Stick em up 1940s gangster4/2/2023 But before they could finish, Toriello heard a noise in the café and got skittish. They set to work emptying several five-gallon Coca-Cola drums filled with gasoline onto the carpet. Torriello and an associate entered the eatery in the early hours of the morning on Tuesday, October 17. Toriello was “perfectly cast for the role of mafia muscle…built like an overweight grizzly bear,” wrote one reporter “a brawny, ham-handed guy packed like a sausage into a white T-shirt and black pants,” wrote another. Cottone sent his henchman Alfredo “The Butcher” Toriello to set the place alight. It was popular with local bureaucrats – in Cottone’s eyes, too popular. īassin’s Café on Pennsylvania Avenue was a historic locale billed as D.C.’s first sidewalk café. His method of beating the competition? He had it burned it to the ground. So, in 1978, Cottone sought to gain an advantage over one particular competitor, a neighborhood landmark he believed was drawing business away from one of his cafes. eateries, long established restaurants with reliable clientele. Cottone and his associates had to compete with well-known D.C. īut even with the added income from drug sales, the restaurant business in D.C. And though the business wasn’t exactly family-friendly, it was at least family-run: Cottone put his younger brother Giuseppe, a “flashy, ambitious young man who liked fast motorcycles and ritzy cars” in charge of the narcotics distribution. Cocaine, heroin, you name it - they carried it at Cottone’s pizzerias. They were what you might call “full-service establishments”, which is to say, you could buy a lot more than a slice of pepperoni behind the counter - if you knew who to ask. These were no normal pizza shops, however. area with his two brothers in the mid-1970s, he opened a couple of pizza shops, including a Pizza Delight on 14th Street NW. If you asked the FBI, that was where he rubbed elbows with the Gambinos and other mafia heavyweights, cutting his teeth in the world of organized crime. If you asked him, that was where his “American Dream” started: working his way up in the restaurant industry, climbing the ladder from immigrant to owner in his adopted nation. He started working as a dishwasher at a restaurant in New Jersey. Salvatore Cottone was born in Sicily in 1947 and arrived in the United States just shy of his twentieth birthday. When Cottone departed in 1990, it was for the federal penitentiary, and he left behind a legacy of drug-dealing, arson, and attempted murder. But, he concedes, “it was wide open.” The arrival of Salvatore Cottone and his brothers in the 1970s changed all that. “Who would be so stupid as to go into the backyard of the FBI, CIA, other law enforcement” to set up a criminal enterprise, asks former assistant U.S Attorney Michael Smythers, who helped prosecute D.C.’s most famous mafia case almost thirty years ago. New York had ‘Lucky’ Luciano, Chicago had Al Capone, and Washington D.C., had… Salvatore Cottone? When you think of Washington D.C., you probably don’t think about the mafia.
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