At one key point in the pivotal episode 1.5 (“College,” February 7, 1999), Tony Soprano explains to his daughter Meadow that he never finished college because his parents “didn’t stress college. They were working-class people.” Of course, the context of this statement—Tony and Meadow are traveling about New England visiting potential colleges for her—combines with his use of third person and past tense to suggest that he himself does stress college and that he does not regard his own children (and possibly not even himself) as working-class people. Meanwhile, this statement takes on added significance because it takes place during a moment of father-and-daughter bonding in which he reveals (though it’s no news to her) the big secret that “some of his income” might come from illegal sources.
The gangsters of The Sopranos, like Twin Peaks’ Laura Palmer, are full of secrets. Some of the most memorable moments in the series thus involve attempts to suppress memory—or at least to suppress evidence. Indeed, one of the most obvious ways in which the series allegorizes American history is in the motif of buried bodies, as Tony Soprano and his crew seem to spend an inordinate amount of time planting their victims beneath the earth, only to have them threaten to come back to light. This motif, of course, is a familiar one in American history, in which dark moments (such as the genocidal extermination of millions of Native Americans and the brutal enslavement of millions of Africans) have often been buried beneath the surface of the American national narrative, only to resurface at inopportune moments.
In many ways, the reality of class inequality in America, while ultimately inseparable from race-based inequities, has been suppressed even more thoroughly than the ugly realities of racism—in the interest of a vision of the United States as a land of equal opportunity and equal access to resources. Constance Coiner, in her introduction to the 1997 republication of Alexander Saxton’s 1948 novel The Great Midland, praises the book for its sophisticated handling of the issue of class in modern American society, offering an important object lesson to American literary scholars who, Coiner suggests, continued even in the supposedly politicized teaching and criticism of the 1990s to treat class as “the last taboo, the Great Unmentionable” (xi). In a similar vein, sociologist Paul Blumberg, in a 1980 study of economic inequality in America, notes that “the tradition of classlessness is fundamental to American history” (10), while cultural critic Paul Fussell begins his 1983 study of class in America by noting that he was made to feel, while writing the book, that he was committing an immense indiscretion, as if he had been “writing a book urging the beating to death of baby whales using the dead bodies of baby seals” (1).
Given this widespread hostility to even thinking about class in America, it is probably surprising that an American television program such as The Sopranos pays as much attention to class as it does, even if the program (like Tony himself—and like American society as a whole) often seems confused about class, including a tendency to conflate issues of class with issues of ethnicity. Indeed, the treatment of class in The Sopranos is confused in all sorts of ways, with Tony’s own confusion serving (as it so often does) as the thematic center of the series in this sense. In particular, Tony’s upward mobility has left him without a clearly defined class affiliation. Having risen from the working class, he finds himself (because of his profession) looked down upon by the “Medigans” who have similarly risen, but by more conventional (and legal) means. Tony is thus unable comfortably to reside in either the working class from which he came or the more affluent class in which his income would otherwise place him.[1]
Tony often seems proud of his working-class heritage, which can perhaps best be seen in the two trips (one with each of his two children) that he makes to an area church that his grandfather had helped to build eighty years earlier. In the pilot episode of the series, Tony takes daughter Meadow to the church (now surrounded by urban decay) and explains to her: “Your great grandfather and his brother Frank, they built this place. Stone and marble workers. They came over here from Italy and they built this place. . . . They didn’t design it, but they knew how to build it. Go out now and find me two guys that can put decent grout around your bathtub.” Tony holds the church up as an example of a pride in craftsmanship that has now been lost amid the general decline embodied in the surroundings of the church. Importantly, though, Tony’s nostalgic vision of the virtues of his grandfather’s generation is not really a picture of working-class virtue so much as a look back to the sort of medieval craftsmanship that built the great cathedrals of Europe. It is, in short, a fantasy of non-alienated labor, something that is unavailable to the working class under capitalism and that is, in the modern world, typically associated with the work of artists and other “creators.”[2]
The escape from alienation that Tony imagines to be located in the idealized labor of his grandfather can also be described as an escape from the “rationalization” or “routinization” associated by Max Weber with the inexorable march of capitalist modernity, stripping the world of wonder and magic and replacing these with materialism and efficiency. Despite Tony’s various rationalizations about his participation in organized crime as an attempt to protect his Italian ethnic and cultural heritage, it seems clear that he and many of the other gangsters in the series participate in crime because it allows them to escape the tedium of ordinary working life, which involves endless grueling labor without the production of any tangible product that the worker can think of as his own. This vision of work as boredom (as opposed to creative and productive activity), for Tony, is key to the malaise of his contemporary world.
Of course, by the time of The Sopranos, this declining work ethic has infected the gangster business as well, and crime in the series is itself often a form of tedium, rather than an escape from the same. Tony, now a successful “executive,” clearly feels nostalgic about his early days as a rising gangster, as when he and a young Jackie Aprile Sr. daringly robbed a card game being run by gangster Feech La Manna and escaped not only with their lives but with greatly enhanced reputations. Tony occasionally tries to recapture this youthful sense of adventure even as a middle-aged mob boss. In episode 6.9 (“The Ride,” May 7, 2006), Tony and Christopher Moltisanti are on their way back to New Jersey from a trip out of state when they spot two biker types apparently stealing crates of expensive wine from a liquor store. They themselves boost the wine from the bikers (whom they clearly view as amateurs), and Tony obviously gets a thrill from this foray into low-level (one might almost say “working-class”) crime, even though he is injured in the gun battle that ensues when the bikers spot them loading the wine into their vehicle. Later, Tony and Christopher laugh about the event, with Tony clearly reveling in the memory of how shocked the bikers were to encounter real criminals, whom they couldn’t intimidate.
Incidentally, Tony also occasionally takes pride in performing actual working-class tasks, though these are often modified by the criminal context in which they take place. A key example would be his obvious enjoyment in being able to operate a backhoe that allows him to dig a hole in frozen ground to bury the remaining parts of the body of Ralph Cifaretto in episode 4.9 (“Whoever Did This,” November 10, 2002). This manly ability seems to make Tony feel masculine and capable, but also contains a nostalgic memory of his youthful days on his grandfather’s construction site, where he learned to operate equipment like the backhoe. That Tony easily operates the backhoe after a drug-addled Christopher has completely failed in his attempt to do so only adds to the older man’s sense of triumph, while at the same time verifying Tony’s sense that the world is in a state of decline and that “young people these days” have lost sight of what’s important. This latter loss includes losing the ability (and desire) to do the hard work that is necessary to accomplish anything truly worthwhile, an ability Tony seems to feel ended with his generation. Meanwhile, this macabre moment, in which the camera lingers at surprising length on images of a man doing physical work, features work that is seldom represented so directly in American popular culture. This scene even comes close to suggesting that the most mundane of labors can become non-alienated if one simply takes sufficient pride in doing the job well—only to have this suggestion come crashing down when one realizes just what Tony and Christopher are up to in this scene. Apparently, manual labor can be rewarding only if it is part of a criminal escapade—and even then only on special occasions.
Christopher himself is central to the motif of work as tedium in The Sopranos. Along these lines, in episode 1.8 (“The Legend of Tennessee Moltisanti,” February 28, 1999), Christopher tells Tony, “The fuckin’ regularness of life is too hard for me.” Christopher, we will learn repeatedly throughout The Sopranos, is hardly a deep thinker, but here he puts his finger on one of the key insights of the series: that the mind-numbing and heavily routinized banality of life under late capitalism is simply too much for many individuals to bear. Christopher, with family connections in organized crime, predictably attempts to escape the routine of daily life by becoming a gangster. Indeed, Christopher’s frustrated comment about the “regularness of life” provides an important key to understanding the utopian dimension of organized crime in The Sopranos. Now, as opposed to the search for a family-like community that Jameson has seen as central to the utopian energies of the modernist Godfather films, we have the more debased and more desperate search for escape from boredom and routine that is central to the postmodern utopian energies of The Sopranos.
Given that organized crime is, in the world of The Sopranos, very much a business like any other, caught up in the circuit of the commodification of everything that is a central fact of existence in the late capitalist world, it should come as no surprise that Christopher is unable to successfully escape the tedium of the workaday world via his life as a gangster. Indeed, Christopher at several points in the series seems to regard his activities as a gangster as simply another example of the “regularness” he is trying to escape. For example, once he finally achieves his long-term dream of becoming a fully “made” member of the Mafia—in episode 3.3 (“Fortunate Son,” March 11, 2001)—Christopher finds that his life does not quite become the romantic adventure he had imagined. Instead, he becomes mired in an even more desperate quest for cash as Paulie “Walnuts” Gualtieri, his new “supervisor,” pressures him to produce more income. Crime has become precisely the same sort of tedium that Christopher’s exploits as a gangster were supposed to help him escape.
Christopher, like so many others in The Sopranos, comes to think of himself as just another working stiff, having come to organized crime too late in the game—at a point when all the romance has been removed by routine. Early on, in fact, the young gangster seems to realize that, far from providing the escape he seeks, organized crime is actually one of the things he needs to escape from. He thus turns to a “back-up” means of escape from “regularness” by hoping to break into the film industry, Hollywood having, at least since the 1930s, functioned as a “dream factory” designed precisely to provide relief from the grueling boredom of day-to-day existence. In Christopher’s mind, of course, his two main alternatives to late capitalist boredom are closely entangled, and he begins the series convinced that Hollywood will find the story of his life as a gangster so fascinating (and so marketable) that he can write his own ticket to film industry fame and fortune. Christopher, in short, hopes to escape the entrapment of his life within the rampant commodification of late capitalist society by selling his life story to the Culture Industry as a commodity. Little wonder, then, that this strategy does not succeed. Indeed, Christopher quickly learns that Hollywood is fast losing interest in gangster narratives because they aren’t producing enough income at the box office, the film industry being far more concerned with producing profits than with producing exciting films.
Christopher does, however, ultimately break into the film industry via the somewhat marginal route of producing a low-budget horror movie backed by funding obtained from other gangsters and written by a screenwriter whom he strong-arms into producing the script under threat of violence. The film actually gets made, but the experience turns out to be less romantic than Christopher might have envisioned, his high hopes for the project being revealed as hopelessly unrealistic in episode 6.7 (“Luxury Lounge,” April 23, 2006) when he and his new partner and backer, Little Carmine Lupertazzi, travel to Los Angeles, where they actually hope to convince distinguished British actor Ben Kingsley (played by himself in the episode) to star in their movie. Kingsley, of course, is appalled by the idea (and terrified by the gangsters), while their contact with him brings them into a world of Hollywood glamour where they are decidedly out of place.
Christopher, meanwhile, experiences a radical bout of class-related jealousy as he begins to realize how stars such as Kingsley are treated like royalty. This jealousy peaks when Christopher discovers the tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of swag that is handed out to such stars for free on various occasions. Christopher is suddenly overcome by working-class righteousness, furious that so much is given to those who need it least, though there is, of course, an irony in his anger given that he himself has become quite affluent without having actually done an honest day’s work in his life. This motif, meanwhile, is extended when Christopher is introduced to Hollywood legend Lauren Bacall (played by herself in a cameo role), gushing that he admired her performance in “The Haves and the Have-Nots,” his memory of the title of the 1944 classic To Have and Have Not perhaps being altered by his class-based anger. His reaction to this inequity culminates in a moment of black comedy in which a masked Christopher mugs Bacall and takes her swag bag, punching the frail-looking old woman in the face when she resists and leaving her on the ground cursing like a sailor in the aftermath. Christopher ultimately gives away most of the loot garnered in this lowly heist, but he is no Robin Hood. Rather than robbing from the rich and giving to the poor, he hands over most of the take to Tony as tribute.
Given the nature of Christopher’s attempts to escape from the boredom of work, it is little wonder that he has little success or that he is eventually driven back to drug addiction, the final resort of all those who have failed to escape commodification and routinization in any other way. It is not insignificant that he also winds up dead, as does Tony’s cousin Tony Blundetto, who attempts to go straight after an extended stay in prison but finds that the stresses of ordinary work (he works delivering laundry as he studies to become a massage therapist) are simply too much for him. So he reverts to crime, including killing the brother of Phil Leotardo, which ultimately leads not only to an all-out gang war but to the killing of Blundetto himself at the hands of his cousin in an attempt to avert that war.
Gangsters who try to go straight and enter the legitimate workplace almost always wind up dead in The Sopranos. During the sixth-season sequence in which closeted gay gangster Vito Spatafore flees New Jersey after he has been spotted in a gay club by another gangster, Vito finds that the regularness of working-class life is similarly overwhelming. Vito has had great success in organized crime while managing the Sopranos’ operations in the local construction industry, so it seems natural that, while on the run, he would try to support himself by working construction. However, when he attempts to do actual manual work as a handyman in episode 6.10 (“Moe n’ Joe,” May 14, 2006), he finds that the work is not only painfully hard on his oversized body, but also mind-numbingly boring, each hour on the job seeming to last an eternity. Unable to cope, he heads back to New Jersey, where he is soon murdered by Leotardo.
It is apparently far easier to be working class when you don’t actually have to do the working part. In fact, actual workers do not fare well in The Sopranos. The garbage workers who man the trucks controlled by Mafia-dominated companies not only have to perform grueling, mind-numbing, and dirty jobs, but are at several points subjected to violence as various groups jockey for control of the garbage business. Meanwhile, George “Georgie” Santorelli (Frank Santorelli), the hulking bartender (and general flunky) at the Bada Bing!, is treated relatively well by his direct supervisor, Silvio Dante. However, Georgie seems to serve largely as a whipping boy for Tony and the other gangsters, who tend to take out their frustrations by heaping verbal and physical abuse on the slow-witted worker. Indeed, Georgie is sometimes seriously injured by the assaults of the gangsters, as when Ralph Cifaretto hits him in the eye with a chain. He also suffers permanent ear damage when Tony clubs him aside the head with a cash drawer.
Another working-class character who comes in for abuse at the hands of gangsters is landscaper Sal Vitro (Louis Musillo), though to be fair Vitro owns his own landscaping company and thus might be considered petit bourgeois, rather than working class. However, he works in the field alongside his employees doing lawn care and certainly does not seem to enjoy an elevated lifestyle. We first meet Vitro in episode 5.3 (“Where’s Johnny?,” March 21, 2004), when he is working a lawn in an area that aging gangster Feech La Manna insists is in the territory of the lawn-care company run by his nephew (even though Vitro has been working in that neighborhood for many years). To drive home his point, La Manna attacks Vitro and savagely beats him, breaking Vitro’s arm. Paulie intercedes on Vitro’s behalf, and Vitro ultimately gets half his original territory back (by order of Tony), but in return is required to provide free lawn-care services to Tony and Johnny Sacrimoni. In general, Vitro is treated rather contemptuously by Tony, who insists that the landscaper should be grateful that he is not being treated even worse.
Tony’s treatment of Vitro is part of a seemingly generalized lack of respect for real working-class individuals. Despite his own declared respect for working-class virtues, Tony seems to regard actual workers as dupes of a corrupt system, perhaps partly because he feels that he has worked so hard to get beyond that class and to beat the system. Thus, while the hardworking Vitro would appear to embody precisely the sort of work ethic that Tony seems to have admired in his grandfather (though perhaps with less skill and craft), Tony does not seem to see it that way. After all, Tony’s respect for the craftsmanship of his grandfather’s generation is part of a generalized nostalgia; it is oriented toward an idealized vision of the past, while Vitro works in the debased here-and-now. Of course, Tony’s profession and lack of polish disqualify him from full participation in the upper class, too, which might partly explain his professed disdain for group affiliations of any kind in favor of a self-reliant individualism. Indeed, Tony regards his upper-class Medigan neighbors with as much contempt as he regards Sal Vitro, perhaps more.
At the same time, Tony also regards the lifestyles of the Medigans with a certain envy, and he is very proud of the fact that he can match (and perhaps even exceed) them in terms of income. Indeed, while he would never admit it, it is clear that his dream for his children is that they will grow up very much like the Medigans for whom he has such disdain. He does not wish for either of his children to enter organized crime, and when Meadow (his “good” child) manages to make it to an Ivy League college, he develops the hope (typical of working-class parents) that she will become either a lawyer or (preferably) a doctor. And he develops this hope despite the fact that the Medigan who most embodies the pretentiousness that Tony supposedly rejects is also a doctor, his neighbor Dr. Bruce Cusamano.[3]
Tony clearly harbors a certain envy of Cusamano and his “respectable” position in society, just as Cusamano and his Medigan friends experience a certain fascination with Tony’s “outlaw” existence. The Medigans are thus experiencing a certain vicarious thrill when they begin to befriend Tony, including a moment in episode 1.10 (“A Hit Is a Hit,” March 14, 1999) when they invite him to join them for a round of golf at their exclusive country club, a place where Tony himself would never be welcome as a full member.[4] As they question him about various aspects of gangster culture (ranging from Al Capone’s winter home, to John Gotti, to the Godfather films), Tony begins to realize that he is there strictly for their amusement and entertainment and to fulfill their lurid curiosity, and not because they regard him as an equal and a friend. As he later tells Melfi, the gangster felt that these Medigans were treating him like a “dancing bear.” He then recalls to her an experience in his childhood when he and his friends made fun of another boy because of his speech impediment, and concludes that the Medigans were treating him much the same way.
In this case, Tony has a class impediment, and these Medigans make their sense of class-based superiority to him quite clear. However, Tony has his own fun with his hosts, as when he begins to refer to Cusamano by the problematic nickname of “Cooze.” He also agrees to confide in them about an experience he had with the notorious Gotti. The Medigans are all ears, hoping for something really juicy, but Tony instead provides a story about the time the Bungalow Bar ice-cream company went out of business and auctioned off their ice-cream trucks. Tony hoped to buy one, he tells them, but he was outbid for the last one by Gotti, who subsequently gave Tony a ride home in the souvenir vehicle, ringing the bell all the way. The awkward silence that ensues as the Medigans try to find a way to respond to this story is one of the funniest moments in the entire series.[5]
Later in the same episode, Tony exhibits even more class-based hostility to the Medigans when he extracts a certain amount of revenge for the golf outing. Aware that Cusamano fears him despite feeling superior to him, Tony gives the good doctor a mysterious package to hold for him, knowing that Cusamano will assume that the package contains something illegal (such as drugs or a weapon) that Tony is probably trying to hide from the authorities. When Tony tells Carmela about the prank, they have quite a laugh about it.[6] Though reluctant, Cusamano is afraid to incur Tony’s wrath, so he takes the package. As the episode ends, the intimidated Cusamanos are staring at the package, wondering what it might hold, but too terrified to open it.
Tony’s attitude both toward the Medigans and toward the working class is hopelessly confused and conflicted, a situation that can be well comprehended within the context of Jameson’s discussion of the widespread perception in the first-world West that we live in a postindustrial society “in which social classes of the classical type no longer exist” (Postmodernism, 53). Jameson, of course, disputes this perception, believing that only socialism can bring about the actual end of class inequalities (319). Indeed, one might (especially in the United States) see the perceived demise of class not as an observation of reality but as a projection of fantasy, the effacement of class having, as we noted at the beginning of this chapter, long served as a key structural feature of the American national consciousness. Jameson himself concludes that, far from having entered a new historical phase in which class is no longer the key category of social and economic grouping, we are currently in a confused transitional period in which the category of class is being restructured and reformulated on a global scale, toward its eventual clarification in ways that are still impossible to predict. In the meantime, we are left with declassed subjects such as Tony Soprano, whose class consciousness has been shattered both by his own upward mobility and by this large-scale unsettling of older class identifications as a whole.
Kingpin of a fairly extensive (even if we’re not sure how extensive) criminal empire with tentacles that reach out across the globe, Tony might be seen as a member of a newly emerging ruling class, managing and administering quintessentially late-capitalist enterprises that involve the provision of services (such as “protection,” prostitution, and gambling) and the redistribution of assets (via graft, theft, and again gambling) but that actually produce nothing. But Tony, however rich and powerful, also can’t get into the Medigans’ country club and is constantly hounded by the FBI. In this New World Order (or disorder), it is truly impossible to figure out who’s on first, making Tony’s repeated trips to the Lou Costello Monument brilliantly appropriate.
For Jameson, the confused class situation under late capitalism helps to explain the “schizophrenic collective consciousness” of American society in the postmodern era, a phenomenon that for him includes the ability simultaneously to believe in the dissolution of conventional forms of collective identification such as class, and in the value of new forms of smaller and more localized group organization that can serve as a replacement for class (Postmodernism, 320). As such, the postmodern mind is able to celebrate individualism while virtually ceding true individualism altogether in the interest of group identifications—group identifications that have lost all power to challenge capitalism at a fundamental structural level.
The crime family as depicted in The Sopranos is precisely such a new postmodern group, providing a source of substitute identity for its members (“I am a gangster,” but also “I am a businessman”) amid the general dissolution of genuine individual identity in the postmodern world. Even Tony Soprano, with his expressed disdain for the new group identities of the postmodern world and his declared belief in individualist self-reliance, still relies in a very fundamental way on his identity as an Italian American gangster in order to maintain any sense of who he really is. These identities allow Tony and his fellow gangsters to take pride in rejecting the conformist values (the “regularness”) of American consumer society by not following the usual (nominal) rules of business, while at the same time celebrating those very values at their core, the pursuit of profit. Indeed, the schizophrenic postmodern collective consciousness, for Jameson, plays out in a variety of forms of doubleness, including
the capacity of a postmodern public to conceive of two such radically incommensurable and contradictory representations all at once: the tendential immiseration of American society (filed away under the rubric of “drugs”) and the self-congratulatory rhetoric of pluralism. (Postmodernism, 320)
In the case of the gangsters of The Sopranos, this last double consciousness resides in a particularly obvious way in their ability both to believe that the gangster business is going to the dogs and to take an immense pride in being a part of that same business. These gangsters place a strong emphasis on adherence to traditions and maintenance of standards, while at the same time grousing that there no longer are any standards or traditions. This ability simultaneously to hold seemingly opposed and contradictory positions, believing sincerely in both without any sense of conflict, is the essence of what George Orwell once called “doublethink,” which, by the end of the twentieth century, has become simply a characteristic way of thinking, period.
Such doubleness is also characteristic of The Sopranos as a series that shatters the barrier between high and low that marked Western culture through most of the twentieth century and that can itself be taken as a version of class inequality, “high” culture generally being accessible only to those with sufficient income to afford it and education and leisure time to appreciate it. After all, The Sopranos has been lauded in hyperbolic terms as one of the great achievements of American culture, yet it draws its materials from a variety of popular forms, ranging from crime dramas, to soap operas, to family sitcoms. This collapse of the high-low boundary is only to be expected of such a postmodern work, of course—observers such as Andreas Huyssen have seen the shattering of this high-low boundary, the bridging of the “great divide” in modern culture, as one of the principal distinguishing features of postmodernism as a cultural phenomenon. For Huyssen, bridging this divide is a democratic gesture that seeks to challenge the classist, elitist separation of modernism from the world of ordinary working people, but (like almost everything else about postmodernism—or late capitalism) this phenomenon can be seen in widely disparate ways.
Jameson, for example, insists in his analysis of postmodernism that modernism was a last-ditch effort at resistance to the ongoing march of capitalist commodification of culture, and that postmodernism represents an all-out capitulation to this commodification. For him, the crucial distinction between high and low culture was one on which modernism “depended for its specificity, its Utopian function consisting at least in part in the securing of a realm of authentic experience over against the surrounding environment of middle- and low-brow commercial entertainment” (Postmodernism, 63). In The Sopranos, this realm has collapsed, and authentic experience would appear to be a thing of the past. If the Medigans represent the epitome of what Holden Caulfield would call “phonies,” then Tony and his gangster culture hardly represent an authentic alternative. They, like the pretentious Medigans, are just pretending, acting out roles that sometimes call for them to commit heinous acts, sometimes call for them to claim to be virtuous outlaws fighting for justice for those who, for reasons of class or ethnicity, have been excluded from the halls of contemporary power. In either case, they are still acting, which makes it all the more appropriate that the performance of the late James Gandolfini at the center of this highly theatrical piece has been widely regarded as one of the great virtuoso achievements in contemporary thespianism.
M. Keith Booker has argued that Tony’s lack of class identification is one of the key sources of the psychological problems that have driven him into therapy (“Tony Soprano”).
As a stonemason and church builder, Tony’s grandfather shares a profession with Jude Fawley, the protagonist of Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure (1895) and one of the best-known working-class characters in all of Western literature. Indeed, the profession is treated very much the same way in the mind of Tony Soprano and in Hardy’s novel.
Cusamano is also Tony’s personal physician, and it is he who refers Tony to Jennifer Melfi, a personal friend of Cusamano. The sexual fascination that Tony develops for Melfi is made up of a number of ingredients, but one of them is surely her class position as a successful Medigan who nevertheless seems to have retained her integrity.
Tony actually does seek membership, but is told (quite unconvincingly) by Cusamano that membership is “closed—no new members until old members die.”
Tony’s story is obviously fabricated. Bungalow Bar was a brand of ice cream sold from trucks in the New York area in the 1950s and 1960s. They would have been out of business long before Tony (born in 1959) was old enough to bid against Gotti for one of their leftover trucks.
While explaining the prank to Carmela, Tony impersonates Vito Corleone, indicating that he is playing gangster for Cusamano’s benefit—and probably referring to a scene in The Godfather: Part II in which young Vito holds a parcel of guns for Peter Clemenza.