Made Men (14 page)

What was expected, it can be presumed, was Don Vito Corleone and the nostalgic, mythic world created by Mario Puzo in
The Godfather.
Anyone who read or saw
The Godfather
would come away believing that all gangsters were essentially hardworking, noble men born in the wrong century. The characters portrayed in
The Godfather
possessed a flair for the theatrical. There was a dead fish wrapped in a bulletproof vest. There was a gangster shot in the eye because he got too greedy. There was the claim that gangsters only shot one another and always for business purposes. Each of these characters was honorable in the same way, say, as Billy the Kid or Ned Kelley or Robin Hood was honorable. They were outsiders who wished to gain their rightful place at the American table. Wasn’t that how legitimate men like J. P. Morgan and William Randolph Hearst and Andrew Carnegie got to own huge corporations? It was true that other movies had undermined this “men of honor”
Godfather
mythology.
Goodfellas
and
Casino
made clear there was little integrity and plenty of duplicity among the pinkie-ring set.
Married to the Mob
and
The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight
made fun of these very serious Roman senators and their very serious business. But the image of Marlon Brando mumbling philosophies and applying corporate logic to determine who will live and who will die—this was the image of the Mafia that most people believed. This was the image of the gangster as proud antihero that most Americans believed was real.

This would soon change.
In
The Sopranos,
the protagonist is a fairly intelligent capo named Tony Soprano. He’s in the mob because his father was in the mob, and he never wavers from the belief that “the life” is the only way to live. This was all very
Godfather
-like. But Tony Soprano also has a wife who runs up credit-card bills, two children who evince all the signs of adolescent angst common to suburban progeny, and a group of gangsters around him who complain more than a bunch of old ladies in slippers playing mah-jongg. He lives in a very nice suburban home and writes down on his tax forms that he is in the waste-disposal industry. He begins seeing a psychiatrist after having a nervous breakdown. He never sits in a darkened room in a tuxedo allowing real working people to kiss his ring and beg favors. He never uses fish to communicate a message. Opera he disdains. He listens to Steely Dan.
The Sopranos,
its creator, David Chase claimed, was going to show these people to be just what they were— people. They had families, they had back problems, their hair was thinning, their cars broke down. Yes, they killed one another for business purposes, but sometimes they did it for spite, or because of ineptitude. This was to be the real Mafia, every Sunday night.
Don Vito Corleone would have had a stroke.
The similarities between the real world and the TV world were mostly predictable. Many of the themes and schemes portrayed on
The Sopranos
were based on the Big Four of well-known Mafia activities: murder, extortion, loan sharking, and gambling. In real life and on TV, the mob loaned out money at exorbitant interest rates, then beat their customers with baseball bats if they were slow to pay. They took over businesses by becoming secret partners with entrepreneurs who got in over their heads. They ran high-stakes, all-night poker games for legitimate businessmen. They paid off corrupt cops. They headed to Fort Lauderdale or, better yet, Sicily when word leaked that the FBI was about to show up with arrest warrants in hand. They routinely killed informants, who were inevitably referred to by the all-purpose epithet
rats.
They set up “pump and dump” schemes on Wall Street and beat on brokers who refused to hype bogus stock. They were imaginative with the use of the word
fuck.
All of this predictable stuff that was found in hundreds of mob investigations that had been written about and played out on TV ad ridiculum found its way into
The Sopranos.
Some of the TV plots seemed to have been lifted straight from the headlines. Take Junior Gotti, for instance. In January 1998, John A. (Junior) Gotti, the son of Gambino crime boss, John Gotti, was indicted in New York on racketeering charges that included his alleged involvement in something known as a phone-card scam. In this version of how to steal from your fellowman, the mob set themselves up as distributors of phone cards by buying millions of dollars of credit from a big phone company. They then sold thousands of bogus cards, refused to pay the company for the credit, and went out of business. The company would then cut off the phone cards, leaving thousands of clueless callers hearing only dial tone. Gotti’s phone card was very patriotic. It featured a photo of the Statue of Liberty and could be purchased in poor neighborhoods throughout New York. His name, needless to say, was not included on either the back or front. At the time Gotti was indicted, this was the first time the mob had been implicated in this type of phone-card scam.
Somehow,
The Sopranos
managed to mention this same phone-card scam a year later in a midseason episode.
This occurred again and again. In the case with the phone cards, Gotti was also charged with another new Mafia scheme that had never been revealed before. In New York City, groups of black and Latino construction workers would descend upon white-controlled construction sites and demand jobs. Sometimes they did this by smashing equipment and beating up workers with iron pipes. These so-called coalitions had operated for years, and no one was quite sure how they were allowed to operate in an industry that was allegedly controlled by the mob. The answer, it turned out, was simple—some of the coalitions were also controlled by the mob. In the January 1998 indictment, prosecutors alleged that members of Gotti’s crime family had for years secretly paid the coalitions to show up and make threats. The good-hearted gangsters would then step in and and tell the harassed constructioncompany executive the problem could be “fixed” for a fee, usually substantial. The contractor would pay this protection money and hope for the best, unaware that the gangster would then dole out some of this fee to the coalition leader as payoff for a job well done. That this extremely cynical scam was run by the mob was not known to the general public at all until January 1998—just months before
The Sopranos
episode in which Tony Soprano does the very same thing to a make-believe construction company called Massarone Construction.
It happened again with airline tickets. In November 1999, prosecutors in Atlanta unsealed a racketeering indictment against one of Junior Gotti’s associates, a New York businessman named Steven E. Kaplan. Among the many charges, Kaplan was accused of corrupting two Delta Airlines employees by “comping” them at his Atlanta strip club in exchange for dozens of reduced-fare airline tickets. This was the first time prosecutors had charged the Mafia with systematically stealing airline tickets. Coincidentally,
The Sopranos
included the same scheme in a show that was filmed months before these charges were made public.
And then it occurred with Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI). In the summer of 2000, the FBI raided a South Carolina doctor’s office and carted away boxes of documents. They were looking into what they believed was the Mafia’s newest scheme. An associate of the Gambino crime family had set up a company that leased out MRI equipment. A South Carolina doctor, they were told, got kickbacks to recommend expensive MRI testing to patients who didn’t really need it. In some cases, they were told, he’d gone so far as to recommend MRI tests for patients who did not exist. The doctor then referred the patients to a company in the Bronx. This company, which was secretly controlled by a reputed gangster, leased out MRI equipment. The company would run the patient through the MRI machine, then submit the bill directly to the insurer. In this way the MRI company was able to pocket millions of dollars in insurance fees for care that was either completely unnecessary or nonexistent.
This new scam had found its way into the Mafia grapevine shortly before
The Sopranos
went into production and was not revealed to the public until the middle of the year 2000. The entire scam was mentioned on the episode of the show that had been wrapped up long before the public knew anything about the Mafia’s alleged involvement in the highly profitable business of MRIs.
In many instances, the activity depicted on television was remarkably similar to the activity of the real-life Mafia, activity no member of the public had ever been privy to. And nowhere were these similarities more obvious than in New Jersey’s only homegrown version of La Cosa Nostra—the DeCavalcante crime family.
Many had whispered about the DeCavalcantes’ alleged connection to the silver screen. It was said that Don Vito Corleone of
The Godfather
was modeled on Sam the Plumber DeCavalcante. But many questioned such a connection. Who could imagine a guy offering up unforgettable philosophical bons mots while sitting in a beat-up heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning office in industrial New Jersey? Whether Mario Puzo took Sam the Plumber into consideration while writing his novel will never be known because Puzo always maintained that he made the whole thing up. No matter. With
The Sopranos,
though, the connection with the DeCavalcante name was obvious.
Events and circumstances that occurred in real life but had not yet been made public made their way into the scripts of
The Sopranos
. Some were innocuous. Most of the names on the show, for instance, came straight out of your average Mafia Yellow Pages—Johnny Boy and Uncle Junior and Philly and Patsy and Richie. One was very unusual—Big Pussy Bonpensiero. No other family had a Pussy, Big or Little, save the DeCavalcante crime family. His name was Anthony (Little Pussy) Russo, a guy who once bragged to an acquaintance about the time he stuffed a murder victim inside a furnace.
Both the TV family and the real family suffered from a persistent inferiority complex caused by the repeated ridicule of the New York crime families, who referred to them as “farmers.”
The TV family and the New Jersey family both had bosses in prison who’d designated others to run their operations. At the start of
The Sopranos,
a guy named Giacomo Aprile, known to friends and family as Jackie, is acting boss and slowly dying of stomach cancer. Jackie Aprile’s slow death creates a leadership vacuum that threatens to turn deadly. In the DeCavalcante family, the acting boss was a guy named Giaciano Amari, known to friends and family as Jake. Jake Amari was slowly dying of stomach cancer, and his impending demise was creating a leadership vacuum that threatened to turn deadly. This was a fact known only to members of the DeCavalcante crime family and law enforcement on both sides of the Hudson who made it their business to know such things.
One of those agents theorized that the writers of the show were communicating with real members of the DeCavalcante crime family. “They’ve got to have somebody over there,” said the agent, who did not want his name used as he pointed out other coincidences.
In the TV family, Tony Soprano ends up with a secret ownership interest in a hotel owned by Hasidic Jews. Inside the hotel, Tony runs a high-stakes poker game that goes all day and all night. In the DeCavalcante crime family, a real-life associate ran a high-stakes poker game out of a community center operated by Hasidic Jews.
On the TV show, Tony Soprano the acting boss promoted to capo one veteran soldier named Paulie Walnuts over another named Big Pussy, inspiring in Big Pussy jealousy and resentment. In the DeCavalcante family, Vincent Palermo the acting boss promoted one veteran soldier named Uncle Joe Giacobbe over another named Joey (Tin Ear) Sclafani, prompting scorn and derision in Sclafani.
On TV, the resentful soldier, Big Pussy, is secretly charged with a crime that can put him away for a decade. The FBI then offers to let him walk away with only minimal jail time if he agrees to cooperate and wears a secret device to record inculpatory statements of old friends. In the DeCavalcante crime family, a longtime associate named Ralphie Guarino was arrested on charges that could put him away for a decade. He agreed to wear a wire for the FBI and began recording the conversations of his friends within the DeCavalcante crime family.
On the TV show, the gangsters hang out at a New Jersey strip club called the Bada Bing; in real life, the DeCavalcante crime family hung out at a strip club in Queens called Wiggles. To make things even stranger, when the makers of
The Sopranos
went looking for an authentic Mafia-owned strip club, they must have possessed special Mafia radar. The actual club on a busy thoroughfare in Lodi, New Jersey, where the show was filmed had once been known as Satin Dolls. According to the State of New Jersey’s Commission of Investigation, Satin Dolls was for years secretly controlled by Vincent Ravo, an associate of the Genovese crime family. Ravo, it should be noted, also secretly owned another bar down the road in Garfield, New Jersey, by the highly imaginative name of Goodfellas. One of his front men in that venture was one Daniel Conte, who had a small role as a mob associate in the movie
Goodfellas
and claimed to be a close friend of Joe Pesci.
As the hype started to build in 1998 for the premiere of the show, its creator, David Chase, insisted
The Sopranos
would be anything but predictable. This was a tricky task. Although
The Sopranos
would be realistic, he claimed, it would never be about real people. In an Internet interview published by HBO to help explain how the show was put together, Chase was asked how he managed to accurately portray the lifestyles of the Mafia in his series.
“We try to write about human behavior with all its warts and glories, and we do our research,” he replied. “And having grown up in New Jersey helps.”
“Are the Sopranos based on a specific person or group of people or just purely invention?” Chase was asked. “Purely invention,” was his terse electronic reply.
Not long after Chase gave that answer, a group of FBI agents with surveillance cameras sat freezing off their cannolis inside a van parked on Mulberry Street in New York City’s Little Italy. This was shortly before Christmas and the van was bathed in the electric red-and-green glow of the thousands of festive lights that emerge from their hiding places each holiday season in Little Italy. It was parked across from one Mafia social club and three blocks away from John Gotti’s former hangout, the Ravenite. Across the narrow street the agents kept an eye on a low-key popular restaurant known as Il Cortile. Inside the exposedbrick-walled classic Italian eatery was focaccia “Puddhica” con Brie for $7.50, lobster ravioli for $25, and a well-attended Christmas party thrown by the Colombo crime family.
The FBI agents—who had not been invited—were interested in the comings and goings of the party’s hosts, James (Jimmy Green Eyes) Clemenza, a reputed Colombo capo, and his brother, Jerry, a reputed family soldier. At some point they recognized the two men making their way down Mulberry and into Il Cortile. A few minutes later they got a little surprise. There were two other men—a Frigidaire-size guy with a full head of black curly hair and a smaller but extremely compact guy with a pompadour gone silver at the temples.
Here were mob soldiers Big Pussy and his pal, Paulie Walnuts. Actually it was Vincent Pastore, an actor who played the gangster named Big Pussy, and Tony Sirico, an actor who played the gangster named Paulie Walnuts on
The Sopranos.
But there was more. Another guy ambled by who was a little tougher to recognize but still within reach for anybody who’d watched movies during the 1970s. It was James Caan, the actor who became famous after playing the volatile Sonny Corleone in