Saying Ciao to a Red Ferrari

Do you like your brother? Let’s see how much:

Would you let him drive your Ferrari?

Sure, you’ll loan your brother your raw silk sport coat if he promises not to spill Chianti on it, and you’ll let him use your golf clubs and maybe give him the keys to the Jeep if he’s got a hot date.

But are you going to hold the door for him while he eases behind the wheel of your red 308 GTS, gets a big possessive grin on his face and goes rocketing off to Palm Springs? Well?

Sure, said Salvatore Crivello. You bet, said Sebastiano Crivello. No sweat, said Vincenzo Crivello.

After all, the Crivello brothers have shared almost everything for most of their lives: a birthplace in Porticello, Sicily; a delicatessen business in Lynwood; a small chain of pizza takeout places and now three Orange County Italian restaurants. Trading the Ferrari around was duck soup.

It helps to know that the three Crivellos (and their two other brothers, Massimo and Baldassare) are incurably jovial, voluble and outgoing--they can talk as much with their hands as with their mouths--and appear to have learned that lesson about not sweating the small stuff.

At Ciao in Santa Ana, one of their three restaurants, Vincenzo, 33, and Sebastiano, 28, flip pizzas and dish up pasta and other dishes in the kitchen while Salvatore, 30, handles the counter and often works the room with, among other things, card tricks.

Baldassare, 27, and Massimo, 18, usually work at the second Ciao in Dana Point. Their mother shows up frequently “to give us problems,” Salvatore says, smiling broadly. “She tells us what’s right and what’s not right.” The Crivellos’ father works in San Pedro as a commercial fisherman and helps out in the Ciao kitchen on weekends.

The family moved from their native Sicily to South Gate in 1972 “because mom felt that the five brothers would have a better chance in America than in Sicily,” Vincenzo said. “She wanted a better future for us. We all got a job within six months. And she decided that the best thing for us was to get into a business together, and that’s when we bought the delicatessen in Lynwood.”

Next came the five pizza takeout stores, which the brothers eventually sold, Salvatore said, “because we wanted to get a little more serious and get into the restaurant business. We wanted something more fun than a pizza place, where we could enjoy it, tell a few jokes.”

The Santa Ana Ciao was opened four years ago, followed by the Dana Point restaurant six months ago. And the brothers are preparing to open a third restaurant, called Rumari, in Laguna Beach.

It has all been a lot of hard work, the brothers say. But since 1984, the few leisure hours were made all the sweeter by the fact that in the family garage was a red Ferrari 308 GTS.

“It was a dream car,” Salvatore said wistfully. “Since we were kids, it was our dream to buy a Ferrari. We used to follow Ferraris on the freeway. A Ferrari was the ultimate thing. But we couldn’t each afford one. So we figured with what money we had, we’d buy a Ferrari and share it.” To Italians, Vincenzo explained, a Ferrari is a kind of Holy Grail.

“In Italy,” he said, “it’s so prestigious. When we came here, that’s all we talked about:, Ferrari, Ferrari, Ferrari. When we came here, though, the dream was possible.”

“We worked so hard,” Sebastiano said, “we felt like we had to get that Ferrari.”

The 308 GTS was actually less of a shared possession than an addition to the Crivello family motor pool. The family already owned a handful of cars (Massimo, Salvatore and Vincenzo live with their parents in Santa Ana and Baldassare and Sebastiano, who are both married, live next door to each other in Costa Mesa) and drove them almost interchangeably, according to Salvatore.

There were no disagreements about who drove the Ferrari or when, Vincenzo said, but priority generally was given to Sebastiano, who did the cosmetic and maintenance work on it. Baldassare was too young for a driver’s license at the time and Massimo seldom drove it, he added.

The brothers talk about the car in the same voices that they might use to talk about former, and beloved, girlfriends.

“The best feeling about owning a Ferrari,” Vincenzo said, “is when you have it inside a garage and on a Saturday or a Sunday morning you open the garage and there’s this beautiful car sitting inside. It’s a joy. It just makes your day. It’s beautiful, like a painting.”

Still, he added, “it’s a beast. It’s more than machinery, it’s emotional. It’s not easy to control. It’s a shock. And the engine is right behind your head and that makes it so damn hot in there, it’s like a Formula race. You have to take the top off.” And, Salvatore said, there’s that sound . . .

“We have a friend who has a (Ferrari) 328,” he said, “and he says that just the engine noise when you’re driving the car is worth 50% of the cost. It’s like a jet engine.”

“And that’s when you get all the looks,” said Sebastiano, grinning. Today, however, the Crivellos’ dream car is in someone else’s garage. “We made a major investment in it,” said Vincenzo, “and since we bought the new restaurant, we needed some fast cash. After five years (of owning the car), we decided that it had to go. It was the best thing to do, but it was a major loss.”

Even though the lovely high whine of the engine is gone, the brothers aren’t spending too much time grieving for their sleek, red beauty. They remember an earlier day, in 1976, when they had pooled their money and ordered an American muscle car, a Pontiac Trans-Am, to be shared among them.

“A friend of ours said, ‘Why buy a car with that money? You can take it and put it into a business and that business will buy you a car and a house and so forth,’ ” Salvatore recalled. “I thought that made a lot of sense. I went home and told everybody about it and they said yeah, yeah, yeah.”

They took the Trans-Am money and bought the delicatessen with it.

Now they’re taking the Ferrari money and opening the Laguna Beach restaurant with it.

“Hey, if everything works out,” Salvatore said, “maybe this time we’ll buy three Ferraris instead of one.”