Former celebrity chef David Ruggerio said he was a Gambino foot soldier.
The celebrity chef who once ruled New York’s restaurant scene has admitted to being an active member of the Gambino crime family and committing shocking crimes at the height of his power in the 1980s and 90s.
David Ruggerio, 59, who once ran the kitchens at top Manhattan restaurants La Caravelle, Maxim’s and Le Chantilly, confessed to the shocking confession in an interview with Vanity Fair published Thursday.
Ruggerio — a former Food Network star who largely disappeared from the public eye after being arrested in 1998 on charges of credit card fraud — admitted in an interview to a mind-boggling range of mafia crimes, including heroin trafficking, truck hijacking, loan sharking, betting, extortion. and even participation in gang killings.
Because he led a secret double life, few realized that he was actually a blood relative of “boss of bosses” Carlo Gambino – although the FBI was aware of his connections, especially after he hosted the 50th anniversary of “Teflon Don” John Gotti . party in Maxim’s luxurious dining room.
Now, although he refuses to talk about the crimes of any other living mobster, Ruggerio breaks the seal of the omerta, the mafia’s code of silence, by saying that he regrets his life of crime.
“I wouldn’t wish my life on anyone. I hate sleeping. The nights are very long and full of nightmares,” he told Vanity Fair. “I didn’t want to be a criminal. I want you to understand this. I loved being a chef.”
David Ruggerio, 59, who once ran the kitchens at La Caravelle, Maxim’s and Le Chantilly at Manhattan’s finest restaurants, has admitted to being a mobster.
Ruggerio is a former Food Network star who largely disappeared from the public eye after being arrested in 1998 on charges of credit card fraud.
Ruggerio’s birth name was Sabatino Antonino Gambino and his Sicilian father Saverio Gambino was a cousin of notorious mob boss Carlo Gambino (center in 1970).
Although it was not widely known, Ruggierio has been associated with the Gambino family since his 1962 birth in Brooklyn.
Ruggerio’s birth name was Sabatino Antonino Gambino, and his Sicilian father Saverio Gambino was a cousin of the infamous mob boss Carlo Gambino.
“I lived two lives,” Ruggerio said in an interview.
Ruggerio said that in 1977, when he was still a teenager, his father took him to Sicily to become “an accomplished man.”
He recalled that the ceremony took place in the basement of a cafe in Castellammare del Golfo, his family’s ancestral village, where a man tattooed a fiery cross on his right shoulder with a needle, along with the words Uomo de Fiducia, which means “man of trust” in Italian.
The most shocking confessions in the lengthy article concern several mafia murders in which Ruggerio says he was involved.
He said that in March 1978, he helped Gambino capo Egidio “Ernie Boy” Honorato torture and kill a 56-year-old Genovese and Colombo partner named Pasquale “Paddy Mac” Macchirole at a tire shop in Yonkers, New York.
Ruggerio said they left Macchirol’s corpse in the trunk of a car in Brooklyn. Contemporary reports confirm that police found Macchirol’s body in March 1978.
“Ernie was younger than my father and weighed around 155 pounds, but he was the most ruthless gangster I’ve ever seen,” Ruggerio told the magazine.
The most shocking confessions in the lengthy article concern several mafia murders in which Ruggerio (right) says he was involved.
In the 1980s, Ruggerio joined the Brooklyn team of Gambino capo Daniel Marino (above).
In another shocking incident in the summer of 1980, Ruggerio says he watched Honorato beat his friend Joey “Skitch” Cannizzaro, a 22-year-old aspiring comedian, with a lead pipe.
Ruggerio said that Honorato, who died in 1999, was furious that Cannizzaro circumcised himself to please a Jewish girl and wore the severed foreskin on a gold chain around his neck.
Ernie took the lead pipe and went berserk. He beat this guy to such an extent that he was no longer recognizable. Ernie turned around and I thought I was going to be killed next,” Ruggerio recalled.
He lifted the phone an inch from my face. Blood dripped from him. He says, “You brought that fucking guy! He’s your fucking problem. So we started wrapping Skitch’s body in an old rug,” he told the magazine.
“Then I heard Skitch moaning. It turned out he was alive,” Ruggerio said, confessing that he then pinned down Cannizzaro’s body with lead window frames and threw him into the water near Sheepshead Bay.
Violent incidents led to Ruggerio parting ways with Honorato’s crew and going to work for another Gambino capo, Carmine Lombardozzi, known as the “King of Wall Street” for his stock siphoning and dumping schemes.
Lombardozzi had a strict rule for his crew that they all had to take legitimate day jobs to ward off suspicion from law enforcement, which led Ruggerio to take a job in the kitchen at La Caravelle, then one of the finest French restaurants in the city.
Ruggerio took a job as a kitchen worker at La Caravelle after his mob boss ordered the entire crew to take day jobs in order to get rid of suspicion from investigators.
Ruggerio never told his restaurant colleagues about his mafia connections in an attempt to separate his two worlds. But he continued his work for the crime family on the side.
“I often went with the guys to the little brokerage houses that Carmine had and relied on the brokers,” Ruggerio recalled.
In the meantime, he rose through the ranks in the restaurant world, studying in France and becoming a chef at La Caravelle at the age of 26.
He would later manage the kitchen of French fashion designer Pierre Cardin at Maxim’s New York outpost, as well as Le Chantilly, where he co-owned with Gambino capo Daniel Marino.
In October 1990, notorious Gambino boss John Gotti asked Ruggerio to celebrate his 50th birthday at Maxim’s restaurant.
Ruggerio says he closed the windows so that the FBI agents who were following Gotti could not peek inside and see a bunch of the city’s 25 most powerful gangsters.
In the 90s, Ruggerio had television deals with PBS and the Food Network, but that all came crashing down in 1998 when he was charged with stealing $190,000 from a credit card company by falsifying credit card receipts for payment.
Prosecutors said he falsified credit card payments by inflating tips left by 26 diners at his restaurant, in one case by as much as $30,000.
Ruggerio rose through the ranks of the restaurant world, studying in France and becoming chef at La Caravelle at the age of 26.
He now says he regrets his life of crime and is working on a memoir following the recent publication of the supernatural mafia thriller (above).
Although Ruggerio denies the allegations to this day, on the advice of his lawyer, he made a deal with the investigation and served probation and community service.
After the scandal, Ruggerio lost his restaurants, his television contract, and disappeared from the public eye, quietly running a donut shop and other small businesses.
But after his son, who aspired to a gang life, died in 2014 of a drug overdose, Ruggerio says he reached his breaking point when his longtime mob partner Marino refused to attend the memorial service.
“When Danny didn’t show up, I said, ‘Fuck it all.’ I’m done,” Ruggerio told Vanity Fair.
He now says he regrets his life of crime and is working on a memoir.
“When I was pushed, I did things that I’m not proud of,” he said. “But to really be on the streets, you have to have a black heart. When you turn this switch, there can be no emotion. You have no pity. You should just do it.