Mafia specter hangs over Little Italy fair
NEW YORK -- The red-white-and-green tinsel arches are back over Mulberry Street, with the sizzling mounds of sausage and peppers and the warm zeppole pastry dusted with powdered sugar. But at the Feast of San Gennaro in downtown Manhattan this year, there is also something unsavory in the air: the taint of organized crime.
Nearly a decade after Mayor Rudolph Giuliani said he purged New York's largest street fair of Mafia control, a witness at a Brooklyn mob trial testified this summer that the president of the feast's board, restaurateur Perry Criscitelli, was a soldier in the Bonanno crime family. Criscitelli resigned.
The American Mafia was born on the streets where the San Gennaro festival draws a million visitors over 11 days. The feast features blocks of Italian food stands and a religious procession celebrating the patron saint of Naples, the backdrop to Vito Corleone's assassination of the Mafioso Fanucci in the movie "The Godfather: Part II."
Organized crime shows that it has a way of hanging on, even as prosecutors and other officials announce they have cleaned up enterprises such as trucking or construction, said Jerry Capeci, an authority about the mob who writes a column on organized crime for The New York Sun.
"It's even harder to get the mob out from its roots," he said.
In the latest attempt to assure the festival's uprightness, city officials announced last Monday that a former federal prosecutor would join the board of directors and monitor the festival on behalf of Mayor Michael Bloomberg. They said the appointment of Nelson Boxer, who prosecuted one of the original San Gennaro corruption cases, came after publicity about Criscitelli's alleged mob ties and was not an indication that they were concerned about renewed mob control.
"It was really a proactive measure, not because I'm suggesting that there is any issue," said Rose Gill Hearn, head of the city's Department of Investigation.
She said the courtroom testimony about the festival president's alleged ties to organized crime "had nothing to do with the feast itself."
Criscitelli, the president, did not respond to a message left at the restaurant that includes his office. His lawyer declined to comment about the allegations made against him in court.
Vendors operating the plywood stands set up outside Mulberry Street's stretch of red-sauce Italian restaurants dismissed assertions about Mafia involvement in the feast.
"The mob? Who's the mob?" asked John Persco, 69, as he turned a row of pork sausages.
"I never saw nothing, nothing whatsoever," echoed Peter Trapani, 47, as he fried pastries in a vat of peanut oil. "There is no mob involvement. It's a lot of nonsense."
Festival spokesman Bob Liff said there were concerns that participants in the feast were being tarred with mob links because they are Italian-American. In addition, he said, controls put in place under Giuliani have found no recent financial improprieties.
Ray Corchado, 54, a native New Yorker working as a chef in Florida, strolled down Mulberry pulling zeppole from a grease-stained white paper bag.
"It's always been involved," he said of organized crime. "It's part of doing business. It's the New York way."
