Rao’s Italian restaurant in East Harlem is a gold standard for gangster meeting places. Wiseguy’s from the Harlem based Luchese Crime Family are definitly on the A-list for access to the few available tables.
The Food is fabulous. The late Luchese mob leader Anthony “Tony Ducks” Corallo, was always seen in Rao’s sucking up linguine and clams while talking turkey to his crime cohorts. Even the hungry Hollywood stars come visit actor and owner Frank Pellegrino who played the head, Fed, on the Sopranos and mangiare with the mob Read the story
By MEGAN ABBOTT , New York Times
On a December night in 2003, at Rao’s, the legendary restaurant on Pleasant Avenue in East Harlem, a man nicknamed Louie Lump ,Lump shot another patron after reportedly taking issue with his disparaging comment about the female singer’s rendition of “Don’t Rain on My Parade” from “Funny Girl.” The incident felt like a tale from a bygone era and garnered a great deal of giddily nostalgic local press. One patron told The Daily News, “I was surprised. Things like that don’t happen here.” At least not in recent decades.
The first time I ever saw Pleasant Avenue was in “The Godfather.” Long before I knew where it was, Iwatched Sonny Corleone bound across it and thrash his wife-beating brother-in-law with a garbage-can lid.
A 10-year-old kid in suburban Michigan, I was thunderstruck. For years, it remained my favorite single Hollywood mob movie moment, followed closely Goodfellas with Henry Hill pistol-whipping the man who assaulted his girlfriend in “Goodfellas.” The scenes speak to all the romantic, ill-founded notions of the mob that I grew up with and that, even after I became a writer of crime fiction, have proved embarrassingly hard to shake off. To read the rest click Here
Hollywood goodfella 
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