By the time he was 30, David Ruggerio helmed kitchens at the finest French restaurants of 1990s New York: La Caravelle, Maxim’s, and Le Chantilly. A Brooklyn-born boxer turned chef, Ruggerio cooked for presidents past and future (Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Donald Trump); Wall Street titans (Stephen Schwarzman, Lloyd Blankfein, and Jamie Dimon); media moguls (Michael Bloomberg and Martha Stewart); Hollywood royalty (Sophia Loren); and actual royalty (Prince Albert of Monaco). The New York Times food critic Bryan Miller twice awarded Ruggerio’s restaurants three stars. New York magazine’s Gael Greene hailed his cooking at Le Chantilly as a “miracle on 57th Street.” PBS aired his series Little Italy With David Ruggerio, and Food Network gave him a prime-time show, Ruggerio to Go. With his fuhgeddaboudit persona and wiseguy quips—“Ya know what I mean?”—Ruggerio was rocketing toward Emeril Lagasse–level stardom.

But it all blew up on the afternoon of Thursday, July 2, 1998, when police entered Le Chantilly with a search warrant. 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. 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. Within months, Food Network canceled his show, his restaurants closed, and he filed for personal bankruptcy. Then he disappeared from the food world. “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. Now 59, his refrigerator-size body and T-bone thick hands made him appear too big for the cramped room. He was preparing an ambitious lunch menu: goat cheese terrine, mignon of lobster, wood-fired roast chicken, and crème brûlée. An open laptop rested on a small desk next to the dining table. 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.

“I was living two lives,” Ruggerio told me.

I was introduced to Ruggerio in the spring of 2021 by friends who said he was ready to go on the record about his years in the Mob. Ruggerio’s operatic rise and fall sounded like one of the most improbable career arcs I’d heard about—one part Goodfellas, another Kitchen Confidential.

Over the summer and fall, I interviewed Ruggerio about his life of cooking and crime—the first time he’s spoken about his time in the underworld to a journalist. The name David Ruggerio is itself an invention. According to his baptismal certificate, he was born Sabatino Antonino Gambino on June 26, 1962. Ruggerio’s Sicilian father, Saverio Erasmo Gambino, was a cousin of Carlo Gambino, the infamous “boss of bosses,” who ruled New York’s five Mafia families in the 1960s and ’70s. In the 1980s, Ruggerio joined a Brooklyn crew run by Gambino capo Daniel Marino. Ruggerio said his own Mob résumé includes heroin dealing, truck hijackings, loan-sharking, bookmaking, extortion, and participating in several notorious gangland murders. He said he steered lucrative restaurant supply contracts to Mob-connected vendors and bribed union officials to keep his kitchens nonunion.

In recent years, though, he said he was motivated by feelings of guilt and betrayal to violate his sacred vow to uphold omertà. In 2014, Ruggerio’s 27-year-old son, an aspiring gangster, died from an apparent drug overdose. Ruggerio felt responsible. He was deeply wounded and enraged that Marino didn’t show up at the funeral: “When Danny didn’t come, that’s when I said, ‘Fuck this. I’m done,’ ” Ruggerio told me. (Though his old capo was under house arrest at the time, Ruggerio insisted such conditions weren’t exactly encumbrances for the guys he knew. “A wake was a reason that his parole officer would have okayed in a split-second,” Ruggerio said.)

During our conversations, Ruggerio toggled between the rarefied backdrop of gourmet cuisine and unspeakable street violence—some of which he was committing himself. His stories provided a singular glimpse of late-20th-century New York, the twilight years of both French cuisine and the Mob in the city, when The New York Times credibly described La Caravelle as an “elegant Midtown temple to French gastronomy,” and federal authorities were systematically dismantling the New York families, case by case. It was also a time before everyone carried a camera in their pocket. Rich and famous New Yorkers could be their unvarnished selves in public, and no one outside the dining room would know about it. Ruggerio’s restaurants were stages for some truly outrageous episodes.

In the author’s note of his unpublished memoir, Ruggerio writes: “Everything within these pages is accurate…. There was no need to embellish; the truths were horrific enough.” At times, though, I questioned if he was exaggerating for dramatic effect, as wiseguys have been known to do. I cross-checked names and dates he cited with contemporaneous newspaper accounts, public records, court filings, and personal photographs. I also spoke to former FBI agents and Ruggerio’s former employees, who confirmed mobsters were frequently hanging around his restaurants. Bruce Mouw, who ran the FBI’s Gambino squad in the 1980s and ’90s, confirmed Le Chantilly was one of Danny Marino’s haunts. “We knew it was a hangout,” he said. Mouw’s successor on the Gambino squad, Phil Scala, confirmed that Ruggerio was a member of Marino’s crew. “Danny would tout Ruggerio and invite all his friends to his restaurants,” Scala said.

“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. “I remember we once owed money to a meat company. 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?”

Ruggerio was candid during our conversations, sometimes shockingly so. But members of organized crime are, not surprisingly, just as organized about what they admit to—and what they don’t. 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. He was circumspect, though, when I asked about more recent activities. Ruggerio was adamant that while he quit the Mob, he didn’t want to get any current Gambino members in trouble. “I will not cooperate against anyone. That isn’t why I did this,” he told me. Over lunch, I asked if he was worried that he could implicate himself or become a target of the Mob for going public. “I’ll let the chips fall where they may. After I lost my son, I knew that this has to end with me,” he said.

Ruggerio described his Brooklyn childhood as a series of Dickensian tragedies. 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. When Ruggerio was about four, he says he found his infant sister dead in her crib. “Her coffin was so tiny we didn’t need a hearse,” Ruggerio recalled. 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.”

After 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. “He beat me every chance he had,” Ruggerio said of the man. Ruggerio took David after his mother’s favorite movie, the 1962 psych-ward love story David and Lisa. (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. (Her nephew, Angelo Ruggiero, would become Gambino boss John Gotti’s confidant.) The adoptive father could not be reached for comment.

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. “My mother’s family was as straight as an arrow,” Ruggerio recalled. (According to public records, his grandfather had been an administrator for the New York City Department of Corrections.) But by the 1960s, East Flatbush had become one of the city’s roughest neighborhoods. “It was a different time in Brooklyn. There were so many murders,” Ruggerio recalled. Ruggerio said his grandmother made the kitchen an oasis. “To watch her hand-make pasta, knead bread, or simply jar vegetables was a joy. Everything she did was with such care and precision,” he said.

Grim reality soon intruded. Not long after the move, Ruggerio’s grandfather had a heart attack. Ruggerio said he found him collapsed in the bathtub. Ruggerio believes his early experiences with death stripped him of his ability to feel empathy. “I learned early that I had a very cold side to me,” he said. The toughness was also a survival tactic. By elementary school Ruggerio had started his first hustles. He ran a three-card monte game and soon graduated to selling stolen Christmas trees, fireworks, and Jordache jeans for local wiseguys. He honed his fighting skills at a local gym owned by the famous Jewish boxer Izzy Zerling. Around this time, Ruggerio recorded his first of multiple arrests for gambling and fighting. “Did I want to be a gangster? Never one day did I say to myself, Yeah, I want to be a gangster when I grow up,” he recalled. “All I wanted to do was survive the next day.”

Ruggerio fell in with one of his father’s trusted lieutenants named Egidio “Ernie Boy” Onorato. “Ernie was younger than my father and weighed about 155 pounds, but he was the most ruthless gangster I ever saw,” Ruggerio said. Onorato died in 1998, which liberated Ruggerio to talk about his mentor. According to Ruggerio, wiseguys nicknamed Ernie “M&M,” short for “murder and mayhem.” Ruggerio recalled one night when he was 11 years old that he accompanied Onorato, then 23, to the Alley Cat bar on the Lower East Side and waited on the street while Onorato went in and lured a federal informant named Anthony Finn to an alley. Ruggerio said he watched Onorato beat Finn to death and then shoot him and stuff a packet of coke in his mouth. “We loaded the body into a car and drove it over to Avenue A and Ninth Street,” Ruggerio said. (On March 4, 1974, The New York Times reported: “A 33-year-old Bronx man was found dead in his car on the Lower East Side with a bullet wound in the back of the head shortly before 11 a.m. in what the police said was a gangland-style slaying. The police identified him as Anthony Finn…”) Onorato and Ruggerio were never publicly linked to the crime. Two men, Louis Santos and Salvatore Scudiero, were later convicted for conspiracy to commit murder.

In 1976, when Ruggerio was 13, his father was released from prison and returned to Brooklyn. Ruggerio was on edge having to explain that he gave up the Gambino name. “When I told him about my name, he just said, ‘We’ll take care of that.’ He never called me David. It was always Sabatino,” Ruggerio recalled. Saverio opened a fish market and a car service in nearby Mill Basin, Brooklyn, and put Ruggerio to work. “He did loan-sharking out of the car service and brought in heroin to the fish market,” Ruggerio recalled as he showed me the storefronts on a hazy July afternoon. “They were bringing in sardines, squid, and octopus frozen in 2.2-pound boxes,” he said. “In the center [of the fish] was pure heroin. When it landed here, the dogs couldn’t smell it.”

Ruggerio worked out of another one of his father’s front companies: a dog grooming store. To make some extra money, Ruggerio said he started dealing exotic animals in the back. One Christmas, Ruggerio said Gambino capo Frank Piccolo (also known as Frank Lanza), who was famously indicted in 1980 for conspiring to extort singer Wayne Newton, bought a monkey named Bongo for his grandchildren. Soon after, Piccolo demanded Ruggerio take him back. “I let that cocksucker out of the cage, and now all he does is sit in the corner, shit, and throw it at me!” Ruggerio remembered Piccolo screaming over the phone. Ruggerio said he and a friend took the monkey back and let him loose into the Prospect Park Zoo late one night.

As Ruggerio prepared to start high school in the summer of 1977, his father took him to Sicily to be made. Ruggerio said Santo Inzerillo, the brother of Palermo boss Totuccio Inzerillo, presided over the ceremony in the basement of a café in Castellammare del Golfo, his family’s ancestral village. A man used a dirty needle to tattoo Ruggerio’s right shoulder with a fiery cross image. The tattoo includes the words Uomo de Fiducia (Italian for “man of trust”).

Shortly after father and son returned to Brooklyn, Saverio was arrested again and deported to an Italian jail. Before going away, Saverio assigned Onorato to look after Ruggerio. By this point, Ruggerio was participating in Ernie’s brutality. Ruggerio said that in March 1978, he helped Onorato torture and kill a 56-year-old Genovese and Colombo associate named Pasquale “Paddy Mac” Macchirole at a tire repair garage in Yonkers, New York. Ruggerio said they left Macchirole’s corpse in a car trunk in Brooklyn. (On March 24, 1978, The New York Times reported: “The police found Mr. Macchirole’s body yesterday after his family received an anonymous phone call telling them where to look. He had been missing for three weeks.”)

Onorato rewarded teenage Ruggerio handsomely. “Ernie had a house down in Fort Lauderdale. It had a sunken living room and in the middle was a big coffee table. There was always a quarter or half kilo of coke piled up on it. Ernie used to have girls over and everybody was naked. For me, sex at 14 and 15 wasn’t a big deal,” Ruggerio said. (Public records show Onorato’s name associated with an address on Sea Island Drive in Fort Lauderdale.) Ruggerio said during his teenage years he earned $50,000 from drug dealing—about $230,000 in today’s dollars—which he hid in the attic of his grandmother’s home. “When I was 16, I sent my grandmother and my sister on a monthlong tour of Italy,” he recalled.

The thrills didn’t last, however. In the summer of 1980, Ruggerio’s friends started dying. Ruggerio said the first to go was a 22-year-old aspiring stand-up comic named Joey “Skeetch” Cannizzaro. “Skeetch was a wannabe. He was fucking crazy to be a gangster,” Ruggerio said. On the way to meet Onorato one night, Ruggerio noticed that Cannizzaro was limping. “He tells me he had fallen in love with a Jewish girl, and she made him get circumcised. He showed me a gold chain around his neck. On it there looked like there was a dried-up piece of chicken. It was foreskin. I said, ‘Get rid of that fucking thing! And whatever you do, don’t tell Ernie.’ ”

They drove to a burned-out building in East New York, where Onorato sent Cannizzaro out for Chinese food. “Everybody’s grabbing cartons off the table. Skeetch leans over and his fucking gold chain falls out. And Ernie goes, ‘Oh! What the fuck is that?’ I put my hands over my head because Skeetch starts telling the story of getting circumcised! I’m looking at Ernie and there was no expression on his face, nothing. Against the chair there was a lead pipe. Ernie picked up the lead pipe and he went berserk. He beat this kid to the point where you couldn’t recognize him anymore. Ernie whirled around and I thought, I’m getting killed next. He put the pipe an inch from my face. It was dripping blood. He says, ‘You brought this fucking guy around! He’s your fucking problem. So we started wrapping Skeetch’s body in an old rug. That’s when I heard Skeetch moaning. Turns out he was alive.” Ruggerio said he weighed Skeetch’s body down with lead window sashes and dumped him in the waters near Sheepshead Bay. (According to Social Security Administration death records, Cannizzaro was 22 when he died in June 1980.)

In July 1981, Ruggerio’s best friend, a 21-year-old bodybuilder named Caesar Juliani, was found dead, shot in the head, behind the steering wheel of a car parked in Brooklyn. Ruggerio believed Onorato killed Juliani on the orders of a Bronx wiseguy whose girlfriend Juliani was sleeping with. (According to public records, Juliani was buried on July 16, 1981, in Suffolk County, New York.)

Not long after Juliani’s murder, Ruggerio said his girlfriend overdosed and drowned at Jones Beach on Long Island. Her friends told Ruggerio she took pills Onorato had given her. Ruggerio believed Onorato had given her pure heroin because he was angry about how much time Ruggerio was spending with her. “That’s when I decided I was going to kill him,” Ruggerio said. Ruggerio said he planned to kidnap his mentor and murder him in the back of a stolen Good Humor ice cream truck.

But before he executed the plot, a Gambino soldier named Peter “Little Pete” Tambone intervened. “Little Pete was probably about four foot six. He goes, ‘I know this guy Ernie is with your father, but let’s be honest, he’s U gira diment,’ a Sicilian term for ‘going crazy.’ He then says, ‘You’re going to kill him and go to jail, or he’s going to kill you, or you’re both going to die. On Friday you come to Grotta D’Oro.’ ”

Grotta D’Oro was a popular Italian restaurant in Sheepshead Bay. On Friday nights, Gambino capo Carmine Lombardozzi conducted business there out of his Rolls-Royce parked out front. Lombardozzi was possibly the Gambino family’s biggest earner. He specialized in “pump and dump” stock market fraud and loan-sharking. (His nickname was “The King of Wall Street.”) When Ruggerio showed up, Little Pete waved him over. Lombardozzi whispered to Ruggerio that he would be working for him. The message was clear: Ruggerio couldn’t touch Ernie Onorato, but Onorato couldn’t touch him either. “Carmine was the 900-pound gorilla that Ernie wasn’t going to fuck with. And from that day on, I was one of Carmine’s guys,” Ruggerio said.

The new affiliation came with a requirement. Lombardozzi expected that members of his crew would find legitimate jobs to deflect law enforcement attention. Ruggerio had dim prospects. He was recently expelled from high school and had a criminal record. He did, though, have a secret passion: cooking. If he had to get a job, then he wanted to be a chef.

Despite his heritage, Ruggerio had no desire to work in an Italian kitchen. “Italian restaurants were junk in those days. They were red-sauce places. You know, glorified pizzerias,” he said. In the early 1980s, French cuisine dominated the New York dining scene, and that’s the food Ruggerio aspired to cook. “I went to the Kings Plaza mall where there was a B. Dalton bookstore,” he recalled. “I bought all the French cookbooks by Julia Child, Auguste Escoffier, and Jacques Pépin,” he recalled. “I started memorizing French terms. I consumed the New York Times food section and Jay Jacobs’s restaurant reviews in back issues of Gourmet magazine. After all that reading, I knew what the top restaurants were.”

One of them was La Caravelle. The menu had barely changed since the restaurant opened in 1960. It featured classics such as quenelles de brochet, striped bass Dugléré, and oeufs à la neige. “I walked in, and it was like something out of a movie,” Ruggerio recalled. “The kitchen was in the basement of the Shoreham Hotel. There were all these Frenchmen in pristine white toques and big hats running around. There was no English being spoken.” After lunch service one day, Ruggerio approached the chef, Roger Fessaguet. “Before I could get three words out, though, he goes, ‘Non! I’m not hiring. Leave!’ Right then, I decided this is where I was going to work.”

In the spring of 1981, La Caravelle hired Ruggerio as an entremetier, a junior cook that mainly works with vegetables and soups. There was a mind-numbing amount of information to absorb at a breakneck pace in a language he barely understood. Chefs would yell out an order for consommé Tosca and another for consommé vert-pré, and he’d have to immediately know the difference between one (chicken consommé thickened with tapioca and garnished with julienned carrot and quenelles of chicken, truffles, and foie gras) and the other (chicken consommé garnished with finely cut vegetables and fresh sorrel). He kept the book Le Répertoire de la Cuisine at his station and feverishly flipped through it when he got lost, which was often. “Those first couple of services were pure hell,” he recalled. “They screamed at me all the time. But the more they screamed, the more I wanted it. I knew that if I stayed in the street, I was going to get killed or go to jail.”

Ruggerio quickly understood that a French kitchen was not dissimilar to La Cosa Nostra. Both were governed by rigid hierarchies and Old World codes. Transgressors were punished harshly. “At La Caravelle they would inspect your drawer twice a day, and if your knives weren’t clean and sharp, they threw everything on the floor,” Ruggerio said. He respected how the imperious owner, Robert Meyzen, enforced the dining room’s dress code like a hardened don. “He once didn’t let Jackie Kennedy in because she was wearing pants,” Ruggerio recalled. “Another time, Ralph Lauren showed up wearing one of those Western leather bolo ties. Meyzen told him he had to wear a tie. Ralph said, ‘I am wearing one.’ Meyzen pointed at it and said, ‘No, you tie horses up with that!’ He threw him out.” (Lauren did not respond to a request for comment.)

When Ruggerio wasn’t in the kitchen, he was knocking heads in the street. “I would often go with guys to small stock brokerages that Carmine had and lean on brokers,” Ruggerio said. Ruggerio intended to compartmentalize his two lives, and he never told anyone at La Caravelle who he ran with. “He would just tell me about where he grew up in Brooklyn and his past being a boxer,” said former La Caravelle cook Fabrizzio Salerni, who now works for Daniel Boulud.

Violence, though, wasn’t something Ruggerio could switch on and off—it nearly ended his nascent cooking career. One night a few months after landing the job at La Caravelle, Ruggerio said he was mugged on the subway in Brooklyn. In the ensuing fight, Ruggerio grabbed the attacker’s knife and stabbed him in the arm and stomach. “I was out of control. I got on top of the guy and assaulted him,” Ruggerio recalled. Ruggerio claimed self-defense, but the Brooklyn D.A., seeing Ruggerio’s arrest record, charged him with attempted murder. Ruggerio remembered spending 10 days in jail on Rikers Island until, he says, Lombardozzi’s 40-year-old nephew, Danny Marino, bailed him out. Ruggerio said Marino instructed him to get out of town.

Ruggerio returned to La Caravelle and begged Fessaguet to find him a cooking job in France. “He must have seen the emotion in my eyes,” Ruggerio said. Fessaguet sent Ruggerio to the Riviera to train under famed chef Jacques Maximin at the Michelin two-star restaurant Le Chantecler in Nice’s famed Hotel Negresco. The French press dubbed the five-foot-five Maximin the “Bonaparte of the Ovens.” Ruggerio found that his new boss lived up to the moniker. Maximin disdained American cooks (and Americans in general). “He said American products were shit, there was no American cuisine, and American chefs were all shit,” Ruggerio recalled. But Ruggerio’s outer-borough background amused Maximin. “You are not American, you’re from Brookleeen!” Maximin once joked. (Maximin did not respond to a request for comment.) After a year, Maximin sent Ruggerio to complete his apprenticeship with some of France’s top chefs. First stop was Roger Vergé, who had mentored Maximin, Boulud, and Alain Ducasse at his Michelin three-star restaurant Le Moulin de Mougins, near Cannes. From there it was on to Michel Guérard, who pioneered nouvelle cuisine at his spa restaurant in the Pyrenees. Ruggerio’s final destination was Paul Bocuse’s legendary restaurant L’Auberge du Pont de Collonges, on the outskirts of Lyon.

Meanwhile, Lombardozzi’s crew cleaned up Ruggerio’s legal problems. “Guys visited my attacker at his mother’s Brooklyn home, and convinced him to not cooperate with the investigation,” Ruggerio said. When I asked what they did, Ruggerio responded, “Let’s just say they spoke the English this guy understood.”

In the fall of 1983, Ruggerio returned to New York. La Caravelle hired him back as a saucier, which was one step below sous-chef. He was 21. I asked Ruggerio why he didn’t walk away from the Mob when his food career was taking off. “I had a terrible need to be wanted and respected. And I never felt like I belonged in the legitimate food world. In the street was where I felt respected,” he said. “I can’t tell you the points I earned when I got [then Gambino boss] Paul Castellano a table at La Caravelle by telling them he was my uncle.”

Ruggerio’s straight job gained the attention of Danny Marino, an ascendant figure in the Gambinos. “Danny loved food. You never saw him in a jogging suit. He didn’t wear jewelry. His thing was beautiful suits and high-end restaurants. He was a different kind of gangster,” Ruggerio said. Marino took over Lombardozzi’s crew and began inviting Ruggerio to join his inner circle for a weekly Sunday meal of meatballs Marino hosted at his house in Brooklyn. “Danny was so damn proud of his meatballs,” Ruggerio said. Ruggerio recalled Marino giving him a printed copy of his recipe. At the bottom of the page was a warning: “This paper will self-destruct if this recipe falls into unfriendly hands!!! Good luck!!!” One time, Ruggerio said, after John Gotti criticized Marino’s meatballs, Marino didn’t speak to Gotti for months.

When Ruggerio returned to La Caravelle, the nouvelle cuisine revolution was sweeping New York’s French restaurants. The trend toward lighter, inventive cooking created previously unfathomable opportunities for young American chefs. In 1984, 32-year-old Michael Romano took over La Caravelle from Fessaguet. Romano named Ruggerio his sous-chef. A few years later, Danny Meyer poached Romano to oversee the kitchen at Union Square Café. At 26, Ruggerio became La Caravelle’s executive chef.

The Gambino family was also in the midst of a revolution. Nine days before Christmas in 1985, Castellano was gunned down in front of Sparks Steak House in midtown Manhattan. The unsanctioned hit on the family’s boss was ordered by Gotti. “I’ll never forget. I was at La Caravelle. I got the call and ran over [to Sparks]. There were cops and photographers everywhere,” Ruggerio recalled. Gotti’s coup was perilous for Ruggerio because Ruggerio was aligned with Marino, a Castellano loyalist. “John despised Danny,” said former FBI agent Mouw. A few months after Castellano’s murder, according to investigators, Marino approved a revenge plot to kill Gotti with a car bomb. (The device blew up Gambino underboss Frank DeCicco instead.) Fearing reprisal, Ruggerio hid from Gotti’s crew. “We changed our habits and didn’t frequent places that we normally did,” Ruggerio said.

Ruggerio’s vaunted place in the restaurant scene would wind up protecting him from Gotti’s wrath because Ruggerio was a guy Gotti wanted to know. “The thing you gotta understand is, when wiseguys get together, you know what’s the first thing they talk about? What’d you have for dinner last night? What’d you have for lunch? What wiseguys do most of the time is they talk about food,” Ruggerio said.

In April 1990, the fashion mogul Pierre Cardin hired Ruggerio to reinvent Cardin’s restaurant Maxim’s. “Gotti loved Maxim’s,” Ruggerio said. The Madison Avenue location was a virtual reproduction of the Belle Époque Parisian dining room, with its Art Nouveau woodwork, pink table lamps, and rose-colored banquettes. In October 1990, Gotti asked Ruggerio to cater his 50th birthday at Maxim’s. Ruggerio remembered papering over the windows so FBI agents surveilling Gotti couldn’t peer inside where 25 of the city’s most powerful gangsters toasted Gotti with jeroboams of 1961 Lafite and magnums of Cristal Rosé. “It was a fucking shindig,” Ruggerio said. Ruggerio’s menu started with a buffet of Beluga caviar, roasted loins of tuna, swordfish, and aged prime beef. For the main course, Ruggerio served a Gotti favorite, loup de mer, whole braised bass with fennel, butter, and flambéed with Pernod. As Ruggerio carried the flaming platter into the dining room, he felt a searing pain in his hand. The sous-chef had inadvertently splashed too much Pernod on the fish, and it set Ruggerio’s hand on fire. “The flames leaped in the air, and the scent of fennel was mixed with slight odors of my burning flesh,” Ruggerio recalled. He said he fought every urge to drop the platter so as not to enrage the explosive Gotti. The dinner turned out to be Gotti’s last birthday as a free man. The FBI arrested the Teflon Don two months later on racketeering charges. He was convicted and sentenced to life in prison without parole. He died of cancer in 2002.

As Ruggerio gained food world status, hiding his Mob life was becoming increasingly difficult. In January 1992, Bryan Miller awarded Maxim’s three stars in the Times. Ruggerio should have scaled back his Mob activity. Instead, he plunged deeper into gangland. “I was a tortured person. I knew right from wrong, but at times I couldn’t stop myself,” he said.

In the summer of 1992, the restaurateur Camille Dulac courted Ruggerio to take over the kitchen at Le Chantilly on East 57th Street. Dulac hoped Ruggerio could revive his venerable French restaurant, which had slipped in recent years. Ruggerio modernized the menu with Italian influences such as crab ravioli and quail risotto. Not long after hiring Ruggerio, Dulac got good news: The Times and New York magazine were going to publish reviews.

One afternoon in early February 1993, Ruggerio said he was preparing dinner service when the maître d’ burst into the kitchen and informed him that police were in the dining room and a locksmith was at the front door changing the locks. Ruggerio ran to investigate. A man in a trench coat approached. He identified himself as a court-appointed auctioneer and said he was there to liquidate the restaurant. Le Chantilly had been in bankruptcy since 1991; Ruggerio said Dulac hadn’t told him. “I was furious,” Ruggerio recalled. Ruggerio glared at the bar where Dulac was forlornly sipping crème de menthe. He needed a way to keep the restaurant open until the reviews ran in a few days. A positive review would fill up the reservation book for months.

Ruggerio looked at the auctioneer again. I know this fucking guy, he thought. Then it clicked: He was a low-level hoodlum from Brooklyn named Bob Moneypenny (yes, that’s really his name). Ruggerio leaned over and whispered that he was a friend of Joe Watts. “The blood drained out of his face,” Ruggerio recalled. Joe “The German” Watts was a Gambino member and one of the most feared gangsters in the city. (According to prosecutors, Watts was a backup shooter on Gotti’s hit squad that whacked Castellano.) Phil Scala, the former FBI agent, told me Watts would have been the family’s boss if both his parents had been Italian. “He was a brilliant criminal,” Scala told me.

Moneypenny apologized profusely and called the court for permission to pause the liquidation. “We opened at 5:30 like nothing happened,” Ruggerio recalled. The following week, the Times and New York magazine published rave reviews. Le Chantilly became one of the city’s hottest tables. Money poured in.

But the restaurant was still in bankruptcy. Ruggerio said he conspired with Moneypenny, who died in 2007, to rig the auction and buy the restaurant for $100,000. “The cellar alone had half a million dollars of wine in it,” Ruggerio said. The plan was simple, according to Ruggerio. Legally, Moneypenny needed to advertise the auction in a newspaper. So he advertised it in the Staten Island Pennysaver, where few buyers would see it. However, a day before the auction closed, Ruggerio learned a guy in the garment district offered $150,000. Ruggerio said he sent three “friends” to reason with the bidder. Ruggerio got the restaurant.

The purchase kindled Ruggerio’s ambitions of restaurant mogul-dom. “People bowed down to me when they found out I owned the place,” he said. In the spring of 1994, Ruggerio checked his judgment at the door and partnered with Dulac to open an Italian restaurant called Nonna. I asked Ruggerio why he continued to work with Dulac if, as Ruggerio claims, Dulac had hidden Le Chantilly’s bankruptcy. “It was a huge mistake,” Ruggerio said. Ruggerio’s much bigger error was, he said, accepting a six-figure investment from Marino. It violated Ruggerio’s bedrock rule: Never borrow money from the Mob. “It was pure stupidity and ego on my part,” Ruggerio said. Marino was about to do six years in federal prison on a murder conspiracy conviction. Ruggerio said Marino warned him that if Nonna folded, Ruggerio and Dulac would repay him in full.

Ruggerio and Dulac’s partnership unraveled almost immediately after Nonna opened, as both Ruggerio and multiple former employees of Le Chantilly told me. In August 1994, Ruggerio said he discovered Le Chantilly owed New York State tens of thousands of dollars in back taxes. (New York City and State records show a series of tax judgments against the restaurant throughout the 1990s.) Ruggerio said he wanted to cut ties with Dulac right then, but he couldn’t without getting Marino’s permission. Ruggerio went down to Ashland, Kentucky, to visit Marino in federal prison and explain the situation. Marino was not pleased, Ruggerio remembered. According to Ruggerio, Marino reminded him that Ruggerio had vouched for Dulac. Ruggerio promised he would get all of Marino’s money out.

On the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, Ruggerio and Dulac’s troubled partnership ruptured for good. Ruggerio said he caught Dulac on the sidewalk taking a case of Cristal Champagne from Le Chantilly. Ruggerio said he punched Dulac in the face, causing the bottles to smash on the sidewalk. “I couldn’t contain my rage,” Ruggerio recalled. Dulac denies this, though a former Le Chantilly employee confirmed parts of Ruggerio’s account. Ruggerio said the next day he called Dulac into a private room at Le Chantilly and put a dollar bill on the table. “Consider yourself bought out,” he told Dulac. “You have an hour to clear out. When I come back, if you’re still here, I’ll kill you.” While Dulac denies this as well, former employees recalled that Dulac didn’t have a regular presence at the restaurant following the conflict.

Still, this wasn’t the street, and elbowing an unwanted partner aside took more than words. Ruggerio seethed as the partnership took its time to formally unwind. When another money matter arose between the two, something inside Ruggerio snapped. “When I lost it, I didn’t get crazy. I got quiet and cold,” he said.

According to Ruggerio, he assembled a crew from Brooklyn. One night in early 1995, they followed Dulac to the West Village and pulled him into a van and sped off. “At first he was indignant. He kept saying, ‘I’m going to call the police!’ ” Ruggerio recalled. Ruggerio said he drove Dulac to a remote beach in Breezy Point, Queens, where, earlier that day, one of Ruggerio’s guys had dug a hole in the sand. “It was pitch-black when we drove out there. When we pulled in, the headlights from the van shined on the hole. We dragged Camille from the van and marched him over to the hole. By this time, he was on his knees, begging for mercy.” It was the middle of winter, but Ruggerio said he told Dulac to take off his shoes and socks, which Ruggerio threw into the Atlantic Ocean. Ruggerio said he then pulled out a contract he had had a lawyer draw up for Dulac to sign. “I kicked him into the hole, we got in the van, and we left,” Ruggerio said. Dulac denies this incident ever took place.

Ruggerio said he regrets what happened. “I did things when I was pushed that I’m not proud of,” he said. “But to really, truly be in the streets, you gotta have a black heart. When you turn that switch, there can be no emotion. You have no pity. You gotta just do it.”

One way Ruggerio rationalized his lawlessness was that the hospitality industry was not exactly a bastion of upstanding behavior. “There are more thieves and deviants in the restaurant business than there are wiseguys in the street,” Ruggerio said. He also observed powerful New Yorkers act appallingly, sometimes violently so. “They judged me, but they were no better,” he said. Ruggerio recalled attending a meeting with Pierre Cardin and Maxim’s landlord, the late real-estate heiress Leona Helmsley, during which Helmsley called Cardin a “little fuckin’ French fag.” He said La Caravelle owner Robert Meyzen once put the world-famous cardiac surgeon Christiaan Barnard in a headlock during an argument over whether Barnard should be seated despite arriving 25 minutes late for his reservation.

In the end, they got Al Capone on tax evasion. David Ruggerio got pinched for credit card fraud. On Thursday afternoon, July 2, 1998, Ruggerio was filming a cooking segment at Macy’s when he got the news police barged into Le Chantilly with a search warrant. He raced to the restaurant and found officers in orange “Gambino Squad” vests removing the restaurant’s financial records. The Manhattan D.A. wanted to indict Ruggerio and two employees for stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars from Le Chantilly’s credit card processing company by inflating tips. “I didn’t do the credit card crime,” Ruggerio told me. There was enough evidence, though, that Ruggerio said famed Mob lawyer Charles F. Carnesi told him to take a deal. On March 11, 1999, Ruggerio pleaded guilty to attempted grand larceny.

It was a ridiculously stupid thing to get caught for. Ruggerio didn’t need the money. Vintner Robert Mondavi named Ruggerio one of the 13 best young chefs in America in 1995. Cardin had lured Ruggerio back to Maxim’s the following year and made him a co-owner. Ruggerio was planning to open Pastis in Le Parker Meridien hotel with a dining room designed by architect David Rockwell. He published cookbooks, taped a PBS series, and was signed by Food Network. “After the credit cards, the press just categorized me as a moron because I fucked up my TV career. I had five restaurants, 650 employees. And it was gone,” he said.

The more painful thing Ruggerio lost was the respect of the gangsters that cooking had given him. Shortly after the credit card bust, Marino was released from prison and went to see Ruggerio at Le Chantilly. “We sat in the back of the restaurant and he said to me, ‘I gotta ask you a question. Don’t lie to me. Why the credit cards? What the fuck possessed you to do this shit? You had things that none of us could have had.’ I just sat there. There was nothing left to say,” Ruggerio said.

After that, Ruggerio drifted. He co-owned a strip club for a while. He ran a Jewish deli, a sushi bar, and a doughnut shop on the Upper West Side until those closed by 2014. That same year, Ruggerio was arrested for allegedly forging a check during a real-estate deal gone bad. (He said he pleaded guilty to one count of possession of a forged bank instrument and avoided jail time.) On the morning of June 21, 2014, he got a call that his oldest son, Anthony, was dead. “He did a lot of OxyContin and drank. He went to sleep and never woke up,” Ruggerio said. Ruggerio knew his life in the Mob was over when Marino didn’t attend his son’s funeral. Ruggerio told me he stopped returning Marino’s calls. The Mob had cost him the only two things that gave him joy: cooking and his children. “I wouldn’t have wished my life on anyone. I hate to sleep. The nights are very long and filled with nightmares,” he told me recently. “I didn’t want to be a criminal. I want you to understand that. I loved being a chef.”

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misstated the year that Egidio Onorato died. He died in 1998, not 1999. 

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