Whoever murdered Lawrence Ricci appeared to have been well familiar with the Huck Finn Diner in Union.
It was there where the body of the alleged capo — said by law enforcement officials to be associated with the notorious Genovese crime family — was found in 2005 in the locked trunk of a late-model silver Acura, which had sat undisturbed for weeks in the back of the restaurant’s big parking lot.
While there was much speculation over why someone wanted him dead, no one in law enforcement has ever suggested why this was where they wanted him to be found. But it would have been an easy place to escape much scrutiny.
On our continuing summer tour of dining venues that have figured into some of New Jersey’s biggest stories of crime and corruption, we paid a visit to the Huck Finn. Over lunch, we not only pondered the fate of the unfortunate 60-year-old Ricci, but spent time as well to see just what might have turned a ubiquitous diner into a major crime scene so many years ago.
Any New Jerseyan worth their salt (and that’s a lot, if they eat Taylor ham) loves diners. If there’s nothing more American than apple pie, there’s nothing more New Jersey than a diner — where you can get a slice of that apple pie, and a coffee, and some disco fries and a full Thanksgiving dinner if you really want it, at any hour of the day or night.
So perhaps it should come as no surprise that New Jersey criminals like diners too, right? Not just for the food, but the transient nature of the clientele who come in and out of those cushy leather (or vinyl) booths — some popping in just for a cup of coffee, some taking their time to chat with friends over a meal.
It’s easy to blend in at a diner, even if the dining room is sparse with customers. The wait staff typically gives you your space and no one is going to remember a random customer. Perfect place to plan a crime, and it turns out a place someone thought was safe to at least leave the evidence of a major crime.
Ricci’s killer, or killers, would probably have known that the popular Huck Finn on Morris Avenue usually attracts a steady stream of hungry customers, who very likely would not have remembered seeing anyone getting out of a car on any given day.
At the same time, they surely would have known that like so many Jersey diners, the Huck Finn was open from 6 in the morning until midnight — making it easy to drop off a car with a body stashed in the trunk at just about any time of the day without anyone blinking an eye.
Then again, perhaps it was just a convenient place to grab a final cup of coffee before disappearing into the night.
No one knows for sure. There were no surveillance cameras of the parking lot. No one was ever charged with the murder. And no one to this day is talking.
VIOLENCE AT THE TABLE
The Huck Finn is a friendly place. While in these days of COVID, everyone working there wears a mask, a sign by the register notes “there is a smile” behind every one of those masks. We took them at their word.
It’s a clean, well-lit dining room with green Formica tables, mauve faux leather booth and chair seating, and no shortage of wait staff. Of course, there is a refrigerated cake display case.
A place of comfort food, its menu is like the yellow pages (if anyone remembers what those were in the days before the internet).
From meatloaf and mashed potatoes to Greek salads and Western omelets, just about anything can come out of its kitchen. A late-night slice of cheesecake is always available. Politicians may campaign there, real estate deals are closed on napkins, and sports fans can stop in after games, able to catch highlights on the TV screens that are part of the diner’s décor.
Still, it’s not often that a dead mobster is left at the back door. Indeed, there was not a hint that this of all places would have figured to be the dumping-ground-of-choice for a high-stakes mob rubout.
In Jersey, the Meadowlands, long rumored to be the final resting place of Jimmy Hoffa, the mob-tied labor leader — who vanished after he went to a meeting regarding a growing feud with New Jersey Mafia boss Anthony “Tony Pro” Provenzano — would seem far more likely. Or the Hackensack River. That was where the body of another reputed mob leader, John DiGilio, a 55-year-old former middleweight fighter and said by authorities to be part of the same Genovese organized-crime family as Ricci, was once found wrapped in mortician’s bag floating near Carlstadt.
Still, in a business where the bad guys take care of business with a deadly finality, there are no shortage of stories of mob violence unfolding somewhere around a dinner table in New Jersey.
Depression-era bootlegger Dutch Schultz was gunned down amidst a gang war while in the men’s room of the old Palace Chop House in Newark back in 1935. Willie Moretti, yet another Genovese underboss, was sitting down to lunch at Joe’s Elbow Room in Cliffside Park when he was murdered over orange juice and cake in 1951.
Just down the block, federal prosecutors earlier this year detailed a murder-for-hire scheme involving a Democratic political operative who admitted in January that he hired two men to murder a former associate found stabbed to death in his Jersey City apartment in 2014. The next day, the operative met one of the killers — where else, but in the parking lot of an Elizabeth diner — admittedly paying him thousands of dollars in cash.
Ricci came to his end while on trial in Brooklyn on a federal racketeering indictment. A major player on New Jersey’s waterfront, he had been indicted along with two International Longshoremen’s Association officials on allegations he used threats and intimidation to steer contracts from the union’s health care and welfare funds to companies that benefited mob associates.
When he went missing in October 2005, three weeks after the trial began, his lawyer feared the worst.
As it turned out, Ricci and his co-defendants were acquitted of the charges. But as his attorney predicted, the father and grandfather would never celebrate the victory.
Just a few weeks after the jury returned with its verdict in November, Ricci’s body was found at the Huck Finn in a relative’s car that had been left for weeks in the back of the parking lot overlooking a high school athletic field.
Alerted by a foul odor and the swarming of flies around the car, police found his decomposing remains, face down with a grey sweatshirt over his face.
Somebody had shot him in the back of his head.
DISCO FRIES, A TRUE JERSEY MYSTERY
The parking lot at the Huck Finn Diner is indeed sizable, as is the case at most diners. Another reason we love them — even at their busiest, you can typically find parking. (Unless you’re going to Tops Diner in East Newark. That parking lot is so small that someone would have been complaining about the car where Ricci’s body was stashed after two hours. At the Huck Finn, the lot is so big that it took a while for anyone to notice.)
Did the person that left Ricci’s body in the back actually come into the diner for a bite to eat after dropping off the car? If he did, he could have done a lot worse than the turkey club sandwich, a diner staple that the Huck Finn executes to near perfection — though the mayonnaise should have been on the sandwich, not on the side.
The disco fries looked like they were covered by a plastic yellow blanket, and that is exactly how they are supposed to look.
Under that melty American cheese was a bed of rich brown gravy and crispy fries that got soggier the longer they bathed in it. It’s a true Jersey mystery that that combination of unappetizing words can create something so delicious. Don’t try to solve it. Just eat it.
A garden omelet was nicely cooked, full of vegetables with the eggs slightly browned on the outside yet still moist on the inside. The accompanying home fries, another diner staple, were not greasy and held a satisfying crunch on the edges.
The coffee kept coming.
We still don’t know who killed Ricci. Diner waitresses can be mean, but not THAT mean. You might get yelled at for calling it pork roll in North Jersey, but it’s not a whackable offense.
Law enforcement sources believe he was killed because he ignored a mob order to plead guilty in his racketeering trial to avoid the exposure. Several men with ties to organized crime have been named by authorities over the years, but no one has ever been charged.
So why did a dead mobster turn up at the Huck Finn?
It might have been nothing more than a place where someone knew he would be found. At some point…
“They throw him in the trunk of a car in the middle of a public trial for us to find him,” an FBI source told the Daily News at the time Ricci’s body was discovered. “It’s them saying, ‘All right, now what are you going to do?’”
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