Pleasant Avenue
Pleasant Avenue, a six-block stretch in East Harlem is one of the most famous incubators of the Italian Mafia in New York City. Anthony 'Fat Tony' Salerno, ran the Genovese crime family from Pleasant Avenue. Rao's, the most exclusive restaurant in all of New York is located here. In the 1960s and 1970s, Pleasant Avenue was so protected by the mob that residents did not lock their doors.
Locals still recall such colorful characters as Eddie the Butcher, whose meat shop on 119th st supposedly didn't sell a single piece of meat in 40 years and Charlie Ding-Ding's candy shop on 118th st was a casino by night.
Anthony Loria Sr., longtime partner of Vincent Papa who masterminded the "Who Stole The French Connection" corruption scandal was born and raised on Pleasant Avenue. This scheme involved corrupt NYPD and law officials that allowed the drug lords to steal an estimated 70 million dollars of narcotics from the NYPD property room at 400 Broome Street in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The total scope of the scandal is still not known and many questions linger on how exactly it happened.
Read more about this topic: East Harlem Purple Gang
Famous quotes containing the words pleasant and/or avenue:
“When one has come to accept a certain course as duty he has a pleasant sense of relief and of lifted responsibility, even if the course involves pain and renunciation. It is like obedience to some external authority; any clear way, though it lead to death, is mentally preferable to the tangle of uncertainty.”
—Charles Horton Cooley (1864–1929)
“Has anyone ever told you that you overplay your various roles rather severely, Mr. Kaplan? First you’re the outraged Madison Avenue man who claims he’s been mistaken for someone else. Then you play the fugitive from justice, supposedly trying to clear his name of a crime he knows he didn’t commit. And now you play the peevish lover stung by jealously and betrayal. It seems to me you fellows could stand a little less training from the FBI and a little more from the Actors Studio.”
—Ernest Lehman (b.1920)