The Everything Mafia Book (39 page)

Crime Story

Oftentimes a television show fails to find its audience but gets a huge amount of critical praise. One such show was a gangland drama from the mid-1980s,
Crime Story
. The series was produced by Michael Mann, who later went on to fame as a movie director. It follows the story of the head of a special Chicago police unit dedicated to fighting the mob. But unlike
The Untouchables
, this period piece was set in the early 1960s, reflecting the Chicago mob at the height of its power.

The main character was an Italian-American flatfoot, Lieutenant Mike Torello, with a penchant for straight talk. Torello was played by Dennis Farina, a former Chicago cop and no stranger to mob roles. He played the mob boss in the comedy
Midnight Run
, a mobster in the female gangland movie
Bella Mafia
, a low-level wise guy in
Get Shorty
, and another mobster in
Men of Honor
.

Wiseguy

The 1980s brought one of the more interesting shows about organized crime, the critically acclaimed
Wiseguy
. The show starred Ken Wahl as Vinnie Ter-ranova, an undercover FBI agent who investigates some of the biggest crime groups in the country. The show was darker than most prime-time shows back then. But unfortunately the show was plagued by low ratings and battles between Wahl and the producers. Wahl left before season four, and the show fell apart.

Ray Sharkey brought a hard-edged yet flamboyant persona to mobster Sonny Steelgrave. He was the boss of the Atlantic City Mafia and responsible for the murder of Terranova’s mentor at the FBI. Sharkey’s manically comic performance was one of the highlights of the show. Unfortunately Sharkey’s hard partying lifestyle offscreen took its toll. He died of AIDS in 1993.

This Week’s Villain . . . the Mobster

Gangsters served as the weekly foil for an intrepid detective or a nemesis for the police. In many of the PI shows that were popular on television in the 1970s, mobsters began making an appearance as a staple villain for most of the shows. As the genre reinvented itself, gangsters were there, changing from old-time bosses to slick, young players, but their purpose remained the same.

Big Actors, Bad Guys

Many big-name entertainers have jumped at the chance to play small-screen mobsters. Before his turn as mob capo Rusty on
The Sopranos
, singer Frankie Valli played a mobster on the ultimate ’80s cool TV show,
Miami Vice
. Harry Guardino played a mob boss on the ’70s PI series
Vegas
, a natural setting for stories involving racketeers.

Have their ever been any shows with female gangsters?
Actually, yes. There was a Neapolitan mob boss in The Sopranos. Vanessa Redgrave led a women-run Mafia group in Bella Mafia. And in a Lifetime movie (hardly the place you’d expect to see a gangster flick), Alyssa Milano was a mob gal who took over her boyfriend’s rackets in the TV movie Wisegal.

Cartoon Gangsters

One of the most recognizable mob bosses on television is the suave and brooding Fat Tony, the mob boss of Springfield, home of
The Simpsons
. From his post as head of the Legitimate Businessman’s Social Club, Tony and his thugs have tried to muscle in on Marge’s pretzel business (resulting in an all-out battle with the yakuza), recruit Bart for a spot in the mob family, and bribe the borderline incompetent Chief Wiggam. Fat Tony was the real nickname of Anthony Salerno, the late boss of the Genovese crime family.

The Sopranos:
Cultural Phenomenon

Coming onto prime time on a cable channel and under the radar,
The Sopranos
became not only a cultural phenomenon but easily one of the best shows on television, both from a writing and acting perspective. It took the mob mythos into the modern era and added new riffs and spins to old themes. But more than any portrayal of the Mafia before, it delved into the inner workings of the mob family, domestic life, and a mob boss who was becoming unhinged.

Sopranos actors Tony Sirico and James Gandolfini

Courtesy of AP Images/Mike Derer

Actors Tony Sirico, left, who plays Paulie Walnuts and James Gandolfini, right, who plays Tony Soprano, shoot a scene from the mafia drama, The Sopranos, outside the fictional Satriale’s pork store in Kearny, N.J., in this Wednesday, March 21, 2007 file photo.

Jersey

The Sopranos
chronicles the life of Tony Soprano, a Mafia don beset by modern problems that Al Capone and Lucky Luciano did not have to deal with. The story provides a sly counterpoint between the ordinary and the violent. Soprano, who lives in the dangerous underworld, goes home to the pedestrian problems that beset any American family. He has marital problems. He has strained relationships with his kids. And he sees a psychiatrist. Yet when he goes to the office, his daily workload most often involves criminal conduct and occasionally murder. This is what separates him from the other family men living in suburban New Jersey.

The Jersey setting gives the story an authenticity often lacking in other mob projects. From the grimy industrial backdrop of the Newark skyline to the McMansion-filled suburbs, it shows how far the Mafia has come, and how they are now more of a suburban phenomenon than an urban one.

Actors in The Sopranos have run afoul of the law. Michael Squicciarini, who played an enforcer in a couple episodes, was charged with a gangland hit before his death from natural causes. Robert Iler, who played AJ Soprano, got into a couple minor squabbles with the law. Lilo Brancato, who played Matt Bevalaqua, was sentenced to 10 years in prison for robbery in January 2009.

Mafia for the New Millennium

The Sopranos
is a new Mafia image. The old Warner Brothers gangster movies presented hoodlums that suited the allegedly simpler times. Perhaps the times were not so simple in real life, but the movies portrayed them as such, and a conversation with your grandparents is likely to have them waxing nostalgic about the “good old days.”

The show was filmed on location throughout New Jersey, but the interior scenes were filmed at a sound stage in Queens, New York, located at Sil-vercup Studios. Some cities refused to allow the show to be filmed there, but others, like Kearny, Caldwell, and Lodi, embraced the notoriety and gave the show the authenticity it needed.

The Untouchables
television show continued that classic tradition with archetypal good guys and bad guys. Often there was more complexity given to the gangsters, but basically things were black and white with the occasional shades of gray.

In
The Sopranos
you do not see bigger than life. You see a representation of a Mafia in decline that mirrors the culture as a whole on the decline. Tony Soprano laments the loss of the “good old days” of the Mafia. He presides over a Mafia family whose glory days are long gone and are never going to return. But at the same time it shows a vibrant, rich tapestry of ethnicity, family, and success—from Lorraine Bracco’s psychiatrist to the Italian FBI agents pursuing Tony.

There is much culture shock comedy as old mobsters have difficulty adapting to the changing world. One aging Mafioso laments that the mob did not get in on the Starbucks bandwagon, because that is where the real money is these days. Tony Soprano reads self-help books to deal with his many problems. You see a Mafioso picking up tips, tools, and techniques from current trends like pop psychology and applying them to the often grisly business of the Mafia.

The Sopranos generated much ancillary merchandise, including the books The Psychology of the Sopranos and The Sopranos Family Cookbook. There are Sopranos bus tours through New Jersey and a multitude of pop culture references in other TV shows, magazine articles, songs, and movies. It’s safe to say that the show has become as much a part of the culture as The Godfather.

Hero Worship