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:
“What a pleasant lot of fellows they are. What a pity they have so little sense about politics. If they lived North the last one of them would be Republicans.”
—Chester A. Arthur (1829–1886)
“Like art and politics, gangsterism is a very important avenue of assimilation into society.”
—E.L. (Edgar Lawrence)