MY SECRET LIFE AS MOB KILLER
TV chef David Ruggerio serves up shocking dirt
FORMER Food Network star David Ruggerio confesses he’s lived a double life as a top celebrity chef and restaurateur — and a loan shark, drug dealer and killer for the mob!
Ruggerio, now 59, ran the kitchens of the Big Apple’s top French eateries La Caravelle, Maxim’s and Le Chantilly in the ’80s and ’90s and starred on the Food Network’s Ruggerio to Go show from 1997 to 1998.
He seemingly disappeared following a bust for credit card fraud in 1998.
Now, he confesses he was a “made” member of the Mafia and a relative of the late “boss of bosses” Carlo Gambino. But now Ruggerio says he regrets losing what he loved — being a celeb chef.
“I was living two lives,” he reveals. “I hate to sleep. The nights are very long and filled with nightmares. I didn’t want to be a criminal. I loved being a chef.”
Born in Brooklyn as Sabatino Antonino Gambino in 1962, his Sicilian dad, Saverio, was a cousin of Mafia Don Carlo, who died of a heart attack in 1976.
Saverio took him to Sicily as a teen to become a “made man” in a ritual where a fiery cross and the words “man of trust” were tattooed in his shoulder.
Ruggerio says he took part in several murders.
He claims in 1978, he helped capo Egidio “Ernie Boy” Onorato torture and snuff mobster Pasquale “Paddy Mac” Macchiarole in a Yonkers tire repair garage, leaving his body in a car trunk in Brooklyn.
In 1980, working for capo Daniel Marino, he helped Ernie Boy kill his 22-year-old pal Joey “Skeetch” Cannizzaro, he says.
Furious Skeetch had gotten circumcised for a Jewish galpal and was wearing his foreskin on a gold neck chain. Onorato viciously bashed his face in with a lead pipe “where you couldn’t recognize him anymore,” Ruggerio dishes.
They wrapped him still alive in an old rug and Ruggerio could hear Skeetch moaning when they dumped him near Sheepshead Bay.
The killings caused him to quit working with Onorato and join “King of Wall Street” capo Carmine Lombardozzi, a stock scammer, Ruggerio
says. With Lombardozzi insisting his goons have day jobs, Ruggerio got into cooking and went to chef school in Paris.
While running top restaurants, Ruggerio “would often go with guys to small stock brokerages Carmine had and lean on brokers.”
In October 1990, he catered the 50th birthday bash for Teflon Don John Gotti, attended by 25 of New York’s biggest mobsters at Maxim’s, covering the windows so FBI spies couldn’t see inside.
He landed TV cooking shows, but his life crashed when he was busted for ripping off $190,000 by falsifying credit card receipts.
Ruggerio insists he was innocent, but pleaded guilty on his lawyer’s advice and got probation and community service.
He lost his restaurants and TV deals and dropped out of sight running a doughnut shop.
Now, he regrets his gangster past, saying: “I did things when I was pushed that I’m not proud of.”