He Insulted a Singer at Rao’s — Then the Mob Shot Him in the Back 

 

 

 

Monday, December 22nd, 2003. A little after 10:00 at night, 3 days before Christmas, Rao’s, a tiny Italian restaurant on the corner of East 114th Street and Pleasant Avenue in East Harlem, a red-headed Broadway singer named Rena Strober had just finished belting Don’t Rain on My Parade to a room full of applause.

 She sat back down at her table. Then she heard a sound she thought was a waiter dropping a glass. It wasn’t. A 67-year-old man named Louis Barone had just pulled a .38 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver out of his coat pocket and fired it into the back of a man standing at the crowded bar. Albert Circelli, 37 years old, pitched forward and hit the floor face-first.

A second shot cracked out and tore through the foot of an innocent diner sitting nearby. The whole thing was over in seconds. A man was dead before the Christmas lights on the wall finished their next blink. Here’s the thing you have to understand. This wasn’t a planned hit. There was no contract, no crew, no getaway car idling outside.

 Louis Barone wasn’t even a made man. He was an aging associate of the Lucchese crime family who drifted into Rao’s maybe once a year. And the man he killed died over something almost impossibly small, not money, not territory, not an informant who talked. A man died because he wouldn’t stop running his mouth while a young actress sang a Barbra Streisand show tune.

This is the story of the most exclusive restaurant in New York City, a room so hard to get into that presidents, movie stars, and billionaires couldn’t buy their way to a table. And this is the story of the one December night when its unwritten rules turned deadly. This is how a single insult thrown across a packed bar room ended one life, shattered another, and turned a struggling singer into front page tabloid fodder overnight.

But here’s what almost nobody understood about that night. The man who pulled the trigger wasn’t really defending the singer at all. He was defending something older and far more dangerous. And by the time he understood what he’d done, it was already too late to take any of it back. To understand how a man dies over a show tune, you first have to understand the room.

 Rao’s opened in 1896. A Rao family immigrant bought a small saloon at the corner of 114th Street and Pleasant Avenue. Back when East Harlem was the largest Italian-American neighborhood in the entire country. Bigger even than Little Italy downtown. It stayed one room, just one. 10 tables, four tables, and six booths, seating for about 60 people.

The walls got covered in Christmas lights that never came down. All year, every [music] year. And framed photos of Frank Sinatra and Frankie Valli. For decades, it was a neighborhood secret. Homey Southern Italian food, lemon chicken, meatballs the size of your fist, marinara that would later make the family millions in jars on grocery shelves.

Then, in 1977, a New York Times critic named Mimi Sheraton walked in and gave the little joint three stars, and everything changed. The phone started ringing and never stopped. There were suddenly 10,000 people who wanted into a 10-table room. So, the owner, a man named Frank Pellegrino, did something no other restaurant on Earth would do.

 He stopped taking reservations entirely. Instead, he assigned the tables permanently. If you were a regular, that table was yours A on your night for life. When you died, your family inherited it. If you couldn’t make it, you gave your table to a friend or donated it to charity. And if you weren’t one of the chosen, you didn’t get in.

Period. Pellegrino turned away so many people he earned a nickname, Frankie No. There were nights he couldn’t even get his own celebrity friends a seat. You have to sit with how strange that is. This was a place where Bill Clinton, Billy Joel, and Martha Stewart came as guests.

 Where the table itself was the currency, worth more than money, because money couldn’t buy it. And in a room that intimate, that clubby, that closed off from the outside world, everyone knew everyone. Everyone had a place. Everyone understood the rules. And some of those regulars, going back generations, were connected men, wise guys. The safest corner to park your car in all of Manhattan, people joked, because nobody would dare touch anything near Rao’s.

That’s the world Albert Cerchelli walked into that Monday night. Cerchelli was 37, a resident of Yonkers, just north of the city. Depending on which account you believe, he was either a made man in the Lucchese crime family or a lower-level associate. That detail is genuinely disputed. The first wire reports the night of the shooting simply called him a patron.

Later reporting described him as a made guy. What isn’t disputed is that he carried himself like someone who belonged, someone owed respect. And that night, he’d come to Rao’s bar to drink. And then there was the other man, Louis Barone, 67 years old, silver-haired, unremarkable, the kind of old-timer you’d walk right past on the street.

Barone was a Lucchese associate, too, but a peripheral one. A guy who showed up at Rao’s about once a year, took a spot at the bar, and blended into the wallpaper. He was not a killer by trade. He was not there on business. He was there, like everyone else, for a plate of food and a drink 3 days before Christmas.

Two connected men on the fringes of the same crumbling old world, in a room where honor still meant something and everyone was watching to see if you had it. Now, the singer. Rena Strober was 27 years old that December. Blue eyes, red hair, an up-and-coming Broadway actress who’d been part of the national touring company of Les Misérables.

She wasn’t mob connected. She wasn’t from that world at all. She was Jewish, from a completely different New York than the one inside Rao’s. She got her seat at the table through a man named Sonny Grosso, a former New York City police detective. And not just any detective. Grosso was one of the two real cops whose work cracked the legendary French Connection heroin case, later immortalized in the movie.

He’d become a television producer, and he’d taken Strober under his wing like a father. He owned a Monday night table at Rao’s, and every week he brought Rena along. Every week she’d eat clams and lemon chicken, mingle with an A-list crowd, and at some point in the evening the co-owner [music] Frank Pellegrino would ask her to sing.

Because that was the ritual. Pellegrino had decided sometime back that Don’t Rain on My Parade was her song. The big belter from Funny Girl, the one Barbra Streisand made famous. He’d learned she was a real Broadway performer, and he loved showing her off. So, on her nights, the jukebox would start, and Rena would stand up and sing to the whole room, and the room would go crazy for her.

But this Monday was different. It was 3 days before Christmas, and the place was packed. All 10 bar stools full. Patrons standing three deep. It was loud, a real party atmosphere. When Pellegrino came over and asked her to sing, Rena actually hesitated. It was too loud, she thought, too chaotic. Maybe she should wait for the crowd to settle.

But Pellegrino had already made up his mind. He hit play on the jukebox. And once that jukebox started, that was her cue. So she stood up, and she began to sing, facing toward the back of the restaurant, pouring everything into that Streisand belter while the room roared. She had no idea what was happening at the bar behind her, because as Rena Strober sang, Albert Cercelli was not impressed.

 According to Barone’s own confession to police later, Cercelli turned to a friend at the bar and snarled, and I’m quoting the account here, “Ah, shut up. Get her off.” She sucks. Now Lewis Barone was standing right there. And to Barone, in that room, on that night, this was not just rudeness. This was a violation. Somebody was disrespecting a guest, a singer, in Rowes, in front of everyone.

So Barone did the smallest possible thing. He raised his index finger to his lips and made a shushing gesture. “Quiet down. Let her sing.” That should have been the end of it. It wasn’t. Because that’s when it escalated, fast. Cercelli didn’t take the correction. He got in Barone’s face. He put his finger in the old man’s face, and according to the confession, threatened him crudely and viciously, telling Barone exactly what he was going to do to him.

Barone told the police, “You don’t have to talk to me like that.” But the insults kept coming, and something in the 67-year-old man came loose. In his own chilling words to detectives afterward, “I was really mad. I had blood in my eyes.” And then Barone said the sentence that explains this entire tragedy.

 The sentence that takes you inside a dying code that most of the world had already left behind. He told police, “I lost face. I had to defend my honor. I had no choice but to shoot him. I had no choice but to kill him.” Think about what that means. He had no choice. In Louie Barone’s world, in that back corner of an old subculture, a man who let himself be humiliated in public, in front of connected people, in Rao’s of all places, was finished.

 To back down was to die a different kind of death. And so, a peripheral old man who came to that restaurant once a year decided, in the space of a few seconds, that a stranger’s rudeness had left him no option but murder. Here’s where it happened. As Sirchelli finally started to turn and leave the bar, Barone reached into his right coat pocket. He pulled out the .

38 caliber Smith & Wesson revolver, and he shot Albert Sirchelli in the back. Sirchelli dropped straight down, face first, onto the floor of the restaurant. And then Barone did something that shows just how far gone he was in that moment. Sirchelli was already down. >> [clears throat] >> It was done. But Barone, in his own words, snapped.

“I went ballistic,” he confessed. He fired a second time. That shot missed Sirchelli completely. Instead, it flew across the room and struck a 57-year-old man named Albert Petraglia in the foot. Petraglia wasn’t connected to any of this. He was a chief court clerk, an ordinary man having dinner, who suddenly had a dead body land on the floor right in front of him and a bullet in his own foot.

 He’d later describe the horrible moment simply. He was staring up at the dying man. The dying man was staring up at him. Petreglia said he felt sorry because he knew he himself was going to the hospital and he knew the other man was going to the morgue. Meanwhile, Rena Strober, who had just finished her song and sat back down, dove under her table.

 She thought the first shot was a dropped glass. When the second one rang out, she understood. And this young Jewish actress, hiding under a table in a mobbed up Italian restaurant 3 days before Christmas, began to pray. She recited the Shema, the holiest prayer in Judaism, the words traditionally spoken on a deathbed, because in that instant she genuinely believed she might be about to die.

 Now, watch what Louis Barone did next because it tells you everything. He didn’t run. He didn’t try to hide the weapon. He simply dropped the revolver on the floor right there, exactly the way you’d see it in an old gangster movie, and he walked outside. He stepped out onto the sidewalk into the cold December night and walked directly into the path of two uniformed police officers.

 He told them calmly that someone had just been shot inside. An off-duty cop who’d been eating dinner in the restaurant ran out behind him and pointed at Barone as the shooter, and that was that. The old man was arrested on the spot. He defended his honor, and it had cost one man his life, wounded a court clerk, and traumatized a young singer, all in under a minute.

The aftermath came fast and heavy. Albert Cerchelli died of his wounds. Albert Petreglia was treated at the hospital and survived his foot injury. And Louis Barone, facing a murder charge, did not fight it the way a hardened killer might. In 2004, he pleaded guilty to manslaughter and assault. He was sentenced to 15 years in state prison. He never got out.

 Louis Barone died behind bars of natural causes, according to the New York State Department of Corrections. An old man who threw his remaining years away over a few seconds of wounded pride at a bar. But the ripples spread far beyond the two men at the center of it. Rao’s, the untouchable little restaurant, suddenly had the one thing it had spent a century avoiding. Bad press.

The story was irresistible. A real mob shooting in the most exclusive room in New York over a singer 3 days before Christmas. It sounded like a lost episode of The Sopranos. In fact, the crime writers of Law & Order turned it into an episode building a fictional restaurant murder directly on what happened that night.

Late-night hosts cracked jokes about it in their monologues. And Frank Pellegrino, the co-owner who’d hit play on that jukebox, was himself an actor. He’d played a chef in the movie Goodfellas and an FBI bureau chief on The Sopranos. The line between the real Rao’s and its fictional mob mythology had collapsed completely.

And then there’s Rena Strober. Overnight, she went from an anonymous touring actress to, in her own words, “da singer from da mob hit.” Journalists knocked on her door. The trauma was real. She lived with post-traumatic stress, the memory of praying under that table, the press hounding her every move.

 She never went back to her regular Monday nights at Rao’s. Not once. Instead, she joined the Friars Club and sang there on Thursday nights, telling herself, and I love this line, that a room full of old Jewish men with no guns was probably a safer place for her to perform. But she also said the night changed her in a lasting way. It made her fearless.

Life was short, she decided. She stopped playing it safe. Years later she turned the whole surreal experience into a one-woman stage show called Spaghetti and Matzo Balls, about a nice Jewish girl who accidentally landed in the middle of a mafia murder.