Salvatore "Big Pussy" Bonpensiero¶
At a glance¶
- Played by
- Vincent Pastore
- Position
- Soldier, DiMeo family — Tony's oldest friend
- Flipped
- FBI informant, from before S2
- Died
- 2000 — shot on a boat by Tony, Silvio, and Paulie, "Funhouse" (S2E26)
You know I'd never wear a wire on you, T.
The show's first great betrayal, and the one that establishes what the series is actually willing to do.
The arc¶
Pussy is Tony's oldest friend — the two go back to childhood, and the warmth between them is real and constantly on display. He's funny, affectionate, physically enormous, and completely embedded in the family's life: at the barbecues, at the christenings, at the table.
He disappears at the end of season one under a cloud of suspicion about a wire. He returns in season two with a story about back surgery in Puerto Rico, and the show lets the audience believe it for a while.
Then, in "From Where to Eternity" (S2E22), we see him with his FBI handler, and the rest of the season becomes a slow-motion execution that everyone but Tony can feel coming.
Why he flipped is never given a heroic gloss: a narcotics charge, a long sentence, kids, and fear. He isn't malicious. He's frightened, in over his head, and increasingly drunk about it.
The fish¶
In "Funhouse" (S2E26), Tony gets food poisoning from bad Indian takeout and spends most of the episode feverish and dreaming.
In the dreams he already knows what he's spent thirteen episodes not knowing. He talks to a talking fish on a boardwalk, speaking in Pussy's voice, which tells him plainly: you know I've been working with the government, Tony.
The unconscious gets there first. That's the show's recurring proposition about dreams — they're where characters know what they've refused to think. See Dreams & Symbolism.
The boat¶
Tony wakes up, confirms it — a wire in a closet — and takes Pussy out on the boat with Silvio and Paulie, ostensibly to look at a purchase.
What follows is one of the great scenes in the series, and its power is in the manners.
Everyone knows. Nobody says so for a long time. They drink. They reminisce. And then Tony says it, and Pussy admits it, and the conversation becomes almost administrative — how long, how much, what he told them.
He asks not to be shot in the face.
They shoot him and put him over the side. On the ride back nobody talks, and Tony leans over the rail and vomits.
Afterward¶
Pussy keeps appearing. He's in Tony's dreams for years. He's the voice in the "Test Dream" (S5E63) alongside the other dead. Season six brings him back in the coma sequences.
More than any other death, this one stays with Tony — because it's the first time the audience sees him kill someone he genuinely loved, and because the show establishes here that friendship is not a defence against the business.
Vincent Pastore¶
Pastore ran a nightclub in New Rochelle before acting, and is one of the 27 actors who appear in both Goodfellas and The Sopranos.
He has said he was told the character's fate well in advance, which is unusual — Chase generally didn't tell actors they were being killed until the script arrived.