Former PBS and Food Network host David Ruggerio reveals he was a made man in the mafia

Deadline

Ruggerio admitted to his mob past in an interview with Vanity Fair's Gabriel Sherman, who has been working on this story for a year. In the 1990s, Ruggerio was a rising celebrity chef, leading some the finest French restaurants of New York and hosting the PBS series Little Italy with David Ruggerio and Food Network's Ruggerio to Go with "his fuhgeddaboudit persona and wiseguy quips," writes Sherman. But his rise to fame blew up in 1998 when he was charged with -- and later pleaded guilty to -- defrauding a credit card company out of $190,000 by inflating diners’ tips. "Within months, Food Network canceled his show, his restaurants closed, and he filed for personal bankruptcy," writes Sherman. "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." As Ruggerio put it: "I was living two lives."