South Philly's Dante & Luigi's Italian Restaurant Is A Longtime Hit

Although Dante & Luigi's in South Philadelphia has scores of customers who are not mob-related, the outstanding Italian restaurant is as widely known for its connection to organized crime as they are for their wonderful food.

William Bender wrote an interesting piece about the restaurant for the Philadelphia Daily News.

Sure, bullets were flying in the barroom at Dante & Luigi's on Halloween night in 1989, when a masked man pulled a gun out of his trick-or-treat bag and starting pumping round after round into Nicodemo Scarfo Jr., son of the former Philadelphia mob boss.

Before that, the Italian restaurant at 10th and Catharine streets was a hangout for Angelo Bruno, the mob boss who was killed outside his Snyder Avenue home in 1980 by a hitman with a shotgun.   

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20120130_Dante___Luigi_s__Still_a_longtime_hit.html

William Bender wrote another piece about a South Philly eatery with an organized crime connection, Joey Giusepp's Pizzeria.

The place was formerly owned by the former boss of the Philadelphia Cosa Nostra crime family.

Joe Stanfa doesn't want you to read this.

He can't make you put down the newspaper or click on another website, but he's worried that continuing on could be bad for business, for his fresh start.

"I don't want to scare people away," Stanfa said from behind the counter at Joey Giusepp's, his new pizzeria just off the Schuylkill Expressway, in Grays Ferry.

Stanfa is perhaps the only proprietor in Philadelphia who doesn't want you to know about his pizza joint. He'd rather make you a hoagie than talk about the blood that was shed at the same address nearly 20 years ago, or the story behind the scar on his cheek.

You can read the rest of the story via the below link:

http://www.philly.com/philly/news/20120130_MOBBED____with_customers__now__where_wiseguys_once_hung_out.html