Tony Soprano

Tony as a runt

The story of Tony Soprano's upbringing comes to us from a variety of sources - neighborhood gossips, teachers, classmates, parole officers, and high school sweethearts. Most of these people wish to go unnamed, for obvious reasons. Tony's life is not ancient history - it's current events. Wernick's collection of interviews contains much pertinent information about the early life of Tony Soprano.

JEFFREY WERNICK: Anthony John Soprano was born August, 1959, the middle child of Johnny Boy and Livia Pollio Soprano. All the children came late because Livia had problems conceiving. Tony's older sister, Janice, was the only person in the family who ever stood up to the demanding Livia. Baby sister Barbara seemed to fade into the background. Tony was caught somewhere in the middle.

NEXT-DOOR NEIGHBOR, NAME WITHHELD: They lived in a small three-bedroom rowhouse in the Ironbound section which Livia lorded over like Queen Elizabeth. The house was nuthin' to speak about, but they had nice things. I remember they were the first to put carpet in the bathroom. And Livia had a big stereo to play her Broadway musicals and Italian crooners at ten in the morning. She grew up poor, you know, and the insecurity of it really got to her. And Johnny brought home the cash.

CHILDHOOD FRIEND OF TONY, NAME WITHHELD: Tony was like any other Italian kid growing up in 60s and 70s "Down Neck" and later in West Orange. He played sports, in fact, was an ace baseball player, collected baseball cards, looked up girls' skirts, watched The Ed Sullivan Show, you know, the regular stuff. The fact that his dad made the family paycheck from gambling and shit didn't seem to faze any of the kids and certainly not Tony. Tony liked his dad. Johnny was a good-looking guy, funny, smooth, hard not to like. But he had a temper and would knock Tony around. If Tony showed up late for dinner or talked back to his mother, the old man would slap him halfway across the room. It scared the shit out of him. Johnny would yell at the girls, but never hit them. Tony, he treated like a punching bag.

Little Janice

RETIRED NEWARK POLICE OFFICER, NAME WITHHELD: Johnny Boy's connection to the meat business led him, eventually, into "buying into" the Pork Store over on Kearney Avenue, which could function as a legit enterprise. Buying in, of course, meant loaning the owner some money and then taking over the store when he couldn't pay up. A classic bust-out. He learned the trade - the crime trade, not the meat trade - from a legend in the neighborhood, Old Man DiMeo. DiMeo liked him. He was a smart kid. Smarter than Junior, by all accounts.

JEFFREY WERNICK: Down Neck was all working-class Italians at that time, and maybe a few Poles and Irish thrown in. There was no middle-class. Everyone was making the same lousy money working at the factory or driving a truck or laying cement. Then there were the mob guys. They had class. And if you lived next door to one, no one ever broke into your house. You could leave your doors wide open, it didn't matter. You were as safe as any rich guy in North Caldwell.

CLOSE FAMILY FRIEND, NAME WITHHELD: Livia was a terrible housekeeper, a terrible cook - I think she made one baked ziti dish over and over - and not the world's greatest mother, either. I think she was ill-equipped for the responsibility of three kids and Johnny and everything. I don't think she had what you might call the mental stability to deal with it all. She was often agitated, focused on various crazy fears. She spent a lot more of her time pushing Johnny to get into this racket or that racket than she did helping the kids with their math assignment. She didn't care all that much if they did well in school. I think school reminded her of all those intellectual Eugene Debs types that used to sit around her father's house all night arguing about "the dictatorship of the proletariat" and crap like that. She saw where books got that crowd - nowhere.

Excerpts taken from Chapter 3