Made to Be Mayor

Friends of ours: Tony Spilotro, Frank Cullotta
Friends of mine: Oscar Goodman

Oscar Goodman once defended some of Chicago's most notorious hoodlums and is now running the city they once ran: Las Vegas.

When federal prosecutors in Chicago put 14 mobsters on trial this summer, an aspect of the case will be how the outfit once controlled criminal rackets in Las Vegas. That prospect has Las Vegas' most prominent politician somewhat skittish because he was part of that past.

In a city of lights and largess, no one shines brighter or bigger these days than Oscar Goodman, the mayor now in his third term. The seat behind his city hall desk isn't just a chair, it's actually a throne. Even the headliners billed out on The Strip haven't played the halls that King Oscar once played before becoming mayor: the halls of justice, where for years as a lawyer, he tried to keep some top Chicago hoodlums out of jail.

The Chicago mob-the outfit, which is the given name for traditional organized crime founded in Chicago almost a century ago, is an organization pioneered by Al Capone and perfected by Anthony "the Ant" Spilotro, the outfit's Las Vegas emissary into the 1980s, frequently shadowed by his lawyer, Oscar Goodman.

"From a government perspective, he killed 26 people 21 people or 19 or whatever, but when I represented him he never did a day in jail. From '72 until the time he was killed ...They created him to be much greater than the role that he was really playing on behalf of Chicago while he was here, but they made him into an everyday news item and caused him to have a reputation perhaps he didn't deserve," Goodman said.

Nor did Tony Spilotro and his brother Michael deserve this, according to Goodman: the men were buried alive in an Indiana cornfield after angry mob bosses ordered them pummeled and planted.

"It was a violent death," said Goodman. "I think it was interesting when they were filming the movie Casinoand depicting the murder of Tony and his brother, it was so rough, that even during the production of a movie, somebody broke their arm. That's how violence it was."

Oscar Goodman knows all about the brutal movie. He played a mob lawyer in the film, and Goodman reveals that, as the Spilotro murders remained unsolved for years, he was never contacted by investigators. "I was always disappointed that nobody asked me any questions about who had done it or what was happening as far as Tony was concerned before it took place," Goodman said.

I-Team: "They didn't ask you a single question?"

Goodman: "No, not a single one. Don't you think they would've asked: Do you have any idea who might have done this?"

Despite smothering the opposition in last April's mayoral election, Goodman is not without critics.

"He's a braggadocio man. He's got an ego as big as it can be, and he's got the right job, because he's got a big mouth and he can promote [Las Vegas]," said Frank Cullotta, ex-mob hitman.

Cullotta was Tony Spilotro's major domo In Las Vegas before rolling over in 1982 to help the government prosecute outfit bosses. Cullotta and two former lawmen are authors of a new book on the Chicago mob and contend that Goodman had little to do with the mob's eventual exodus from Las Vegas.

"The Chicago Outfit is much less potent than it was years ago," said Dennis Griffin, author/former policeman.

"It is interesting that the mayor stopped it. Because before he said there was no organized crime," said Dennis Arnoldy, author/former FBI agent.

"Big corporations cleaned up this town...not Goodman," said Cullotta.

Unlike Mayor Richard M. Daley, who refuses to capitalize on Chicago's rich mob history, Goodman proudly displays outfit trinkets in his office and is turning a historic Las Vegas building into a mob museum.

"To celebrate that era, basically it's going to be telling the truth about Las Vegas. We're not going to implode any decades here...I won't whitewash our history here. We advertise as what happens here stays here, the mystique of Las Vegas. I don't want to give that up," said Goodman.

Goodman says that during the time he was representing mobsters, federal prosecutors tried to have him indicted for obstruction of justice but could never convince a grand jury that he did anything wrong. He has never been charged with anything.

Goodman says he is so well liked that a movement is underway to eliminate term limits in Las Vegas so he can continue to sit on the throne.

Thanks to Chuck Goudie

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Chicago Mobster Pleads Guilty

Friends of ours: Michael Marcello, James Marcello, Sam Carlisi, Nick Calabrese

Mobster Michael Marcello, half-brother of James Marcello, the man prosecutors say is the head of the Chicago Outfit, pleaded guilty today to racketeering and gambling charges on the eve of his trial.

Marcello, 56, admitted he was associated with the "Melrose Park Crew" of the Mob, reporting at various times to Sam Carlisi and James Marcello.

Further, he admitted he ran M&M Amusement, a Cicero vending company that altered amusement video poker games to make them into gambling machines, which they then distributed to bars and restaurants, giving those owners a cut and then collecting the rest of the proceeds.

More importantly, Marcello admitted that he tried to hush up mob turncoat Nick Calabrese, the man primarily responsible for supplying agents with the evidence for the upcoming trial that begins Tuesday with jury selection. Calabrese turned on his brother, Frank Calabrese Sr. of Oak Brook and other mobsters, telling the government of various murders he said he was aware of, including murders he said he committed personally.

Michael Marcello said he relayed $4,000 a month from James Marcello to the family of Nick Calabrese when Nick Calabrese was in prison in an effort to placate Nick Calabrese and keep him from going to the feds.

After prosecutor Mitch Mars described the above acts, U.S. District Judge James B. Zagel asked Marcello, "Is what he said true?"

"Yes, your honor," replied Michael Marcello.

Catherine O'Daniel, who, along with attorney Arthur N. Nasser, represented Michael Marcello said he "is a good man and has accepted responsibility for the conduct in the indictment."

She also denied published reports that Marcello has been having problems while inside the Metropolitan Correctional Center. "He is just eager to put this behind him," said O'Daniel.

Michael Marcello faces 70 to 108 months in prison. Zagel will rule within a week whether he will sentence him soon, as Nasser requested, or wait until the trial is over, as prosecutors have requested.

Thanks to Rob Olmstead

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Tony Soprano's Blackout

Friends of ours: Soprano Crime Family

What rough beast is David Chase riding?

He seems to have understood the mood of his nation better than anyone since Mario Puzo and Francis Coppola forecast the fate of the American empire in The Godfather. And he has world leaders mouthing his dialogue, day and night. Here is Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, the prime minister of Iraq, in The New York Times yesterday: “There are two mentalities in this region,” he said. “Conspiracy and mistrust.”

Baghdada-bing.

The rest of the world was muttering about Tony Soprano’s final blackout, but Mr. Maliki proved once more that David Chase has been battling for something worth fighting for. What do I mean, battled?

Try David Chase himself, as interviewed cathartically and perceptively by the hardest-working man in Sopranos land, Alan Sepinwall, the TV critic for Tony Soprano’s end-of-the-driveway hometown paper, The Star-Ledger: “No one was trying to be audacious, honest to God,” Mr. Chase said. “We did what we thought we had to do.”

He had completed his story, but he was giving us a gift in the last scene: He was telling us more. What happened in the four last minutes was plenty of information, and not of the conspiracy-theory type: We got to see the world as Tony does, suffused with anxiety and some amusement and apprehension. It took David Chase eight years to get Tony in and out of therapy, and he was improved about as much as a patient can be improved, maybe 2 to 5 percent.

“It felt like ginger ale in my skull,” he told Dr. Melfi in the first episode. The Sopranos ended up as it began—not with a bang, but an anxiety attack.

Only this time it was ours. This time we blacked out.

“I was shocked by the ending,” said Peter Bogdanovich, the movie director and film historian who played Dr. Elliot Kupferberg, Tony’s therapist’s therapist. Mr. Bogdanovich said he had shot another scene that didn’t make the final episode, in which he was comforting an exhausted, bereaved Dr. Melfi.

“It ends at that moment because that’s his life,” said Mr. Bogdanovich. “He’s anxious about getting blown away, the F.B.I. is going to indict him, Syl is going to die, everything is insecure and tense. It kept going, and the insert shots kept making you feel it was the last thing he was going to do. Endings, endings, endings. The little things in life are the last thing you are going to do. In fact, that’s his life.

“He didn’t give you what you expected—instead of a Hollywood ending,” Mr. Bogdanovich said, and so the viewer was left with “any number of imaginings, so you ask, ‘What the fuck happened?’”

“David has been consistent by doing everything with a vengeance he was not allowed to do on network television, so he gave you a very ambiguous ending,” he continued. “Which is not what the American audience is used to.”

The entire business history of American television has been a conspiracy toward two ends:

a) the resolved ending, generally happy;

b) destroying ambiguity.

Life and art weren’t supposed to jibe when it came to commercial entertainment. It’s not that David Chase was the first guy to come up with ambiguity and moral relativism on TV, but he may have done it with the most vengeance of any television writer since Rod Serling.

You may have noticed that the guys in the safe house where Tony was hiding were watching an episode of The Twilight Zone. It’s a 1963 episode called “The Bard,” and it was written by Rod Serling, the patron saint of television auteurs. In it, a failed playwright summons William Shakespeare from the dead to write his TV pilot for him. Shakespeare, needless to say, sells it, then is compromised and crushed. On Mr. Chase’s soundtrack, you could hear the agent lecture the writer: “The television industry today … is preoccupied with talent, looking for quality … the television writer is a major commodity.” Television writer … commodity. It is the voice of the network slaughterer.

Now the tabloid writers are mad at him. They wanted the show to splatter. As John Candy and Joe Flaherty used to say on SCTV, they wanted it to blow up real good. Mr. Chase inspired the ire of yahoo nation by bagging and dumping what he wanted to avoid: The dark bedtime-story end of The Sopranos was in great demand, and he provided it—splattt!—under the wheels of the Phil Leotardo’s Ford Expedition.

But he also provided the first really grown-up summation in the history of American television: The subjective shot of Tony experiencing the American influx of diners at Holsten’s restaurant was news, as was his inglorious humanity. The final shot of Tony before the black, if freeze-framed, is a human image more photojournalistic than dramatic. If you have that particular device, take a look at Tony, the woolly mammoth in freeze-frame before the ice age, another human in anxious abatement in the Age of Ambiguity.

“It is the most subversive television series ever because it makes you like the monster,” said Mr. Bogdanovich, who was still mulling the last scene. “You don’t know what you’re waiting for. It’s the perfect use of suspense. You are trapped, not wanting anything to happen, but wanting something to happen. It’s very vicious. You’re left with any number of imaginings. What the fuck happened? Which shows you’re bloodthirsty also.”

We saw the two things that were preoccupying Tony: the one unambivalent relationship of his life, the adoring Meadow, his only true believer—she decided to become a lawyer when she saw her daddy taken away in cuffs!—and the assassins around him.

The Chase Gang gave us all the information we needed in the hour: indictments, threats, business, A.J., Carmela, Janice, it was all wrapped up. I was always certain that someone was going to clue Carmela in on the murder of Ade, but it didn’t happen. When Carmela entered Holsten’s, she entered in long shot, and her friendly, reassuring smile to Tony was casual and loving, but quick. A.J. entered with what looked like a potential assassin, his effective twin. But it was Meadow who received the Hitchcockian treatment of threat: Would she be able to park? Was she about to be locked in by assassins? Would she make it across Broad Street, on which she seemed to be in as much jeopardy as was Janet Leigh in Psycho?

“Anybody who wants to watch it,” Mr. Chase told Mr. Sepinwall in The Star-Ledger, “it’s all there.”

The Sopranos could have made it in the Clinton years, but it could only have become the deeply troubling comedy it was in the Bush era. Not because of the White House so much, but because of the viewer’s complicity in the dirty brew of power that flowed from this White House. Not because of the war, but because of the public sense of responsibility for this war.

“Oh,” says Carmela when she’s trying to talk A.J. out of joining the army, “you want to get your legs blown off?”

“Always with the dramatics,” he says. But not really.

Earlier, at Bobby Bacala’s funeral, A.J., who truly did seem to relax and inhabit his own body once more after his yellow S.U.V. exploded, had a peroration for the commercial landscape the show inhabited: “America,” he said, “is still where people come to make it. It’s a beautiful idea. And then what do they get? Bling and come-ons for shit they don’t need and can’t afford?” Paulie mocked him and descended into a Norm Crosby routine.

But David Chase fought for and won a strange moment of pure insight into the American process. It was romantic, bleary, filthy, piercing. It was as much a comedy of American sobering up after 9/11 as Dallas was a comedy of America getting drunk on the Reagan years. But Mr. Chase fought a battle and won: He created a last shot on television that was one of the best close-ups in movie history, the snapshot of Tony taking in American ambiguity: the Boy Scouts, the killers, the gangstas and the one person toward whom he had little ambiguity. Like the final image of Antoine Doinel in The 400 Blows, he captured all the intimate uncertainty of his age, in a room that could have been heaven or hell, but with good onion rings.

It was, so far, the best last episode in TV history—better than The Mary Tyler Moore Show or All in the Family or Seinfeld, despite all the screaming about it from plotmongers who wouldn’t have been happy with anything short of the conflagration from the end of Scarface or Tony whacking Dr. Elliot Kupferberg before he entered witness protection. Paradox, moral relativism, internality. All the stuff that network television has battled and ejected in the past 60 years—except in a very few instances—is the essence that David Chase brought to his 86 hours. David Chase’s enduring triumph in American television is that he embraced ambiguity and looked for poetry in the Bush administration.

Paulie Walnuts thought he had seen the Virgin Mary, and Tony mocked him; but in fact, Tony had seen the other side of mortality as well, and almost was cajoled by Cousin Tony—a spectral Steve Buscemi—into entering that big, well-lit house in his coma dream, after Junior shot him. But he didn’t, he re-entered the living and went on. That was, he knew somewhere, his task, and it’s why the cozy, dark ordinariness of Holsten’s restaurant in Bloomfield, N.J., was a terrifying but immensely moving way station.

Orson Welles once said that “Every story essentially has an unhappy ending. If you want a happy ending it all depends on where you stop telling it.” David Chase’s triumph was that he had the balls to stop telling it right h

Thanks to Peter W. Kaplan

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Appeals Court Orders Chicago Mob Bosses to Stand Trial

Friends of ours: James Marcello, Frank Calabrese Sr., Tony "The Ant" Spilotro

Two alleged Chicago mob bosses must go to trial this week despite their claims that they already have been convicted of the charges in the indictment, an appeals court said Tuesday.

James Marcello and Frank Calabrese Sr. each were convicted of taking part in racketeering conspiracies more than a decade ago but now are charged with an entirely different conspiracy, Judge Richard Posner of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said in a nine-page majority opinion.

He said the latest conspiracy charges outlined a completely new case even though some of the same criminal acts were part of the indictments when the two reputed mob bosses previously were convicted.

''We have no basis at this early stage for thinking that the government will fail to prove separate conspiracies,'' the appeals court said in the 2-1 ruling. But it said the men could have grounds for appeal if new evidence ''differs only trivially'' from the evidence used to obtain the previous convictions.

Marcello and Calabrese are among a dozen alleged mob bosses and associates set for trial on charges involving 18 long unsolved killings, including that of Tony ''The Ant'' Spilotro, long the Chicago mob's man in Las Vegas. Spilotro was the basis for the Joe Pesci character in the movie ''Casino.'' He was found buried with his brother in an Indiana cornfield.

The trial is expected to last four months and stems from a long-term FBI investigation dubbed Operation Family Secrets. It is considered one of the biggest mob trials in Chicago in a number of years.

Marcello and Calabrese have pleaded not guilty to the charges.

Marcello and eight other men were charged in a 1992 indictment with conspiring to conduct the affairs of the Carlisi street crew by means of numerous illegal acts including extortion, intimidation, arson, murder plots, loan sharking, tampering and gambling between 1979 and 1990. He was convicted in 1993 and sentenced to 12 1/2 years in federal prison.

Calabrese was charged with six others in a 1995 indictment alleging a similar conspiracy involving the Calabrese street crew. He pleaded guilty in 1997 and was sentenced to almost 10 years in federal prison.

The two men noted that there was considerable overlap between the conspiracies in which they previously were convicted and the new one alleged in the Operation Family Secrets indictment involving the Chicago Outfit. Federal prosecutors argued that the Chicago Outfit was a separate criminal enterprise from either the Carlisi or Calabrese street crew.

While Posner and Judge Diane Sykes agreed that the alleged conspiracy was something new, Judge Diane Wood said in a minority opinion she would have removed the overlapping allegations against the two men from the indictment. But she said she would still make them go to trial on the allegations that don't overlap.

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Long Unsolved Murders Focus of Chicago Mob Trial

Friends of ours: Tony Accardo, James Marcello, Frank Calabrese Sr. Joseph "Joey the Clown" Lombardo, Anthony Doyle, Frank "The German" Schweihs, Nicholas Calabrese, Tony "The Ant" Spilotro

It seemed like a good idea at the time. A gang of burglars decided in December 1977 to break into the home of Tony Accardo, one of the most powerful men in organized crime history, and rob his basement vault. Accardo was not amused.

Six men Accardo blamed for the heist were swiftly hunted down and murdered, according to papers filed by federal prosecutors in preparation for Chicago's biggest mob trial in years, scheduled to begin Tuesday. And that's only one of the grisly tales jurors are likely to hear at the trial stemming from the FBI's "Operation Family Secrets" investigation of 18 long-unsolved mob murders allegedly tied the Outfit, Chicago's organized crime family.

"This unprecedented indictment puts a hit on the mob," U.S. Attorney Patrick J. Fitzgerald said in announcing the charges in April 2005. "It is remarkable for both the breadth of the murders charged and for naming the entire Chicago Outfit as a criminal enterprise under the anti-racketeering law."

Reputed top mob bosses head the list of defendants -- James Marcello, Frank Calabrese Sr. and wisecracking Joseph "Joey the Clown" Lombardo. Four co-defendants include a retired Chicago police officer, Anthony Doyle. All have pleaded not guilty.

Another defendant, alleged extortionist Frank "The German" Schweihs, has been tentatively dropped from the trial for health reasons.

Accardo, the notorious mob boss whose home was hit by the burglars, died in 1992 at age 86. He boasted that he never spent a night in jail.

The case has already made the kind of headlines that might seem the stuff of novels and movies. A federal marshal assigned to guard a star witness was charged with leaking information about his whereabouts to organized crime. The marshal has pleaded not guilty. That witness -- Nicholas Calabrese, brother of Frank Calabrese Sr. -- knows four decades of mob history from the inside and really does have a link to the movies. He is expected to testify against his brother.

Nicholas Calabrese pleaded guilty to several counts in May and admitted that he took part in 14 mob murders including that of Tony "The Ant" Spilotro, known as the Chicago Outfit's man in Las Vegas. Spilotro, who inspired the character played by Joe Pesci in the movie "Casino (Widescreen 10th Anniversary Edition)," and his brother were beaten to death and buried in an Indiana cornfield in 1986.

Lombardo, 78, and Schweihs disappeared after the indictment was unsealed in 2005, setting off an intense FBI manhunt.

Crime buffs speculated that Lombardo was hiding out in the hills of Sicily or enjoying a life of ease in the Caribbean. In fact, after nine months on the run, FBI agents nabbed him in a suburban alley one frosty night in January 2006. Schweihs was captured deep in the Kentucky hill country in December 2005.

The Clown lived up to his nickname later when he appeared before U.S. District Judge James B. Zagel, who inquired about the aging man's health and asked why he hadn't seen a doctor lately.

"I was supposed to see him nine months ago, but I was -- what do they call it? -- I was unavailable," Lombardo rasped.

In the 1980s, Lombardo was convicted in the same federal courthouse, along with then-International Brotherhood of Teamsters President Roy Lee Williams, of attempting to bribe Sen. Howard Cannon of Nevada.

When Lombardo got out of prison he took out a newspaper ad denying that he was a "made guy" in the mob and disavowing any role in future organized crime activities. Lombardo defense attorney Rick Halprin scoffs at prosecutors' claims his client is a powerful organized crime leader. "Those things just aren't true," he said.

Experts say the Chicago crime syndicate is so deeply entrenched that it won't be decapitated even if the government gets a clean sweep of convictions.

Gus Russo, who describes the Chicago mob in his book "The Outfit," noted that the federal Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act has helped crime-busting prosecutors make progress against the mob. "But, regretfully, greed is such a part of our culture that you're always going to have a criminal element and it will organize," Russo said. "This will hurt the mob but it won't end it."

The trial is expected to take four months. Among the security precautions, jurors' names are being kept secret and prosecutors say they have nine potential witnesses whose names have been kept secret out of concern for their safety.

Thanks to Mike Robinson

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We Get No Such Thing as An Soprano Ending

Friends of ours: Soprano Crime Family

We get a basket of onion rings, hailed by Tony Soprano as Jersey's best.

We get shifty-eyed diner customers, one of whom (whoa, look out!) just shuffled off into the bathroom.

We get a 25-year-old Journey song on the jukebox.

We get Meadow's abysmal parallel parking effort, reminiscent of a teen's first driver's test, outside the diner.

We hear the diner's front door open, and now our hearts are pounding and we're gripping our chairs waiting for what happens next.

And we got a spooky blank screen.

Did the cable just go out? Come on, who's sitting on the remote?

Nobody's sitting on the remote. The cable didn't go out. The greatest show in television history just stopped.

As it turned out, creator David Chase was just toying with us. He'd sooner subject himself to the kind of fate received by Phil Leotardo earlier in the episode (crunnnnch!) than provide a neat and tidy conclusion to the Sopranos.

Sure, we knew Sunday's much-anticipated finale wasn't going to tie up all loose ends.

Nobody should have expected the crazy Russian who Christopher and Paulie Walnuts chased in the snow a few years ago to turn up again.

We shouldn't have expected to see Tony pay a price for ordering the hit on Ade.

We shouldn't have expected to learn what happened to, say, the nutty Goth son of the late Vito Spatafore.

Fine. But let's cut to the (David) Chase: Does Tony live or die?

Does Meadow find her family dead once she finally manages to park her car? Is she killed herself? Or does she simply walk in, take a seat and enjoy Jersey's finest onion rings with her family?

And what about that psycho cat who kept staring at Christopher's picture earlier in the show? That has to come into play somewhere, doesn't it?

Of course not.

The best we can figure is, Tony will be indicted. (If he lives, that is). But what about Silvio? He's toes-up in a hospital bed. Is he a goner? Or does he make the same sort of miraculous recovery from bullet wounds that Tony did?

I liked the last Sopranos episode, but it left me empty, and because of an interruption, it took an extra long time to discover the resolution, or rather that there was no resolution.

My 5-year-old daughter emerged from her bedroom halfway through the episode, still wired from a long day at Holiday World, unable to sleep. This was just before Phil's head got smashed. Needless to say, the television had to go off and the DVR had to go on. My little girl fell in the arms of my wife, who looked at my distraught facial expression and tried hard to keep from laughing. The end of the Sopranos would have to wait until Caroline was back in bed.

But even then, we were still left waiting for an ending that never came.

Thanks to John Martin

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The Sopranos Don't Stop Believin'

Friends of ours: Soprano Crime Family

The songwriters of Journey's power ballad "Don't Stop Believin"' were "jumping up and down" when they learned a few weeks ago it had been licensed for use in the final episode of "The Sopranos." But even they couldn't believe how it would prove so integral to one of the most memorable final scenes in television history.

"It was better than anything I would have ever hoped for," said Jonathan Cain, Journey keyboard player, who watched at home with his wife and family.

Tony Soprano chose the song after flipping through a jukebox at a New Jersey restaurant where he dined with his family. The song played in the background as ominous characters flitted about and, right as Steve Perry was singing "don't stop," the HBO series did exactly that, for good. The ending infuriated some fans, amused others and intrigued all.

Cain, who wrote the song with Perry and Neal Schon, didn't know how it would be used when they agreed to the licensing. Cain kept the fact that it was going to be in at all a secret, then watched the episode with his family.

"I didn't want to blow it," he told The Associated Press on Monday. "Even my wife didn't know. She looked at me and said, 'You knew that and you didn't tell me?"'

Journey released the song in 1981, and it reached No. 9 on the singles chart. It has taken a life of its own since then, often reflecting the attitude people had toward Journey itself. "Don't Stop Believin"' brings back fond memories for many, is unbearably cheesy for others.

It's easy to imagine Tony Soprano, back in the day, taking a young Carmela to a Journey concert.

David Chase, creator of "The Sopranos," has an eclectic musical taste. He's curated two songtrack albums for his series, and made music a key part of the stories, particularly as the ending credits rolled. It's possible "Don't Stop Believin' " was part of the elaborate inside joke he made of the final episode.

It's also possible he found the end of the last verse too hard to resist: "Some will win, some will lose," Perry sings. "Some were born to sing the blues. Oh, the movie never ends. It goes on and on and on and on ... "

"Don't Stop Believin' " has been featured in a several television and movie scenes. It crept onto an iTunes top-10 list when, during the same week, it was on Fox's "Family Guy" and in a romantic scene on MTV's "Laguna Beach."

Sports teams have adopted it, too. After the Chicago White Sox used it in 2005, Perry sang it at the parade to celebrate the team's World Series victory.

Cain, who has a 13-year-old and twins aged 11, said the songwriters are careful about how they license the song, and have resisted several advertising campaigns. They debated its use in the film "Monster" with Charlize Theron but, in the end, "she's too cute to say no to," he said.

He was a little nervous Sunday when, as he watched with his children, the mob boss Phil was shot and viewers heard his head crunched as it was run over by an SUV. But he loved the final scene.

"It was very smart writing," he said. "I always love movies where you don't see the guy whacked. You wonder whether he's going to get whacked."

It could help Journey's visibility, too, as it did for singer Nick Lowe when his song "The Beast in Me" was used over the closing credits for "The Sopranos" very first episode. There had been some speculation that Chase would return to it for the finale.

"A lot more people knew Johnny Cash's version (of 'The Beast in Me') and this put Nick's version on the map," said Jake Guralnick, Lowe's American manager. "Nick's version is a lot more vulnerable."

Cain said it indicated that a wish he and Perry had -- that their songs would have a long life -- was coming true.

"It puts our feet in the cement," he said. "We're a staple in the American music culture. Like us or not, we're here to stay."

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David Chase Speaks on The Sopranos Finale

Friends of ours: Soprano Crime Family

What do you do when your TV world ends? You go to dinner, then keep quiet. Sunday night, "Sopranos" creator David Chase took his wife out for dinner in France, where he's fled to avoid "all the Monday morning quarterbacking" about the show's finale. After this exclusive interview, agreed to well before the season began, he intends to go into radio silence, letting the work -- especially the controversial final scene -- speak for itself.

"I have no interest in explaining, defending, reinterpreting, or adding to what is there," he says of the final scene.

"No one was trying to be audacious, honest to God," he adds. "We did what we thought we had to do. No one was trying to blow people's minds, or thinking, 'Wow, this'll (tick) them off.' People get the impression that you're trying to (mess) with them and it's not true. You're trying to entertain them."

In that scene, mob boss Tony Soprano waited at a Bloomfield ice cream parlor for his family to arrive, one by one. What was a seemingly benign family outing was shot and cut as the preamble to a tragedy, with Tony suspiciously eyeing one patron after another, the camera dwelling a little too long on Meadow's parallel parking and a man in a Members Only jacket's walk to the men's room. Just as the tension had been ratched up to unbearable levels, the series cut to black in mid-scene (and mid song) with no resolution.

"Anybody who wants to watch it, it's all there," says Chase, 61, who based the series in general (and Tony's relationship with mother Livia specifically) on his North Caldwell childhood.

Some fans have already assumed that the ambiguous ending was Chase setting up the oft-rumored "Sopranos" movie, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards. "I don't think about (a movie) much," he says. "I never say never. An idea could pop into my head where I would go, 'Wow, that would make a great movie,' but I doubt it.

"I'm not being coy," he adds. "If something appeared that really made a good 'Sopranos' movie and you could invest in it and everybody else wanted to do it, I would do it. But I think we've kind of said it and done it."

Another problem: over the last season, Chase killed so many key characters. He's toyed with the idea of "going back to a day in 2006 that you didn't see, but then (Tony's children) would be older than they were then and you would know that Tony doesn't get killed. It's got problems."

(Earlier in the interview, he notes that his favorite part of the show was often the characters telling stories about the good ol' days of Tony's parents. Just a guess, but if Chase ever does a movie spin-off, it'll be set in Newark in the '60s.)

Since Chase is declining to offer his interpretation of the final scene, let me present two more of my own, which came to me with a good night's sleep and a lot of helpful reader e-mails:

Theory No. 1 (and the one I prefer): Chase is using the final scene to place the viewer into Tony's mindset. This is how he sees the world: every open door, every person walking past him could be coming to kill him, or arrest him, or otherwise harm him or his family. This is his life, even though the paranoia's rarely justified. We end without knowing what Tony's looking at because he never knows what's coming next.

Theory No. 2: In the scene on the boat in "Soprano Home Movies," repeated again last week, Bobby Bacala suggests that when you get killed, you don't see it coming. Certainly, our man in the Members Only jacket could have gone to the men's room to prepare for killing Tony (shades of the first "Godfather"), and the picture and sound cut out because Tony's life just did. (Or because we, as viewers, got whacked from our life with the show.)

Meanwhile, remember that 21-month hiatus between Seasons Five and Six? That was Chase thinking up the ending. HBO chairman Chris Albrecht came to him after Season Five and suggested thinking up a conclusion to the series; Chase agreed, on the condition that he get "a long break" to decide on an ending.

Originally, that ending was supposed to occur last year, but midway through production, the number of episodes was increased, and Chase stretched out certain plot elements while saving the major climaxes for this final batch of 9. "If this had been one season, the Vito storyline would not have been so important," he says.

Much of this final season has featured Tony bullying, killing or otherwise alienating the members of his inner circle. After all those years viewing him as "the sympathetic mob boss," were we supposed to, like his therapist Dr. Melfi, finally wake up and smell the sociopath?

"From my perspective, there's nothing different about Tony in this season than there ever was," insists Chase. "To me, that's Tony."

Chase has had an ambivalent relationship with his fans, particularly the bloodthirsty whacking crowd who seemed to tune in only for the chance to see someone's head get blown off (or run over by an SUV). So was he reluctant to fill last week's penultimate episode, "The Blue Comet," with so many vivid death scenes?

"I'm the Number One fan of gangster movies," he says. "Martin Scorsese has no greater devotee than me. Like everyone else, I get off partly on the betrayals, the retributions, the swift justice. But what you come to realize when you do a series is you could be killing straw men all day long. Those murders only have any meaning when you've invested story in them. Otherwise, you might as well watch 'Cleaver.'"

One detail about the final scene that he'll discuss, however tentatively: the selection of Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" as the song on the jukebox. "It didn't take much time at all to pick it, but there was a lot of conversation after the fact. I did something I'd never done before: in the location van, with the crew, I was saying, 'What do you think?' When I said, 'Don't Stop Believin',' people went, 'What? Oh my god!' I said, 'I know, I know, just give a listen,' and little by little, people started coming around."

Whether viewers will have a similar time-delayed reaction to the finale as a whole, Chase doesn't know. ("I hear some people were very angry, and others were not, which is what I expected.") He's relaxing in France, then he'll try to make movies. "It's been the greatest career experience of my life," he says. "There's nothing more in TV that I could say or would want to say."

Here's Chase on some other points about the finale and the season:

-After all the speculation that Agent Harris might turn Tony, instead we saw that Harris had turned, passing along info on Phil's whereabouts and cheering, "We're going to win this thing!" when learning of Phil's demise.

"This is based on an actual case of an FBI agent who got a little bit too partisan and excited during the Colombo wars of the '70s," says Chase of the story of Lindley DeVecchio, who supplied Harris' line.

-Speaking of Harris, Chase had no problem with never revealing what -- if anything -- terror suspects Muhammed and Ahmed were up to.

"This, to me, feels very real," he says. "The majority of these suspects, it's very hard for anybody to know what these people are doing. I don't even think Harris might know where they are. That was sort of the point of it: who knows if they are terrorists or if they're innocent pistachio salesmen? That's the fear that we are living with now."

Also, the apocryphal story -- repeated by me, unfortunately -- that Fox, when "Sopranos" was in development there, wanted Chase to have Tony help the FBI catch terrorists, wasn't true.

"What I said was, if I had done it at Fox, Tony would have been a gangster by day and helping the FBI by night, but we weren't there long enough for anyone to make that suggestion."

-I spent the last couple of weeks wrapping my brain around a theory supplied by reader Sam Lorber (and his daughter Emily) that the nine episodes of this season were each supposed to represent one of the nine circles of Hell from Dante's "The Divine Comedy." Told of the theory, Chase laughed and said, "No."

-Since Butchie was introduced as a guy who was pushing Phil to take out Tony, why did he turn on Phil and negotiate peace with Tony? "I think Butch was an intelligent guy, he began to see that there was no need for it, that Phil's feelings were all caught up in what was esentially a convoluted personal grudge."

-Not from Chase, but I feel the need to debunk the e-mail that's making the rounds about all the Holsten's patrons being characters from earlier in the series. The actor playing Member's Only guy had never been on the show before, Tony killed at least, one if not both of his carjackers, and there are about 17 other things wrong with this popular but incorrect theory.

Thanks to Alan Sepinwall

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Cast of The Sopranos Cheer Final Episode

Friends of ours: Soprano Crime Family

Hey, you got a problem with how "The Sopranos" wound up? Take it up with Christopher, if you dare.

"I think it's a great ending. It's a good way to go out," said Michael Imperioli, who played Tony's nephew, until he got whacked this season.

Imperioli and fellow cast members told reporters they were pleased with the finale as they walked the red carpet at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino on Sunday. "We're all heartbroken. We could go on forever. Me and Edie Falco wanna die on the set," Tony Sirico said, sporting his character Paulie's trademark silver wings.

The characteristically shy James Gandolfini, who played New Jersey mob boss Tony, was mum on his thoughts on the ending. He sported a beard and sunglasses and was sweating in the muggy South Florida weather as he smiled and waved to the large crowd of fans that gathered for his send-off.

Lorraine Bracco's character, Dr. Jennifer Melfi, didn't appear in the series finale. Melfi abruptly terminated Tony's therapy in last week's episode. "She ended a strong confident woman and I loved that," Bracco said at the cast party.

Steven Van Zandt, who played Tony's consigliere Sil, said cryptically of the finale, "We're not sure it's ending."

Series creator David Chase's dangling ending seems primed for the big screen. Although there's been no serious talk of making a film, "a couple of years from now, who knows?" Van Zandt said.

Arthur Nascarella, who played Carlo on the show, also didn't rule out the possibility of a future for the show. "Wait three years and get back to me," Nascarella said.

Thanks to Kelli Kennedy

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Top Ten Surprises in 'The Sopranos' Series Finale

10. Paula Abdul shows up as celebrity judge, thinks the Sopranos are singers

9. Bada Bing strip club changes into bingo parlor named "Bada Bingo!"

8. Pauly Walnuts reveals hair coloring routine after signing exclusive contract with Just For Men

7. Tony comes out of the shower to find it was all a dream and he's actually just a fat guy from New Jersey

6. Dr. Melfi reveals she's actually a podiatrist

5. Bob Barker neuters Tony

4. Tony seated next to Tuberculosis Guy on flight to witness protection program

3. Ugly turf war with The Altos and The Baritones

2. Rosie O'Donnell makes guest appearance as Tony's long lost twin brother

1. Tony's psychiatrist says he can't go to prison because of "medical condition"

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The Day Mobsters Killed a Father

Friends of ours: Joseph "Joey the Clown" Lombardo

Joseph Seifert's only memory of his father, Daniel, is the day the mobsters killed him.

It happened Sept. 27, 1974. Joseph Seifert was 4 years old.

The little boy had been excited that morning. He didn't like pre-school and was feeling under the weather, so his mother decided they would spend the day at his father's fiberglass factory in Bensenville. Joey Seifert brought his Matchbox cars and toy garage.

When the family arrived at the factory, not far from their home, the little boy and his mother entered first. Coming behind was Daniel Seifert with a vacuum cleaner he had picked up from the car's trunk.

In the minutes that followed, masked killers gunned down Seifert. The murder ripped apart a young family, leaving its surviving members grappling with anger and loss to this day. "It follows you forever. That's what people should understand," said Nick Seifert, the oldest of Daniel Seifert's three children. "We've never gotten over this," he said. "Father's Day, we think about it. Mother's Day, we think about it. His birthday comes around, we think about it. The 27th comes around, we think about it. When our kids have birthdays, we think about it."

What's more, the man allegedly behind the slaying was once of Daniel Seifert's closest friends -- mobster Joseph "Joey the Clown" Lombardo, according to federal prosecutors.

Lombardo had baby-sat Seifert's children. Lombardo was the godfather to Joseph Seifert. In fact, the little boy had been named after him, according to the Seifert family. "It's never bothered me," Joseph Seifert said. "I think I've done the name more justice than [Lombardo] has."

Nick Seifert -- who was in school at the time of the shooting -- can recall Lombardo and his girlfriend taking him to Ringling Bros. Circus, to restaurants for dinner and to a White Sox game. But Daniel Seifert, his father, was cooperating in a federal criminal case against Lombardo and other mobsters, and Outfit leaders decided he had to go, authorities say.

Joseph and Nick Seifert, who share the same father but have different mothers, spoke for the first time at length in an interview with the Chicago Sun-Times about their father's murder. They want to strip away any glamor of Outfit life and tell people of the devastating impact the murder had on their family. Their comments come on the eve of the Family Secrets trial -- likely to be the last major Outfit case in Chicago history, starting June 19. Top mobsters have been charged in connection with 18 unsolved Outfit hits, including Seifert's slaying.

Joseph Seifert, now 37, remembers masked men struggling with his father in the factory the day of his death. He remembers seeing blood. He remembers being shoved with his mother into a factory bathroom.

He recalls being whisked from the factory in a car and looking out the window as the car pulled away. "I remember seeing my dad lying in the grass," Joseph Seifert said.

Joseph Seifert doesn't remember seeing his father shot, although Daniel Seifert suffered gunshot wounds. The gunmen chased him, bleeding, through his factory and into a neighboring one. He made it outside, gravely wounded. There, Daniel Seifert fell to the ground, and a gunman delivered the final shot at point-blank range to his head.

Joseph Seifert, now a father himself, still marvels to this day how his mother stayed composed and protected him.

Lombardo contends he had nothing to do with the murder. His attorney, Rick Halprin, said Lombardo has a rock-solid alibi. At the time, he was reporting a stolen wallet to police. Halprin said investigators have the same evidence today they did in 1974.

Daniel Seifert, who was 29 when he died, was a tough guy and no angel, his sons acknowledge. While he may once have been involved in Chicago mob life at the periphery, they said, by the time he had set up his business in Bensenville he was doing his best to get away from mobsters. He was cooperating with the feds, but not out of fear.

"He was not afraid. Lombardo didn't scare him. That was the reason for his demise. They threatened him, tried to intimidate him, and they only had one option left," Nick Seifert said.

When Daniel Seifert died, the feds lost their star witness against Lombardo, and the case was dropped against him. The day after the murder, Lombardo was smacking golf balls on a driving range. He allegedly said: "That S.O.B. won't testify against anybody now, will he?" according to an account provided to the government by an informant.

After Daniel Seifert's murder, the family rarely talked about it. Since all the killers were masked, they didn't know who was involved. The family tried to ignore all of it, hoping the pain, anger and confusion would go away. It only grew. Their mother was left with hardly any money and had to find a full-time job while raising three children on her own.

Over time, the bad feelings built and created problems for the children, the Seiferts said. The thirst for information sparked an obsession in Nick Seifert to find out what happened and why. Since no one had been charged, the killers were getting away with murder, he felt. Law enforcement wasn't sharing theories with the family.

Now, at trial, for the first time, the Seifert family hopes to get the most complete picture of what happened to Daniel Seifert that morning -- of who was involved and why.

"It created a monster inside us," Joseph Seifert said. "We're looking for closure."

Thanks to Steve Warmbir

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"Joey the Clown" is no Al Capone Says Defense Attorney

Friends of ours: Al Capone, Joseph "Joey the Clown" Lombardo

Joey "the Clown" Lombardo's attorney, Rick Halprin, says the upcoming Family Secrets mob trial is about "Al Capone and his successors."

"One of them is not Joey Lombardo," Halprin said, adding, "If you look at the two convictions in detail from his cases, they support that."

Lombardo was convicted in the 1980s for scheming to bribe U.S. Sen. Howard Cannon and for working to bring the skim of millions of dollars from Las Vegas casinos to Outfit bosses, one of their most lucrative deals.

Lombardo is offering a most unique defense -- the so-called withdrawal defense -- that he is no longer part of any conspiracy.

It's a difficult defense to present but it's also causing concern among the federal prosecutors handling the Family Secrets case, according to sources familiar with the matter.

When he was released from prison in the early 1990s, Lombardo took out a newspaper ad, saying he was not part of the mob and asking anyone who saw him meeting with gangsters to report him to his parole officer.

Thanks to Steve Warmbir

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Tony Soprano: Our Favorite Murderer

I'm bummed for a lot of reasons about the end of "The Sopranos." I'll miss Tony's invincible life force, and the shambling way he pulls late-night snacks out of the refrigerator. I'll miss Carm's shrewd emotional casuistry, and Meadow's fight to make a clean life, and Artie's weird unkillable marriage, and Paulie's utter lack of self-insight, and Dr. Melfi's half-sexy, half-unnerving voice. I'll miss the Bada Bing and Satriale's and that great opening sequence, the drive through stratified class layers until we arrive at Tony's vulgar McMansion. I'll even miss poor little lost A.J., who, God help him, not only tried to commit suicide, but discovered the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But mostly, I'll miss the show's absolute and perverse amorality. In the age of Bush, how am I going to survive without my weekly double shot of ethical ambiguity?

The genius of "The Sopranos" has always been that it presents two apparently contradictory realities simultaneously, like one of those illustrations that looks alternatively like a vase or a picture of Abraham Lincoln. Its shtick is that it is a show about an American family just like ours -- who are also a bunch of coldblooded murderers whom according to even the laxest moral standards we should loathe. And the king of these monsters is, of course, our dear old Tony.

And he is our dear old Tony. We try to loathe him, but we can't make it stick. Not for very long, and not really at all. We identify with him too much. We feel for him. In a weird but undeniable way, we actually love him. Because even after he murders his relatives, or whacks some terrified kid who's pissing in his pants, a few minutes later he bobs back up, the original and literal whack-a-mole, the same old crinkly-eyed Tony. Tony is just Tony, as real as you or me -- and a hell of a lot more real than just about any other character on TV. We know him too well not to love him, this careworn family man damaged by his cruel mom, this dad trying to raise his kids and keep his marriage going, this hardworking guy who just happens to have this unusual job that involves killing people. He's our favorite murderer.

This puts us in a deliciously uncomfortable position. Loving Tony, like loving Hitler or Osama bin Laden, is not something we're supposed to do. In one episode, Tony callously murders his nephew Christopher -- then in the next reveals his most wounded, deeply sympathetic side, wrapping his arms around his suicidal son while groaning, "My baby, my baby." Neither of these is the "real" Tony, for there is no "real" Tony -- there are a multiplicity of Tonys, and at every moment he is free to choose. "The Sopranos" is existentialist TV: To paraphrase the legendary French capo Jean-Paul Sartre, Tony's existence precedes his essence.

"The Sopranos" is built not just on moral ambiguity, but moral obscenity. It achieves this by graphically depicting the most brutal events, while suspending all judgment about them. This holds true for the good guys and bad guys alike. Actually, there are no good guys. FBI agents are icy zombies. Priests are corrupt and confused. Psychiatrists are backstabbing pedants, trotting out neat phrases like "sociopath" that illuminate nothing. Married men are only as faithful as their options. Married women are manipulative and self-serving. Human behavior of any kind, from adultery to blackmail to murder, has no transcendental meaning. If Tony Soprano can strangle somebody and then return to checking out a college campus, it doesn't mean he's a madman. It's what he does.

"The Sopranos" wasn't the first mass entertainment to challenge the unwritten (and sometimes written) moral codes laid down by our national entertainment nannies. Film noir flirted with reversals of moral and narrative expectation. The '70s saw a wave of revisionist westerns and war movies. And many TV shows have pushed the envelope. But David Chase's creation represents the most decisive break ever with pop culture's punish-evil, reward-good rules.

Tony may die Sunday night, but if he does, his death will not represent "payment" for his sins. Whether he lived or died was just a matter of fate. Even Francis Ford Coppola's "The Godfather," which brilliantly subverted traditional moral judgments -- and was attacked for glorifying criminal violence -- was not as nihilistic as "The Sopranos." The film's famous final shot, in which Michael Corleone, now completely and irrevocably alone, broods bitterly as his command to kill his older brother is carried out, implied some kind of cosmic justice: As ye sow, so shall we reap. In the universe of "The Sopranos," Michael would have brooded for a few minutes, then called up his goomah, done a few lines and partied. And then gotten depressed again a few weeks later. And then gone out to eat.

The sheer duration of "The Sopranos" helps to explain its oceanic approach to narrative and morality. Since the writers are not confined to a two-hour story, they aren't under pressure to make their stories mean anything. And the fact that most of the main characters have had a fictional life -- the entire show is 80 hours long! -- pushes the form toward the picaresque. There are dozens of little climaxes but no big plot hinge. This deepens the show's contingent, arbitrary, lost-at-sea feeling. Like the beautifully realized characters in John Dos Passos' great, insufficiently appreciated "USA" trilogy -- an achievement that led Sartre to call Dos Passos "the greatest writer of our time" -- the characters in "The Sopranos" wander aimlessly about, bump into obstacles, and eventually fall down.

For me, and obviously for many viewers, the amorality of "The Sopranos" is a consummation devoutly to be wished for. Growing up, I hated the bogus quasi-official morality promulgated by popular entertainment -- in movies, but especially in TV shows. I couldn't stand the fact that the Good Guys always won and the Bad Guys always lost. I groaned at the two-bit narrative semiotics employed by Hollywood hacks on shows like "Dragnet" -- the "maniacal" laughter of a villain, a hero's "noble" profile, all accompanied by message music piped in by some dreadful cosmic DJ.

In "The Story of the Bad Little Boy," Mark Twain viciously sends up the Sunday school tales he was forced to read as a child. "Once there was a bad little boy whose name was Jim -- though, if you will notice, you will find that bad little boys are nearly always called James in your Sunday-school books," Twain begins. "It was strange, but still it was true that this one was called Jim." Jim, Twain tells us, didn't have a sick mother, "who was pious and had the consumption, and would be glad to lie down in the grave and be at rest but for the strong love she bore her boy." No, his mother was "rather stout than otherwise, and she was not pious; moreover, she was not anxious on Jim's account. She said if he were to break his neck it wouldn't be much loss." Twain then goes on to relate how Jim did all kinds of horrible things, but instead of being caught and punished, he blamed them on other people and laughed coarsely. Finally, "he grew up and married, and raised a large family, and brained them all with an axe one night, and got wealthy by all manner of cheating and rascality; and now he is the infernalest wickedest scoundrel in his native village, and is universally respected, and belongs to the Legislature. "

Give or take a detail or two, this is the Tony Soprano story. But of course there's more going on with "The Sopranos" than just a satisfying reversal of bogus moral strictures. Its goal is not just to tear down pious, mom 'n' apple pie subjects like the family, but to use that destruction to wake us up to the quiet violence and repressed mayhem that haunt our own oh-so-respectable lives. The existence of Tony Soprano, whose combination of lovableness and explosive violence makes him an utterly familiar enigma, makes our own lives stranger and scarier and bigger.

And this is one reason why the corrosive moral ambiguity of "The Sopranos" speaks to us. Like Tony Soprano at the start of the series, America is a little stressed these days, a little anxious. On the surface, everything is fine. Under our devoutly Christian leader, we are all highly moral. We have right and God on our side as we fight the evildoers. Except that, well, we've been feeling kind of weird. And, to tell the truth, we have a few skeletons in our closet.

Somebody whacked some of our crew, and we were scared, so we whacked Iraq. Just like Tony ordered the hit on Adriana. Steps were taken, as Sil would say. Except it turned out there were some unexpected consequences. We basically killed an entire country, and a whole lot of Americans, and people are dying all the time. And what are we doing? Nothing. We're going to the Bada Bing. We're having dinner at Artie's. Same old same old. Everything's fine. It's just fine.

Except that it's wearing us down, having this strange war that no one thinks about, and this president who keeps preaching about good and evil and how we're the greatest country in the world and why we have to keep fighting this "war on terror" that no one understands. And it's hard to say anything back to him because he's really prickly and self-righteous. It's kind of like having a really mean, manipulative mom -- the kind who says, "Take the knife out of the ham and stab me here!"

We're trying to act like nothing's wrong but all this stuff is working on our minds. Nothing they tell us about right and wrong seems to make sense anymore. It's all self-contradictory. They told us all terrorism is evil, but it seems like some terrorist acts are more evil than others. Like this Turkey deal. Some Kurdish separatists just set off a bomb outside a shopping center in Turkey's capitol, Ankara, killing six innocent people. The Turks want to cross the border into Iraq and wipe out the terrorists. But we don't want them to, even though we cited a terror attack against us as justification for invading a country that didn't even have anything to do with the attack. What's up with that? They tell us lying is wrong. But after Lewis Libby was convicted of lying to federal investigators, the same people who were screaming the loudest about America's moral decline and the need to embrace transcendent values are now raging that it didn't matter because no crime was ever discovered. What's that about? It's all confusing, and the pressure is building up, and we're starting to get these anxiety attacks. And there's no Dr. Melfi in sight.

Art serves a cathartic function by exposing the unspoken, the repressed, the taboo. In this case, the taboo is our moral code -- a rigid, black-and-white, self-righteous insistence that what we are doing must be right and no one must question it. In Bush's America, this code has become singularly oppressive. But it predates Bush. It's the way we simplify the world, the story we tell ourselves to make sense out of life's senselessness.

Among its many other achievements, "The Sopranos" has allowed us to mock that frozen certainty. For seven years, it has been a saturnalia of ethical meaninglessness. It has given us a precious breather from sanctimony, a holiday from the tyranny of right and wrong. It has thrown us into the big, blue, endless sea and let us swim. It's scary being out in the middle of the ocean, no horizon in sight. But it's liberating.

And now that "The Sopranos" is over, we'll have to find other seas to swim in, other stories to reflect our lives. Stories that are bigger and darker and truer than the ones they've been telling us, and the ones that we tell ourselves.

Thanks to Gary Kamiya

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Pizza Man Soprano Mystery Man

Friends of ours: Soprano Crime Family

After eight years and 86 episodes, the ultimate fate of fictional New Jersey crime boss Tony Soprano might be determined by a pizza shop owner from Penndel.

Paolo Colandrea, owner of Paul's Penndel Pizza, last month filmed a potentially pivotal scene for the final episode of “The Sopranos,” the groundbreaking HBO mob drama that says goodbye at 9 Sunday night.

Colandrea, 47, describes his role as simply “mystery man,” a guy who walks into a diner and locks eyes ominously with Tony, who's sitting at a table with wife, Carmela, and son, A.J. Colandrea sits down at the counter, stares at Tony again, gets up to go the bathroom, and ...

He can't say what happens next. But even if he could, it might not mean a thing.

“Sopranos” creator David Chase reportedly filmed three different endings to ensure secrecy. Colandrea, who spent 18 hours on the set one day and 10 hours two weeks later, doesn't even know if his scene will appear.

“I don't know. Nobody knows,” the charming Italian said while sitting in the restaurant he's owned since emigrating from Naples in 1978. “They keep it so closed, not even the cast knows all that's going to happen. I can assume, but I don't know.”

Colandrea, who doesn't have any lines, filmed his scene at Holsten's Diner in Bloomfield, N.J. Off camera, he said he mingled with series stars James Gandolfini (Tony) and Edie Falco (Carmela) and met Robert Iler (A.J.) and Chase. During his first day of filming, he shared a sushi dinner with Gandolfini, Falco and the crew.

“He's such a nice guy, just an unbelievable person,” Colandrea says of Gandolfini. “And Edie Falco, she's the sweetest woman you ever want to meet.”

Colandrea, who earned more than $3,000 (before taxes) for his role, also saw Jamie-Lynn Sigler (Meadow) on the set but didn't talk to her. “She's so gorgeous,” he said. “She has bodyguards with her, but I don't blame her.”

So how does a pizza shop owner with no previous acting experience land a role on the final episode of the most acclaimed program in cable television history? Right place, right face, really.

Earlier this spring, Eileen DeNobile, owner of the Lawrenceville, N.J.-based Noble Talent Management, was looking for an Italian man, about 6 feet tall, between the ages of 30 and 50, for a part on “The Sopranos.” She stopped into Penndel Pizza for dinner one evening, saw the framed photo of Colandrea pouring a glass of wine and thought she might have found her man.

“That's authentic Italian all the way,” said DeNobile, who already knew Colandrea casually. “He certainly looks the part. Plus, we were looking for a person easy to work with, and he's got a great personality, very bubbly.”

DeNobile sent the photo and a recommendation to HBO, and Colandrea was invited to audition in New York City, along with 29 others. The audition consisted of performing the actual role as it appeared in the script. A few days later, Chase called Colandrea and asked him to come to North Jersey for a costume fitting. The part was his.

“It's unbelievable,” said Colandrea, a fan of the show since its debut in 1999. “For an Italian, it's the experience of a lifetime to be on "The Sopranos.' ”

Colandrea, a single father of two daughters, said he plans to watch Sunday's episode with about 100 friends and family members at a cousin's house in Ewing. (“I have to cook for all of them,” he said, smiling.)

Meanwhile, he said, “half of Italy” is waiting to hear what happens Sunday night. And if his scene ends up on the cutting-room floor?

“Everyone knows there's nothing I can do, that it's out of my power,” Colandrea said. “But I'm thinking, "Why make me go up again after two weeks if they're not going to use me?' I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

Thanks to Andy Vineberg

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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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The Ruthless Rise of Mobster Joey "The Clown" Lombardo

To neighbors, Joseph Lombardo was a beloved family man and respected boys baseball coach in his West Side neighborhood -- "more liked than the priest" in the community, according to one friend.

To the feds, Lombardo is the man who had a factory owner slain in front of the man's wife and 4-year-old son.

To investigators, he's the man who knows no loyalty, signing off on the murders of three close friends.

When he appears in federal court these days, for updates on the trial starting June 19 that could put him in prison until his dying days, he's the wisecracking senior citizen. At 78, he's the oldest of a mostly geriatric bunch of mobsters in what likely will be the last great Outfit trial in Chicago history -- the Family Secrets case.

He's "the Clown," known for his quick wit. When the cops stopped him once in the 1980s, after he fled a gambling raid, he had $12,000 in cash on him and a book filled with jokes. But the wisecracks, investigators say, only mask the brutality of one of the last of the old-time Chicago mobsters.

Interviews with people who have known and investigated Lombardo, as well as a review of thousands of pages of court records and law enforcement documents, reveal the story of the ruthless rise of Lombardo in the Chicago Outfit.

"He was vicious and a killer," said retired FBI Agent Jack O'Rourke. "He was their prime enforcer."

Lombardo has denied hurting anyone. Now behind bars at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Chicago, he declined an interview request.

In court in 1983, Lombardo said: "I never ordered a killing, I never OKd a killing, and I never killed a man in my life."

His attorney, Rick Halprin, says his client has never been a mob leader. But investigators say Lombardo was a top mobster for years, thanks to his criminal versatility.

He allegedly went from busting heads and two-bit burglaries to orchestrating a bribe attempt of U.S. Sen. Howard Cannon. He was convicted in that case in the 1980s, as well as another one for skimming millions from Las Vegas casinos for the mob. He allegedly controlled millions of dollars in Teamster pension funds through his friend, insurance magnate Allen Dorfman, and was responsible for getting the skim from Las Vegas casinos to Chicago mob bosses.

As a child, Lombardo never knew such wealth, growing up poor in Depression-era Chicago, one of 11 children, the son of a printer. A graduate of Wells High School, he worked as a paperboy, plucked chickens, shined shoes, loaded boxcars at Union Station for 69 cents an hour and handled room service at the Blackstone Hotel.

He was also quite the athlete, playing on wrestling, basketball, fencing and swimming teams and even taking square-dancing lessons. He found a passion for golf and caddied for top Chicago gangster Jackie Cerone. He was also quite the gin rummy cardshark. But he didn't have to rely on cards for cash. His criminal work was apparently quite profitable, authorities said. In recent years, while Lombardo pleads poverty, his family trust benefitting his ex-wife, son and daughter has sold real estate for millions. Authorities believe the trust was set up to keep the feds from seizing assets.

Lombardo's success was punctuated by violence. He has been a suspect in numerous murders but never convicted. What's more, authorities say, he had control over the most allegedly vicious hit man around, Frank "The German" Schweihs. Schweihs is charged in the Family Secrets case with Lombardo. Schweihs would talk about doing an Outfit killing like he was taking out the garbage, court records show.

Even before Lombardo was a somebody in the Chicago Outfit, he was "the Clown."

It was 1964, and Lombardo was on trial in Chicago with other alleged loan sharks for beating a man who owed the mob money. The case was making headlines, and so was Lombardo. When police took his mug shot, he opened his mouth into a cavernous yawn to stop the cops from getting a good photo of him.

Even then, Lombardo -- then going by a variation of his birth name, Joseph Lombardi -- was referred to in the press as the Clown.

The other notable twist: Lombardo was innocent of the charge. But he was part of a clever plot to scotch the case, authorities said. When police rounded up the loan sharks, they arrested the wrong Joseph Lombardi. At the time, two Chicago gangsters had that name and looked similar. Defense attorneys for the men realized the error but kept silent to spring a trap on prosecutors, authorities said. It worked. When the victim took the stand, he could identify all the defendants as his attackers, all except the Clown.

"Talk about having your jaw drop and your case collapse," said attorney Louis B. Garippo, who prosecuted the case. Lombardo walked out a free man. His fellow mobsters walked too, after a jury acquitted them.

Lombardo's antics would be only his first of many public displays.

After he was arrested in 1980 for leading police on a chase, he left the courthouse one day, past the press corps, hidden behind a newspaper with a peephole cut out for his eyes. He was tripped up, though, as he went through the revolving door.

When Lombardo got out of prison in 1992, the FBI in Chicago began getting strange phone calls from a man identifying himself as Long John Silver. The caller would let agents know when he was going to call through newspaper ads.

The caller provided good info about the Outfit's hierarchy but was anxious to steer agents away from one person -- Lombardo's son, Joseph Jr., whom agents were investigating but never charged. Agents traced the calls as coming from pay phones near Lombardo's home, sources said.

The phone calls never amounted to much, and the agents never proved they were coming from Lombardo. But there was a tantalizing clue. Flip the initials for Long John: you get J and L. Short for Joseph Lombardo? Lombardo could pull that stunt, agents figured.

To get into the Chicago Outfit as a made member -- to have the full rights of membership -- a candidate must murder for the mob. Lombardo's qualifying kill was allegedly the 1965 hit of mob associate and hotel owner Manny Skar, according to court records. Lombardo allegedly shadowed Skar for two days before Skar was killed as he exited his car to enter his apartment on Lake Shore Drive.

Throughout the 1970s and 1980s Lombardo was on the move, wearing multiple hats for the Outfit and allegedly signing off on the murders of three close friends.

The first was in 1974 -- the slaying of businessman Daniel Seifert. Seifert ran a fiberglass business in the suburbs and was an unwitting front for Lombardo. Lombardo and Seifert were so close that Lombardo baby-sat Seifert's kids. But when the feds came calling and Seifert decided to cooperate, Lombardo decided his friend had to go, authorities charge. On Sept. 27, 1974, Seifert was gunned down outside his Bensenville factory as his wife and 4-year-old son watched. With Seifert dead, the charges against Lombardo evaporated. Lombardo is charged in connection with Seifert's murder in the Family Secrets case along with racketeering.

The next to go was insurance magnate Allen Dorfman, who went on Hawaii golf vacations with Lombardo. Lombardo was close to Dorfman, a clout-heavy insurance broker. Lombardo and Dorfman allegedly schemed to control the Teamsters' pension funds, which loaned millions to build Vegas casinos. Lombardo would allegedly muscle people for Dorfman.

In one conversation, secretly tape-recorded by the feds, Lombardo spoke to mob lawyer and casino investor Morris Schenker, who wasn't coming up with the money Dorfman believed Schenker owed the Outfit.

"Now, it's getting to the point now where you either s - - - or get off the pot," Lombardo said to Schenker, who was 72 at the time of the 1979 conversation. "If they come back and tell me to give you a message and if you want to defy it, I assure you that you will never reach 73," Lombardo said.

Schenker died of natural causes. Dorfman did not, getting gunned down in 1983 in Lincolnwood after Outfit leaders worried he'd turn stool pigeon.

Three years later, another Lombardo friend, mob killer Anthony Spilotro, was beaten to death along with his brother, Michael Spilotro. Lombardo allegedly oversaw Spilotro, who was the Outfit's man in Las Vegas. The Spilotros and Lombardo were close. Their families came over on the same boat from Italy.

In the end, though, Anthony Spilotro had to die, Outfit leaders decided. He was causing too much heat in Vegas, including taking out a contract on an FBI agent.

The Spilotro brothers were lured to a Bensenville area home on the ruse they were getting promotions. Instead, when they went down to the basement, several mobsters surrounded them and beat them to death. They were buried in an Indiana cornfield.

In recent years, Lombardo has kept a low profile. He has been seen hanging out more at the Italian restaurant La Scarola than with other mobsters.

His defense -- unique but possibly workable -- is that he has moved away from the mob life.

In short, he's retired.

Thanks to Steve Warmbir

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Tony Soprano: Leadership Consultant

Friends of ours: Soprano Crime Family

If you're in the waste management/strip joint/butcher racket, look to Anthony John Soprano as your guiding cannoli ... er ... light.

His story--a blueprint for how to run a crime family like a well-oiled business machine--has been airing Sundays on HBO for the past seven years and has now come down to this weekend's series finale. Fans are heading into the closer blind, with previews revealing no more than a few quick cuts of the main characters set to a resonating drum beat.

Whether Tony lives or dies, he'll be missed like no other capo.

Since The Sopranos, which Vanity Fair called ''the greatest show in television history,'' debuted in 1999, Tony Soprano--reputed mob boss of northern New Jersey, loving father, modern-day American icon and born leader--has proved that ruling with an iron fist can be quite efficient.

Nancy Davis, associate professor at the Chicago School of Business Psychology (and a Sopranos fan), says Tony's approach, while effective, leads to a power struggle within the core group and spurs an utter state of panic, or "learned helplessness," among followers.

As a result, "they can't function without the support of the boss," Davis says. ''They need to be led. They need to be puppeteered." But the minute a gunshot wound to Tony's gut forced him into a coma in Part 1 of Season 6, his underlings were more concerned with who would be a fitting successor rather than with their boss's health; hence the power struggle. Silvio--Tony's loyal but limited henchman--ultimately takes the reins as acting boss. Davis predicts Tony will fall.

Jennifer Thompson, an assistant professor and Davis' colleague at the Chicago School of Business Psychology, says Tony's method of leadership has much to do with class distinction. Thompson says the closest comparison to this type of leadership is in a blue-collar work environment where brute force can win the boss's respect.

"It's not appropriate, but it's understandable [in Tony's case] and effective," Thompson says.

She cites an episode in Part 1 of Season 6, when Tony, post-coma, bludgeoned his massive bodyguard though he was unprovoked, emphasizing he was still the alpha in the room and proving he was still capable of dominance, despite recent proof that he is, in fact, fallible.

Wharton School professor Michael Useem says Tony's authoritative style works because lives are at stake. He made the comparison to a Marine commander, who gets his soldiers to comply by the judicious use of force because any procedural snafu could prove more costly than cash-filled envelopes.

"Tony Soprano has it half-right in business," Useem says. "When you get away from those circumstances, then autocratic control tends to be a non-starter. As a decision-maker, you do want people working for you who don't see it your way because they may see an opportunity you're not looking at."

It's hardly in Tony's nature to be that democratic, but everything is behind him now as his men stand firm in his corner at the crucial 11th hour.

How many CEOs wish they could say the same?

Thanks to Matthew Kirdahy

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