Warming Up for The Sopranos' Swan Song

With the end coming for Tony Soprano, wanna bet on his last words? I figure one word will do:

Mama.

If he says "Mama," the Oedipal gangster is ending where he began, though I'm not wagering money. Placing bets about the end of "The Sopranos" with offshore Internet gaming companies would be too ironic, even for me.

Or, Tony might offer up a pathetic "I'm sorry," after he's been betrayed by a friend, the universe contracting in that last moment of excruciating clarity, when there's so much to say but no time left to say it. But the only one he could tell is Paulie Walnuts, so why bother?

Then again, Tony might live. And his last words could be, "I swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth," as he sits in the witness stand, ballooning out of his suit, staring glumly at old colleagues at the defense table.

He'd have something in common with real-life Chicago mobster Nick Calabrese and his old pals, who will show up soon in the federal building in Chicago for the upcoming and historic Outfit trial, to the dismay of those who simpered that the Outfit was dead and that Chinatown tough guys are the stuff of fiction.

Either way, it's been a fine ride, and I've loved it and laughed along with it, and tonight it's over, with "The Sopranos" final episode on HBO after an eight-year run.

I'm old enough to have witnessed other pop-culture spasms of ritual mourning for television shows, and loathed them all, cringing at words like "iconic" and "touchstone" being applied to what escapes the idiot box. I've been nauseated by eulogies of comedy/dramas about sex-crazed Army doctors in Korea or sex-crazed alcoholics in Boston sports bars where everybody knows your name, even the drunken mailman. But here I am, in ritual, reeking of incense, and I can't help it, because "The Sopranos" was great drama and great TV.

What a premise: the dysfunctional suburban gangster family and the boss undergoing therapy, appraising the legs of his psychiatrist week after week, and the whiny children and the wife who made her bargain with blood money and decided to keep it. And the guys, Paulie and Big Pussy and Bacala, and Christopher seduced by Hollywood like others before him, and Silvio, who ran the strip club, yet was appalled that his teen-age daughter could be seen as a sexual object by a soccer coach.

The hook was a natural, and for years we sat safely in our living rooms, enjoying characters offered up as the last unrepentant white males, saying what they wanted, grabbing what they wanted, smoking, drinking. And we remain locked on the other side of the screen, in an increasingly bureaucratic, timid and politically correct modern American landscape.

No wonder Tony Soprano's crew stood out like broken thumbs on the hands of a mannequin in a window.

Corruption was the constant theme, not only the pimping and the muscle stuff and the gambling, but corruption with the stain of legitimate business upon it. It was realistic, too, in its analysis of politics. Organized crime can't survive without the support of politicians and judges and police officials, in those towns where billions of dollars in public works and development deals are skimmed. We viewers understood all this, if not in our bones, then somewhere in the inarticulate ligaments of our wrists, as we signed our names on tax forms. But millions were also turned off by the show when one of the gangsters had his questionable sexuality challenged by a dimwitted stripper, and he beat her to death in the parking lot of the Bada Bing. A woman at work was visibly shaken by the scene of the stripper's murder and could not believe they could be so cruel. But that's what they are, I told her. That's who they are. They're criminals.

They run suburban abortion clinics and rely on our respect for privacy to shield them. They're shot down in the vestibules of fried chicken restaurants at morning meetings, pawing the glass doors as they fall. And if they're lucky enough to die shriveled with age, as did the ruthless Chicago Outfit hit man Marshall Caifano, then their children fill their coffins with crucifixes asking Jesus to save them.

"The Sopranos" creator David Chase told the truth and created characters that are aped by the wise guys, and the guys who ape wise guys on Rush Street, much as their grandfathers aped the fictional persona of Edward G. Robinson's "Little Caesar," a case of life imitating art.

It was art, as Chase allowed his characters to reveal themselves. "The Godfather" films glamorized the wise guys, and though many Italians know the lines from those films, many -- including my wife who is now hooked on the show -- felt insulted by Tony Soprano, and argued that he glorified crime. But in the end, is Tony glorious? In the episode preceding the finale, he was hiding out in a dump, on a bed without sheets, in his clothes, staring at the ceiling in the dark, cradling a gun, waiting to be betrayed.

I expect he calls on his mother when, and if, he goes. But don't bet on it. Gambling's illegal -- unless it's government-approved.

Thanks to John Kass

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Sopranos Fall Short of Organized Crime's Impact on Cyber Crime

Friends of ours: Soprano Crime Family

The world of Tony Soprano ended Sunday night with the final episode of "The Sopranos." Over seven years, the award-winning HBO TV series offered insight into the business of the modern Mafia, albeit based on a fictional crime family in New Jersey.

We got glimpses of garbage contracts, construction scams, protection rackets, illegal gambling, truck hijacking and credit card fraud. But missing from the list of criminal enterprises was cybercrime. Tony Soprano was a face-to-face communicator, someone who is wary of wiretapping and other forms of electronic surveillance. He wasn't a laptop user, and he didn't appear to cash in on the myriad ways to get rich from Internet-related scams.

Richard Stiennon, chief marketing officer at security firm Fortinet Inc., says this is where "The Sopranos" fell short in its depiction of modern organized crime.

"Here they are beating people up with baseball bats, and a lot of the criminals have moved online," Stiennon said. "The opportunity has been growing with the growth of the Internet. Cybercriminals are looking to expand. They need an organization to exploit those opportunities. It's like organized crime 2.0."

Stiennon has been an expert on security for a while. For work, at PricewaterhouseCoopers, he was a "white hat" hacker. He would break into corporate networks to tell companies where their vulnerabilities were. He succeeded every time, he said.

Now at Fortinet, which supplies security appliances that protect networks, Stiennon has been going around giving talks on how we have to worry about how much money is flowing through the illegal crime networks online.

Of course, a lot of security tech vendors want us to be scared. They'll make more money if we buy enough armor to protect ourselves. "Some like to take the attitude that this is all vendor hype," Stiennon said. "The problem is, there is so little revelation of actual attacks. Companies like to stay out of the news, even when they're attacked."

But others are raising the same alarms about organized crime. Like the Mafia depicted on the show, the nature of cybercrime has evolved over the past seven years from "script kiddies," or young kids who used automated programs to create "cybergraffiti," to organized efforts aimed at stealing a lot of money.

Michelle Dennedy, chief privacy officer at Sun Microsystems Inc., said that in the past couple of years, the FBI and Secret Service have been warning that they're encountering much more organized crime activity in cyberspace. "Stealing identities is the new bank job," Dennedy said. "They go to chat rooms where they trade credit cards, using code words. I don't know if you need to have mob bosses behind it. But it is organized crime."

Christian Desilets, research attorney for the National White Collar Crime Center, said the "Tony Soprano types" may indeed be missing out on electronic crime. But Desilets added, "We do see them in offshore betting, but not as much in electronic crimes. But the electronic criminals are organized. There are very sophisticated operations linked to the Russian Mafia."

In its annual report on organized crime and the Internet last week, McAfee Inc. said that new criminal organizations are emerging to prey on Internet users and that they're becoming more sophisticated and scoring bigger paydays.

One study that McAfee cited said banks lost $2 billion through illegal access to online bank accounts last year. In 2005, the FBI estimated computer crimes cost U.S. corporations $67 billion.

With such stakes, you can bet most organized criminals are involved. The FBI notes that a number of crime syndicates are based in Russia but that many cross borders.

Stiennon contends that organized criminals online now are split up, like vendors in a flea market. Some sell hacking tools for spying on people or stealing identities. Others use those tools to steal credit cards and data, including programs that harvest identities from unsuspecting Internet users.

The FBI periodically shuts down these sites. The criminals put credit cards up for sale. Still others will buy the cards and use them to buy merchandise in electronics stores.

Since organized criminals have traditionally been linked to credit card fraud, expanding into online credit card theft is an easy expansion. Here and there, evidence of organized criminals using technology is emerging.

In 2005, thieves stole $423 million from the London branch of the Sumitomo Mitsui Bank. They did so by posing as janitors, putting "keystroke loggers" that captured keystrokes on computers, thereby stealing passwords from clerks who handled wire transfers.

Authorities traced the crime to a gang in Israel, and Stiennon noted that one person held for the crime was later killed.

In a series of incidents ranging from mid-2005 through January 2007, more than 45 million credit card numbers were stolen from TJX Cos., the owner of the TJ Maxx, Marshalls and other retail chains. Stiennon said many of those card numbers have been used around the world in various kinds of fraud. One ring of criminals used the card numbers to buy more than $8 million in merchandise in Florida.

Other big cases have involved the purchase and sale of controlled drugs via Internet pharmacies or credit card theft.

Extortion, one of the oldest traditional mafia tactics, has moved online as hackers threaten to shut down Web sites unless they're paid off.

Meanwhile, the federal budget aimed at stopping cybercrime doesn't add up to much, Stiennon said. "The sequel to the Sopranos will be cybercrime, with a lot of young kids using computers," Stiennon said. "Tony, assuming he's still alive, will be typing LOL (laugh out loud)."

The cost of cybercrime

2 million: Number of Americans whose online bank accounts were robbed
$2 billion: Total losses for the banking industry from such thefts
$30 million: Credit card company fraud losses from online crime, 30 percent of total fraud losses
15 million: Number of Americans who reported being victims of identity theft in the 12 months ending mid-2006, up 50 percent from 2003
$3,257: Average loss from identity theft in 2006, up 131 percent from 2005

Source: McAfee North American Criminology Report: Organized Crime and the Internet, 2007

Thanks to Dean Takahashi

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Fans Bid Farewell to The Sopranos

Friends of ours: Soprano Crime Family

MILLIONS of fans of the mafia series The Sopranos anxiously awaited the hit drama's final episode on Sunday amid a flurry of speculation over the fate of its top mobster, Tony Soprano.

Viewers were left last week with a final scene of Tony climbing into bed at a hiding house, clinging to a massive assault weapon after his New York rivals gunned down his top captain and sent his consiglieri into a bullet-ridden coma.

With the last of 86 episodes of the award-winning series set to air at 9pm (local time), the media was abuzz with predictions about how the psychotherapy-seeking New Jersey mob boss and his dysfunctional family's saga would end.

"I think he lives," former FBI special agent Joe Pistone, whose life as an undercover infiltrator of the mob was chronicled in the hit movie Donny Brasco, told Fox News television.

Another mob expert, Bill Bonanno, son of the notorious real-life New York mafia kingpin Joseph Bonanno, concurred. "I think he lives because (show creator) David Chase would like to bring him back some time," he said.

Chase reportedly filmed three different endings in order to keep secret the finale of the series which began in 1999 and has aired on the cable channel Home Box Office, or HBO.

Chase said he knew "about three years ago" how the story would end, and that "from the beginning, my goal was always to do a little movie every week," according to the Washington Post. "It has all been planned out, we always knew exactly where it was going, but within that framework, we left a lot of room for each episode to have its own character and to invent stories that would fit in with the continuing story," he said.

However, Chase has ruthlessly upset expectations throughout the long-running mafia yarn, killing off popular characters like mob girlfriend Adriana LaCerva (Drea de Matteo) and letting a Russian foe escape a gunbattle in the snowy woods, never to resurface.

Over the last eight years, mob watchers have come to adore quirky characters like Tony's right-hand man Silvio Dante, played by Steven Van Zandt who in real life strummed guitar alongside rock legend Bruce Springsteen.

Tony's therapist Jennifer Melfi, played by Lorraine Bracco who starred as mobster-turned-rat Henry Hill's wife Karen in the movie Goodfellas, and Tony's blond money-grubbing wife Carmela, portrayed by Edie Falco, are also fan favorites.

Tony is played by James Gandolfini, who has admitted that he is ready to let the character go after years of whacking enemies and friends, having sex with mistresses, lounging in his Bada Bing strip club and trudging down his driveway to fetch his newspaper in his open bathrobe. But however bloody, cruel or treacherous Tony has been over the years, his character is cherished by fans and the twists and turns of his storyline have largely won over the American public.

"I think America has witnessed an erosion in kinship with each other and an erosion of honor," said Bonanno. Regardless of what happens with the characters, "people still see a sense of morality there."

The New York Times described the series, which has won 18 Emmy awards, as "widely proclaimed as the greatest drama ever created for television."

For Pistone, the public just adores the mafia lifestyle, and its sheen will never wear off. "I think people really go for the mob and the movies and the Sopranos show, because the average guy is a working stiff. He comes home he has the same hours every day. He sees the Sopranos, he sees guys that don't go to a 9-5 job."

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