Part 3
The show puts all this American social and cultural rot in front of characters wholly incapable of articulating it, if they even notice it. What is, for me, one of the show’s most memorable scenes has no dialogue at all. Tony and his crew have just returned from a business trip to Italy, during which they were delighted with the Old Country but also confronted with the degree of their alienation from their own heritage. They’re off the plane, and in a car traveling through Essex County. As the camera pans by the detritus of their disenchanted world — overpasses, warehouses — Tony, Paulie and Christopher are seeing their home with fresh eyes, and maybe wondering if their ancestors made a bad trade or if, somewhere along the line, something has gone horribly wrong. But we don’t know: For once, these arrogant, stupid and loquacious men are completely silent.
In “The Many Saints of Newark,” Chase brings viewers back to a time before that terminal decline set in. It’s 1967, everyone still lives in Newark and their world still turns. The crew gathers for lavish dinners at its own Jersey-scale version of the Copacabana, with live entertainment and all the rest. They dress properly — no tracksuits. Satriale’s Pork Store, where Tony’s crew will one day gather, still appears to be a part of a functioning neighborhood; you can see a greengrocer across the street, instead of slow decay.
Looking at the film through Dainotto’s lens, “Many Saints” makes a timely update to the story of postwar American capitalism by focusing on who was left out of its embrace. Whatever nostalgic qualities the film has are undercut by the added perspective of Harold, a Black affiliate of the crew who is allowed to run, and violently enforce, the numbers racket in the Black neighborhoods. He beats and kills his own and kicks the profits up to a bunch of gangsters who treat him like scum — an unjust arrangement that can only last so long, and one not exactly unique to Harold. It is the eve of the riots that will ultimately disperse the working-class whites of the city, including the Soprano family, all over Essex County and beyond. And after Newark revolts, Harold follows suit: He starts his own numbers game.
Cinematic depictions of the Mafia tend, for obvious reason, to focus on the dramatic: the Lufthansa heist, the hit men, extortion schemes, broken thumbs, infiltration by the feds, wars between and within families. The reality of the mob is of course a lot more boring. As Chase put it to me: “They spend all day sitting around eating sandwiches and thinking of ways to outsmart the government or big business.” In New York, the Mafia’s real power came from its infiltration of a vast array of industries in the city: commercial waste-hauling, garment manufacturing, the docks, the Fulton Fish Market and construction. According to Selwyn Raab’s “Five Families,” the Lucchese family even had a racket in this very newspaper, through its control of the union that represented deliverymen, which it used to get no-show jobs and to steal and sell copies of The Times.
The Mafia was a parasite on a grubbier economy — one that was more tactile and localized than containerized and algorithmic. It was a grotesque mirror image of the American dream this economy enabled, a perverted form of upward mobility through hard work and enterprise. The key component enabling its industrial racketeering was control of unions, another choke point in an economy that had yet to become so totally manicured to suit the needs of corporations. Unions could be used as a two-way tollbooth. Employers could be pressured into giving regular kickbacks, in the form of cash or no-show jobs, through the threat of a strike — but they could also bribe mobbed-up officials to look the other way so they could hire nonunion labor.
Around the time “The Sopranos” premiered, the N.Y.U. Law professor James B. Jacobs wrote a paper, along with a student, arguing that the Mafia, though weakened by decades of prosecutions, could come roaring back. By 2019, though, he had published a new paper called “The Rise and Fall of Organized Crime in the United States,” declaring the Mafia all but finished. “The world in which the Cosa Nostra became powerful is largely gone,” he wrote. And he cites a litany of factors that aided its collapse, a mix of technological advances, deregulation and financialization — many of the same forces that have created the stratified economy of today.
Expanded access to credit had cut into what mobsters call the shylock business; there’s no need to go to a loan shark when the payday lender will offer you similarly competitive rates. Gambling was legalized in many states and flourishes on many reservations; nearly every state in the Union has a lottery, which decimated the numbers racket. Italian American neighborhoods have emptied out — as Jacobs writes, “radically diminishing the pool of tough teenagers with Cosa Nostra potential”; this is dramatized brilliantly in the final episode of the series, when a mobster from a New York family hurries through Little Italy on an important phone call and, when the call ends, looks around to see he’s wandered into an encroaching and vibrant Chinatown. And, Jacobs notes, union membership has been decimated. “In the mid-1950s, about 35 percent of U.S. workers belonged to a union,” he writes. “In recent years, only 6.5 percent of private-sector workers have been union members.”
Though hardly a friend to the worker, the Mafia rose to power in tandem with a postwar economy that was. It was an organization adept at finding and exploiting crevices in a world that still had crevices. And it has been surpassed, both onscreen and in reality, by a form of organized crime better suited to our era: the transnational drug cartels that mimic our immense global supply chain, corrupting the governments of the developing world while aiding the developed world’s slide into senescence.
The Mafia did famously plunder the Teamsters union pension fund to build Las Vegas (as dramatized in “Casino”) and then (probably) killed Jimmy Hoffa when he threatened their control of it (as dramatized in “The Irishman”). But they could never have accomplished what came next. The trucking industry was deregulated in 1980, which crippled the Teamsters’ bargaining power and membership (and, by making freight trucking so cheap, gave us big-box retail). In 1982, the Central States pension fund, which had been the mob’s piggy bank, was handed over to be managed by the big Wall Street banks. By the 2000s, the fund was facing shortfalls because of crippled union membership, and its Wall Street trustees made risky bets to cover the gap — bets that went south. In recent years, the fund was paying out $2 billion more than it was taking in annually, a situation that could have emptied it entirely by 2025, were it not bailed out by Congress this March. Say what you will about the Mafia’s stewardship of the fund, but at least they left us with a place to see Celine Dion and play craps.
You can see this world — one in which no one can be squeezed because everyone is being squeezed — starting to take shape from the very beginning of the show. In the pilot, Tony is fending off competition from a new waste-hauling business undercutting his company’s extortionate fees, and trying to figure out how he can get a piece of the similarly extortionate costs his health insurer paid for his M.R.I. — a procedure he had because the stress in his life had given him a panic attack. The Mafia was the perfect lens through which to see the forces that were already transforming our world.
By Season 6, the Newark riverfront is being redeveloped, and has become a federal boondoggle. Its centerpiece is, hilariously, the Museum of Science and Trucking. Two members of Tony’s crew, Burt Gervasi and Patsy Parisi, go to a chain coffee shop nearby, claiming to be from the North Ward Merchants Protective Cooperative, offering round-the-clock security in exchange for weekly payments — a classic protection racket disguised in more sanitized language.
“I can’t authorize anything like that,” the manager explains. “It would have to go through corporate in Seattle.”
“How do you think corporate would feel if — for the sake of argument — someone threw a brick through your window?” Burt says.
“They’ve got something like 10,000 stores in North America,” the manager replies, still not getting what’s going on. “I don’t think they’d feel anything.”
Patsy leans in close and lowers his voice. “What if, God forbid, it wasn’t just vandalism? What if an employee — even the manager, say — was assaulted?”
The scheme finally clear to the manager, he levels with them, almost sympathetically. “Look, every last coffee bean is in the computer and has to be accounted for. If the numbers don’t add up, I’ll be gone, and somebody else will be here.”
Disoriented, Patsy walks out onto the street and says, with complete and utter sincerity: “It’s over for the little guy.”
“The Many Saints of Newark” is not just about Harold and the riots; it is also a prequel to a show preoccupied with questions of self-knowledge, inheritance and morality. It centers on dikkie Moltisanti — the “Many Saints” of the title — Christopher’s father, whom he never really knew, a revered figure in the show said to have been murdered by a crooked cop. dikkie is, like Tony, smarter than those around him, and desperate to be a good man, or at least he tells himself that. He does horrific things — things beyond the pale even for a mobster — and tries in vain to rebalance the scales. He mentors a young Tony, played by Michael Gandolfini, James’s son. It’s not yet clear that Tony will follow his father into mob life. In fact, the younger Gandolfini’s portrayal of Tony renders him surprisingly soft. In a deeply ironic scene, dikkie offers Tony some speakers that fell off the back of a truck. Tony isn’t sure it would be right to take them, so dikkie offers him a different way of looking at it. “Look, you take the speakers, right?” he says. “At the same time, you say to yourself: This is the last time I’m ever going to steal something. It’s that simple.”
The advice doesn’t take. By the end of the seven seasons of “The Sopranos,” Tony kills dikkie’s only son. He murders his own cousin and his best friend. He beats and strangles a man to death on suspicion of killing a horse. He cheats on his wife constantly; he hits women; he’s a bigot. He drives two of his lovers to attempt suicide (one succeeds); one of his best friends tries, too, thanks to him. And yet you’d be lying to yourself if you said you didn’t allow yourself to see it his way to some degree, if you didn’t sort of come to love the guy, even as he slides deeper into his most repulsive habits. Which is OK: None of the stuff on the show actually happened.
The bien-pensant line on Tony remains that he’s a sociopath, and only used therapy to become a better criminal. This is an idea spoon-fed to the viewer in the final episodes by a contrite Dr. Melfi, in a show that spoon-feeds almost nothing to the viewer. Melfi herself might call this a coping mechanism to avoid the messier reality, which is that Tony lives in an immoral world nestled within another immoral world, both of which have only grown more chaotic because of forces outside his control. Because of this, you can see how he reasons himself into more and more heinous crimes, justifying each and every one of them to himself. Perhaps to you too — at least, up to a point. That sympathy for Tony led contemporaneous critics to ask if people were watching the show in the wrong way, or if our enjoyment pointed to a deficiency of the heart. But perhaps it’s better to ask, without passing judgment — as a therapist might suggest — what it is about Tony that we find so magnetic, and why.
There’s plenty about him that young people wouldn’t relate to. He’s a Boomer, just a handful of years younger than my parents. He spends a fair amount of time in the first season getting mad about breaches of decorum that seem almost comically dated, once losing it at a guy for wearing a hat in a restaurant. He likes World War II history. In a running bit throughout the show, he laments that American men no longer live up to the ideal of Gary Cooper, “the strong, silent type.” But even Gary Cooper himself isn’t spared. In a rant delivered on a car ride home from a casino in Connecticut, Tony complains that if Cooper were alive today, “He’d be a member of some victims’ group: the fundamentalist Christians, the abused cowboys, the gays, whatever!” (Christopher chimes in idiotically from the back seat: “He was gay, Gary Cooper?”) But Tony hates himself too for failing to live up to this ideal. He has given in to psychiatry, to Prozac, to private schools for his kids and the rest of his comfortable exurban lifestyle, and he knows he needs it all.
It is this quality of Tony’s — this combination of privilege and self-loathing — that I suspect resonates with a younger generation, whether we want to admit it or not. He’s not so different from us, after all. He has an anxiety disorder. He goes to therapy and takes S.S.R.I.s, but never really improves — not for long, anyway. He has a mild case of impostor syndrome, having skipped some key steps to becoming boss, and he knows that people who hold it against him are sort of right. He’s still proud of his accomplishments in high school. He does psychedelics in the desert, and they change his perspective on things. He often repeats stuff he half-remembers someone smarter than him saying. He’s arguably in an open marriage with Carmela, if a rather lopsided one. He liked listening to “Don’t Stop Believin’” in 2007. He’s impulsive and selfish and does not go to church, though he does seem open to vaguer notions of spirituality. He wishes his career provided him with meaning, but once he had the career, he discovered that someone had pulled the rug out at some point, and an institution that had been a lodestar to him for his whole life was revealed to be a means of making money and nothing more. Does this sound at all familiar to you?
Like many young people, Tony is a world-historically spoiled man who is nevertheless cursed, thanks to timing, to live out the end of an enterprise he knows on some level to be immoral. It gives him panic attacks, but he’s powerless to find a way out. Thus trapped — and depressed — it’s not so hard for him to allow himself a few passes, to refuse to become better because the world is so rotten anyway. Tony’s predicament was once his to suffer alone, but history has unfolded in such a way as to render his condition nearly universal. And if people still see a monster in Tony, then the monster is themselves: a twisted reflection of a generation whose awakening to the structures that control them came in tandem with a growing aversion to personal accountability in the face of these systems.
. I dont think I've seen a bigger p*ssy in TV and I've watch NGE
