“My mother’s family was as straight as an arrow,” Ruggerio recalled. When his mother died, Ruggerio’s adoptive father sent David and Lisa to live with their maternal grandparents in Park Slope and, later, the East Flatbush section of Brooklyn, a middle-class enclave where Barbra Streisand and Rudy Giuliani grew up a generation prior. (Her nephew, Angelo Ruggiero, would become Gambino boss John Gotti’s confidant.) The adoptive father could not be reached for comment. (His sister took Lisa.) Ruggerio hated his adoptive father’s last name and later took Ruggerio, the Americanized spelling of his grandmother’s maiden name, Ruggiero. Ruggerio took David after his mother’s favorite movie, the 1962 psych-ward love story David and Lisa. “He beat me every chance he had,” Ruggerio said of the man. A year later he watched his pregnant mother die in bed during an asthma attack: “The last memory of my mother was watching them carry her lifeless body out of the house.”Īfter Ruggerio’s father went to jail, Ruggerio’s mother married one of his friends, who agreed to adopt her son but demanded he change his first and last names. “Her coffin was so tiny we didn’t need a hearse,” Ruggerio recalled. When Ruggerio was about four, he says he found his infant sister dead in her crib. Before he was born out of wedlock in June 1962, his father Saverio, a prolific heroin trafficker, was deported from Brooklyn to Sicily and jailed in Palermo’s infamous Ucciardone prison.
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Ruggerio described his Brooklyn childhood as a series of Dickensian tragedies. After I lost my son, I knew that this has to end with me,” he said. Over lunch, I asked if he was worried that he could implicate himself or become a target of the Mob for going public. Ruggerio was adamant that while he quit the Mob, he didn’t want to get any current Gambino members in trouble. He was circumspect, though, when I asked about more recent activities. As he detailed the shadow life he led while rising through the city’s finest kitchens, Ruggerio openly discussed brutal crimes he committed with mobsters who are dead. But members of organized crime are, not surprisingly, just as organized about what they admit to-and what they don’t.
Ruggerio was candid during our conversations, sometimes shockingly so.
A guy walked into the restaurant with a baseball bat and said, ‘You better pay, or I’m coming back and using this.’ I’m this nice girl from Brooklyn thinking, What in the hell?” “I remember we once owed money to a meat company. “When you called about David, my first thought was, is this the FBI calling?” said Dawn DuBois, a former corporate attorney who worked at Le Chantilly. It’s where Ruggerio has been writing his memoirs, which recount his rise to the highest echelon of the New York restaurant world but also reveal the secret he kept along the way: He was for decades-including the entirety of his cooking career-a working member of the Gambino Mafia family. An open laptop rested on a small desk next to the dining table. He was preparing an ambitious lunch menu: goat cheese terrine, mignon of lobster, wood-fired roast chicken, and crème brûlée. Now 59, his refrigerator-size body and T-bone thick hands made him appear too big for the cramped room. “Overnight it was gone,” Ruggerio recalled one afternoon last fall as he sautéed onions in the cluttered kitchen of his modest home at the end of a Long Island cul-de-sac. Within months, Food Network canceled his show, his restaurants closed, and he filed for personal bankruptcy. Ruggerio initially denied the allegations, but facing 15 years in prison, he pleaded guilty to attempted grand larceny in exchange for five years’ probation and an agreement to pay $100,000 in restitution. The Manhattan district attorney charged Ruggerio with defrauding a credit card company out of $190,000 by inflating diners’ tips-in one instance, by as much as $30,000. But it all blew up on the afternoon of Thursday, July 2, 1998, when police entered Le Chantilly with a search warrant.
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