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It followed that one morning when Tony Cafe was at home in Brooklyn, where he lives with his eighty-year-old sister, the last of four sisters, the first three dead of cancer, he heard knocking on the door downstairs. He looked out. He could see two agents, each holding up identification.
Tony Cafe sighed. "I'll be right down," he called. He threw his wallet to his sister.
When he got downstairs there were three agents, one of them a little Irish woman who did the talking.
"Are you going to lock me up?"Tony asked.
"No, but you're number one."
She made it official. A week before, an article by Jerry Capeci appeared in New York magazine and was first to mention that Tony Cafe-proper name Anthony Rabito-was suddenly an important figure. Capeci, whose Gangland News is on the Internet, is the authority on the Mafia to the extent that all those left in crime know that on Thursday, when Capeci's work comes out on the Net and in the afternoon's New York Sun, they will find out where they stand, if anybody is left to stand. Now on Tony's stoop, the FBI confirmed that Tony was number one in the Bona
"I live upstairs with my sister. I don't have any money or guns in the house," he said.
The agents sniffed and left.
And now Tony Cafe, who is allegedly the boss replacing the last boss of the Bona
Bamonte's appears to be an out-of-the-way place, but it is on Broadway in the world of New York people who know what they eat. It is a short drive across the Williamsburg Bridge. At lunchtime half the city seems to walk past the bar and into the dining room.
Here was police commissioner Ray Kelly coming in and shaking hands with everybody. At the bar Tony Cafe held out his hand, and Kelly grabbed it and then moved on. Later, in the gloaming, Tony Cafe sat in the empty restaurant and said, "The police commissioner shook my hand. How do you like it? He didn't know who I was. Nobody knows who I am. I don't know anybody else. They're all in jail. Once the top of the family turns like Joe did, nobody from the other families will talk to you."
"What was the worst thing to happen to the outfit?" he was asked.
"Gotti," he said slowly,"when he had the case against him with a woman prosecutor and he fixed the jury. That got the government mad. Nobody was safe after that. They got Gotti and then they came after everybody else. Because of him, all of a sudden I'm standing out here alone."
Jimmy Breslin was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Commentary in 1986. His nationally syndicated columns have appeared in Newsday and various other New York City newspapers. He is the author of numerous works of nonfiction, including The Short Sweet Dream of Eduardo Gutierrez and, most recently, The Church That Forgot Christ. He lives in New York City.
Mark Jacobson : The $2,000-an-Hour Woman
from New York magazine
Jason Itzler, the self-anointed world's greatest escort-agency owner, prepared to get down on his knees. When a man was about to ask for the hand of a woman in holy matrimony, especially the hand of the fabulous Natalia,America's No. 1 escort, he should get down on his knees.
This was how Jason, who has always considered himself nothing if not "ultraromantic," saw it. However, as he slid from his grade school-style red plastic seat in preparation to kneel, the harsh voice of a female Corrections officer broke the mood, ringing throughout the dank visitors' room.
"Sit back down," said the large uniformed woman. "You know the rules."
Such are the obstacles to true love when one is incarcerated at Rikers Island, where Jason Itzler, thirty-eight and still boyishly handsome in his gray Department of Corrections jumpsuit, has resided since the cops shut down his megaposh NY Confidential agency in January.
There was also the matter of the ring. During the glorious summer and fall of 2004, when NY Confidential was grossing an average of $25,000 a night at its five-thousand-square-foot loft at Seventy-nine Worth Street, spitting distance from the municipal courts and Bloomberg's priggish City Hall, Jason would have purchased a diamond with enough carats to blow the eye loupe off a Forty-seventh Street Hasid.
That was when Itzler filled his days with errands like stopping by Soho Gem on West Broadway to drop $6,500 on little trinkets for Natalia and his other top escorts. This might be followed by a visit to Manolo Blahnik to buy a dozen pairs of $500 footwear. By evening, Itzler could be found at Cipriani, washing down plates of crushed lobster with yet another bottle of Joh
But now Jason was charged with various counts of criminal possession of a controlled substance, money laundering, and promoting prostitution. His arrest was part of a large effort by the NYPD and the D.A.'s office against New York 's burgeoning Internet-based escort agencies. In three months, police had shut down American Beauties, Julie's, and the far-flung New York Elites, a concern the cops said was flying porn stars all over the country for dates. Reeling, pros were declaring the business "holocausted" as girls took down their Web sites and worried johns stayed home.
Many blamed Itzler for the heat. In a business where discretion is supposed to be key, Jason was more than a loose ca
Only days before, Itzler, attired in a $5,700 full-length fox coat from Jeffrey, bought himself a Mercedes S600. Now the car, along with much of the furniture at Jason's lair, including the $50,000 sound system on which he blared, 24/7, the music of his Rat Pack idol, Frank Sinatra, had been confiscated by the cops. His assets frozen, unable to make his $250,000 bail, Jason couldn't even buy a phone card, much less get Natalia a ring.
"Where am I going to get a ring in here?" Jason said to Natalia on the phone the other night. He suggested perhaps Natalia might get the ring herself and then slip it to him when she came to visit.
"That's good, Jason," returned Natalia. "I buy the ring, give it to you, you kiss it, give it back to me, and I pretend to be surprised."
"Something like that," Jason replied, sheepishly. "You know I love you."
That much seemed true. As Jason doesn't mind telling you, he has known many women since he lost his virginity not too long after his bar mitzvah at the Fort Lee Community Jewish Center, doing the deed with the captain of the Tenafly High School cheerleader squad. Since then, Jason, slight and five foot nine, says he's slept with "over seven hundred women," a figure he admits pales before the twenty thousand women basketball star Wilt "the Stilt" Chamberlain claimed to have bedded. But, as Jason says,"you could say I am a little pickier than him."