That’s A-L-L-E-G-E-D-L-Y

The Village Voice’s Tom Robbins does nothing to disprove the axiom that good Italian food necessarily involves mob links:

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. In February, Straci sent a letter to the members explaining that the union he represents had considered and dismissed their protest.
“All of the challenges were investigated by the committee appointed by the Secretary-Treasurer,” wrote Straci. The committee had recommended, and the executive board had voted, that the challenges be dismissed. The decision was then ratified at a meeting of the general membership, “without questions or objections from the floor.” Case closed. Straci made no mention that the secretary-treasurer in question who oversaw this inquiry into democratic procedures was a spry 83-year-old, an alleged veteran mobster named Julius Bernstein, who goes by the nickname “Spike.” Nor that the meeting of Local 1181 of the Amalgamated Transit Union had been presided over by president Salvatore Battaglia, 59, another reputed mob associate. Nor that both men, along with the woman overseeing the union’s $268 million in pension funds (the girlfriend of said Spike Bernstein), are currently accused by federal prosecutors of conspiring with an acting boss of the Genovese crime family to obstruct justice and extort a union medical vendor of $100,000.

. . .

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.”

And of course Robbins gives the reader ample reason to remain suspicious . . .