Soprano Ethical Lapses Debated

Friends of ours: Soprano Crime Family

Therapists, we've long known, are among the biggest fans of The Sopranos.

So pleased were they with the credible therapy scenes between Tony Soprano, pop culture's most famous mobster/patient, and the appealing Dr. Jennifer Melfi, played by Lorraine Bracco, that the American Psychoanalytical Association once gave the show and Bracco an award. But professionally speaking, they could only scratch their heads at the latest developments on HBO's hit drama, which aired its penultimate episode last weekend.

Just as Tony Soprano's life seemed to be imploding with dangerous speed — in short, just when he needed some really good therapy — Melfi and her own therapist made some highly questionable moves. Not only therapists were distressed. Some patients were actually furious when they showed up for appointments this week, said one New York psychoanalyst.

"You wouldn't believe the outrage I am hearing," said Dr. Arnold Richards, who'd missed the episode, but was filled in by his patients. He was talking about a serious ethical lapse by Elliot Kupferberg, played by Peter Bogdanovich, at a dinner party full of therapists. Across the crowded table, the character callously revealed — over Melfi's protests — the identity of her star patient.

"Mind-boggling," pronounced Richards. "I do not recall ever being told the name of a patient in treatment."

Colleagues agreed. "That dinner party was just very upsetting to me," said Dr. Joseph Annibali, a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst in McLean, Va. "What he did was outrageous. He's never had control of himself, and this just fits in with that."

Why did Kupferberg commit such a sin? He didn't think Melfi should be treating Tony, whom he considered a manipulative psychopath. Be that as it may, his disclosure was "a very egregious ethical violation," said Dr. Jan Van Schaik, chair of the Ethics Committee at the Wisconsin Psychoanalytic Institute.

"A patient needs to know that what gets said in the doctor's office stays there," said Van Schaik, who's never witnessed such a violation. "I've been at gatherings where people talk about patients in a more disguised form. Even that can be inappropriate. A good therapist should do the best they can to protect the anonymity of patients."

It's a shame, Van Schaik added, because "prior to Sunday's episode, The Sopranos was the best portrayal in the popular media of a therapist-patient relationship." Annibali agreed: "We're so used to seeing therapists presented as incompetent hacks. Or as people who are more disturbed than their patients!"

What's been nice about Melfi, the Virginia therapist explained, is that she's a complex and caring figure — she's not ideal, but she tries to help Tony even as she struggles with the idea of treating him.

That is, until this last episode, when she ... dumped him.

"We're making progress," Tony protested, genuinely shocked. "It's been seven years!" But Melfi had reluctantly read a study, brought to her attention by Kupferberg, claiming that therapy doesn't actually help sociopaths — it further enables their bad behavior by sharpening their manipulative skills. Demoralized, guilt-ridden and almost speechless with hostility, Melfi literally showed Tony the door.

A tidbit that had some therapists buzzing this week: it turns out the study is a real one — albeit hardly new — from authors Samuel Yochelson and Stanton Samenow, psychiatrists specializing in the criminal mind. But the way the fictional Melfi shoved aside her patient was anything but real, therapists said.

"You don't just drop a patient like a hot potato, even if you conclude they aren't responding to therapy," Annibali protested. "She should have taken several months to do it."

For Richards, the development just didn't ring true. After seven years, "only NOW she figures this out? My sense is that there was some narrative purpose for (series creator David) Chase to end this relationship."

As in the fact that there's only an hour left to the entire story? That Tony's life is crashing down around him, and one by one, by death or rejection or his own murderous hand, he appears destined to lose everyone close to him? Maybe. But Annibali said he'd heard that Bracco may be appearing in the final episode next Sunday. Which means there may still be time to reverse her professional missteps.

"My hope," Annibali said, "is that she and Tony will get together again."

But for one certified expert on both therapy AND The Sopranos, that wouldn't make sense, dramatically speaking. Around halfway through the show's run, Tony's therapy started failing, said Dr. Glen Gabbard, professor at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston and author of The Psychology of The Sopranos.

Perhaps it was because Chase himself went through years of therapy, and has publicly expressed ambivalence about its usefulness. In any case, at the busy psychiatry clinic where Gabbard works, the talk this week is about how Melfi should have ended things with Tony years ago.

"The therapy had to end," Gabbard said. "It was getting more and more futile."

"He's just not getting any better."

Thanks to Jocelyn Noveck

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Tony Soprano, Family Guy

Friends of ours: Soprano Crime Family

In the pilot episode of “The Sopranos,” which Home Box Office first aired on January 10, 1999, a thickening son of Essex County, New Jersey, reluctantly visits Jennifer Melfi, a psychiatrist, at her office in Montclair. His name is Anthony Soprano and he has been depressed.

Tony lives in a “French provincial” McMansion in North Caldwell with his wife, Carmela, and their children, Meadow and A.J. He works as a “waste-management consultant,” as he all too modestly informs his doctor; in fact, his interests extend to the docks, “no show” construction jobs, paving and joint-fitting unions, an “executive card game,” a sports book in Roseville, loan-sharking, coffee-shop and pizza-place protection rackets, truck hijacking, HUD scams, fell-off-the-back-of-a-truck consumer goods, a strip club in Lodi, and extensive holdings in real estate, vinegar peppers, and gabagool. The New Yorker

Tony Soprano, as everyone in north Jersey and beyond has come to know, is the head of the Di Meo crime family. He has been suffering from panic attacks. Business is uneven. His associates and his children lack focus. His uncle resents his authority. His wife resents his late-night romps with yet another goomah. And his mother, the Medea of Bloomfield Avenue, never loved him (and may yet give the signal to have him whacked). The pressure is really something. Just recently, he tells Dr. Melfi, he was short of breath, tingly inside—“It felt like ginger ale in my skull.” He collapsed while grilling pork sausages on the barbecue:

TONY: The morning of the day I got sick, I been thinking. It’s good to be in something from the ground floor. I came in too late for that, I know. But lately, I’m getting the feeling that I came in at the end. The best is over.
DR. MELFI: Many Americans, I think, feel that way.
TONY: I think about my father. He never reached the heights like me. But in a lotta ways he had it better. He had his people. They had their standards. They had pride. Today, whadda we got?

And so began Tony’s quest for a renewed sense of family, heritage, coherent truths, mental health, and a prime cut of the Esplanade construction projects. “The Sopranos,” the richest achievement in the history of television, comes to an end June 10th, after eighty-six episodes. It has been with us a long time—longer than the Bush Administration (and nothing seems more interminable than that).

In his first hour onscreen, Tony, played by James Gandolfini, still had a modest shock of hair and a Gleasonesque lightness to his step. He had not yet achieved the menacing rhino plod that would come with time, anxiety, and fifteen thousand buttered bialys. We’d yet to glimpse his rages, and his accent was less mobbed up, almost refined. He sounded more Summit than Newark.

Nevertheless, to an astonishing degree the characters and the ideas––comic, dramatic, and social––in “The Sopranos” were in place from the start. Even though its creator, David Chase, never had the luxury of a novelist’s control of length and narrative destiny, he has rarely faltered. The show evolved in the manner of a sprawling social novel of the nineteenth century, constantly sprouting new plotlines, developing recurring jokes, images, and characters. Dickens would have seen a kinsman in the creator of “Paulie Walnuts” Gualtieri. Besides, there are fewer dull patches in “The Sopranos” than there are in “The Mystery of Edwin Drood”––all due respect.

Like John Updike’s Rabbit series or Philip Roth’s novels of the past decade, “The Sopranos” teems with the mindless commerce and consumption of modern America. The drama and the comedy are rooted in the particulars of life as it is lived from the Pulaski Skyway to Bergen Avenue, and yet the larger events of the world are never completely sealed from view. There are always televisions playing in the background––the local news in offices and hospital rooms, the “Hitler channel” in Tony’s living room—and so world politics is the undercurrent rumbling beneath the ordinary nights in New Jersey. History echoes the domestic catastrophes. As Bobby “Bacala” Baccalieri put it with dire resignation, “Quasimodo predicted all of this.”

No matter how funny or blatantly cartoonish some of the supporting players are (Steve Van Zandt’s Silvio Dante seems less like a human being than an animated Fellini figure), the mobsters and their families in “The Sopranos” are a recognizable reflection of all of us. The epic is peopled with every variety of twenty-first-century character imaginable: mobsters, yes, but also shadow communities of smug and equally troubled psychiatrists, disillusioned F.B.I. agents and cops, neurotic priests, immigrant “caregivers,” screen-addled teen-agers, earnestly self-indulgent Columbia students. It is an Essex County of Italians, Irish, blacks, and Jews, but also of new immigrants: Koreans, Russians, Ukrainians, and Arabs. Other television series have guests, character types who make a purposeful one-night stand and are then replaced with new types in new situations. In “The Sopranos,” characters arrive and take full human shape; children grow into adults—and sometimes, without explanation, like a Russian mobster fleeing through the snowy woods of the Pine Barrens, they inexplicably disappear and frustrate our TV-shaped need for lessons and resolution. It doesn’t matter that we come to “like” Adriana La Cerva. Chase has no use for our sentiment. He kills it off with a .38.

“The Sopranos,” like its predecessor, Martin Scorsese’s “Goodfellas,” is about the ruthlessness of petty lying crooks, but the beat-downs, strangulations, and shootings are the least of the violence. Chase is merciless with his exposure of the ordinary disappointments and tragedies. He has immersed us for years in an examination of addiction, twelve-step recoveries, teen-age depression, modern pharmacology, suicides, sexual indulgence, family betrayals, financial manipulation, accidents, heart attacks, strokes, death and dying––and always, afterward, the inability to summon a language to equal the emotion. “Whaddya gonna do?” is the shrugging motif. A young, healthy thug dies reading a magazine on the toilet. An S.U.V. flips over on a rain-slick road. “Whaddya gonna do?”

Michael Corleone almost convinces us, in his autumnal walk with Kay Adams, that he is the moral superior of a senator. Chase’s vision is darker, and as we descend into the death spiral of the final episodes it only gets worse. Just when we begin to grow too fond of Tony, when we get all gooey about his plight as a misunderstood son and overextended executive and father, Chase has him do something to undercut our sympathy. After his son, A.J., has tried to kill himself by pulling a plastic bag over his head, tying a cinder block to his foot, and jumping into the family’s back-yard swimming pool, Tony explains to Dr. Melfi (Lorraine Bracco) that A.J. survived because the rope was too long. Maybe he’s just “an idiot,” he declares offhandedly, his paternal grief mixing with loveless dismissal. “Historically, that’s been the case.” Even Tony’s clear-eyed and maternal wife, Carmela, played by Edie Falco, is willing to set aside her occasional outbursts of umbrage for the price of an Hermès scarf. “They say it’s the best,” Tony informs her, as the marital storm passes.

Everyone in “The Sopranos” has grown older (and we along with them). One after another, the made men and crew members disappear from the stage—an accelerated version of what happens naturally. “Hope comes in many forms,” Dr. Melfi tells Tony in one of their first sessions. “Well, who’s got the time for that?” he replies.

The end is a mystery, but we know one thing: “The Sopranos” defied Aristotelian conventions. It is a comedy that ends with a litany of the dead and missing. Whaddya gonna do?

Thanks to David Remnick

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How to Invest from Prison Like "A Known Associate of Organized Crime."

Friends of ours: Frank Saladino
Friends of mine: Nick S. Boscarino

Received a tip from a reader about reputed Mob associate (according to Illinois Gaming Regulators) and millionaire Nick S. Boscarino of South Barrington. Boscarino was sentenced to three years in federal prison in Yankton, S.D., on fraud charges for bilking the Village of Rosemont of money related to undisclosed insurance fees.

At one point, he attempted to reduce his sentence by claiming that he was an alcoholic as he sought treatment at Yankton's alcohol treatment program, which would make him eligible for an earlier release. The judge denied the request by Boscarino through his attorneys.

Apparently, before Boscarino went to prison, he put millions of dollars into 5 Hampshire parcels in 2005. They are now back on the market, he is trying to double his money on 2 of the parcels, bought for $1.5 million and selling for $3.7 million. On the other three parcels he is trying to increase his money 10-fold - bought for $1.4 M and selling fro $14 M. Nice way to make a living while sitting in prison for 2 years.

Even more interesting is the "mispelling" of his last name on the property records - seen as Boscarino, Boscario, and Borcarino. Not trying to hide any assets, are we Nick ??

The property information was obtained from the data links below. An interesting tidbit of trivia is that Frank Saldino lived (and died) in in a rural Kane County truck stop hotel (I-90 Rt 20 intersection) just up the road from the subject parcels. Saladino was found dead of "natural causes" April 25-the same day he was indicted on federal charges of murder and other undisclosed "criminal" allegations that were performed by Saladino on behalf of "The Outfit."

Tax and property info from these sites, by entering parcel numbers (listed below)

Hampshire Township Assessor's Office (Property Search)

Kane County Property Tax: Tax Payment Search

Tax bills go to Boscarino's home and business addresses

Properties Listed for Sale By Century 21 New Heritage

For All Your Real Estate Needs - Real Estate Listings Search - Page 1

>>>>>>Parcels 0109100011 and 0109100010

THIS 83 ACRE PARCEL IS ACTUALLY 2 PARCELS - 40 ACRES + 43 ACRES. THEY CAN BE PURCHASED SEPARATELY. 2ND PPI# IS 0109100011. THIS PROPERTY IS LOCATED IN HAMPSHIRE'S GOLDEN COORIDOR FOR RESIDENTIAL GROWTH. MOST OF THE FARMLAND ALL THE WAY TO ALLEN RD HAS BEEN SOLD FOR DEVELOPMENT. PROPERTY HAS HIGGINS RD ADDRESSS -- FRONTAGE IS ACTUALLY ON MELMS RD.

$3,767,850 Vacant Land - 47W531 HIGGINS(MELMS) Road, HAMPSHIRE, IL 60140


>>>>> Parcels 0124400028 and 0124400027

22.62 ACRES CURRENTLY ZONED FARM, BUT HAS POTENTIAL FOR COMMERCIAL/INDUSTRIAL USE. SELLER WILL PARTICIPATE IN DIVIDING PROPERTY INTO SMALLER PARCELS. PARCEL IS ON HAMPSHIRE'S FUTURE ANNEXATION BORDER. CURRENTLY TWO PARCELS 16.39 ACRES PIN# 0124400028 6.23 ACRES PIN# 0124400027
$2,262,000



>>>>Parcel 0122100012

19.3ac PRIME COMMERCIAL PROPERTY WITH FRONTAGE ON STATE ST. AND ALLEN RD. NEW WATER AND SEWER LINES TO PROPERTY. NEWLY CONSTRUCTED STREET WITH CURBS. 14.00/S.F. IS FULLY DEVELOPED PRICE, READY FOR CONSTRUCTION. WILL DIVIDE AS DESIRED. PRELIMINARY SITE PLAN CONCEPT ON FILE. HAMPSHIRE'S NEW GOVERNMMENT CENTER TO BE BUILT ACROSS THE STREET FROM PROPERTY. $14 per sq ft, (~$12M total, price $610,000 per acre.)

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Meeting Nick Calabrese: Good Instincts or Naive?

Friends of ours: Nick Calabrese

Received an email from a reader who shared his own personal opinion and experiences with running into Nick Calabrese around his neighborhood in Chicago. Nick is currently in the Federal Witness Protection Program and expected to be a key witness U.S. Attorney in their Operation Family Secrets trial later this summer.

I used to go into a cafe on Cumberland just north or Lawrence several years back called Il Cafe'. I was in there one day with one of my friends and their was this large older man about 6'2 or so with salt and pepper hair and beedy eyes. He was "cut up" as in lean and muscular. I said to my buddy Brian "that guys in the mob." My friend Brian laughed at me and said "that's Nicole's father." I guess Nicole was some girl he knew. Brian said "he was in jail with those kind of guys but he's not in the mob."

Another time I was in Il Cafe' and the gentleman came in again. I was standing at the counter drinking an espresso. The gentleman was talking to the girl about a squirmish that had taken place the night before in which he pulled a gun out to scare off some punks, as the girl had stated. She said "Nick you had a gun I saw it." He said "maybe you thought you saw and gun but you didn't and that's what you should tell the police." She said "but Nick you did have a gun." Nick then left the cafe. I told the girl "you know that guys a mobster." "Don't you understand what he's trying to tell you?" She laughed at me and said I was "crazy" "Nick's not in the mob." I couldn't believe her stupidity.

The last time I saw Nick I was standing again at the counter drinking an espresso and he came in and starting teasing the girl behind the counter. He then looked at me and said "is this your girlfriend?" To which I replied "no." He then asked "do you speak Italian?" To which I answered "no." and he ignored me after that.

I can tell you that this man gave me chills. He didn't dress flashy or stick out. He would always wear Levi's a t-shirt and slip ons with no socks. But when you looked at him you knew he was tough and commanded respect without acting like a tough guy. His eyes were very small and dark you couldn't even see the whites of them.

It was until a year or two after this I seen an article in the Sun Times with an old picture of him and about "operation family secrets."

Either I have good instincts or people are really naive, LOL.

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The Chicago Outfit is the Smartest Mob in the Country

In an exclusive interview with Sean Chercover, Cameron Hughes touched on a number of topics including the mob in Chicago. Of particular interest, is Chercover's view of the past and current condition of the Chicago Mob.

Sean Chercover's first novel, Big City, Bad Blood, was a surprising debut. Just when I thought the Private Investigator sub-genre was on life support, along came this gritty, realistic story. Sean Chercover used his real experiences as a PI to make his writing better and I got a kick out of it. He knows and loves the genre well and had some interesting things to say about cliches, character development, and more.

CHUD: Obviously Chicago is famous for the Mafia, but ever since the RICO Act, is it still a noticeable presence there, or is it just amped up in the book to give it more color?

SC: Organized crime is alive and well and still extremely powerful in Chicago. Extremely. The Chicago Outfit was (and is) the smartest mob in the country. First, they're the only mob that stayed true to the "no narcotics" rule. Second, they divested themselves of street-level prostitution over the last 20 years or so. And third, they've made huge investments in legitimate "upperworld" industries.

Staying out of narcotics and getting out of street-level prostitution (they still run the high-end sex trade, mind you) has had two major consequences. First, it takes the heat off, because drug dealers and prostitutes on the streets are the things that the civilians get riled up about. Second, it has made the black and latino street gangs very, very powerful, because they run the narcotics and street prostitution. Consequently, the cops focus mostly on the street gangs, because that's what the civilians are upset about.

Anyway, the mob in Chicago showed a great deal of discipline by not getting into narcotics and by getting out of street prostitution, and it has allowed them to stay clear of a lot of police attention that would otherwise be directed at them. The other thing - investing heavily in legitimate businesses - has given them the stature to buy their way into positions of political power. They own way more than you might suspect, and they use the legitimacy as a front, to funnel money where it can buy influence. Unions, politics, and so on.

Anyone who thinks that the Outfit is ancient history should read the books by investigative reporter Gus Russo. Start with The Outfit. Great overview. And everyone with an interest in current organized crime and how it corrupts the political process should visit the website The Illinois Police and Sheriff's News. An incredible resource. I go there regularly.

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