State puts the freeze on Toscanini's

By LINDSAY BERRIGAN

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Toscanini's Ice Cream and Coffee shop owner Gus Rancatore joined Al Capone in tax-evasive glory. The Massachusetts Department of Revenue (DOR) posted an orange sign that read 'SEIZED' in the window of Toscanini's on Mass. Ave. last Thursday.

"That's gonna suck," 27-year-old Alan Baker said as he passed. "I've only been here a few months, but I've come here too many times to count."

Rancatore owes $167,811 in back taxes, according to DOR spokesman Robert Bliss. About $140,000 of that is meals tax. Some of the debt goes back to 2000.

"There's been a lot of discussion over the years," Bliss said. "This is a last resort."

Rancatore and his sister Mimi don't know how big the down payment will be, but they set a fundraising goal of $25,000. They've created savetosci.com, a website where people can donate via PayPal, and posters can lob angry comments across the internet.

Mimi Rancatore said she filed an abatement Monday and hopes to reopen soon, so the store's revenues can pay for the rest of the debt. "The state has approached us before," she told the Dig. "I was hoping we could avoid this, but it wasn't like 'Oh my God, we're completely blindsided by this.' The state has been very helpful ... They let us take our financial information and put the ice cream in the deep freezer so it wouldn't go bad."

Gus Rancatore founded the original Toscanini's on Mass. Ave. in Central Square in 1981, after he dropped out of BU. Attempts to expand to other Cambridge locations were short-lived. The store on MIT's campus closed in 2002, and the Harvard Square location shut down in 2007.

Toscanini's isn't the only business to struggle under Gus Rancatore's management. In 2001, he bought Someday Café from Glen Wallace, the original owner. Wallace said that it took Rancatore five years to fulfill a three-year payment plan. "I will say this: I did get paid," Wallace said. "He fulfilled his contract, but it was tedious. It took two or three calls a month. He's the kind of businessman who's hard to get in touch with ... he was a pain in my ass."

Rancatore also neglected to renew the lease on Someday's space, which led to its much-protested closing. David Tucker, who worked at Someday from 2004 until 2005, said the property's owner had been looking for a new tenant for a while. "He didn't like the noise, he didn't like that homeless people hung out there, and people were always using the basement to sneak into the Somerville Theater."

Wallace said Rancatore's reputation speaks for itself. "Why would he run Someday into the ground, and then run Toscanini's any differently?"

In the interest of full disclosure, we should admit Rancatore defaulted on several thousand dollars in advertising with the Weekly Dig.

As of press time, savetosci.com had generated $10,089, probably because Rancatore is such a popular character. "Gus is an incredible guy. He's smart and really friendly," said Tucker. "For Sunday brunch at Toscanini's, he serves the food himself and talks to everybody. It was just keeping track of the specifics of his investments that got away from him."