John "Johnny Sack" Sacrimoni¶
At a glance¶
- Played by
- Vincent Curatola
- Position
- Underboss → Boss, Lupertazzi family (New York)
- Wife
- Ginny Sacrimoni
- Died
- 2006 — lung cancer, in federal custody, "Stage 5" (S6E79)
Tony's opposite number, closest peer, and the only person in the series who operates at his level.
The relationship¶
Johnny Sack lives in New Jersey while running New York business — a geographical oddity that makes him the permanent interface between the two families, and gives him and Tony a genuine, wary, sometimes warm working friendship.
They like each other. They understand each other's problems in a way nobody else does. And they are structurally obliged to be adversaries, which they both know and periodically regret.
Their scenes are the show's best depiction of the business as a business — two executives from competing firms who golf together, complain about their boards, and would each have the other killed if the numbers required it.
The Ginny joke¶
The best plotline in season four, and the purest demonstration of how this world works.
Ralph Cifaretto makes a crude joke about Ginny Sacrimoni's weight. Johnny hears about it and wants Ralph dead. Ralph is a huge earner. Tony refuses to sanction it. Johnny plans to do it anyway. Tony plans a preemptive hit on Johnny.
The two families come within a phone call of open war over a joke about a woman's weight — and Chase plays it entirely straight, because in a culture built on respect as currency, an insult is a financial event.
It's resolved by Carmine Sr., anticlimactically, and both men have to live with having planned each other's deaths.
The fall¶
Johnny becomes boss after Carmine Sr.'s death and a succession fight with Little Carmine. He is arrested almost immediately.
His humiliation is drawn out with real cruelty. In "Mr. & Mrs. John Sacrimoni Request…" (S6E70), he is granted a furlough to attend his daughter's wedding — and, at the end of the day, is taken back into custody on the lawn, in front of everyone, weeping openly.
The crew's reaction is the show at its most precise: they're not moved. They're disgusted. A man cried in public. Tony, who has spent seven years in therapy, is among the most contemptuous — and then goes and reassures himself in a mirror.
Johnny takes a plea — accepting a RICO conviction and admitting the existence of the organization, a serious breach — to protect his family's assets. He dies of lung cancer in custody in "Stage 5."
Vincent Curatola¶
A businessman before acting, with no formal training. He got the audition through a chance encounter and had never played a substantial screen role.
He has spoken about the perp-walk scene as the hardest thing he was asked to do, and about the crew's genuine on-set discomfort watching it.