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It was an offer he couldn’t refuse.
One of the Big Apple’s most notorious Mafia hotspots is shedding its wiseguy reputation to become a halal Italian restaurant — thanks to a former pizza-slinger who bought the business from its cash-strapped owners in December.
Sheik Ahsan Ali, 29, the new proprietor of Aldo’s Pizzaria and Restaurant in Ozone Park, Queens, celebrated his restaurant’s grand re-opening last week, although without the pork and alcohol that fueled some of the reputed backdoor gambling rings and 14-hour Mafioso lunches there over the past six decades.
“There’s a need for change because the demographic is changing,” Ali recently told The Post.
“We have a lot of immigrants, and not everybody is eating because of certain things — like some folks can’t have alcohol,” said Ali, who spent years working behind Aldo’s counter.
“We have to change with the times.”
But while everyone is welcome at Ali’s joint, he emphasized that the gangsters who once used Aldo’s as a meeting spot will not be.
Gambino crime-boss Ronald Trucchio — known as “Ronny One Arm” because one of his arms was partly paralyzed — was a regular and told prosecutors he even took a $72,000 salary from Aldo’s before his 2003 racketeering arrest, when Aldo’s was at its original 101 Street location.
Vinny Asaro, who played a role in the 1978 Lufthansa heist that inspired “Goodfellas,” was also known to frequent the joint.
“It looked like a scene out of a mob movie that went right to video and never made 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 eatery and probed whether City Councilman Eric Ulrich gave a government job to one of Aldo’s co-owners under suspicious circumstances.
Ulrich brought Eric Adams to the restaurant, with the then-mayoral candidate then turning it into his unofficial headquarters during his 2020 run. Aldo’s even catered the ex-mayor’s primary-race watch party, according to sources.
Ali claimed the eatery’s mob connections have long been dead — as part of a larger dying Big Apple mobster culture.
“I did hear a lot of stories back in the days, but I have never encountered anything, being in this place for the past so many years, their activities or anything like that,” said Ali, whose first shift at Aldo’s was in 2016.
“There is no attachment of those people anymore. I believe the time has changed.”
While halal pizza joints can be found throughout the city, he said he believes his shop is the first full Italian restaurant to be halal.
Ali said that owning his own halal restaurant had long been a dream of his — since he learned to toss dough under the original owner, Aldo Calore.
He quickly graduated to general manager, a role he was serving when brothers Anthony and Joe Livreri, who ran the shop for a decade, were evicted in December for failing to pay their rent.
With the legendary name of “Aldo’s” — which Ali estimates to be worth $1 million — and the shop’s perfect corner spot up for grabs, Ali realized he was given an offer he couldn’t pass up.
Ali’s uncle, Arshad Hussain, who owns the building, was ecstatic at his nephew’s business idea — telling The Post, “I dreamed of this.
“I always wanted to do something like this for the community and for the legacy of Italian food. I think this is a very new concept to the people,” said Hussain.
Aldo’s still uses the same recipes that its founder, Calore, crafted when he opened his original shop in 1962, save for two key ingredients.
The two are the pork and booze that are non-permissible for Muslims, so Ali’s recipes call for alcohol-free cooking wine, and all bites feature beef or chicken instead of pork.
“The first thing — after our own food — Muslims like Italian food, and the problem is that we can’t go out to eat because most Italian food is made out of alcohol, wines and stuff like that,” Ali told The Post, noting that he and his fellow-Muslim pizza slingers were limited to eating plain slices in the previous iterations of Aldo’s.
“So I always wanted to open my own place where I could cater to all kinds of nationalities.
“But I just didn’t want it to be limited to Muslims people only. I wanted to cater to everybody,” he said. “That is why we took a lot of time to make sure all the meat to be substituted would taste the same.”
Ali has a friend who taste-tested his substituted meats to make sure the beef pepperoni or beef prosciutto tasted like their pork counterparts.
“A lot of people say it tastes better than before!” Ali said.
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