Noo Yoik is not as dangerous as they say,” said my cabbie as he careered through the glass-and-concrete canyons of Manhattan. “People think they’ll be mugged if they step outside their hotel at night, but it’s safer than California.”

True, violent crime in New York has fallen by two-thirds in the past decade and it is now among the 10 safest cities in America. But organised crime is still alive and well in the Big Apple. In the New York metropolitan area, the mafia “is involved in a broad spectrum of illegal activities”, according to the FBI’s website. “These include murder, extortion, drug trafficking, corruption of public officials, gambling, labour racketeering, loan sharking, prostitution, pornography, tax fraud and stock manipulation.”

Scriptwriters of shows such as The Sopranos — about a New Jersey mafia boss — are delighted because they are never short of material. Reality mirrors fiction in macabre parody. A couple of weeks ago, FBI officers started digging up a piece of waste ground in Queens, searching for victims of John Gotti, the New York crime boss. A recent episode of The Sopranos showed two mobsters moving the long-dead bodies of rivals they’d killed.

Luckily for tourists, the public is left out of these turf wars and the city is relatively secure for the thousands of film and television fans drawn to New York’s mean streets precisely because of their mafia associations. I was there looking for trouble. From my hotel in Manhattan’s traffic-choked midtown district, I planned to explore the old mobster haunts to find out whether the characters who inspired mafia films were still alive and well.

I started at Rao’s, on the corner of 114th and Pleasant in East Harlem (00 1-212 722 6709). Rao’s is run by Frankie Pellegrino, a restaurateur-turned-actor who plays an FBI agent in The Sopranos. Once upon a time, Rao’s was a mob dive, but these days it’s full of celebrities such as President Clinton, De Niro and Pellegrino’s fellow Sopranos actors. It’s all very friendly and A-list. But, occasionally, one or two of the old crowd slip back. Last December, a local numbers runner called Louis Barone (also known as Louie Lump Lump) shot dead Albert Circelli, a businessman with reputed mafia links, in front of horrified diners. Circelli heckled a singer as she was performing “Don’t Rain on My Parade”. Louie told him to show some respect and in the altercation that followed, let him have it with a .38. Louie was arrested by an off-duty cop dining at Rao’s. The singer hid under a table. Not surprisingly, the incident had an effect on business. Now you can’t get a table for love nor money.

On any weekday night (Rao’s is closed at weekends) there are a dozen limousines with smoked-glass windows outside. Madonna was recently turned away — hence Pellegrino’s nickname “Frankie No”. If you are lucky and you get in — as I was — the bill will set you back a modest £30 a head. “My customers could afford to dine at any restaurant in this city — correction, in the world — but they come here because they trust my food and my prices,” says Pellegrino.

That hasn’t stopped him cashing in by launching a cookbook that includes a recipe for a red bolognese sauce to die for. As Pellegrino steered me between tables to introduce Tony Lo Bianco (an actor from a string of mafia movies) and Sonny Grosso (the former cop on whose crime-busting career The French Connection was based), I couldn’t help noticing how many customers had bent noses.

Food is an ingredient of nearly all mobster movies, as essential as bullets or broads. Plots are hatched or rivals gunned down over steaming plates of pasta or sausage and polpette (meatballs) like mamma used to make.

In The Godfather, Michael Corleone, played by Al Pacino, carries out his first hit at Louis’s, a fictional restaurant in The Bronx. Going over the plan, one of his henchmen remarks: “It’s perfect for us. A small family place; good food; everyone minds his business.”

Places to eat in New York were traditionally a favourite for gangland hits because crime bosses returned predictably to the same restaurant and the same table.

Carmine Galante, head of the Bonanno family, was shot while lunching at Joe and Mary’s Italian-American restaurant in Brooklyn. He collapsed with his cigar still clenched between his teeth. Galante didn’t survive and nor did the restaurant. It is now a Chinese takeaway.

Paul Castellano, boss of the Gambino family, was gunned down outside Sparks Steak House on East 46th Street (212 687 4855). The restaurant is still there and claims the biggest and best steaks in New York. Older members of staff still recall the shooting, carried out nine days before Christmas in 1985. “Yeah, those were crazy times,” said one waiter, remembering the night he rushed out to find Castellano breathing his last on the sidewalk. “Those guys liked their steaks bloody and their killings bloodier.” The murder is reconstructed in the film Gotti — a biopic about the mobster. Gotti ordered the hit on Castellano, then calmly watched from across the street. He was eventually jailed and died in prison in 2002. His son is facing trial for planning a failed assassination.

New York has had more than its fair helping of gangland executions, many of them in Little Italy, a district of lower Manhattan squeezed between the financial district and Chinatown. Here, the cooking is authentic Sicilian and the dialogue is pure Don Corleone. “That guy, he shoulda got whacked years ago,” I overheard one customer say. “Yeah, one day his luck’s gonna run out.”

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