The Taste of Hate in the 518

Frank and Alyssa Cappello are trying to pull back their brand back into respectability with lies and "fake news." The records including Alyssa's Facebook posts and the community are not having it.

There is the American small business owner who believes his Facebook page is a private diary rather than a storefront window, and Frank Cappello, proprietor of Taste of Italy 23 in Latham, New York, and self-styled livestream personality “Frankie Fresh,” has just given the Capital Region and beyond a masterclass in what happens when that delusion meets a grieving community and a very unforgiving news cycle.

The facts, for anyone who has been mercifully offline: a seven-year-old autistic boy named Harbe Nagi went missing near Menands on June 28. For two days, the whole neighborhood, Muslim, Christian, Jewish, whoever owned a flashlight, turned out to search for him. He was found dead in a pool. Grief, in other words, of the plainest and most devastating kind. And into that grief, under a news anchor’s post about the boy’s death, the official account of Taste of Italy 23 dropped a comment suggesting the child’s own family would have killed him sooner had they stayed in a Muslim country, called Islam a “terrorist organization,” and announced that no Muslim should hold authority in America. This was not a slip of the thumb. This was a manifesto, typed out in full, published under a business name, sitting there collecting horror for the world to screenshot. There is also the video (I’ve included that too).

Cappello’s first move, when the account was traced back to his restaurant, was to reach for the oldest trick in the small-business-scandal playbook: the phantom staffer. Forty people, he told CBS6, have access to that Facebook page. Forty! An establishment apparently run like the Politburo, no one individually responsible for anything, blame diffused across a workforce as if by policy. It is the kind of number you invent when you want journalists to stop asking who, exactly, sat down and wrote it.

Then came the wife. Alyssa Cappello told CBS6, off camera, that she’d written it, meaning to post from her personal account and hitting the business page by mistake, a claim that requires you to believe a grown woman confused Islam-as-terrorist-organization with something she’d say to her friends. Then, to the Times Union, she recanted that story too, said she’d taken the fall to protect her husband, and produced a new name: an employee, who obligingly resigned and is no longer available to confirm or deny anything. Three stories in a week is not confusion. It is workshop.

Frank Cappello, for his part, has settled into the register of a man who has said something indefensible and knows it, performing contrition while carefully declining to identify anyone. “I know who did it, and I’m going to take care of it,” he told CBS6, a sentence that manages to sound both threatening and evasive, which is a neat trick. He is “not prejudiced against Muslims, Blacks, gays or any of that stuff,” he added, a formulation that should be studied in journalism schools as the platonic ideal of a denial that convinces no one.

The town, to its credit, did not accept any of it. Protesters showed up within hours and kept showing up for days. Elected officials, including members of Congress, condemned the comment publicly, which is the least a coward could ask of them and more than some crises get. By Sunday, the standoff outside the restaurant had degenerated into an actual pepper-spray incident between protesters and the owners, an image so on the nose you’d reject it in a screenplay. By Wednesday night the restaurant’s sign had been torn half off, vandalism nobody has been charged with, a Colonie police cruiser idling out front with nothing to say about it.

And here is the part that should embarrass Latham more than the original comment did: Cappello announced, with great solemnity, that Taste of Italy would close “to protect the community” and let the Nagi family grieve. It reopened about a day later. A closure sized precisely to the news cycle, not the sin. If you are looking for the real character of the man, skip the apology tour and look at the calendar. Twenty-four hours, apparently, is what atonement costs at a strip-mall pizzeria.

Meanwhile, on July 2, the Nagi family buried their son at the Al-Hidaya Center, his uncle, the mayor of a Michigan city, flying in to thank the neighbors who searched for him. Mehak Jamil of the Albany Muslim Advocacy Coalition made the only point worth making amid all this noise: that anti-Muslim sentiment doesn’t need a viral scandal to exist. It was already rising, comment or no comment, long before Frank Cappello’s business page decided to advertise it.

This being the Cappellos, of course, the backstory does not begin last week. Jacqueline Silvestri-Edwards, who runs the local Facebook group 518 Foodies, sued the couple back in January 2025 for defamation and civil assault, alleging threatening phone calls from Alyssa Cappello after a customer-complaint dust-up turned personal. An Albany County judge declined to dismiss most of it this past March, finding several statements plausibly false enough to proceed to trial. That case remains unresolved, and fairness requires saying so. But a pattern is not the same thing as a coincidence, and two lawsuits about the same couple’s temperament in eighteen months is not exactly a pattern anyone should be shocked by.

Then, because God apparently enjoys irony, there are the tax warrants. The Times Union broke the story; the Daily Gazette, digging harder, found more. Seventeen active warrants across four Cappello-linked entities, dating to 2019, totaling $377,403.76 in unpaid sales, corporation, and withholding tax, down from an original $403,774.01. Frank Cappello is named “individually and as a responsible person” on three of them. Alyssa Cappello appears under her maiden name, DiBiase, on one worth nearly $140,000. Confronted with all this by the Gazette, Cappello did not offer an explanation. He offered a slogan. “Not true. Fake news.” Then, smoothly, pivoted back to the tragedy of Harbe Nagi, deploying a dead child as a change of subject a second time in the same week, which takes a particular kind of nerve.

The Cappellos replete with the Cross - the new sign of intolerance

None of this touches the family’s other ventures, and fairness demands saying that too. Alyssa Cappello’s beauty business, She’s Yar Lash & Beauty Bar, and the couple’s forthcoming restaurant, Grazie Italian Kitchen, in Albany, have no reported connection to the comment or the tax warrants beyond the Cappello name on the paperwork. Guilt by address is its own kind of injustice, and this piece has no interest in manufacturing one just because the real material is damning enough on its own.

Because it is. A restaurant’s official mouthpiece slandered a dead boy and an entire faith, and the man who owns it responded not with accountability but with an accounting exercise: forty suspects, three storylines, one twenty-four-hour closure, and a denial of a very real tax bill delivered in the language of a man who has learned that “fake news” is now a complete sentence. Latham did not fail here. The Cappellos did, and they are still open for business, regular hours, first floor of a strip mall on Route 9, doing what by all accounts they do best: staying open no matter what they’ve said, and blaming somebody else for having said it.

©2026 All Rights Reserved | The Powell House Press | Josh@thepowellhousepress.com