Nor is Franzese — who went to prison, found God, and is now a motivational speaker — alone. Over the past few years, YouTube has become a kind of Sing Sing for retired crooks. With names such as Joey Merlino and Jimmy Calandra and Dominick Cicale, they explain the mafia code and review classic movies. All the while, with their high-res cameras and sparkling production values, they hawk. Shamelessly. Quite aside from his book, which compares his country’s rulers to erstwhile mobsters like him, Franzese also sells Armenian wine and autographed posters. Buyers, for their part, are encouraged to “join the family”. 

To put it differently, then, that hidden world of Cosa Nostra, of omertà and hits, is gone, replaced by the kind of tawdry consumerism you could get from MrBeast. Given the influence the American mob enjoyed for much of the last century — at its peak, it boasted some 5,000 made men and held billions in assets — that’s remarkable enough. And just as the gangsters are shrugging off their pasts and strolling amiably into the republic’s mainstream, millions of ordinary Italian-Americans are losing their cultural uniqueness too. Together with the grandkids of other European migrants, rather, they’re shedding their hyphenated identities and becoming mere Americans, a process with immense consequences from food to music to politics. 

The American mob has been failing for years. In 1970, Congress passed the RICO Act, which for the first time allowed prosecutors to target anyone belonging to an “enterprise” involved in racketeering — even if the robbery or fraud was done by someone else. That meant bosses became vulnerable: in the mid-Eighties, several New York dons were indicted under RICO and condemned to 100-year jail terms. The prospect of such awesome sentences soon encouraged mobsters to snitch. One example is Sammy “The Bull” Gravano, now a YouTube regular but who became infamous for testifying against his colleagues in 1992. 

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Beyond the rise in guilty verdicts, the mob’s decline can be traced through American culture. When it appeared in 1972, The Godfather mirrored a phenomenon that broadly still existed. Weeks after the movie premiered, “Crazy Joe” Gallo, like Franzese a member of New York’s Colombo family, was gunned down while celebrating his birthday at Umberto’s Clam House in Little Italy. A few decades later, this bloody way of life was already sliding into caricature. In the second episode of The Sopranos, broadcast in 1999, Tony and his friends sit about quoting The Godfather, drowning in nostalgia from their South Jersey strip joint. 

Visit Little Italy now, and Gallo’s killing feels like it could have happened in the Bronze Age. In truth, little but the name remains: the pastries are stodgy, the delis are closed, and the souvenir shops sell t-shirts emblazoned with “Faghedda Bout It”. Across the East River, my old Queens neighbourhood tells the same story. In 1982, two gangsters were executed at Licata’s, a bar the brothers ran in Ridgewood. In some ways, the area hasn’t changed: the yellow brick rowhouses, with their bay windows and Victorian plaster details, look as smart as ever in the sun. These days, though, the mafiosi have disappeared, replaced by $19 cocktail bars. Tellingly, the bar at Licata’s old address remained an underworld stalwart — it’s just that Albanian toughs hung out there instead. 

This hints at a broader trend: while RICO surely ravaged the mafia, the social foundations that gave it strength have crumbled too. That’s obvious enough demographically. Around 1900, that warren of tenements where Gallo was killed hosted some 10,000 paisans, even as substantial Italian-American enclaves arose from Providence to St Louis. Yet you’re now more likely to hear Cantonese than Calabrian on the streets of New York, with only 5% of Little Italy’s population boasting heritage from Il Bel Paese. And if that makes organised crime harder — thugs no longer have a captive audience to extort — the flight to the suburbs is revealing in other ways. 

When it first emerged, at the dawn of the last century, the mafia could recruit from pools of poor young men, just arrived from Neapolitan slums or Sicilian hilltop towns. Illiterate in Italian and ignorant of English, membership helped migrants navigate the treacherous paths of American capitalism, especially when discrimination from Anglo society remained a pervasive (if exaggerated) threat. Through the 1890s, more than 20 Italians were lynched for real or alleged crimes, including 11 on a single day in New Orleans. As late as 1969, sophisticates at Yale could chortle that if “Italians aren’t actually an inferior race, they do the best imitation of one I’ve seen”. Cynically or not, mobsters justified their actions on ethnic grounds too. “Friendship, connections, family ties, trust, loyalty, obedience,” said Joseph Bonanno, one of America’s youngest ever dons. “This was the glue that held us together.”

Nowadays, Italian-Americans face little worse than lazy jokes. More to the point, they’ve brushed off their outsider status and are fully at home in the American mainstream, earning comfortably more than the national average. There are Italian-American congressmen, and Italian-American asset managers, and an Italian-American judge on the Supreme Court. There’s even an Italian-American first lady: though she was born a Jacobs, Jill Biden’s grandfather was a Giacoppo. The need for Bonanno’s glue, in short, has gone, whacked by Michael Franzese and his $15 dog tags. And if even the remnants of the Cosa Nostra now succumb to America’s contemporary manias — the biggest mob hit in years only happened because the killer was made mad by QAnon — millions of honest Italian-Americans are shedding their identities too. 

The US Census makes this plain. In Philadelphia, for instance, the number of self-identifying “Italians” slumped by a quarter in a decade. And though some 16 million Americans still consider themselves Italian, either in full or in part, that’s down 7% too. The linguistic data is also telling. Between 2001 and 2017, the number of people who spoke Italian at home fell by 38%, a decline that’s particularly marked among youngsters. No wonder it’s one of the fastest-dying tongues in America. Religion, that other bulwark of Italian-American identity, is moving the same way. In 1972, 89% affiliated with the Catholic Church. Four decades on, that figure had dropped to just 56%. All that’s marinated by marriage: as early as 1985, more than two-thirds of Italian-Americans under 30 were tying the knot outside the community. 

Beyond the raw figures, you sense the passing of a world elsewhere. For the first time in years, Italian is no longer America’s favourite cuisine, with cannoli and ziti replaced by Mexican tacos. And then there’s the music. Between 1947 and 1954, some 25 Italian-Americans topped the nation’s pop charts. From Frankie Valli to Perry Como, they seduced audiences with their light tunes and dark looks, playfully embracing their italianità. In a 1959 duet with Dean Martin, appropriately called We’re Glad that We’re Italian, Frank Sinatra crooned for Chianti, and explained that linguini “sends me reeling”. It goes without saying that, in an age when Latino artists make all the running, any attempt to sing about puntarelle and anchovies today would be mocked to a shallow grave. 

There’s an irony here. By wearing their heritage on their sleeves, icons like Sinatra first made it sexy, then acceptable, then routine — then nothing much at all. Not, of course, that Italian-American society will vanish overnight. For one thing, identity is about more than language or God. For another, we shouldn’t overgeneralise. This Christmas, and for many more to come, families will celebrate the Feast of the Seven Fishes, a distinctly Italian-American take on the festive meal. No less important, there remain places where the old customs retain some power. Dodge the rats, and take the D Train uptown from Little Italy, and you’ll soon reach another ethnic enclave. This time, though, the Italian community in the Bronx preserves more that makes it special, from mozzarella makers and fresh pasta stores to Our Lady of Mount Carmel, a neo-Romanesque doorstop that still offers mass in Italian. 

Yet the broad trends, I think, are indisputable — just consider that Americans loved cricket until the Civil War. What I mean is that where the English have been, Italians are going; that sooner or later, every immigrant community is destined to be conquered by that mangled mongrel army called the United States. Certainly, this is happening far beyond people whose surnames end in vowels. In 2010, around 35 million Americans claimed Irish ancestry, down from 40 million in 1980. Two years ago, self-declared German-Americans accounted for about 12% of the population, a 4% drop in a decade. Other groups, from Belgians to Czechs, are assimilating too. And though the results are sometimes muddled, with Irish-American identity enjoying a late resurgence, this decline is again visible on the streets and in the suburbs. In Upper Michigan, viewers can no longer watch Finland Calling, a bilingual television show that ran for 53 years to 2015. Across the Great Lakes, the Ohio town of Lorain lately witnessed the demolition of the United Polish Club. It had first welcomed patrons back in 1913.

Quite apart from the flattening power of the American Dream, these identities are doubly vulnerable now. In 1960, when the US was almost 90% white, the countless fissures of Old World ethnicity unsurprisingly mattered more. There’s a reason “Polack” jokes were once so common, and why Martin and Sinatra started their song with “apologies to the Irish and the Jews”. But in 2024, when it’s race not ethnicity that counts, how can Welsh- or Dutch- or Swedish-Americans retain their idiosyncrasies in a culture, in politics and in media, that sees them merely as white? When even prime-time comedy decries Tim Walz for “white nonsense” — the answer must be that they can’t. Nor are things likely to change, especially when “majority-minority” status arrives in a few decades, and when Trump and his discontents have prodded two-in-five white Americans towards racial identitarianism. 

But integration is an old American pastime. And where the English have gone, and the Italians are going, more recent arrivals will someday travel too. In time, Cantonese will fade from the tenement courtyards. There’ll come a day when those Albanians bury their shotguns and shuffle off to Westchester, the proud dads of asset managers and congressmen. 

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This isn’t, however, simply an elegiac tale of loss. Rather, the passing of the clubs, and the cooking, and the identities that underpin them, has birthed a political storm. As late as the Vietnam War, so-called “white ethnics” were habitually assumed to vote Democratic, showing collective loyalty to the traditional party of migrants, Catholics and blue-collar workers. And so it proved: 78% of Polish-Americans voted for Kennedy in 1960, with the same percentage of Irish-Americans backing Johnson four years later. Even Italian-Americans, somewhat faster to go Right than their hyphenated peers, overwhelmingly championed LBJ. After half a century of wealth and assimilation — leavened by demographic shifts and the racially tinged mantras of people like Richard Nixon — the DNC surely would leap at such numbers today. In 2020, barely half of Polish-Americans gave Joe Biden the nod. In New Jersey, 57% of Italian-American men now say they’re Republican, comfortably more than other white males in the state. 

These trends are affecting practical politics. Boasting a large Italian-American population, Staten Island, alone in New York’s boroughs, went red in 2020. That’s dovetailed by GOP gains in other suburbs, in the Bronx and Long Island, where two recent Republican winners were suggestively called Anthony D’Esposito and Kristy Marmorato. Clearly, the Empire State has some way to go before it becomes competitive at the national level, but Donald Trump could nonetheless win more votes here than any Republican since 1988. It’s the same in the battlegrounds. For Poles in Milwaukee (Wisconsin), or Hungarians in Pittsburgh (Pennsylvania), razor-thin electoral margins mean the conservative turn matters. And recall once more that where they’re going, newer migrants will finally follow. Small wonder some Asians and Latinos are now moving Rightward themselves.

While the numbers are doubtless useful, the most interesting shift is cultural. And here, again, we return to the mob, with Italian-Americans using the last dregs of gangsterism to proclaim their politics. Trawl community Facebook pages, and many posts favourably compare Donald Trump to a mafia boss, praising his thuggish charm and disdain for social convention. It presumably helps that even his name is Don. He may be a born-again Christian, but Michael Franzese is much the same. Between waxing sentimental for the Cosa Nostra, he also shares more polemical videos, for instance reminding viewers that Trump “lowered your taxes” and that “we had no wars” during his time in office. Sometimes, he’s even more explicit. In a February interview with Piers Morgan, the presenter suggested the former president acted like a mob boss. “What’s wrong with that?” Franzese retorted. “You know how many people tell me, ‘I wish the mob was running the country right now’?” As a policy prescription, it sounds dubious. But as a mark of integration, I can think of nothing better. 

This second life of the acclaimed HBO series, which ran from 1999-2007, has been given further energy by the anticipation of The Many Saints of Newark, a prequel film co-written by Sopranos creator David Chase, originally scheduled for last month but postponed until September. The film stars Michael Gandolfini, son of the late Sopranos star James, as the young Tony Soprano.

Widely considered by critics to be one of the greatest television series of all time, a recurring question for fans of The Sopranos has revolved around Tony’s moral character.

“Is Tony Soprano a hero or a villain?” as Michael Imperioli asked in one of the first episodes of the podcast, to which Schirripa replied, “I think he’s both.” The fundamental tension of good and evil contained within the same man captivated audiences throughout the show, and is fundamental to its popularity.

“Tony Soprano,” Schirripa explains, “was the first lead character to be a bad guy who did bad things, yet the audience chose to root for him. He’s a murderer, he’s a drug dealer, he’s a thief, he cheats on his wife, he hits all the sins. Yet, for whatever reason, the audience likes him.”

Throughout the series, people who entered Tony’s orbit met their demise. A classic story plot is a man who makes a wager with the devil, but The Sopranos was the first series to get the audience to sympathise with the devil rather than the man. Throughout the series, Tony kills or orders the murders of a number of people: his best friend, the son of one of his close friends, his cousin, his nephew’s fiancé, and then his protégé nephew. Yet creator David Chase, in collaboration with the immense talent of actor James Gandolfini, got viewers to root for a monster. Tony is clearly not a hero. Instead, the question should be: “Is Tony a villain or a victim?”

Tony was the first mainstream television character to portray what villainy looked like from the point of view of the villain — and what we learned is that no one is the bad guy in their own story. He attempts to be a good father and, to a lesser extent, a good husband — and as reprehensible as Tony was, he was still a better man than his own father. During one of Tony’s sessions with his therapist Dr Melfi, he describes how “the belt was [father’s] favourite child development tool.”

These therapeutic sessions were an ingenious way of giving audience members an insight into the mind of a monster. Initially, Tony visited Dr Melfi because he suffered from panic attacks. Dr Melfi traced the origins of these attacks to a dormant memory: as a child, Tony secretly witnessed his gangster father chop off a guy’s finger for not paying off his gambling debts. Dr Melfi also discovered that when Tony was a child, his mother, Livia, threatened to stab his eye out with a fork. In another flashback scene, Tony’s father suggests to Livia that they relocate to Nevada. Livia loudly replies, within earshot of young Tony, that she would rather smother Tony and his sisters with a pillow than move.

Livia’s random explosions of rage cultivated inner turmoil in Tony. She would lose it over inconsequential mishaps and Tony felt like he had to avoid landmines. “You definitely don’t want to get her started,” he coolly says to Dr Melfi.

The American psychologist Thomas Achenbach made a distinction between “internalising” and “externalising” behaviours for how children cope with stress. Internalising symptoms include depression, social withdrawal and eating disorders; externalising symptoms include drug use, aggression and violence. Tony loved his mother so, as a child, could not carry out externalising behaviours. Instead, he responded to stress at home with internalising behaviours such as panic attacks and depression — a fact acknowledged by Dr Melfi in her explanation that “depression is rage turned inward.”

As an adult, Tony’s unacknowledged, barely contained rage against his mother was portrayed in a key scene early in the series. Today, it might be seen as a little too on-the-nose, but in 1999 its subtlety was novel for television. During the episode, Tony learns that Livia has difficulty with her phone’s answering machine. Later, Tony observes one of his employees having difficulty with an answering machine — just like Livia — and Tony beats him senseless. This is meant to indicate Tony’s true feelings about his mother, feelings he turns against himself or directs to other targets.

Tony’s panic attacks later serve as harbingers of fear or violence on the horizon. For example, in season two, Tony attempts to reintegrate Richie Aprile into his crew after Richie is released from prison. During a particularly heated conversation between them, Tony unconsciously realises that Richie will never be satisfied working for him, and that he will likely have to dispose of Richie. After their conversation, Tony suddenly experiences an attack and collapses.

A key reason Tony Soprano stopped having panic attacks was that he used his sessions with Dr Melfi as an avenue to relieve the stress and guilt he experienced from his violent actions. Therapy allowed him to feel better while continuing to be a violent criminal — but his conscience was never fully unperturbed. Throughout the series, it is implied that Tony is wracked with self-reproach from his criminal activities. There are two ways he can manage this guilt: by changing the actions that give rise to it, or by reinterpreting his actions so that they no longer produce guilt. Throughout the series, Dr Melfi tries, in an unbiased and nonjudgmental way, to guide Tony to change his actions. But often Tony’s sessions merely enabled him to justify himself and continue his criminal acts.

Gradually, thanks to therapy and medication, Tony’s panic attacks subside. But they resurface near the end of season five. Tony is playing golf with New York underboss Johnny Sacrimoni. Johnny says something that leads Tony to subconsciously realise that he has to do something horrible: murder his beloved cousin to prevent a bloody gang war. His body responds with extreme guilt and stress. He collapses.

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Yet armed with an  understanding of Tony’s origins, the viewer can’t help but feel for him. Of course, Tony is also presented as a relatable — a distant cousin to “likeable” — husband and father, under pressure at work with his employees, trying to fit in with his neighbours and caring for his elderly mother, despite her mistreatment of him. But is this enough to understand why the audience roots for such a reprehensible character?

One reason viewers might excuse Tony Soprano’s misdeeds is because we have sympathy for his plight. In fact, researchers at Harvard Business School and Northwestern University have suggested the existence of a “Virtuous Victim” effect, in which victims are seen as more moral than non-victims who have behaved in exactly the same way. People are inclined to positively evaluate those who have suffered. The audience understands that Tony had a terrible childhood, so when we see him do reprehensible things, such as commit violence or cheat on his wife, we find ways to excuse or downplay it.

More intriguingly, recent research suggests that Dark Triad personality traits — comprising narcissism (entitled self-importance), Machiavellianism (strategic exploitation and duplicity) and psychopathy (callousness and cynicism) — are highly correlated with victim-signalling. In other words, people with dark personalities are more likely to broadcast or feign their victimhood, perhaps to gain sympathy and other rewards, while also getting others to excuse their transgressions.

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Does Tony view himself as a victim? He does. In the pilot episode, Tony tells Dr. Melfi that he sees himself as a “sad clown, laughing on the outside and crying on the inside”. He characterises himself again as a “sad clown” in season four, but this time Dr Melfi is sceptical, replying “I’ve never seen it.” She explains that his wife, in a couple’s therapy session, also gave a very different perspective about Tony. Although Tony believes that he responds to inner sadness with outer humour and gregariousness, he in fact expresses his emotions with rage and compulsive eating. Tony views himself one way, but those closest see him as someone completely different.

Sprinkled throughout the show are other indicators that Tony believes he is a victim. In season four, his best friend from high school, Artie Bucco, is in the hospital after a suicide attempt. Tony visits and asks Artie to imagine Tony finding Artie dead, and then asks: “How am I supposed to feel?” He seeks pity from his suicidal friend.

In the following season Christopher, his nephew, accuses him of trying to seduce Adriana La Cerva, Christopher’s fiancé. He tells Tony that he knows Tony was in a car with Adriana alone at night, and that they were going to buy drugs together. Tony becomes enraged and shouts, “So what! I can’t relieve stress every once in a while? I don’t got enough f*****g problems?” Tony’s crew is holding Christopher down, and Tony has a gun in Christopher’s face. Even here, Tony pities himself, and urges Christopher to sympathise with his plight.

Tony is not a sad clown putting on a cheerful face. He wants people to sympathise with him, even as he inflicts violence on them. In a chilling scene, Tony beats up the college dropout son of his late friend Jackie Senior. Tony punches Jackie Junior and tells him: “All I ever did was tell your old man what a good kid you were, and all you do is f******g hurt me.”

By the final season, Tony is even more morally compromised and monstrous than he was at the beginning of the show. But he has fewer panic attacks. Does this mean his treatment was effective? Dr Melfi, in the penultimate episode of the series, terminates therapy with Tony. He responds with dismay: “I think what you’re doing is immoral.”

In The Sociopath Next Door, author and psychologist Martha Stout explained how some people weaponise pity to manipulate others: “More than admiration — more even than fear — pity from good people is carte blanche. When we pity, we are, at least for the moment, defenceless… All in all, I am sure if the devil existed, he would want us to feel very sorry for him.”