The Don Con

by Richard Armstrong

  It was good advice, so I smiled and nodded. But I didn’t hear a word of it. Having a face-to-face conversation with Tony Soprano left me star struck.

  So my impression of James Gandolfini? He was a decent guy.

  But am I going to tell all this to some geek who waited in line for fifteen minutes to get an autograph? Of course not. First of all, it would reveal that I hardly knew James Gandolfini at all. That’s the last thing I wanted to do in this situation. Secondly, it would take too much time. So I had a stock answer:

  “He was a great man. A great actor. He was very helpful to me in my career. He gave me some advice about acting I’ll never forget. But he was a troubled man. A complex man. I couldn’t really get close to him. I wish I could, because maybe if I’d been a better friend I could’ve helped him.”

  The usual response to this was, “Wow!”

  To which I would say, “Did you bring something for me to sign or did you want a photograph?”

  This was the cue for my assistant at the convention to give his spiel, which went something like this: “If you brought something for Mr. Volpe to sign, the charge is thirty-five dollars. If not, you can buy a headshot for fifteen dollars. If you want me to take your picture with Mr. Volpe using your phone, that’s an extra twenty-five dollars. Most people take the whole package, so that’s seventy-five dollars. Cash only. Exact change would help.”

  My assistant’s name was David. He was a nerd. And quite proud of it. He made no attempt to hide it. Crew cut, horned-rim glasses, white short-sleeved dress shirt. His skin was so pale that I thought he was wearing the shade of makeup referred to in the theater as clown white. Everybody here was a nerd or a geek and none of them seemed the least bit ashamed of it. This was the one place in the world where they could embrace their nerdiness. David was one of the hundreds of volunteers here at the 2014 Fan-a-Palooza Con in Atlantic City. He did this work for the sheer pleasure of rubbing shoulders with superstars like myself. He understood that at the end of the day, I would give him about 5 percent of the day’s take for a tip. Some of my fellow celebrities were so cheap they refused to hire someone like David to help them. I tried that and regretted it.

  It’s demeaning enough signing eight-by-ten-inch photographs of yourself at a fan convention without managing hordes of autograph seekers. Keeping them in line. Asking them face-to-face for money. “Only cash, please, I can’t take credit cards.” Making change when necessary. Stuffing twenty-dollar bills until every pocket in your pants and your shirt is overflowing, and you’re shoving money in your shoes and down your underpants.

  (Nowadays, more and more actors take credit cards. Or so I’m told. But this was several years ago, and it was still an all-cash business.)

  Meanwhile, each one of these fans wants to stop and chat with you about what James Gandolfini was really like. Or their secret theory that Carmela Soprano was an informant for the FBI. Or every now and then—and I must confess I had a soft spot for these fans—somebody would remember the other cable television series I was on, Button Men. I had a pretty big role on that show. Well, not big exactly, but big enough for my name to show up in the credits.

  Even though I was a gangster on TV, it was David’s job to play the bad guy in this little scene. I played the charming celebrity who wanted nothing more than to spend the day chatting with his fans. After I delivered my stock answer about Gandolfini, David took over. “As you can see, sir, Mr. Volpe is very busy. There are a lot of people waiting in line to get his autograph. Unless you want me to take a picture with you and Mr. Volpe—and that’s an extra twenty-five dollars, cash please—I’m going to have to ask you to move along and give the next person in line a chance to meet him.”

  I smiled at the fan and shrugged my shoulders as if to say, “I’d love to talk to you all day. But alas, I must obey this geeky little nerd seated next to me because he’s wearing an official volunteer badge around his neck.”

  “Naaah,” said the fan. “No picture. I would like the autograph, though. And could you make it out to Barry, a real pezzonovante?”

  I chuckled. Pezzonovante meant ninety caliber in Italian. I knew this for two reasons. My father was a professor of Italian literature at the University of Pennsylvania. He was born in Genoa and moved here with his parents, my grandparents, when he was five years old. So I’m second generation and I speak a little Italian. I also knew the word pezzonovante because it’s used throughout the Godfather movies as a Sicilian expression meaning big shot. The characters always said it with a touch of sarcasm, implying the person in question was powerful but not trustworthy. In proper Italian the phrase would be pezzo da novanta. But I didn’t bother to correct the guy.

  Instead, I signed the autograph just the way he wanted it. David collected the cash. Before I knew it, I was face-to-face with the next fan in line. Who turned out to be a real pezzonovante. And who changed my life forever.

  Not for the better.

  3

  I’d been watching the next fan in line out of the corner of my eye for the past fifteen minutes as he worked his way to the front. I noticed him because he looked like a gangster.

  Not that this was unusual. In any given line of people waiting to get my autograph at a fan convention (sometimes known as a Fan-Con), at least two or three of them would dress like gangsters. Most of them wore 1930s-style zoot suits with spats on their shoes. They sported wide ties with a glittery diamond tie clasp fastened a few inches under the knot. The pinstripes on their suits were so wide you could no longer call them “pin” stripes. They were like chalk marks used to outline a dead body on the sidewalk. A Sinatra-style felt fedora topped it all off.

  When considering the way most attendees at a Fan-Con dressed, the gangster-movie fans were the soul of sartorial understatement. There were Klingons from Star Trek, complete with the elaborate facial makeup that made their foreheads look like a turtle shell. There were a few Darth Vaders wandering around, dragging their light sabers behind them. Superman. Batman. Spiderman. Plus, dozens of caped crusaders of one kind or another that I didn’t recognize. (I was never a big fan of superhero comics when I was a kid.) Then there was the whole contingent of fantasy, vampire, and zombie fans. Again, these are literary genres with which I am unfamiliar. I couldn’t tell who was who and couldn’t care less.

  What was intriguing about the guy who looked like a gangster was that he did not dress like a movie gangster. He looked like a real gangster. No zoot suit. No chalky pinstripes. No diamond tie clasp. No tie at all.

  So how does a real gangster dress?

  It’s not the fine tailored suits that John Gotti, the so-called dandy don, used to wear. He was the exception that proves the rule. A real gangster wears an ordinary white dress shirt with an open collar. The gold chains around the neck are a dead giveaway, especially the number of them. One necklace is not unusual on any man nowadays. Neither is an earring, come to think of it. Three or more gold chains tells you that you might be dealing with a mobster. One of these necklaces will have a crucifix attached with a small figurine of Jesus Christ in extremis. Inevitably, another necklace will contain an Italian teardrop-style heart. On a single neck you can not only witness the passion of Christ but also see someone shed a tear about it. A gangster’s watch is almost always a fifty-thousand-dollar diamond-studded gold Rolex. For that kind of money you could buy a nice Patek Philippe from Switzerland or Breguet from France. These guys always think Rolex is the epitome of fine watchmaking. A diamond pinky ring? It goes without saying. The pants are ordinary gabardine black slacks. It’s in their choice of shoes where they sometimes show a flash of good taste. Bruno Magli. Ferragamo. Gucci. Prada. Gangsters think nothing of spending a thousand bucks to decorate their feet.

  How do I know all this? Two ways.

  While killing time on the set of Button Men, I had a long conversation with a chatty woman who worked in the wardrobe department. She told me the producers hired consultants to tell them what real-life gangsters wear. How these consulta
nts acquired such expertise, she couldn’t say for sure. She suspected some of them were former undercover cops or gangsters themselves.

  The other way I know what real gangsters wear is that every now and then I meet one of them. It’s hard to tell for sure. For every hundred guys who come up to me and try to leave the impression they are in the Mafia, I’m sure ninety-nine of them are faking it. They’re Italian. They’ve got the New York accent. They’re dressed about right (except for the shoes and watch). But I’m sure the vast majority are insurance salesman, autobody mechanics, or grocery store clerks who get a kick out of pretending to be Mafiosi—especially when they meet an actor who played a gangster on TV. If guys like this ever ran into a real gangster, they’d wet their pants.

  Which may be why I felt a twinge in my bladder when I came face-to-face with the next guy in the autograph line. I had a feeling he wasn’t faking it. Something about his hooded eyes. His bent nose. The nasty scar that extended from his left ear down to his chin. His old acne pockmarks looked like his face had caught on fire and someone tried to put it out with a chain saw. And his clothing? Well, it fit the pattern.

  “How you doin’?” he said. “Nice to meet you.”

  The accent was not New York, which was unusual. Wannabe gangsters almost always spoke some version of Brooklynese. But this accent was 100 percent pure Philadelphia.

  I was good with voices and accents as an actor. That was the big rap on me when I went to drama school and got my MFA at Yale. “He’s just a voice and makeup actor,” they’d say behind my back. Of course, I heard the gossip from my so-called friends.

  “Yeah, well, Lawrence Olivier was a voice and makeup actor, too,” I’d say. “And it worked out pretty well for him.”

  “You’re no Olivier,” they’d reply.

  The criticism always stung. In part because I knew it was true. Whenever I approached a new role, I tried to come up with some exotic accent or strange voice that might fit the character. Lawrence Olivier notwithstanding, it’s a superficial way to approach the craft of acting and it took me years to outgrow it.

  I could never do the South Philly accent myself. Maybe I was too close to it. Like I said, my dad taught at Penn. I grew up in the Main Line suburban town of Gladwyne, where my mother had a private practice as an ob-gyn doc. And I went to college in Haverford, Pennsylvania, yet another Philadelphia suburb. I heard the accent my whole life on local television or whenever I ventured downtown to Center City (“Senner See”).

  But my father, who learned English the hard way as a five-year-old immigrant from Italy, was a stickler for correct pronunciation and grammar at home. So I grew up speaking a standard American dialect like a network radio announcer from the 1930s.

  But I could recognize a South Philadelphia accent in a heartbeat. Like a latter-day Henry Higgins, I fancied myself something of an expert on it. I could tell you where a Philadelphian grew up within a radius of a hundred feet after hearing him say a single sentence.

  So when the strange man in front of me said, “I came allzaway downashoor from Filelfia to seeyuz,” I would’ve been willing to bet he was born no farther from Philadelphia’s Little Italy than you could throw a strand of limp spaghetti.

  Translated into English he said: “I came all the way down to the shore from Philadelphia to see you.”

  “Well, I sure appreciate it,” I replied.

  “Downashoor” could mean anywhere from Asbury Park at the northern tip of the Jersey shore to Cape May at the southern end. In this case, he was talking about Atlantic City, which was an hour from Philly. His weary tone implied that he had just made the pilgrimage of the Camino di Santiago, crawling on his hands and knees all the way from Paris to the coast of Spain.

  “Yeah, I came allzaway downashoor to seeyuz,” he said, as if his sacrifice had not made enough impact on me the first time.

  “And I’m glad you did. What’s your name?” I said while reaching for the Sharpie pen in the hope I could dispatch this guy as soon as possible.

  “Tony Rosetti.”

  “Well, it’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Rosetti. Should I make this out to you or to someone else?”

  “My name don’t mean nuthin’ to you?”

  (By the way, I’m going to stop trying to recreate the Philadelphia accent from this point forward. First, because it’s not reproducible on paper, relying as it does on peculiar diphthongs, glottal stops, and other unpleasant noises that linguists haven’t discovered yet, much less transcribed. Second, it’s one of the ugliest accents in the world—like the Baltimore accent without the charm.)

  “Should it mean something to me? Did we work together?”

  “No, you’ve never worked for me, that’s for sure,” he said with a nasty smile.

  “I mean were you on Sopranos or Button Men or in some other show with me?”

  “I’m no actor,” he said.

  “Then how do we know each other?”

  “We don’t know each other. I thought you might recognize my name, that’s all.”

  “Well, I’m sorry, Mr. Rosetti, but it doesn’t ring a bell. We don’t even have any Rosettis in my family. Sometimes I think I’m related to every Italian on the East Coast.”

  It was a lame attempt at humor, but I thought it might at least get him to crack a smile. Instead, he bored into me with those hooded eyes.

  He said nothing for a long time. Like any actor, I abhorred the vacuum of silence and felt the need to fill it with the sound of my own voice. “So I’ll make this out to Tony Rosetti, then, okay?”

  “I don’t want your autograph.”

  “Sir, you already paid for it.”

  I turned to David to confirm that this guy had purchased the eight-by-ten photo and paid for my signature. David was looking rather pale. Paler than usual, I should say. He’d been listening to this conversation. Maybe he recognized the name Tony Rosetti. I felt the need to wrap this up. I began writing without waiting for any further instruction from Mr. Rosetti.

  “‘To Tony Rosetti,’” I said aloud as I wrote the words in big block letters with a silver Sharpie that would show up against the dark background. “‘In bocca al lupo! Sincerely, Joseph Volpe.’ How does that sound?”

  In bocca al lupo was an Italian expression that meant “Good luck.” Literally, it meant “In the wolf’s mouth.” The traditional response was “Crepi il lupo,” or “May the wolf die.” (Failure to complete this non-rhyming couplet is bad luck indeed.) I always used this line whenever I ran into an autograph-seeker of Italian descent. But I usually had to translate it for them. Not Mr. Rosetti, though.

  “Crepi il lupo,” he said. “But I already told you I don’t want your autograph. I want to talk to you.”

  “Mr. Rosetti, sir, we’ve got hundreds of people behind you in line.”

  I glanced at the line to confirm the accuracy of my estimate. There were about seven people standing around looking ready to go somewhere else.

  “Well, I mean, we’ve got almost a dozen people in line waiting for an autograph. It wouldn’t be fair to them if I talked much longer to you. They’ve been waiting a long time.”

  I turned to David for support. Dealing with problems like this was what he was there for, after all. To say he had a deer-in-the-headlights look on his face would be putting it mildly. It was more like the look you’d expect to see on the face of an American newspaper reporter threatened by a terrorist with decapitation.

  “Not here. Not now. I want to take you to lunch. I know a nice Italian place on Baltic Avenue.”

  “I already have a luncheon engagement today, sir,” I said like Miss Manners declining an unwanted invitation.

  “Drink at the bar, then?”

  “I’m not a big drinker.”

  I appealed to David again with a helpless glance. He couldn’t speak.

  “Wooder ice onna boorwawk?”

  Sorry, I know I promised no more Philadelphia accents. Wooder ice was South Philly’s way of saying water ice, which most Americans
call Italian Ices and what Italians themselves call granita. The rest of the sentence you can figure out for yourself.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Rosetti. I have ninety minutes for lunch. As I said, I’m meeting a friend. Then I have a panel discussion. After that, there’s another autograph session in the afternoon. So I’m booked solid all day.”

  “How about dinner, then? Look, Mr. Volpe, I want to talk to you about an acting job. There might be some money in it for you.”

  An acting job with money involved? He happened to mention the two things I wanted most at that moment. I had simple needs in life. Fame and fortune, that’s all. What he had to say tempted me to listen. But there was still something suspicious—like a cat offering a mouse two pieces of cheese. So I said, “You’ll need to talk to my agent about that.”

  “Naaah, you don’t want get your agent involved in something like this.”

  Just as well, I thought. If my agent ever got a call from someone wanting to hire Joey Volpe, her first reaction would be to ask, “Who’s Joey Volpe?”

  “So what do you say? How about dinner? My treat,” he said.

  I thought mobsters got people to do their bidding by threatening them with guns. I was beginning to learn that unrelenting, dogged persistence was their weapon of choice. This time I could think of no more excuses.

  “Uh, well, I …”

  “I’ll be back,” said Rosetti and he walked away.

  I turned to David and signaled him to hold up the autograph line for a moment so we could talk.

  “‘I’ll be back?’ Who does that guy think he is, The Terminator?”

  “Worse.”

  “You know him?”

  “I’ve seen his name in the papers. He’s part of what’s left of the Italian mob in Philadelphia.”

  “I know the names of all the big Philly mobsters,” I said. “Scarfo. Testa. Bruno. I never heard of this guy.”