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, …