© 2008, Philadelphia Inquirer

AFTER THE ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT, RESTAURANT HAS 'A ROUGH NIGHT'

Nov 02, 1989

By Mark Wagenveld, Inquirer Staff Writer

Four white napkins, pressed and folded, stood like pup tents last night on the wine-colored cloth over the table where Nicodemo Scarfo Jr. was sitting when a masked man opened up on him with a machine pistol Halloween night.

There were four chairs around the table, all of them empty. And so, 24 hours after the excitement, was much of Dante & Luigi's Restaurant, the landmark eatery at 10th and Catharine Streets in South Philadelphia.

Dante & Luigi’s is in its fourth generation of family ownership, with three of those generations on hand most nights, and mob hits are not what made it a neighborhood institution.

Behind the bar, Dante Vespertino, representing the fourth generation, was shaking his head and trying to carry on.

"It's been a rough night," he said.

There had been the crank callers ("Can we get a table in the non-shooting section?") the gawkers, the photographers . . . and the curious, now trying to be familiar:

"Tommy here tonight? "

"No, Tommy's not been in tonight. "

Despite the gloom, though, Dante & Luigi's, where busboys in white have grown up to be waiters in red, seemed like many another Italian restaurant at dinnertime.

In the kitchen, the help was banging the plates around.

On the menu, the specials included mussels Napolitano for $5, and the dinners began with stuffed calamari for $9.50. The ravioli was tasty, the eggplant parmigiana hot, zesty.

Some regulars from the neighborhood were laughing and dining in a brightly lit room across the hallway entrance from where Scarfo and his friends had been sitting. And elsewhere, there were the oblivious.

In the rear dining rooms, where chandeliers hang from high ceilings over a linoleum floor, two men talked business in one corner. A middle-aged couple made date-talk in a second.

And in a third, an upbeat young couple dressed in black evening clothes inhaled pasta and drained a bottle of wine. For dessert, there was a long, lingering kiss. They dispatched the waiter in search of a check and kissed again.

Vespertino, 24, and his wife, Eleonora, said they were especially concerned about their grandmother, Marie Di Rocco, the restaurant's elderly matriarch, who was photographed Tuesday night peering through a window at the crowd outside. The couple said the woman was shaken by the attempted killing. She has been helping run the restaurant for most of her life.

"Last night it didn't hit her, but it's hitting her today," Eleonora said. The restuarant has never had to contend with this before, she said.

"You see a lot of children come in here, they grow up and take their children here," she said. "That's the kind of place it is. This kind of thing never happened. It's more like the '40s or the '50s. . . . This place is more than a business. There's the family apsect. We'd like our children to grow up here. "

Dante Vespertino wondered how a West Oak Lane restaurant, scene of a recent, much-publicized shooting, has fared. "There's no doubt it's done irreparable harm," he said of the shooting.

A young busboy leaning against the bar took a longer view. "People down here forget things real quick," he said.