Tony Soprano owns a very large, very nice house, from long before season 1, episode 1. At that point he’s just a captain. Arguably the most powerful captain, but still just a captain. Every time we ever see anyone else’s home, with the exception of Johnny Sack, it’s an average middle-class home. Junior Soprano has been in the game for like 50 years and his home is very modest. Even Jackie Aprile, the acting boss at the beginning of the show, has a very modest, average middle-class house (I don’t think it’s ever shown when he is alive, but I assume his widow Rosalie is still in the same house, which we do see).
Is it ever explained why Tony appears to be so much more well off than everyone else?
I suspect that it’s just a storytelling thing. In the bulk of the show, he has a big house because he’s rich because he’s the boss. In the flashbacks, he has a big house because that’s Tony Soprano’s house.
It’s sort of like how the Greek myths will describe a particular god or hero as wielding a particular item, even in stories that chronologically come before the god or hero acquired that item, because it’s so emblematic of that particular god or hero.
A couple of grasping-at-straws answers: Unlike a lot of the other guys, Tony’s never been to prison, so he’s been able to steadily earn and build his “businesses” since he joined the family. Also, by the standards of most of the other guys, his vices aren’t that expensive. He isn’t much of a gambler until late in the series, he doesn’t use drugs the way Christopher does, and he’s reasonably content so long as he has a big TV. His main expense seems to be buying diamond trinkets for his hookups.
And hell, maybe Carm’s parents gave them the down payment on the house as a wedding gift.
He’s the most powerful captain because he’s the highest earner, of which he keeps a good amount. My impression of organized crime is that it resembles the franchise system. There are franchise owners who can get pretty rich.
Perhaps some bosses try to keep a low profile since they’re at the top of police attention.
In terms of storytelling and production: They must have figured that Tony’s house was going to be the most commonly seen house so they might as well go bigger on that in terms of aesthetics and sets.
He lives in that house because his wife wanted it. And while the show never specifically stated so, Carmela’s greed has always been open - she loved the diamonds, the cars, the land, all the stuff that Tony could buy her. And when he could afford a big McMansion in the Jersey burbs, complete with good schools, imho, she had him buy that for her too.
Outside of the show, the house also “normalizes” the Sopranos in a way a typical small NE house would not, for there isn’t a city in middle-America that doesn’t have those stucco monstrosities.
To me the house symbolizes Tony’s ambivalence toward his mob life. The mob way is to live in a small house in the neighborhood and spend money on other things. There is a part of Tony that yearns for middle class respectability. That is why he needs to see the shrink. As he rises in the organization and keeps doing evil things, the normal part of him is slowly killed off and he no longer has to see the shrink because he becomes a psychopath and his conscience no longer bothers him.
Just because Tony has a bigger house doesn’t mean he’s richer. It just means he spent more on a house.
Remember in Godfather 2 when Michael Corleone went to Hyman Roth’s house? It was a very modest house. Made it look like he was ‘an old man on a pension’.
Another factor may be that it reflects Tony was a second generation mob leader. His father had been a mob leader before him and had presumably built up some money. Having Tony live in a big house is a reminder that he’s not a self-made man and part of his power is based on being his father’s son.
I think it’s more like multi-level-marketing; which fits your analysis too. He wants others to want to work for him and make money for his organization, so he has to show off what the organization has done for him. I’ve heard of MLM guys living in huge and hugely-mortgaged houses in order to advertise themselves as successful.
True, but it’s not just the house. Tony’s got rain barrels and trash cans overflowing with bricks of $100 bills, like he’s struggling to find places to store it. Maybe we’re just never shown it, but it doesn’t seem like the other characters have this issue; in fact many of them frequently seem to be broke.
Yes. I’ve often wondered about that and the movie/TV/book trope where (presumably) successful organized crime figures live in very modest homes. (I’ll leave it to readers to check out books and articles that describe how OC figures lived in the 40s, 50s, and 60s.) What’s the point of exposing yourself to “30 years to life” when you’re going to live in a 1500 square foot bungalow?
I think he did some short stints in jail but no long sentences like his cousin Tony B. or Phil Leotardo. Also when he talked about Vito being gay to Dr. Melfi he said “guys get a pass” for gay sex in prison since there are no women.
I think it’s also like a MLM scheme in that the guy at the top of the pyramid gets most of the money. The guys in the middle of the pyramid aren’t seeing much reward for the amount of work they contribute. The best they can hope for is to work their way up to the top and begin exploiting the guys still working in the middle.
It’s not just The Sopranos. In most mob movies, the guys further down the totem pole are typically struggling. I’d think that the Freakanomics section on “Why Drug Dealers Live With Their Mothers” explains it. Basically, there’s just not enough money in the game for most people to get rich. The top guys take the majority of the spoils, and the rest are just rummaging for the scraps.
Tony is smarter in taking advantage of an opportunity than most people around him and just as ruthless. Carmela’s cousin Brian, a financial adviser, makes an observation that you could defraud HUD with a bs husing deal. Tony puts together a scheme with Dr Fried as a buyer and Assemblyman Zellman and Maurice Tiffen who wotrks with youth gang outreach but has child support payments from his first marriage. Tony isn’t satisfied with this scam and has Zellman and Tiffen organize some teens to evict the crack addicts living on the properties by force so he can strip the houses of copper piping, worth $8,000 for each of the four houses.
When you have gardener Sal Vitro caught upin a feud between Paulie Walnuts and Feech La Manna, part of the settlement is Vitro finds himself maintaining Tony’s house, as wll as Johnn Sack’s, for free.
He is also lucky. He could have ended up in jail for 17 years for hijacking like his cousin Tony Blundetto. But he had an anxiety attack and was not there.
The reason Tony has the big house is that in the pilot episode (filmed like a year before the rest of the first season) he is the boss of the family. He gets retconned to captain when they started production on the full series, but they kept the house.
It was a good idea to keep him in the same house, though, because it works as a great metaphor. Tony, being such a greedy, jealous, narcissist simply has to have the biggest, best, and most of everything. And then we later learn that Hugh built the house (a mechanical reason, perhaps, for how a captain could afford such a huge house) with dangerously low-grade material, which is just a fantastic reflection of Tony Soprano’s life.
There is an episode where AJ has some friends over and they wonder why the Soprano house is not as big as the Corleone compound in “The Godfather”. Probably real estate prices in Long Island in the 1930s vs Northern New Jersey in the 1990s has something to do with it. Vito also has no spending vices, at least never mentioned.
Junior Soprano has apparently hid some money but his dementia takes hold before he can dig it up. Johnny Boy may have buried money in his house but Janice can’t find it. When Christopher gets married he buys a nice house.
