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Mob Experts on The Sopranos, Week 9

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from: Jerry Capeci
to: Jeffrey Goldberg

Did Vito Want To Seduce Finn or Kill Him?

Posted Monday, May 3, 2004, at 5:55 PM ET

Who are these people?

Last year, each new episode of The Sopranos was analyzed by a group of shrinks; this year, each week two mob experts will discuss the lives and squabbles of America's favorite gangsters.

Hey Jeff,

I did notice that you seemed to be obsessing about Jerry Shargel, but I decided not to mention it. I checked with Dr. Melfi, and she suggested that I ignore it in the hope that you'd engage in some self-analysis and—presto!—she was right.

As for Deadwood, I'm not really into it, but I have scanned the show on occasion and quickly noticed the difference between Al the Swearing Man and Tony the Crybaby.

I think Greg Scarpa would have killed the low-level associate whose HIV-infected blood caused his ultimate demise, but I believe the poor bloke died a few years before Greg even learned that he had contracted AIDS, if memory serves correctly. And, to set the record straight, I don't think the infected guy was gay but a drug user who contracted the deadly virus by using dirty needles.

Enough distractions. Back to the show. It's always hard to predict exactly how the subplots will play out, but I wasn't sure whether Vito wanted to seduce Finn or kill him. Or, as Finn sagely put it to Meadow, "Maybe he wants to fuck me and then kill me." I did suspect Vito might turn out to be gay because as Gene Mustain and yours truly described in wonderful detail in that, er, great book Murder Machine, the serial killers in Roy DeMeo's crew included a burly gay hitman, who—coincidentally?—was also named Vito—Vito Arena. But that Vito became a cooperating witness and testified against his former buddies. And like many turncoats, he went back to crime when he got out of prison. A convenience-store owner turned the tables on him during an armed robbery and shot him to death.

My guess is that Finn—interesting, isn't it, that Meadow found someone, a wimp, so unlike her father—doesn't have a long-term contract with David Chase. If past performances are any indication, and of course they often aren't in The Sopranos, it should be only a matter of time before Meadow tires of him or Vito whacks him, as he did her first boyfriend.

Another guess. Tony Soprano's snub of "No. 1 Cousin" Chris in favor of cousin Tony B. will send Chris searching for Agent Cubitoso and a chance at a new life, maybe as a screenwriter for a mob show.

Lastly, it was pretty obvious from the title of last night's show, "Unidentified Black Males," that the writers would zero in on the practice often used by many white criminals (not only the Italian-American version) of identifying black men as their assailants. But they certainly drove it home with, according to my memory, four separate references to the practice. Tony B. tried to explain away his injured foot that way; Tony S. recounted his 20-year-old lie that two black guys mugged him just before he was to join Tony B. on the fateful hijacking; Vito used it when he told Felicia to call an ambulance for the goon who was beaten bloody by Eugene Pontecorvo. Meadow, of course, was more politically correct in describing her boyfriend's killers as "African-American" drug dealers.

Later,
Jerry

tv club
entries

1 2 3 4

from: Jerry Capeci
to: Jeffrey Goldberg

Did Vito Want To Seduce Finn or Kill Him?

Posted Monday, May 3, 2004, at 5:55 PM ET

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Jerry Capeci is author of The Complete Idiot's Guide to the Mafia and Jerry Capeci's Gang Land: Fifteen Years of Covering the Mafia. His weekly column about organized crime, "Gang Land," appears in the New York Sun and at www.ganglandnews.com. Jeffrey Goldberg is a national correspondent for the Atlantic and the author of Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror.

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