How Ramona from Mob Wives got engaged to Joe Boy
Mob love can be cruel.
When Ramona Rizzo was just an infant, Joseph “Joe Boy” Sclafani would push her through her Staten Island neighborhood in her baby carriage.
“We knew each other before I was born,” said the “Mob Wives” star. They called each other “kissing cousins.”
Then, after a 10-year marriage to a Jordanian that produced four children and a divorce, Rizzo moved back to the old neighborhood about four years ago — right around the corner from Sclafani.
They started to date. Things got serious.
Ramona broke the news of the engagement on Page Six earlier this month.
“He said: ‘You can’t run away from your destiny,’ ” said Rizzo, who
flashed her new engagement ring to her friends on the show last Sunday
night.
It is exactly the kind of story “Mob Wives” — the hit reality show about a group of Staten Island women with various connections to the Mafia — needed right now.
The marriage will be Hollywood’s version of a mob royal wedding — uniting two families that have been portrayed in Hollywood movies.
Al Pacino played Rizzo’s grandfather, Benjamin “Lefty Guns” Ruggiero, in the movie “Donnie Brasco” in 1997.
Sclafani became famous in the underworld when he hid his then-best friend, Costabile “Gus” Farace, from both the feds and the mob after Farace killed a DEA agent in a 1989 drug bust gone wrong.
Farace’s story — on the front pages at the time — became a made-for-TV movie two years later called “Dead and Alive: the Race for Gus Farace” that starred Tony Danza and Samuel L. Jackson.
Nicholas Turturro, pre- “NYPD Blue,” played Sclafani (though the name was changed for legal reasons).
The movie ends when the mob cashed Farace’s ticket, in a hail of bullets, while riding in Sclafani’s car.
The promised Rizzo/Sclafani wedding would be like hitting a Tinseltown trifecta for “Mob Wives.”
Only one little hitch: Sclafani, 48, was arrested in August 2011 and these days lives in the federal lockup in Brooklyn, awaiting trial and the possibility of many years in jail.
He’s charged with possession with the intent to sell more than 1,000 marijuana plants and 5 kilos of cocaine, according to the US Attorney. Prosecutors identify him as a soldier in the Gambino crime family. Rizzo’s grandfather was a Bonanno.
In the world of mobsters, that qualifies as something of a mixed marriage.
Rizzo insists that — jail or not — marriage plans are still on. Federal prison rules permit inmates to marry while incarcerated, she says — though conjugal visits are not permitted.
“It’s like an upper and downer,” Rizzo says. “We can get married we just can’t . . .” Love with someone in jail isn’t easy, Rizzo says. She visits Sclafani once a week, for only an hour. “You spend more time getting in and leaving than you do seeing the inmate,” she says. And there’s no star treatment. On one visit, a guard wouldn’t let her in because her pants were “inappropriate.”
“They’re jeans, not leggings,” she protested, to no avail. Waiting on line to get in, Rizzo gladly poses for iPhone photos with other jail visitors who recognize her.
“We’re all kinda going through the same emotions,” she says.
http://www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/tv/coastal_nostra_h8Mday5IF9Axrauvid0V1I
When Ramona Rizzo was just an infant, Joseph “Joe Boy” Sclafani would push her through her Staten Island neighborhood in her baby carriage.
“We knew each other before I was born,” said the “Mob Wives” star. They called each other “kissing cousins.”
Then, after a 10-year marriage to a Jordanian that produced four children and a divorce, Rizzo moved back to the old neighborhood about four years ago — right around the corner from Sclafani.
They started to date. Things got serious.
Ramona broke the news of the engagement on Page Six earlier this month.
CONNECTED: Ramona Rizzo, granddaughter of Al Pacino’s
character in “Donnie Brasco”, is set to marry Joe Sclafani, who was
played by Nick Turturro in a TV movie. Got it?
It is exactly the kind of story “Mob Wives” — the hit reality show about a group of Staten Island women with various connections to the Mafia — needed right now.
The marriage will be Hollywood’s version of a mob royal wedding — uniting two families that have been portrayed in Hollywood movies.
Al Pacino played Rizzo’s grandfather, Benjamin “Lefty Guns” Ruggiero, in the movie “Donnie Brasco” in 1997.
Sclafani became famous in the underworld when he hid his then-best friend, Costabile “Gus” Farace, from both the feds and the mob after Farace killed a DEA agent in a 1989 drug bust gone wrong.
Farace’s story — on the front pages at the time — became a made-for-TV movie two years later called “Dead and Alive: the Race for Gus Farace” that starred Tony Danza and Samuel L. Jackson.
Nicholas Turturro, pre- “NYPD Blue,” played Sclafani (though the name was changed for legal reasons).
The movie ends when the mob cashed Farace’s ticket, in a hail of bullets, while riding in Sclafani’s car.
The promised Rizzo/Sclafani wedding would be like hitting a Tinseltown trifecta for “Mob Wives.”
Only one little hitch: Sclafani, 48, was arrested in August 2011 and these days lives in the federal lockup in Brooklyn, awaiting trial and the possibility of many years in jail.
He’s charged with possession with the intent to sell more than 1,000 marijuana plants and 5 kilos of cocaine, according to the US Attorney. Prosecutors identify him as a soldier in the Gambino crime family. Rizzo’s grandfather was a Bonanno.
In the world of mobsters, that qualifies as something of a mixed marriage.
Rizzo insists that — jail or not — marriage plans are still on. Federal prison rules permit inmates to marry while incarcerated, she says — though conjugal visits are not permitted.
“It’s like an upper and downer,” Rizzo says. “We can get married we just can’t . . .” Love with someone in jail isn’t easy, Rizzo says. She visits Sclafani once a week, for only an hour. “You spend more time getting in and leaving than you do seeing the inmate,” she says. And there’s no star treatment. On one visit, a guard wouldn’t let her in because her pants were “inappropriate.”
“They’re jeans, not leggings,” she protested, to no avail. Waiting on line to get in, Rizzo gladly poses for iPhone photos with other jail visitors who recognize her.
“We’re all kinda going through the same emotions,” she says.
http://www.nypost.com/p/entertainment/tv/coastal_nostra_h8Mday5IF9Axrauvid0V1I
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