Daniel F. Libretti A Chef Whose Specialty Was
Firefighting December 31, 2001 Every New York City firefighter
has at least one second job, it seems, unless he is home taking
care of the children while his wife works. But few moonlighting
stints have brought as much joy to the department as that of Rescue
Co. 2 firefighter Daniel Libretti, 43, whose Crown Heights brethren
got to feast on the same crepes and souffles he prepared on off
days as a pastry chef at the top-rated Manhattan restaurant La
Caravelle. "I don't know the names of half the things he made
for us - I'm a simple guy," said Pete Romeo, a longtime friend
and company member, who helped carry Libretti's remains from the
rubble of the World Trade Center on Oct. 10. "But all the rich
people are paying a lot of money for the food we were eating.
He'd do the meal from start to finish. You didn't have to help
him. I guess it's a chef thing." Still, there was no easier way
to torment Libretti than to tell him he was a terrific cook. He
wanted to be known as a good firefighter. And he was - one of
the best - his peers say, who spent 15 years in East New York's
Ladder Co. 103, for a time the city's busiest firehouse in its
worst neighborhood, a place ambitious firefighters fought to join.
No precinct in the city had a higher murder rate when Libretti
got himself assigned there at the height of the crack epidemic
in the early 1980s. Gaunt addicts roamed the streets breaking
into anything that wasn't locked behind concertina wire, toppling
telephone poles to scavenge the copper cable. The back wall of
the firehouse was a popular spot for executions. Libretti and
his fellow firefighters were called out an average of 30 times
a night, typically to burning crack houses, heavily barricaded,
decaying buildings that were littered with dirty needles and salted
with booby traps. Sometimes they managed to rescue the children
who too often were left untended in those buildings. Sometimes
a person would stagger over from the bar across the street with
a broken beer bottle sticking out of his belly after a fight,
or a bullet wound. Tending to them was part of their job, too,
because there weren't enough police to go around. It was the kind
of place where people would call the fire department at 2 in the
morning because a sink was clogged, a stove didn't work, someone
had gotten locked out of their apartment. But the guys at Ladder
103 always came. "There wasn't a lot of good happening anywhere
around us," recalled Romeo, who met Libretti at that firehouse
in 1985. "You just try to go and help. You're the hope in the
neighborhood." For an aggressive firefighter like Libretti, this
harsh place was heaven, with his co-workers, a cast of characters
each crazier than the next who called themselves "TheMen's Club,"
as they went out each night amid the gun battles, adrenaline pumping,
helping wherever they could. Before they turned in at night, Libretti
would take orders for breakfast. Libretti was a character, too,
friends say, a man who could fit in as easily at the Ritz as on
the corner of Bergen Street and Schenectady Avenue, a happy man
brimming with energy, a patient man who loved people. Over morning
coffee, he'd tell his wife, Dolores, he was thinking of building
a deck, and she'd come home from work to find it half completed.
He had a thing for winemaking, too: red, white, you named it,
he'd make it, calling his label Ridgewood Estates after the street
in Elthingville, in Staten Island, where he and his wife lived.
Life gradually improved in East New York and, two years ago, Libretti
moved up to Rescue 2 looking for more action. He was already much
admired there, said company member Duane Woods - for both his
firefighting and his cooking. Indeed, he was hounded in the kitchen
by men trying to learn his secrets. Eddie Rall, another man from
Rescue 2 who died Sept. 11, and also a perfectionist, was one
of them. "He'd be like, 'OK, what do you do next, Danny?'" Romeo
recalled. "Eddie was all set to make the meal at home. But [Rall's
wife] Darlene said to him at the finish, 'You're definitely missing
something.'" Before Libretti joined Rescue 2, the company called
themselves the "Pudding Heads," because their favorite cook at
the time made chocolate pudding after every meal. "When Danny
got here, he said, 'I got something better for you,' and he made
up some chocolate mousse from scratch," Romeo said. "So then we
became the 'Mousse Heads.' We got a little bit of class." After
Libretti died, someone tried to keep his dessert tradition going,
but it didn't work. "It was all lumps in it, like mousse hash,"
Romeo said sadly. "You gotta do the right thing with the chocolate."
-- Elizabeth Moore (Newsday)
A Rescuer and a Gourmet Chef Nov. 28, 2001 Daniel
Libretti didn’t like to sit still. When he wasn't on duty in Brooklyn's
Rescue 2, the 43-year-old Staten Island man was an assistant pastry
chef in La Caravelle, an upscale French restaurant in Manhattan,
or working as a private contractor. Libretti, a 19-year fire department
veteran, was a member of Brooklyn's Rescue 2 since 1999. As a
member of a rescue company, it was Libretti’s responsibility to
ensure the safety of other firefighters. He also cooked gourmet
dishes for his comrades. Surviving are his wife, Dolores; his
father, Frank; two brothers, Joseph and Frank, and a sister, Maureen
Gambino. --Compiled by Newsday
Daniel Libretti, a firefighter for the New York
Fire Department,graduated from the New York Restaurant School
in the mid-1990s and had a side job as anassistant pastry chef
at a French restaurant in Manhattan. Fellow firefighters knew
firsthandabout his cooking skills. “He cooked us meals we couldn’t
afford on the outside. We couldn’teven name them,” said Peter
Romeo, who wasn’t on duty Sept. 11. Libretti also worked as aprivate
contractor and was building a pond in his home’s back yard. “The
joke is, ‘I wonder what career he’s up to in heaven?”’ said his
wife, Dolores. --The Associated Press
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