Don't Call This Man a Pussy

Steven Malanga of the Manhattan Institute isn't one of those hypersensitive Italian Americans, but he gets madder than Mussolini on a late-running train when he considers how Sopranos creator David Chase drags the names of good people through the mud:

There's something downright low-down about how the creator of "The Sopranos," David Chase, has drawn on his weekly visits as a kid to my old Newark neighborhood to construct the general outline of "The Sopranos," in the process plucking the names of many of my neighbors, friends and relatives and inserting them into the show. Yet at the same time, Chase has conspicuously and purposely avoided any references to the real Mafiosi who peopled our neighborhood back then and ran Newark's mob, though he's made it clear they inspired him.

In the Chase-created world of the Jersey mob, it's the standup Italian-Americans from the old neighborhood who cringe because their fictional alter egos are running the family business that they never had a piece of in real life.

Talk about poetic injustice.

Amazingly, Chase actually seems more worried about offending the memory of the bad guys, even though they are mostly long gone. In a 2002 interview, he admitted that "The Sopranos" is loosely based on the crime family of Ruggerio (Ritchie the Boot) Boiardo, who ran Jersey for the Genovese crime family for years from Newark before moving to the much tonier suburban Livingston, a mob boss so powerful he actually helped fix the 1961 Newark mayoral election. In the interview, however, Chase demurs from mentioning the Boot by name - though he describes him in a way that is obvious to anyone who knew the Jersey mob - as if he didn't want to tarnish the name anymore.

Whole article, from a Daily News section tellingly titled "Be Our Guest," here.

As an unabashed fan of the anti-defamation industry, I'm a little disappointed in this article, and not only because Malanga is too clever to use the one-degree of separation trope ("Depicting Italian Americans as mafiosi is no different than burning a cross on Master P's lawn") these articles are always supposed to have. But while he chides Chase for not naming real mobsters, Malanga drops that he had a distant relative with a loose mob connection, but then he too declines to name names.

This leaves only one explanation for his disgruntlement: As he notes in the article, The Sopranos recently reintroduced a plot involving the character "Pussy Malanga." Worse still, this one was "Little Pussy" Malanga, and as we know from The Godfather subplot about a snatch-reduction operation, Italians are extremely touchy on the subject of vagina size.