was signed into law by President Richard M. Nixon in October 1970. Wielded mainly, though not exclusively, as a sword against the Mafia, it holds in its most basic terms that a person or group of people who commit certain crimes as part of a conspiracy or criminal enterprise can be charged with racketeering.

The law has been used against defendants like Funzi Tieri, who once ran the Genovese crime family, and Michael R. Milken, the junk bond financier, and, over the years, has spawned a voluminous literature about what constitutes an “enterprise” or a “conspiracy.”

Yesterday, another debate on just those themes took place as the opposing sides in the so-called Mafia cops corruption case gathered in a federal appeals court in Manhattan to argue whether the convictions of two former New York City police detectives found guilty of killing for the mob last year should stand.

During that debate, at the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, federal prosecutors argued that the convictions, which were overturned last year, should be reinstated because the killings — some as far back as 20 years — were part of the same ongoing enterprise as a small-time drug transaction in Las Vegas two years ago.

The defense argued that there was no continuing conspiracy and that the government had patched together two separate sets of crimes to bolster its case. The three-judge panel will now consider the arguments and rule on whether the convictions should be reinstated.

After a made-for-celluloid trial (with locations as diverse as a senior citizens center in Las Vegas and the parking lot of a Brooklyn Toys “R” Us), the two detectives, Louis Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa, were convicted in April 2006 of killing at least eight men for the mob in one of the most spectacular cases of police corruption in the city since Lt. Charles Becker went to the electric chair for murdering the bookmaker Herman Rosenthal in 1915.

Almost as spectacular as the trial itself was its aftermath, when the district judge who heard the case in Brooklyn, Jack B. Weinstein, overturned the convictions. He ruled that the government’s case had stretched racketeering law “to the breaking point” and that the five-year statute of limitations on conspiracies had run out.

From the start, it was unclear if Judge Weinstein was going to accept the government’s central premise in the case: that the eight brutal murders the two detectives were accused of committing in Brooklyn in the 1980s and early 1990s were related to the single ounce of methamphetamine they were later caught selling in Las Vegas, years after they had retired from the force and had left New York. Though the government said the crimes were part of the same “ongoing criminal enterprise,” the defense contended that the prosecutors had “bootstrapped” the drug charges to the murder charges to “freshen up” the case.

Yesterday, one of those prosecutors, Mitra Hormozi, found herself peppered with questions from three judges who were trying to determine the exact nature of what the government has called the Eppolito-Caracappa enterprise.

The government concedes that the two men did not commit a crime together from their last murder in 1991 until 2005, when they were caught on videotape arranging the drug deal in Las Vegas, but Ms. Hormozi suggested that the conspiracy survived because the men maintained a desire to make a quick, illicit dollar and because they kept their enterprise a secret.

She also suggested that, in terms of personality, Mr. Eppolito (a gregarious salesman) and Mr. Caracappa (a sullen brooder) continued to play the same roles in each other’s lives in Las Vegas as they had in Brooklyn when they worked for the police.

Daniel Nobel, Mr. Caracappa’s lawyer, found this ridiculous, saying that certain “personality traits” in “a mere friendship” were not enough to constitute a criminal enterprise.

Joseph Bondy, Mr. Eppolito’s lawyer, said that the drug deal in Las Vegas and money-laundering that his client was accused of there were “completely sporadic disparate acts utterly unconnected to the New York acts.”

Thanks to Alan Feuer

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Jurors Claim Mob Defendant Threatened Prosecutor, New Trial Coming?

At least four jurors in the city's biggest mob trial in years allegedly heard one of the defendants threaten a federal prosecutor as he delivered closing arguments, according to a published report.

Convicted loan shark and hit man Frank Calabrese Sr. allegedly told Assistant U.S. Attorney Marcus Funk, “You are a (expletive) dead man,” according to a letter obtained by the Chicago Sun-Times and WMAQ-TV.

A juror met with prosecutors after the trial and told them about the alleged threat, according to the letter, sent to Calabrese attorney Joseph Lopez by lead prosecutor Mitchell A. Mars. Three other jurors “confirmed the juror's observations and heard Mr. Calabrese say the same thing,” Mars' letter said.

Lopez told the Sun-Times for a story posted Friday on its Web site that he sat next to his client and never heard any threat. “My client has more brains than that,” Lopez said. “We were surrounded by FBI agents and U.S. attorneys and spectators and nobody heard anything, and now a month later ... Why wasn't something said immediately right afterwards? That's what I want to know. It's an overactive imagination, that's all I can think of.”

U.S. attorney's office spokesman Randall Samborn declined to comment.

If jurors heard Calabrese threaten a prosecutor it could have unfairly affected deliberations, raising the possibility of new trials, attorneys for Calabrese's co-defendants said. “This is quite a development,” said Rick Halprin, attorney for Joseph “Joey the Clown” Lombardo. “I have grave concerns about this. ... You would assume it impacted their thought process. We know from the letter that one-third of them talked about it. I expect to be in court on it next week.”

Marc Martin, attorney for James Marcello, who was held responsible for two murders, said he had argued the defendants should have had separate trials. “Marcello has been complaining about this since day one, and this just adds more fuel to the fire,” said Martin, who also questioned whether Mars and Funk broke rules by having contact with a juror without court permission.

U.S. District Judge James Zagel, who also got a copy of the letter, could let the verdict stand if he reconvenes the jurors and hears from each one that the alleged threat did not affect the deliberations, Alschuler said.

Calabrese was among five defendants convicted last month for taking part in a racketeering conspiracy that included gambling, loan sharking, extortion and murder.

The defendants were accused of squeezing “street tax,” similar to protection money, out of businesses, running sports bookmaking and video poker operations, and engaging in loan sharking. And they were accused of killing many of those who they feared might spill mob secrets to the government - or already doing so.

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