Pizzeria

Much is happening around Mullica Hill. If you haven't been there in a few years, you might be surprised to see shopping centers and McMansions on former fields of green. For some reason, new development does not always bring with it new restaurants. I have driven miles through developing municipalities in search of something to eat. I was pleased to find Toscana Pizzeria & Grill in a shopping area on Bridgeton Pike, not too far from a new Eagles enclave. It's been there three years, but it was new to me. The decor places you in the Italian countryside.

His father says Serdar Tatar is not a terrorist. But federal authorities said yesterday that Tatar used a pizza delivery job - at his father's eatery - to scout Fort Dix as part of a terror plot to kill soldiers there. And he allegedly provided five co-conspirators with a fort map from the Cookstown restaurant. Yesterday, in the quiet communities around Fort Dix and McGuire Air Force Base, news of the suspected terror plot so close to home rattled the nerves of soldiers and area residents alike.

Poets are people, too. I know it doesn't seem that way. Most of us approach a poem with all the enthusiasm of a child forced to eat soggy vegetables. I didn't discover Dickinson, Whitman and Frost of my own free will. I had a high school English teacher standing over me, cracking her intellectual whip. If I didn't interpret the poem adroitly, a ghastly grade would serve as my sentence. At that point in my life, I saw poets as torturers who had struck some perverse bargain with frustrated educators.

For almost three years, Michael Giammarino has known the end was coming for his Lombardi's Pizza on South 18th Street in Center City. And now the time is here. Sunday will be last call for the Philadelphia outpost of the famous Manhattan pizzeria before construction begins for a 33-story luxury condominium tower. What owner Giammarino did not know until about two months ago was that it would also mean Lombardi's departure from Philadelphia. An illness in the family in New York, Giammarino said, has forced him to split his time between the two Lombardi's for weeks, and the demands of that and trying to run his own Internet security company ended his hopes of relocating Lombardi's to a new spot in Center City.

Tony Scotto Di Luzio, owner of a Haddonfield pizzeria, handled a delivery last Thursday that he will never forget: the birth of his first daughter, Ariana. "It was the best experience in my whole life," Scotto Di Luzio said. "God couldn't have made a more perfect moment. " He and his wife, Laura, were sent home from the hospital earlier that morning, after being told that her contractions weren't quite strong enough. About 4:30 p.m., he was tossing pies in Tony's Pizzeria on Haddon Avenue when he heard his wife yell down from their apartment upstairs: "Tony, the baby is coming!"

The Famous King of Pizza, a South Jersey icon that has reigned along Route 70 for nearly 40 years, was destroyed yesterday afternoon by a fast-moving fire sparked in the building's roof. The landmark pizzeria was closed yesterday while construction crews worked on an exterior remodeling project. Fire officials said the blaze may have been started accidentally during the construction. Mario Scaturro, one of the owners, was inside the pizzeria picking out tile colors for the remodeling when the fire started.

Seventeen robberies over seven weeks in Lower Bucks County have detectives in at least six municipalities comparing notes to see whether the crimes are linked. "We're not ruling out that possibility," said Lt. Ron MacPherson of Falls Township police, which hosted a meeting Feb. 14 with detectives from throughout the area to talk about the crimes. The robberies began Jan. 8 and hit Bristol Borough and Falls, Middletown, Lower Southampton, Bensalem and Bristol Townships. Two pizza shops were hit twice, and, on one day, three robberies about seven miles apart occurred within an hour.

Moments after the prosecutor said Victor Enriques showed no remorse and the judge sentenced him to the maximum prison sentence for sparking a gunfight that ended in death, Enriques took a long, sullen look at his victims seated in court yesterday. Then he gave them the finger. Enriques, 26, of Hunting Park, had just been sentenced to 32 1/2 to 65 years in prison for the Feb. 19 gunfight at a Juniata Park pizza shop. A Philadelphia police officer arriving at the scene fatally shot the shop owner's son, mistakenly believing he was the assailant because he emerged with a semiautomatic rifle.

From the outset, police had strong suspicions about a 1998 fire that destroyed a Bensalem pizzeria. Romano's Pizza exploded and burned at 3:30 a.m. on July 22, more than four hours after closing time. An explosives-sniffing dog detected accelerants. And the owner's son, Peter Romano, had been inside and had suffered life-threatening burns. This week, a federal grand jury in Philadelphia buttressed those early suspicions, indicting Romano on federal fraud and arson charges.

Gregory Andrews, a tall, slender 17-year-old, stepped to the witness stand yesterday and described the gunpoint robbery in which his best friend, Qa'id Staten, was slain. Staten, the 17-year-old son of a Philadelphia labor leader, was fatally shot April 27 as he and Andrews fled from a gunman outside a North Philadelphia pizzeria. Andrews said he first saw the defendant, 20-year-old Stephen Spurell of Brewerytown, inside Rainbow Pizza, 2223 Ridge Ave., about 9:30 p.m. "The Spurell dude - him right there - he came in," Andrews testified, pointing to the defendant.