Police say cocaine ring busted at Corona pizza shop

CORONA (WABC) -- Pizza and coke is taking on a whole new meaning.

Police in Corona, Queens busted a popular pizza joint.

Police say the mom and pop joint was just a front for an international drug operation, with their main ingredient, cocaine.

Now a mother, father, and their son are under arrest.

You'd think the pizza business was working out pretty well for the Gigliotti family, given the size of their Whitestone home, with gates out front and the sports car in the driveway and the clouds painted on the third floor ceilings. Customers must be pretty loyal.

"Was it crowded?" Eyewitness News asked.

"No. Not too crowded here to be honest," a resident said.

Maybe that explains why the feds say the family was using the pizza parlor in Corona along with other businesses as a front to sell mammoth amounts of cocaine they were importing from Costa Rica.

"The family owns and operates a number of businesses that have been used in connection with their drug trafficking operations," the feds say in a complaint.

According to the documents, on one trip to Costa Rica, defendant "Eleanor Gigliotti was in possession of $400,000 in U.S. currency," to pay for the cocaine and that on a subsequent shipment from Costa Rica to the family's warehouse, "concealed within numerous cardboard cartons of yucca was approximately forty kilograms (a hundred pounds) of cocaine. And at the families Bronx warehouse, (ICE) recovered fifteen kilograms of cocaine."

"Wow. Pablo Escobar stuff. Crazy. They were nice guys, very friendly," said Giovanni, a resident.

Giovanni saw the feds raid this morning.

"There was a truck there, big, like 16 passengers. It looked like a cop car you know what I mean, it looked like one of those SWAT vehicles, it came and I saw the suits you know, the FBI," Giovanni said.