![More than just a trivial connection After developing a quiz game based on the 'Godfather' films, Merrick toy designer finds personal reasons for his mob fascination Matt Nuccio and murder his great-great grandfather of crime surrounding discovered tales Giovanni Zarcone who died in 1909. BY KEIKO MORRIS The brutal rise of Vito Corleone and the macabre underworld of the mob have been the stuff of movies and, more reeently, fodder for Merrick toy designer Malt Nuccio in developing a trivia game. But in r&entmonths some of the plot lines from '1"he Godfatber' movies moved beyond the fictional and professional realm to become personal. His project - ftlIing game cards with "Godfather" fIlm facts - spurred him to delve into the history of his own family, especially his maternal great-great-grandfather, Giovanni zarcone. Nuccio, a panner at the toy design and packaging company Design Edge in Merrick, was fascinated with the depiction of the tum of the century in "The Godfather Pan II": ~You see the struggle, those scenes when Vito Corleone is not a wealthy man, and be's just an immigrant. You watch as he develops, and it makes you wonder, What was it like when my ancestors came from Italy?" The Godfather Trivia Game - scheduled to be released by Endless Garnes this summer is among the toys and games Nuccio and Brian Tunle, Endless Garnes' national sales manager and producer, have been promoting at the American International Toy Fair this week al the Javits Center. Turtle, with Nuccio and his wife, Michelle Reyes Nuccio, spent hours watching the movies and composing trivia questions. During a break, Turtle glanced at old family pictures on Nuccio's shelves and asked about one showing a distinguished- looking gentleman. ~I could almost see the wheels turning," Turtle said. ~We were in the Godfather mind-sel, and maybe we were in a moment of Don Corleone-isms ... [Then] I staned getting all these e-mails from him [Nuccio] about the Barrel Murder" - the Lower East Side slaying ofa mob leader whose body was found stuffed in a barrel early in the last century - "and that's how I knew it struck anerve.~ Giovanni zarcone's story has been a nebulous one for Matt and his mother, Linda NUC(:io, owner and cofounder of Design Edge. When she was a child, she said, the adults seldom discussed her great grandfatber. When they mentioned him at all, it was as a "mean man,~ an obscure relative who lhey say died in a hunting accident. She did know her family had left their farm in Danbury, Conn., under mysterious circumstances and relocated to Bay Shore and,later, to Amityville, About a decade ago, Linda Nuccio's cousin began researching the family's genealogy and came across Zarcone's possible connection to the Barrel Murder and his own death, by murder, in Danbury. Pressed for answers, she said, older relatives explained that Zarcone had bei:ome entan' g1ed in the mob world when he came over from Sicily and needed help getting one of his daughters released from an Ellis Island hospital. "It just didn't make sense that that was the fIrst time he got involved in it," linda NUC(:io said, ''11J.at's all we knew, and tben Matt began researching. and we found out a 101 more." Matt Nuccio found -rhe American MafIa~ online (onewal.com), a Web site of Thomas Hunt, a historian of the American MafIa. Nuccio got newspaper clippings from Hunt that provided vivid details about Giovanni zarcone's arrest in a grue· some mob murder, his assassi· nation in Danbury and a gunfIght in Ihe streets of Brooklyn involving a Pielro Zarcone, possibly Zarcone's son, and Andrea Gambino, a barber known to police as a Black Hand man. Newspaper anicles identify Giovanni Zarcone as tbe owner of a Lower East Side butcher shop and one ofseveral men arrested in conneclion with the Barrel Murder - the death of Benedetto Madonia, a Buffalo, mob member and alleged counterfeiter whose mutilated body was disrovered in 1903 in a barrel on IIlh Streel. Police arrested four gang members, including Zarcone. New York Timesanicles noted that his shop was the place where government agents saw Madonia meeting with members of a gang the night before his body was disrovered and that zarcone's wagon was used 10 transpon Madonia's corpse. The case against zarcone and the other suspects eventually collapsed, Hunt said, and zarcone disappeared. Three years later, a man named Peter zarcone, who Hunt assumes is Giovanni Zarcone's son, was arrested on charges of violating state "blue laws· by shooting a snake on his father's Danbury farm. The lasl mention of Giovanni Zarcone among the news clippings was his July 1909 assassination. Headlines identifIed him as the fourth man prominent in the Barrel Murder case to have been slain. In a New York Times article he was described as being found ~lying on his doorstep by his son, his head riddled with shot." Malt and Linda Nuccio say they have Ihe advantage of looking at this family history episode from a distance. It's lhe gripping story as well as lhe setting of the early I900s That hold Malt Nuccio's fascination, and he said he wishes Mario Pow were still alive so he could ask about the author's research. ~I wonder if ... ["The Godfather"] is based on a general story of lhe times or whether it's based on any of the developments of the gang he [Giovanni zarcone] ran with." ''The Godfather," above, is the basis for a trivia game by Mati Nuccio, left, seen with his mother, Linda.](Newsday Article feb2008a.jpg)
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Matt Nuccio was just 5 years old when he designed his first toy -a set of action figures based on the ninja characters he saw on Saturday morning Chinese television shows. Meetings with toy manufacturers followed, and soon the figures -along with toy weapons, costumes and other accessories -were on store shelves. Nuccio became known as "the ninja kid."
Twenty-six years later, and an adult by any defmition, Nuccio still spends much of his time thinking about how to tap into children's imaginations.
"It helps that we're both quite immature," said his father, Mark, Matt's partner in Deign Edge, a Merrick-based firm that does everything from inventing new toys to designing, packaging and advertising for other companies' toys.
Right now, Design Edge's Hewlett Avenue offIces are electric with energy as the firm prepares for next week's American International Toy Fair in Manhattan, the largest industry trade show in the Western Hemisphere. There, retailers will peruse thousands of items that will be available this fall for the Christmas shopping season.
One of Matt's latest creations will be introduced at the show. Called Storyt
ime Theater, it's a "reading entertainment" toy that projects a book's pictures onto a wall so that children can follow along as though watching a movie. The toy is licensed and manufactured by DynaTech Action, a Canadian toymaker and distributor.Indeed, many of the new games and novelties on display at the Toy Fair will have come directly from the fertile imaginations of independent toy inventors. All of the industry's heavy hitters -from MatteI and Hasbro to smaller fIrms such as Spinmaster -rely on inventors like the Nuccios to keep up a steady stream of innovation.
"Big companies know that not all ideas come from one pool or one source of people, so they're always looking for outsiders to come up with opportunities they may not have thought of. It's a fresh source of inspiration," said Reyne Rice, toy trend specialist for the Toy Industry Association, which hosts the show.
"We're like soldiers of fortune," said Matt Nuccio, 31. "We don't have to worry about manufacturing or inventory. We can do what we want without being restricted by marketing. At the big companies, everything is done by committee. A camel is a horse designed by a committee.
"But you can't walk in off the street," he added. You have to be established."
That's where having a track record becomes critical, and Design Edge has been building its record for more than 30 years. After graduating from college with a fine arts degree, Mark Nuccio, 59, took a job working for H-G Toy Co., a Long Beach toy maker.
Just before H-G med for bankruptcy in 1988, partly the result of an ill-starred decision to relocate its facilities to New Jersey, Mark Nuccio founded Design Edge in his garage, with $7,000 in his bank account and a family of fIve to support. "We had a daughter in college and we had to take her out. But she dealt with it. She ended up going to Nassau Community College for six months."
Business took off quickly, thanks to Mark Nuccio's edgy sensibility and the reputation and contacts he honed during 17 years at H-G. Over time, he diversified the business and brought in a team of talented designers. One of them was Matt, who by that time was a painter and "totally broke," he said. "I was already working here weekends, summers, holidays, whether I wanted to or not," he added.
Now, "we're a design studio as well as research and development," Mark Nuccio said. The company's revenues are "in the low seven fIgures," he added.
"We do all these different elements invention, model-making, advertising, engineering, marketing, packaging. That is unique in this business, and I attribute that to the fact that everyone who runs the company has a fine arts or liberal arts background."
Design Edge's most successful and long-running product is Tattoo Graphix, a do-it-yourself tattoo kit for kids. The company has brought more than 30 of its own designs to market, and has also created award-winning packaging for a variety of other toys and games.
The biggest challenge in the toy business, Matt Nuccio said, is "always staying fresh, being creative." One has to constantly replenish the store of ideas, ever on the lookout for knickknacks and images that might spark the imagination.
"I have so much useless stuff," he said, "from guitar pickups to canvas tarps to all different types of springs. I'll buy sneakers and tear them apart to see what the cushioning is made of. I'll take apart motors. I like to see how things work, how things light up."
That playful, curious spirit pervades the Design Edge offIces, where the walls are hung with kung fu movie posters and odd sketches, and an antique dentist chair sits in a corner looking like a horror movie torture device.
"We have water fights, dart fights, balls flying through the air," Mark Nuccio said. "Any sticky, messy screwball thing that can go on here, does."