A Queens restaurateur who survived a fatal plane crash is erecting a massive shrine to the saint he said saved him from a watery death.
Giuseppe “Joe” Oppedisano had been dreaming of erecting the Padre Pio Shrine since the Italian saint appeared to him while in a morphine-induced delirium in the wake of the 2020 tragedy that left his entire body broken and one of his best friends dead.
“I’m still alive and kicking. In order to get, you got to give. And that’s what I did,” Oppedisano, 67, told The Post.
The massive shrine sits around the corner from Oppedisano’s Little Neck restaurant, Il Bacco — which was the scene of the infamous Covid conga line in 2020 during the pandemic.
The Catholic sanctuary includes smaller statues of famous saints like the Mother Mary and Saint Anthony, but centers around a 500-pound bronze effigy of Padre Pio, whom Oppedisano credits with his life.
Oppedisano was piloting his single-engine Cessna on Oct. 4, 2020 with longtime friends Jose Urena and his girlfriend, Maggie O’Neill, on board after a lunch in Nantucket and was preparing to land in the East River when a boat suddenly blocked his path.
The plane skipped across the water and smashed into a concrete pier before splitting into pieces.
Witnesses jumped to pull Oppedisano and Urena, who were in the cockpit, from the wreckage. Both were rushed to the hospital in critical condition.
“I was a mess. And I had broken legs, broken knee, broken back, broken ribs, broken tongue. I was on strictly morphine. I’m just hallucinating, I’m in la-la land,” Oppedisano said.
In his daze, Oppedisano called his wife and daughter at 3 a.m., who recalled their loved one rambling for several minutes and repeatedly asking whether his other passengers had survived.
Urena was injured but alive — but 61-year-old O’Neill had been killed.
Tina Marie couldn’t break the news to her father, instead saying, “You really just have to worry about you right now. Just focus on getting healthy and getting strong.”
“It was almost like his whole aura shifted. His whole energy shifted, the tone of his voice, and he was like, ‘Tina Maria, I’m going to be just fine,’” she said. “He goes, ‘Padre Pio is here with me right now … he told me that I’m going to be okay.’ And I remember I just lost it.”
With tears in his eyes, Oppedisano recalled seeing the saint standing in his hospital room with him. The figure was neither touching nor speaking with him, but the restaurateur felt an overwhelming sense of calm and a “chill.”
“I’m not a holy person. I’m a sinner like everybody else, but it was something that I feel goes right through my body,” he said.
Oppedisano has gone under the knife 28 times since the crash, including for a leg-lengthening surgery after the impact of the accident resulted in a 1.5-inch difference between his legs.
“I’m all even now!” he promised.
The restaurateur feels as though he owes his life to the dead religious figure, and has made annual pilgrimages to see his body at its resting place in southern Italy.
It was during a 2023 trip that Oppedisano bought the 6-foot-tall statue.
Tina Marie spearheaded the Padre Pio Shrine of Little Neck non-profit, which crowdsourced more than $400,000 from the community to build the shrine on a lot that the family initially planned to use for restaurant parking.
Missing from the shrine, however, is a memorial to or mention of O’Neill.
“She had two sons … They’re upset with me, like it was my fault that she died,” Oppedisano said, adding that he hasn’t spoken to the pair since the accident.
A National Transportation Safety Board investigation listed poor pilot judgment as the cause of the tragedy.
The O’Neill family declined to comment when reached by The Post.
Although the shrine is Catholic in nature, Oppedisano says the spot will be open to all religions and neighbors as a daily accessible reflective community space.
It will officially be unveiled at a blockbuster blessing ceremony this weekend, which the Oppedisanos expect to draw some 5,000 neighbors.
