Mob Experts on The Sopranos, Week 13

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 staff writer for The New Yorker. He covered organized crime for New York magazine and the New York Times Magazine. He is at work on a book about the Middle East. Gerald Shargel has represented many high-profile clients, including John Gotti. He is a practitioner in residence at Brooklyn Law School, where he also teaches. Dana Stevens, aka Liz Penn, is a Slate TV critic. She lives in New York and also writes on film and culture for the High Sign.

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 discuss the lives and squabbles of America's favorite gangsters. Today they are joined by Gerald Shargel, an attorney who has represented many high-profile clients, including John Gotti, and Slate TV critic Dana Stevens.

Dear Jeff, Jerry, and Jerry,

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Hmm … Keeping TV sacrosanct from politics? I'll have to think about that one. It seems like most attempts to keep politics out of something end up themselves being highly political gestures—i.e., the recent flap over Nightline's enumeration of American war dead overseas. Was it more "political" that Koppel wanted to read the list of names on the air, or that the country's largest single owner of ABC affiliate stations refused to air him doing so? But whatever your opinion about the war, an argument could be made for seeing Bush Cabinet meetings as Mafia sit-downs, with Dick "Bleeding Heart" Cheney holding onto those Energy Task Force records as if they were Bada Bing tax returns, and Georgie "Peeping Tom" Tenet taking the fall for—well, we'll never know, I guess. See what I mean?

As for speculating about the show's end, that's not being put on the spot: It's engaging in juicy water-cooler gossip and getting paid for it! But thanks, don't mind if I do. I asked myself this question a million times this weekend, during my sickening spiral down the moral black hole that is The Sopranos on DVD. Where the hell do they have left to go in the final season? They could end on Tony's death at the hands of the New York mob, at Carmela's hands (as Jerry C. enticingly suggests), or—to confirm that The Sopranos is the darkest show ever on television—by his own hand. But leaving him alive, miserable and bleakly ordering killings for the rest of his life, while all that is dear to him has gone to rot and ruin, could also work as a nice, Godfather III-style bit of heavy irony. I also foresee a major struggle with Anthony Jr.'s slide into crime next season—I don't see the kid who had trouble making it through Robert Frost's "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening" making a big splash at East Stroudsburg State. Maybe the loss of A.J. (sweet-faced, slow-burning Robert Iler, whom I love as an actor) would be a good narrative hook to get Tony into apocalyptic, series-ending payback mode.

I'll keep this short because, among the four of us (I didn't know we'd have two Jerrys and a Jeff today), we've made this into quite a marathon scroll for whatever gangland junkies have bothered to read this far. I just wanted to make one more observation, a general one that occurred to me after last week's show: The Sopranos is peerless at doing something that only TV, not movies or plays, can do. By slowly exposing us to the accretion of a character's experience over years, it supplies us, in effect, with false memories, which, as they slip farther back into time, seem like they actually must have happened to us, or someone we knew. The day after Adriana got taken out (the most ignominious death of a major character yet; even Pussy got to drink tequila shots with the guys first!), I got on a plane to California. I couldn't look at my own suitcase without thinking of Adriana's hard-sided red bag, being packed by Christopher (with her clothes, I hope, not her) and cast into the swamp. I'd look down, see my bag, and suddenly there'd be this mini-montage of Adriana flashbacks: Adriana hostessing at Artie Bucco's, making a fool of herself in front of that gangster rapper, doing a hit of coke off one of her Frito nail extensions. However fictional, her loss had the power of five years of history behind it: Daily life might feel exactly the same, but nonetheless, I was going on in a world without Adriana La Cerva in it.

Thanks for letting me participate, this was great fun. Despite all our caviling, the show rules, and so do all of you.

Humbly,
Dana

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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. Gerald Shargel has represented many high-profile clients, including John Gotti. He is a practitioner in residence at Brooklyn Law School, where he also teaches. Dana Stevens is Slate's movie critic.

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