What A Sopranos Prequel Might Look Like

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http://www.denofgeek.us/tv/the-sopra...ight-look-like

David Chase is intrigued by the idea of a prequel to The Sopranos. Let's look at the Jersey mob landscape before Tony took over.

David Chase recently gave an Associated Press interview where he said the idea of a prequel to his classic HBO gangster series The Sopranos intrigues him. That’s a great word, intrigue; it is so much more committed, and yet more ambiguous, than the word interest. When someone, who’s not Mr. Spock, says "interesting," half the time you know that they’re not listening or they’re being polite. (“What did you think of my one-man show?” "Oh, interesting.") But intrigue has suspense. It holds out a promise. And it fires the imagination.

I am intrigued by the possibilities of a Sopranos prequel. The period of the mob that preceded the ascent of Tony Soprano in the DiMeo family was in many ways the high point of organized crime. So many bugs had been weeded out of the system, and cleared out of the office. The late 1990s and early 2000s pretty much saw that thing of theirs transform itself entirely and all but disappear from view. Like the documentary Let It Be showed the breakup of The Beatles, The Sopranos mirrored the demise of “The Mafia.”

So any prequel would be fantastically intriguing. It was one of the richest times in mob history.

In New Jersey, Brooklyn’s Genovese family set up shop on one end, Philadelphia forces muscled in on the other end, and in the middle was Jersey’s own DeCavalcante family. Tony Soprano is loosely based on Vincent "Vinny Ocean" Palermo, the son-in-law kinda of Simone Rizzo "Sam" DeCavalcante. “Sam the Plumber" was the de-facto boss of the crime family that was really just considered a “glorified crew” by The Sopranos’ New York mob. Sam the Plumber was the guy who turned it into a family. Palermo ran the DeCavalcante family until he turned state’s witness and disappeared into the wilds of Houston.

In the pilot episode of The Sopranos, one of the first things Tony Soprano tells his therapist, Dr. Melfi, is that lately, he’s been “thinking” it’s good to be in something from the ground floor. I came too late for that, I know, but lately I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. That the best is over. I think about my father, he never reached the heights like me. But in a lot of ways, he had it better. He had his people. They had their standards. They had their pride. Today, what have we got?”

Tony's father John Francis "Johnny Boy" Soprano and his brother Corrado "Junior" Soprano were capos in the DiMeo crime family. The boss, Ercoli DiMeo, almost set Johnny up to take over as the boss after he stepped down. Johnny had good people on his crew, like Paulie “Walnuts” Gualtieri and Salvatore "Big *****" Bonpensiero. Tony went into his old man’s business, even joined his father’s crew, along with his friend Silvio Dante. Johnny knew talent. They would wind up as boss and consigliere later. Tony got his button when he was 22 for killing a bookie named Willie Overall on Labor Day in 1982.

"Johnny Boy" was the guy who got Paulie Gualtieri to tell a state trooper he had a cousin named Barnie Fife on Paulie’s first trip south of Jersey. Johnny and his brother Junior were in collections. In the show, Tony has a flashback to 1970, when he saw his father cut off Francis Satriale’s pinky finger for a gambling debt. Satriale didn’t actually bet his finger, and when you think about how little you could get for a finger in the early '70s, you might wonder how that would square him. It didn’t. Johnny Soprano wound up taking over Satriale’s pork store, giving Tony and his crew a place to sip coffee and make plans.

Tony’s father was also a partner in F-Note Records, owned by Hesh Rabkin. No, like any good gangster, Johnny didn’t sing, he was a silent partner. This ties in to Joey Gallo, the inspiration for all the old Sicilian messages and the mattresses in The Godfather. Gallo started out in the jukebox rackets. I think of him as a pioneer in early rock and roll. Gallo was one of the Barbershop Quintet who whacked Albert "The Lord High Executioner" Anastasia on 57th Street while he was under the hot towels.

Though they never state it explicitly, all the evidence seems to point to Johnny dying of emphysema some time in 1992 or 1993, though some have speculated that he could have been alive as late as 1995. There is a 1984 date on Johnny Soprano’s grave in the episode “In Camelot.”

Chase told the AP, “There are a couple of eras that would be interesting for me to talk about, about Newark, N.J. One would be in (the) late ‘60s, early ‘70s, about all the racial animosity, or the beginning, the really true beginning of the flood of drugs.”

Nicodemo ''Little Nicky" Scarfo ran Philadelphia and Atlantic City. Before the 1970s, South Jersey took orders from Angelo Bruno out of Philadelphia. They were mainly into loan sharking, gambling and labor rackets.

The northern New Jersey factions of La Cosa Nostra were into loan sharking, gambling, trucking and construction, just like their cousins across the river. The first New Jersey mob boss was Newark’s Filippo Amari. He died in 1957 and Nicholas Delmore took over until 1964.

Samuel DeCavalcante was the boss of New Jersey until the early 1970s. He was succeeded by John Riggi. One of his capos was Anthony "Tough Tony" Provenzano, a Teamsters Union vice-president who word on the street says was one of the conspirators in Jimmy Hoffa's murder.

The DeCavalcante family was led by John "Jackie Nose" D'Amico, an associate of the Gambino family, for a while. D’Amico was a former bodyguard for John Gotti and after Gotti went up the river, D’Amico was on the Gambino family ruling committee with Peter Gotti, Nick Corozzo, and John Gotti, Jr.

According to what I get from the series, the DiMeo crime family came into its own in the 1950s. The DiMeo crime family was tied in with the Lupertazzi crime family. The first father was Ercole DiMeo. Its top crew was Johnny Boy and Junior Soprano, as well as Herman "Hesh" Rabkin, Raymond "Buffalo Ray" Curto, Michele "Feech" La Manna, Patrizio "Uncle Pat" Blundetto, Robert "Bobby" Baccalieri, Sr., and Giuseppe "Beppy" Scerbo.

A prequel series could explore the Unrest of '83, when Tony Blundetto and Michele 'Feech' La Manna were popped and sentenced to about 20 years each. Tony rose up through the family after he robbed Feech La Manna's card game with Jackie Aprile, younger brother of Richie Aprile, who was the boss of his crew.

Ercole DiMeo got a life sentence in 1995 and named Jackie Aprile acting boss over Junior Soprano. Jackie was boss until 1999. Aprile was diagnosed with stomach cancer in 1998 and named Tony Soprano as boss, again passing over his uncle Junior. That started the War of ’99, where The Sopranos began.

While Chase said he was interested in getting into the mob’s drug era, there is very little evidence from the show that Johnny Soprano was involved with drugs. Of course, like most of the families, drugs weren’t talked about. They might have been sold, bosses might have taken money from drug sales, but the official word was just say no, to everything but the money.

The Gambino crime family settled in Cherry Hill in the 1970s. They were into drug trafficking. So, if Chase goes in this direction. The DiMeo family would have been under the family of New York’s Carmine Lupertazzi. The drugs would be another layer uncovered as a repressed memory that Dr. Melfi pulls from Tony Soprano’s fractured skull.