It was an offer he couldn’t refuse.
One of the Big Apple’s most notorious Mafia hotspots is shedding its slick reputation as a halal Italian restaurant – thanks to a former pizza-slinger who bought the business from its bankrupt owners in December.
Sheik Ahsan Ali, 29, the new owner of Aldo’s Pizzaria and Restaurant in Ozone Park, Queens, celebrated the reopening of his store last week, albeit without the pork and alcohol that fueled the infamous gambling rings and 14-hour Mafioso lunch there six decades ago.
“There is a need for change because the demographics are changing,” Ali recently told The Post.
“We have a lot of immigrants, and not everyone eats because of certain things – like some people can’t drink alcohol,” said Ali, who spent years working behind the counter at Aldo.
“We have to change with the times.”
But while everyone is welcome at Ali’s joint, he stressed that criminals who once used Aldo as a hangout will not be there.
Gambino crime boss Ronald Trucchio — known as “Ronny One Arm” because one of his arms was crippled — was regular and told prosecutors he even took a $72,000 salary from Aldo before his 2003 fraud arrest, when Aldo was at his first 101 Street location.
Vinny Asaro, who played a role in the 1978 Lufthansa heist that inspired “Goodfellas,” was also known to frequent the meeting.
“It looked like a straight-to-video mob movie and never made it to the big screen,” a source said at the time.
In recent years, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg investigated possible illegal gambling at the Ozone Park restaurant and investigated whether City Councilman Eric Ulrich offered a government job to one of Aldo’s owners under suspicious circumstances.
Ulrich brought Eric Adams to the restaurant, and the then-mayor made it his unofficial headquarters during his 2020 run. Aldo even hosted a race watch party for the former mayor, according to sources.
Ali said mobsters have long been dead — part of the dying Big Apple mobster culture.
“I heard many stories a long time ago, but I have never met anything, being in this place so many years ago, their jobs or anything like that,” said Ali, who started working at Aldo in 2016.
“Those people are no longer attached. I believe that time has changed.”
While halal pizza joints can be found all over the city, he said he believes his shop is the first Italian restaurant to be fully halal.
Ali said owning his own halal shop had been his dream for a long time – ever since he learned to roll dough under the original owner, Aldo Calore.
He was soon promoted to general manager, a role he held when brothers Anthony and Joe Livreri, who had run the store for ten years, were evicted in December for failing to pay rent.
With the iconic name “Aldo’s” – which Ali estimates is worth $1 million – and a corner store location up for grabs, Ali realized he had been given an offer he couldn’t pass up.
Ali’s uncle, Arshad Hussain, who owns the building, was excited about his nephew’s business idea — telling The Post, “I dreamed this up.
“I’ve always wanted to do something like this for the community and the heritage of Italian food. I think this is a very new concept for people,” said Hussain.
Aldo still uses the same recipes its founder, Calore, did when he opened his first store in 1962, save for two key ingredients.
Both pork and alcohol are forbidden to Muslims, so Ali’s recipes call for alcohol-free cooking wine, and every bite includes beef or chicken instead of pork.
“The first thing – after our food – Muslims love Italian food, and the problem is that we can’t go out to eat because a lot of Italian food is made with alcohol, wines and the like,” Ali told The Post, noting that he and other Muslim pizza makers were limited to eating light slices at Aldo’s previous iteration.
“So I always wanted to open my own place where I could face all kinds of people.
“But I didn’t want it to be limited to Muslim people. I wanted to take care of everyone,” he said. “That’s why we took a lot of time to make sure that all the meat that will be replaced will taste the same.”
Ali has a friend taste-test his replacement meats to make sure the beef pepperoni or beef prosciutto tastes like their pork counterparts.
“Many people say it tastes better than before!” Ali said.
