New film ‘The Alto Knights’ named for one of Mob’s many social clubs

The Alto Knights, the film written by Nicholas Pileggi and directed by Barry Levinson, is named for a once-prominent Manhattan social club of the Genovese crime family. Social clubs were a home away from home for mobsters to fraternize with their partners in crime. They also were venues for discussing business, which meant anything from robbery and extortion to drug trafficking and murder. Individual crews often had their own hangouts, such as John Gotti’s Bergin Hunt and Fish Club in Queens. Gotti later took over the Ravenite Social Club in Manhattan after ascending to head of the Gambino crime family, as the top dogs typically had their own clubs passed down from boss to boss.

Not all social clubs were affiliated with organized crime. Since the late 1800s, social clubs have been a place for Italian Americans to congregate with one another and preserve their cultural identity. One of the oldest in the country, Tiro a Segno, started in 1888 in New York City and became an important refuge when anti-Italian sentiments were at an all-time high. Tiro a Segno, Italian for “target shooting,” was first a Staten Island hunting club before moving in 1924 to a Greenwich Village location where there is a shooting range in the basement. Tiro a Segno is a legitimate establishment, which counts among its past members reform-minded New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia and famous tenor Enrico Caruso. But the Mob has a way of co-opting legitimate concepts for its own nefarious purposes.

Social clubs usually were places for discussing crimes, not committing them, but there were a few exceptions. Gambino hitman Roy DeMeo had a flat next to his Gemini Lounge outfitted with tools for murder and adhering to his adage of “no body, no crime.” In 1984, Mary Bari the longtime girlfriend of Colombo crime family boss Alphonse Persico, was murdered by Colombo family member Greg Scarpa Jr. at the Wimpy Boy Social Club to prevent her from divulging to the feds the boss-in-hiding’s location.

Some social clubs functioned as mini-casinos in which mobsters would bet on poker and blackjack, but there were non-traditional games too. Gotti, an avid and often-unlucky gambler, added Scrabble, Monopoly and chess to the gaming tables at the Sinatra Club, an after-hours hangout in the Ozone Park neighborhood of Queens that belonged to Colombo crime family associate Sal “Sally Ubatz” Polisi. Polisi’s joint offered other illegal activities too. He contracted prostitutes to accompany patrons in his den of iniquity — and at a nearby motel. And unbeknownst to some of his closest allies, Polisi secretly used the hangout as a front for drug trafficking.

In at least one case, social club dwellers became the victims of crime. In 1992, married swindlers Thomas and Rosemarie Uva targeted these spots in a string of robberies, dramatized in the 2014 film Rob the Mob. The patrons of these establishments were guaranteed to have plenty of cash and jewelry for the taking. Their spree ended on Christmas Eve that year when Gambino capo Dominick “Skinny Dom” Pizzonia gunned them down. The Mob took the violation of their strongholds personally.

The Alto Knights and the Ravenite

The Alto Knights began its life as the Café Royale on the corner of Kenmare and Mulberry streets, just a few blocks away from the New York Police Department headquarters. It began its long association with organized crime as a meeting spot for bootleggers during Prohibition. In the 1950s, Vito Genovese took over and renamed the club the Alto Knights Social Club. Its proximity to police headquarters meant that law enforcement kept a close eye on the place. Sherman Willse, an NYPD narcotics squad detective, conducted regular surveillance of the Alto Knights from September 1955 to February 1956. Willse provided photos of known mobsters having conversations outside the club, including Genovese, to Senator John McClellan’s Rackets Committee in 1958. This surveillance had the added benefit of discouraging attacks from rivals.

There is a misconception that the Alto Knights later became the Ravenite Social Club, the Gambino family headquarters. The ground zero for this misinformation appears to be a 1986 Newsday column, “Inside New York,” which transcribed a voice message from a “Mob insider”:

“You reporters are dumb. You keep mentioning the Ravenite Social Club on Broome Street as Gambino family headquarters, like it was new. What you don’t know is that dump … is where top wiseguys have been doing business for about 60 years. … About 1931, [Lucky] Luciano became boss of the family and named it the Alto Knights. … After Carlo Gambino became the most powerful boss in the country he changed the name, because he always hated taking a back seat to Charlie Lucky and the others. He called the place Ravenite, supposedly after his favorite poem, ‘The Raven,’ by [Edgar Allen] Poe.”

In fact, the Alto Knights and the Ravenite were two blocks away from each other, at 86 Kenmare Street and 247 Mulberry Street, respectively. The former’s renaming took place much later than this caller claims. A September 1951 New York Daily News report on the arrest of a bookie at the address refers to the venue as the Café Royale. Evidently, the Ravenite and Alto Knights existed concurrently. Aniello “Neil” Dellacroce, a Gambino capo who later became underboss, was arrested outside the Ravenite in 1956 in relation to the murder of Abraham Telvi, who allegedly threw acid in the face of investigative reporter Victor Reisel earlier that year. Meanwhile, the Alto Knights was mentioned in a 1958 FBI memo, still actively serving as a Mafia meeting place.

Contributing to the mix-up might be the Ravenite’s original 1919 name, the Raven Knights. This also discounts the theory regarding Gambino’s love for gothic poetry, as the boss didn’t arrive in America until 1921. Although the Ravenite had appeared in some newspaper reports since the mid- to late 1950s, it was Gotti who, in the 1980s, turned it into the most well-known social club in Mob history.

‘Don’t talk, this place is bugged’

Before the Ravenite, Gotti spent his time at the Bergin Hunt and Fish Club in the Ozone Park neighborhood of Queens. In the early 1970s, Gotti’s capo, Carmine “Charley Wagons” Fatico, opened the social club and purportedly named it after Bergen Street where Fatico’s crew originated — the misspelled name stuck. Fatico deliberately picked a location close to JFK airport, a frequent target of his crew’s hijackings. The Bergin consisted of two units sharing a brick façade. Partially obscured behind a window with chicken-wire grating was a sign that read, “Bergin HUNT & FISH Social Club Inc.,” leaving no question about the place’s identity to prying eyes. The Bergin began a slow decline once Gotti was convicted and sentenced to life in prison in 1992. Gotti’s brother, Peter, and son, John Jr., continued to use the club after the conviction, but in 2000, half of the Bergin became a butcher shop. By 2005, it had been vacated and was available for lease.

When the Dapper Don took the reins of the Gambino crime family after his successful plot to kill boss Paul Castellano, he moved his operations from the Bergin to the Ravenite. With only two railroad-style rooms, the Ravenite was not a large establishment. The front room had tables and an espresso machine, while the back room functioned as a private meeting space. Upon taking control, Gotti had the exterior remodeled. The wide bay windows were removed, the façade bricked over and signage removed. From the outside, the renovated — and now non-descript — Ravenite looked more like the Bergin. The brick wall not only concealed the club from curious spectators but protected it from potential bombings.

The Ravenite, like all Mob social clubs, was naturally a prime target for surveillance. All levels of law enforcement knew that having ears inside a social club was a surefire way to gain Mafia intel. In 1979, an NYPD detective snuck into the Ravenite to install a listening device and gave sedative-laced meatballs to the guard dog. However, the drowsy dog later tipped off Gambino associates that something was awry, and they quickly found and disposed of the bug.

It was well known in the underworld that unwelcome ears were listening inside the clubs. A word of advice is attributed to Gotti: “Don’t ever say anything you don’t want played back to you someday.” Some clubs had signs that said, “Don’t talk. This place is bugged.” At the Triangle Social Club, the home base of Genovese crime family boss Vincent “Chin” Gigante, members were directed to never say the boss’s name out loud and only point to their chin when referring to him. Above the telephone at the Ravenite was a picture of a literal bug as a reminder of this cardinal rule. Unfortunately for Gotti, he did not follow his own advice.

Gotti had taken to having private conversations with his crew in an apartment above the Ravenite. Every now and then, the sole resident, 74-year-old Nettie Cirelli, would go shopping on Gotti’s dime while he used her apartment to talk business. Gotti specifically chose this location to avoid the suspected bugs in the Ravenite. However, Gotti would begin conversations while going up the stairs to the apartment, tipping off the feds that there was evidential gold waiting inside.

In late 1989, when Cirelli went on vacation, FBI agents snuck into the apartment and installed a bug, which turned out to be exactly what the team needed to build a case against Gotti. The FBI first used the tapes to convince Gotti’s underboss, “Sammy the Bull” Gravano, to become a state’s witness. Then the tapes became evidence for the prosecution in Gotti’s 1992 trial. As the Teflon Don sat in the courtroom, the day when his own words were played back to him had come.

Beyond New York City

New York was a hotspot for social clubs with its high density of mobsters, but the hangouts existed anywhere with an organized crime presence. And just like New York, law enforcement kept a constant vigil on them. Wiseguys expected surveillance, but some of these operations went much deeper than they expected.

Chicago Outfit boss Sam Giancana had multiple places as his headquarters, although he spent much of his time at the Armory, a cocktail lounge in Chicago’s Forest Park suburb. Unlike the Ravenite, others were welcome in Giancana’s domain. In 1958, Forest Park Mayor William Meyer hosted a dinner for Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin at the Armory. That openness came with a drawback, as the Chicago boss was continually paranoid that the feds were spying on him — and rightfully so. Giancana was a key target of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover’s Top Hoodlum program.

The FBI had installed secret — and illegal — wiretaps and bugs in many of Giancana’s meeting places, including the Armory. Agents gained access to the Armory by copying a janitor’s keys after taking him in for questioning on dubious suspicions. In addition to gaining information about the boss’s dealings, the planted bug tipped off the FBI about his plans to kill Cuban President Fidel Castro, although they didn’t know it was a CIA-sanctioned operation.

The FBI’s methods of surveillance were bold, but in Las Vegas they would have their most audacious scheme yet. The Mob had been flushed out of Las Vegas casinos by the 1990s, but some remnants held strong in other parts of the city. In 1995, Genovese crime family associate Anthony “Fat Tony” Angioletti opened the Sea Breeze, a social club located in an industrial complex a few blocks down the street from the Rio hotel-casino.

The Sea Breeze was a humble establishment. The 504-square foot space had a kitchen, a few places to sit and a television. But the club became a hot spot for mobsters transplanted to Las Vegas, including Carmen Milano, brother of Los Angeles boss Peter Milano; former Spilotro associate Herbie Blitzstein; and New York Mob associate Peter Caruso. Although Angioletti’s boisterous nature was a turnoff for the club’s patrons, they stayed for his free, home-cooked Italian meals. The mobsters enjoyed dinner on the house while plotting their latest schemes.

What the regulars didn’t know is that Angioletti was an FBI informant, and the feds had secretly funded “his” social club. One of the regulars was an undercover FBI agent, Herm Groman, who was part of the team that created the Sea Breeze. Groman, too, benefited from Angioletti’s fine cuisine.

“Ate there many times with the fellas,” Groman said in an email. “I’d say his best item on our menu was when he would make ‘Long Island Littleneck Clams and Linguine.’ He would have the clams overnighted from New York! Bellissimo! If I spent just a little more time there, they would have started calling me ‘Fat Sonny!’”

As part of “Operation Thin Crust,” agents wired up the Sea Breeze with microphones to secretly record conservations about the crew’s money-making schemes. The Sea Breeze helped the FBI to build a solid case against Blitzstein and his fellow mobsters, but it took a sudden turn in 1997. On January 6, the case became a murder investigation when Blitzstein was found shot to death in his home near the intersection of Twain Avenue and Sandhill Road. Caruso told Mob associate John Branco that he had ordered the hit, not knowing that Caruso, also a criminal informant, was wearing a wire. “Operation Thin Crust” was one of the final blows that drove the Mob out of Las Vegas once and for all.

The high profile of social clubs attracted too much attention from law enforcement to continue to exist. There are still hangout spots, but today’s Mob bosses would rather operate in a more incognito manner than their forefathers. The locations of the most infamous social clubs have, too, moved on from their shady past. As of 2025, the Alto Knights is now a pizzeria; the Ravenite is a men’s fashion boutique; the two units of the Bergin are a bubble tea café and a Spanish-speaking Christian church; the Armory Lounge in Chicago is a brunch diner; and the Sea Breeze in Las Vegas is a body shop.