Owner of mob-linked NYC pizza shop fatally shot

In a story seemingly ripped from an episode of “The Sopranos,” a co-owner of the Brooklyn-based pizzeria L&B Spumoni Gardens, was fatally shot outside his home on Thursday night.

Louis Barbati, 61, was shot twice in the torso, leaving at least two bullet holes in his family’s white picket fence.

“It’s a family tragedy. We can’t speak right now,” a distraught manager at the restaurant told the Daily News late Thursday evening.

According to the Daily News, Barbati’s was found slumped against his Dyker Heights home and was pronounced dead on the scene. Barbati’s wife and two sons and another woman were present when the shooting occurred.

Donna Padmore, 56, a home health aide who works across the street from Barbati’s home, told the New York Times that she had heard three or four shots. Padmore also told the Times she heard his wife screaming, “He got shot! He got shot!”

Police are looking for the suspected gunman, believed to be a white man in his 30s wearing a black, hooded sweatshirt, who was seen fleeing the scene. No motive for the shooting has so far been identified.

Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams lamented in a tweet that the shooting occurred on the last day of Gun Violence Awareness month.

“The bullet might have stopped when it hit the owner, but it is sending ripples throughout the community,” Adams told the New York Times.

Adams held a press conference outside L&B Spumoni Gardens to discuss gun violence at 11 a.m. on Friday.

L&B Spumoni Gardens is known for its “thick Sicilian pies, as well as our regular round pies,” according to its website. In 2012, the pizzeria became the focus of a mafia-related extortion case.

Francis Guerra, a Colombo associate and ex-husband of a part-owner of the pizzeria, accused an associate of the Bonanno family, Eugene Lombardo, of using the coveted L&B sauce recipe at his Staten Island pizzeria, the Square. Lombardo’s sons had worked at L&B before working for the Square, and Guerra believed that when they left they took the secret L&B sauce recipe with them.

The debate was resolved at a sit-down meeting between the two families. The Colombos asked the Lombardos to give them either part ownership of the Square, or $75,000, a hefty price for the theft of family secrets. The Lombardos opted for the latter, but only paid $4,000 of that sum.

L&B Spumoni Gardens has been in the Barbati family for four generations, dating to the late 1930s. Ludovico Barbati, Louis’ grandfather, learned to make pizza in a garage on West Eighth Street in Brooklyn, according to the restaurant’s website. He sold the pizza and Italian ice in neighborhoods like Bensonhurst and Dyker Heights in a horse and carriage.

The restaurant, which was recently featured on Man v. Food, now spans three buildings in Gravesend.

The family-owned restaurant shared this photo on Facebook on Friday morning.