The big cheese of his family

BY ROBERT POLNER | NEWSDAY STAFF WRITER

March 18, 2006

Giacinto Mancuso poses with his pizzas at his Gino's Pizza on Queens Blvd. (Newsday photo/ Alejandra Villa / March 9, 2006)

More than four decades after arriving here from Sicily, Gicinto Mancuso, 67, still has some trouble speaking English fluently. Not so his son, Mario. Born in Queens two years after his father opened Gino's Pizza just off Queens Boulevard, the younger Mancuso became a U.S. deputy assistant secretary of defense. His job: special operations and counterterrorism.

Mancuso's pizzeria on Broadway opened in 1967. His red sauce sent his son, who used to spend summers in Sicily at the home of his grandparents, to Harvard, and later to NYU Law School.

First, Mario worked for a corporate law firm in Manhattan. That was before he enlisted in the Army and served in Iraq for most of 2003, inspired by the stories he heard growing up about the U.S. liberation of his parents' native Sicily.

"I work all my life to pay his school," said the father.

And what does Papa Mancuso himself have to show for all the years of spinning dough? For one thing, he received a signed, 8-by-10 photo of George W. Bush, and a letter from the general counsel of the Defense Department, which he keeps on a shelf above the pizza trays. "Mario is making his mark here," Jim Haynes wrote on Pentagon stationery dated April 4, 2005. "He's serving his country well and you should be proud."

Gicinto Mancuso arrived as a tourist in New York when Lyndon B. Johnson was in the White House. His childhood sweetheart was already in America, and he stayed with her at her brother's home in Jamaica. Gicinto drove a truck, hauled boxes, worked at another pizzeria.

"Anything to make money. That's it," he said.

His daughter was born in 1966, and Mario in 1969. That year, Gicinto and his wife, Francesca, bought a house for $15,000 in Howard Beach. They paid it off in just six months and started saving for college for both children.

"Ninety hours a week for 20 straight years," was how he described his life as an immigrant from Sicily. A smile happened to crease his face as his 28-year-old assistant from Ecuador, Oscar Zumba, took a customer's order (a Coke and two Sicilian slices).