The Sopranos

The question people arrive with is whether Tony Soprano was a real person. The short answer is no. The longer answer is more interesting than the short one.

David Chase has been consistent about where the series came from: he was raised in Essex County, New Jersey, and the spine of the show is his own family, particularly his relationship with his mother, which he transposed onto Livia Soprano more or less directly. The mob material was the setting he found for a story about a man in therapy arguing with his mother. He has also said he drew on real New Jersey crime families, the DeCavalcantes among them. Both of those things are true at once, and the second does not make the first a cover story.

What actually lines up

The structural resemblance is real and it is not a coincidence, because there was only one Cosa Nostra family in New Jersey to resemble.

The fictional DiMeo family and the real DeCavalcante family are both small outfits operating in the shadow of New York, treated by the five families as a junior partner and resenting it. Both are led in practice by an acting boss while the official boss is unavailable — the DeCavalcante arrangement from 1990 onwards, with John Riggi holding the title from federal custody. Both make their money from waste, construction and labour rather than from anything glamorous. Both are close enough to the suburbs that the members live in ordinary houses.

What does not

Nothing in the record puts a DeCavalcante boss in a psychiatrist's office, which is the actual premise of the show. The DiMeo family is an invention with an invented history. Individual plots are not drawn from individual cases, and attempts to map characters one-to-one onto real members fall apart quickly.

The recording

The strongest documented link runs the other way, and it is the best-attested fact on this page.

On 3 March 1999, eight weeks after the premiere, an associate wearing a wire for the FBI recorded a conversation between the capo Anthony Rotondo and the soldier Joseph Sclafani. Sclafani asked what the thing was — the Sopranos — and whether it was supposed to be them. Rotondo told him he was in it, that his name had come up. The conversation went on to the casting, and to which characters matched which people they knew.

Rotondo was questioned about that recording under oath in May 2003, after he began cooperating with the government.

Verdict

Loosely based. The series is not a dramatisation of the DeCavalcante family and does not claim to be. It is a work of fiction set in the one place in New Jersey where such a family existed, written by someone who had grown up nearby and had paid attention, and it got the texture right enough that the men themselves sat down to watch it and argued about whether it was about them.