Mafia: Not So Pound Foolish

When I arrived in England in 1962, one of the oddities encountered was the fact that most of the English money was coins which jingled and made holes in my pockets.

I had a hell of a time figuring them out since the decimal system hadn’t yet managed to cross the channel. There were pence, two pence, ten pence shillings, and pounds. The pound was worth $2.80 in real money, more or less. It was not easy to find a five-pound note, and a ‘tenner’ was a rarity. “Penny wise, pound foolish” was the motto of frugal British housewives. Perhaps that was the reason they hadn’t discovered paper money.

The government didn’t want their sterling to go abroad, and they restricted the export of money through Exchange Control regulations which amazingly and for no good reason hung on until Margaret Thatcher axed them in 1979.

Brits, escaping the usually foul British weather, and seeking the sun and going on holiday were only allowed to take out of the country fifty pounds plus another fifteen in pocket money. It wasn’t a perfect system – cheating in small amounts was quite easy and flagrant – but the government’s central purpose, to prevent any panic run on their currency and to stabilize the pound, was generally effective.

So effective, according to well-sourced gossip, that this created a serious problem for the local mafia who found themselves with warehouses full of coins, the profits from their illegal bookmaking and prostitution activities during the war, profits which they couldn’t get out of the country. “Just think”, a friend told me, “What giant transports you’d need to move a couple of million one-pound coins?”

Lovers of good food and ambiance owe these mafiosi eternal thanks and admiration.

Finding pasta in your local grocers, or in one of the rare supermarkets was impossible. I finally tracked down one little Italian grocery which sold fresh pasta but only on Tuesdays. And you had to get there early, they would have run out by noon.

Finding a nice modest restaurant in London in the late fifties and early sixties was near impossible. As a critic of the scene was too chronicle:

“Fashionable restaurants, such as Le Caprice, were grand, carpeted institutions where a coat and tie were de rigeur, where waiters wore starched shirt fronts and funeral black tailcoats, where the dishes of Escoffier were served “silver service”.

Overall, formality trumped comfort and the atmosphere was as rigid as the City gentlemen’s bowler hat and umbrella. The Savoy Grill or the Connaught was where your rich uncle took you to dinner when he came to London.

I took my not rich visiting father to lunch at a restaurant that advertised its open grill. Much to his chagrin I got into a conflict with the wine waiter when I complained that the excellent bottle of Chateau Talbot on which I had splurged, was too warm. Desperate to show his superiority and insult the know-nothing American tourists, he allowed as to how “we don’t chill our clarets the way you do”. After I pointed to the wine rack directly above the open grill, he sourly exchanged our wine for a new bottle.

If reliable legend is true, desperate to put their hoard of coins to work, the mafia bosses decided to fund young Italian chefs to open informal restaurants on the theory that returning soldiers who had sampled the delights of Italian cooking in Italy, would flock to it in London where fish and chips, banger sausages and overcooked vegies were the staples.

The first was La Trattoria Terrazza opened in 1959 by Franco Lagattolla and Mario Cassandro. Mario and Franco introduced informality to the restaurant scene, and their financiers were proven right. There was no lack of takers. The friendly and charming waiters at Le Terrazza wore hooped Neapolitan fisherman’s jerseys and had never heard of Escoffier or ‘silver service’.

It didn’t take long for Terrazza to be discovered by the growing cadre of young London sophisticates and celebrities who were leading the escape from the darkness of the war years and giving birth to what became known as the swinging sixties.

“Out with the old” became the London lifestyle motto, women’s’ skirts had suddenly become ‘mini’, the pencil thin Twiggy was the iconic fashion model, Laura Ashley fabric designs became the rage and Beatles songs blared from every stereo.

It took a couple of years, as the brits say, ‘for the penny to drop’, a colloquialism derived from the long time a penny in a public phone needed to drop so the conversation could begin.

More mafia finance, more wonderful restaurants opened, a magical recycling of all those illicitly earned coins.

I was lucky to be there and to have as friends not only Mario and Fanco but the Italian cartoonist, architect, and designer Enzo Apicella, whose sensitive understanding of the cultural change was reflected in his designs for almost all the new restaurants, a sensitivity so acute it would be almost fair to say he designed the swinging sixties.

The look was cool, white, with lots of spare space roughly plastered white walls, down-light spots over each table, a modernist re-interpretation of the rustic trattoria. To add authenticity, in one, there was a life-sized paper-mâché sculpture of Enzo always sitting comfortably at one of the restaurant’s tables reading Corriere della Sera, an Italian newspaper.

These were places where it was easy to drink carafe wine and imagine you had been transported to Tuscany for lunch or dinner, knowing that when the bill came, it would be modest and fair.

It was a mafia-driven cultural revolution and one without casualties.