Mourning the “Sopranos’” Mafia boss

James Gandolfini, the Emmy Award-winning actor who shot his way to fame on the HBO drama “The Sopranos” as Tony Soprano, the tough-talking, hard-living crime boss with a stolid exterior but rich interior life, died last Wednesday. He was 51. This extends the celebrity for Italian-American film characters of high crime, including Joe Pesci in Casino, Al Pacino in The Godfather, Robert DeNiro in the Godfather and Good fellas, along with Lorraine Bracco, in the latter and the Sopranos.

DeNiro also managed to do the capo of bad guys on screen as Al Capone, who grew up in my native Brooklyn, worked as a barber, trading locales for a stint in Chicago’s badlands, with a baseball bat not a scissor in hand.

Along with directors Martin Scorsese, Frances Ford Coppola, Brian DePalma, they went a long way into cementing Americans of Italian descent into the roles of major criminals, both real and fictionalized, as Tony Soprano was based on a real-life Jersey mobster. Somehow the generations of hard-working, family-raising Italian Americans either got mixed in the sauce of the melting pot or pretty much neglected. In spite of that, I respected Gandolfini’s work and the others’ mentioned. It was good, even when showing the family home-life, or the “familia” side of the mob.

Tony Soprano, David Chase’s “creation,” based on a South Jersey boss, was the first to have a shrink, Lorraine Bracco, to cope with his panic attacks, most likely attacks of conscience for the last capping he did. But the series ran for six seasons and the last in 2002 drew 13.4 million viewers. So this indicates some deep fascination not only with gangsters worldwide, but those of Italian extraction. Even the repairman in my apartment building, an Albanian immigrant, admired Tony Soprano. He gives me a wink when he comes to fix something, and if we speak of an annoying tenant, a “badabing, baddaboom.”

So the fascination with organized crime, particularly the Italian-American brand goes deep, like the sauce-pot and the killing. Tony Soprano was an elegant bull of a man, as was Gandolfini in real life, weighing in at 262 pounds, and always in beautiful suits, ties, shirts, overcoats, the whole nine yards of masculine sartorial splendor, onstage and off. Even when we step away from crime to boxing, we find DeNiro playing the jealousy-crazed Jake LaMotta. I grew up on these heroes and swallowed their fantastic feats like my mother’s pasta.

But where did all this crime and Italians (American or not) come from? Historically, from Sicily, which, as an island culture had been conquered by many diverse attackers, including the Saracens. This constant turnover of rulers brought a state of anarchy to the state of Sicily. So the Cosa Nostra (our thing) or “black hand” became a kind of a Robin Hood’s band, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor. As it developed, it became stealing from the rich and giving it to the rich (bandits), which added another level of struggle for Italians to survive.

This culture floated north to the now containerized seaport of Naples, where the gang has come to be called the Camorra, the ideal location for smuggling in everything from fabrics for knock-off designer clothes to toxic waste to be dumped far out at sea. But earlier on, the migration of Italians from the south, the poorest part of Italy, brought it into the fighting for life the southerners had developed.

When they hit New York City or Jersey’s ports, it was the nightsticks of the Irish cops they met with. And they soon learned how to deal with the Irish cops, demonstrated in that great scene from The Godfather, where the recently returned from WW II, Michael Corleone gets involved in a plot to assassinate a police official by having a gun placed in the bathroom of an Italian restaurant where a dinner has been scheduled for a sit-down. At some point, Michael excuses himself to go to the rest room (to find the planted gun). When he returns, he shoots and kills the rogue cop, and carry on with business. Tragically, this signals Michael’s descent into the underworld, not the political career his father had planned for him.

So, sociologically, this is where the fight came from, with the Italians having to break into the “American Dream’s” back door, not walk through the front door. This story comes down from Mario Puzo’s epic novel, The Godfather, from which the film was made.

Speaking of gangsters, I’ll never forget my grandfather Raphael’s two cousins, the Dallas brothers, who were in the drug and extortion businesses. When they came to visit, the family sat around the table in silence while Grandpa talked with them. they were dressed to the nines and just one of their serpent-like looks scared the living crap out of me as a kid.

Returning to Gandolfini, his death in Rome, where he was on vacation and scheduled to attend the Taormina Film Fest in Sicily, was confirmed by HBO The cause of Gandolfini’s death has been confirmed as a heart attack, not due to drug or alcohol abuse. Gandolfini grew up in Park Ridge, in Bergen County, N.J.

In the much-touted pilot episode viewers were introduced to the complicated life of Tony Soprano, mob kingpin who suffers panic attacks and begins seeing a psychiatrist. Over 86 episodes, audiences followed Gandolfini in the role as he was tormented by his mother (played by Nancy Marchand), his wife (Edie Falco), rival mobsters, the occasional surreal dream sequence and, in 2007, an ambiguous series finale that left millions of viewers wondering whether Tony Soprano had met his fate at a restaurant table. Why not? Food was at the center of family at home, and in the ‘familia’ in the world as well. Food is sacramental with Italians.

The success of “The Sopranos” helped earn HBO a dominant player and more than a billion dollars in the competitive field of episodic television, given the reruns, alternative (no cursing versions), foreign programming residuals, not to mention domestic. This all transformed Mr. Gandolfini from a character actor into a star, and “The Sopranos” from being another spaghetti mob movie into a worldwide paradigm, (involving some of our major politicians). The series, created by David Chase (whose family’s surname was LeCesare, until grandfather purloined the name Chase because it belonged to a classy bank), won two Emmys for outstanding drama series, and Mr. Gandolfini won three Emmys for outstanding lead actor in a drama. He was nominated six times for the award.

HBO said of the gentle giant Gandolfini, in a statement last Wednesday, “He was a special man, a great talent, but more importantly, a gentle and loving person who treated everyone no matter their title or position with equal respect.”

Chase, in a statement that went slightly over the top, called Gandolfini “one of the greatest actors of this or any time,” and said, “A great deal of that genius resided in those sad eyes.” He added: “I remember telling him many times: ‘You don’t get it. You’re like Mozart.’ There would be silence at the other end of the phone.” I’m not surprised.

James Joseph Gandolfini Jr. was born in Westwood, N.J., on Sept. 18, 1961. His father was an Italian immigrant who held a number of jobs, including janitor, bricklayer and mason. His mother, Santa, was a high school cafeteria chef. I’ll bet those school kids ate like bandits. Chase has also described his mother as having had Alzheimer’s disease and he used her as a model for Tony’s mother in the show, he said. For a summary of the series plot on and off stage, wiki provides an excellent essay.

Gandolfini attended Park Ridge High School and Rutgers University, graduating in 1983 with a degree in communications. He drove a delivery truck, managed nightclubs and tended bar in Manhattan before becoming interested in acting at age 25, when a friend took him to an acting class.

Gandolfini began his movie career in 1987 in the low-budget horror comedy “Shock! Shock! Shock!” In 1992 he had a small part in the Broadway revival of “A Streetcar Named Desire,” starring Alec Baldwin and Jessica Lange.

By the mid-1990s Mr. Gandolfini had managed to make gangster roles a specialty, playing burly but strangely charming tough guys in films like “True Romance” (1993) and “The Juror” (1996). He had an impressive list of character-acting credits, but was largely unknown when Mr. Chase cast him in “The Sopranos” in 1999.

“I thought it was a wonderful script,” Gandolfini told Newsweek in 2001, recalling his audition. “I thought, ‘I can do this. But I thought they would hire someone a little more debonair, shall we say, a little more appealing to the eye.’” Little did Gandolfini know how debonair and appealing to the camera’s eye he was, given his range from tears, asking in an argument if his “Uncle Junior really loved him,” to tearing someone apart for betraying him.

“The Sopranos,” which also became a springboard for television writers like Matthew Weiner (who would later create the AMC drama “Mad Men”) and Terence Winter (who later created the HBO series “Boardwalk Empire”), drew widespread acclaim for its detailed studies of the lives of its characters, and, at its center, Gandolfini’s portrayal of Tony Soprano, who was tightly wound, prone to acts of furious violence. (He beat and choked another mobster to death for insulting the memory of his beloved deceased racehorse, just one example.)

Gandolfini, who had studied the Actor’s Studio Meisner technique for two years, said that he used it to focus his anger and incorporate it into his performances. In an interview for the television series “Inside the Actors Studio,” Gandolfini said he would deliberately hit himself on the head or stay up all night to evoke the desired reaction.

“If you are tired, every single thing that somebody does makes you mad, Mr. Gandolfini said in the interview. “Drink six cups of coffee. Or just walk around with a rock in your shoe. It’s silly, but it works.”

Tony Soprano—and the 2007 finale of “The Sopranos,” which cut to black before viewers could learn what plans a mysterious restaurant patron had for Tony as he enjoyed a relaxing meal with his wife and children—would continue to follow Mr. Gandolfini throughout his career. It was an unresolved cliff-hanger, I imagine, in case Chase wanted to revive his epic. Or purloin someone else’s script.

Gandolfini went on to play a series of tough guys and heavies, including an angry Brooklyn parent in the Broadway drama “God of Carnage,” for which he was nominated for a Tony Award in 2009; ironically, he played the director of the C.I.A. in “Zero Dark Thirty,” Kathryn Bigelow’s dramatization of the hunt for Osama bin Laden; and a hit man in the 2012 crime thriller “Killing Them Softly.” Gandolfini’s roots seem planted in understanding criminality.

On the other hand, Gandolfini also produced two documentaries, “Alive Day Memories: Home From Iraq” and “Wartorn: 1861–2010,” about the history of post-traumatic stress in the military. So he possessed a real-life heart for those who fought and made the ultimate sacrifice.

Condolences go to his survivors, including his wife, Deborah Lin Gandolfini; a daughter, Liliana, born last year; a teenage son, Michael, from his marriage to Marcella Wudarski, which ended in divorce; and his sisters Leta Gandolfini and Johanna Antonacci. There was no mention of substance abuse or excessive drinking as a cause of death in the final autopsy.

In a 2010 interview with The New York Times, Mr. Gandolfini said that he was not worried about being typecast as Tony Soprano and that he was being offered different kinds of roles as he aged.

“Mostly it’s not a lot of that stuff anymore with shooting and killing and dying and blood,” he said. “I’m getting a little older, you know. The running and the jumping and killing, it’s a little past me.”

Asked why he did not appear in more comedies, he answered, “Nobody’s asked.” Yet, despite the varied bona fides of Gandolfini, he will last as ‘Tony Soprano,’ just as Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Ray Liotta, Marlon Brando and others remain in the spotlight as criminal stereotypes of Italian-Americans.

Is that the price of success in the stew pot of American culture? Or is it just a way to make more interesting the constant nature of American criminality—from a drone-murdering president to a Mafia NSA chief skimming voice messages and emails of millions of Americans. Theft is us, just so you know. A funeral service for Gandolfini will be held tomorrow at Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in Morningside Heights, NY.

Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer and life-long resident of New York City. An EBook version of his book of poems “State Of Shock,” on 9/11 and its after effects is now available at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. He has also written hundreds of articles on politics and government as Associate Editor of Intrepid Report (formerly Online Journal). Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.