y 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.
