Business Almost as Usual : Deli Owner Carries On, Fears He’ll Be Remembered Only for Drug Charges

At Nick’s Deli on Seal Beach’s Main Street, the pastrami is hot and the pickles crisp. There are baseball pictures on the wall and domestic beer is $1.25 a bottle. And on Thursday, there was a good lunchtime crowd, as if nothing had happened.

Proprietor Dominic Zampino took orders behind the counter and let customers help themselves to soft drinks and beer while waiting for their sandwiches.

The 37-year-old Zampino (Nick to friends) wasn’t worried about someone sneaking a drink without paying.

“Everybody’s honest,” he explained with a good-natured smile.

Not quite everyone, according to the undercover narcotics agents who had visited Nick’s Deli just 1 day earlier.

Zampino was arrested at the deli Wednesday on suspicion of possession of cocaine and marijuana for sale. He was freed on $25,000 bail. At the restaurant and at Zampino’s Long Beach home, authorities said they confiscated about $8,500 in cash, about 20 pistols, shotguns and rifles, 2 ounces of cocaine and a pound of marijuana with a combined street value of about $13,000.

“He told us he was a gun collector,” said a spokesman for the state bureau of narcotics enforcement, which was still checking the registration of the weapons.

Zampino, who for 12 years has operated the deli once run by his mother and father, said he is saddened because when people in town see him now, they will remember him as the guy busted for cocaine, “not for anything good that I have done.”

“It will hurt (my) reputation,” Zampino told a reporter Thursday. “You get remembered for one thing, good or bad, and this is my bad thing.”

“It’s going to be rough. It’ll be really tough,” he added.

As for the alleged drug activity, Zampino said that authorities had advised him not to speak about the case.

Officials of the state bureau of narcotics enforcement said they had received a tip that Zampino was selling cocaine at his deli, a popular eatery 2 blocks from the pier.

After contacting Seal Beach police, state agents were told that Zampino had sold cocaine at the restaurant “since at least 1984,” said Bennie Rincon, supervisor of the narcotics enforcement bureau in Los Angeles.

Local police had been unable to prove a case, however.

“They had tried,” Rincon said. “But it’s real difficult with the community of Seal Beach being as close-knit as it is for them to go in there without being recognized.

“When we made contact with them, they were real excited that someone would give them assistance. It required more than a couple of hours of just sitting out there.”

The surveillance of Nick’s Deli paid off, Rincon said, and agents arrested Zampino and two other men there Wednesday, serving search warrants on the delicatessen and Zampino’s home.

One of the other men was arrested for an outstanding drunk-driving warrant, but the other was arrested for possession of a bindle of cocaine, believed to have been purchased at the deli and stuffed in his sock, Rincon said.

Neighboring merchants, many of whom eat regularly at Nick’s, said they were surprised and saddened by Zampino’s arrest.

A shopkeeper on Main Street told how local merchants and customers were abuzz with the news on Wednesday, stopping on the sidewalks to share the gossip. And Zampino lamented that two daily newspapers had already carried the story and that scores of people had clipped out copies for him “just in case” he hadn’t seen it.

His telephone hadn’t stopped ringing with calls from others who wanted to ask him about it, Zampino said, and “next week the local paper will have it.”

But even in cozy Seal Beach, where everybody knows everybody, not everybody had heard the news yet.

Just a few doors to the south, a clerk selling newspapers and used books who had been to the deli only moments before to buy coffee said that he was astonished to learn that such a thing had happened.

“It’s a terrible thing; he’s a terrific guy,” said Ken Bartel, owner of the Picture Show Gallery, an art shop a few doors north of the deli. “He’s got a family restaurant. He’s got tons of friends in town. He’s just a nice guy.”

“I think it got blown way out of proportion,” Bartel added.