Phil Leotardo¶
At a glance¶
- Played by
- Frank Vincent
- Position
- Capo → underboss → Boss, Lupertazzi family
- Served
- 20 years in prison
- Died
- 2007 — shot at a gas station; his head crushed by his own SUV, "Made in America" (S6E86)
Twenty years. I lost twenty years.
The final antagonist, and the show's most complete portrait of a man who has converted suffering into permission.
The grievance¶
Phil did twenty years. He says so constantly. It is the organizing fact of his personality and the justification for everything he does.
The show is careful about this: his suffering was real. He went in young and came out old, missed his children growing up, and kept his mouth shut the whole time. In the value system he lives by, he is owed enormously.
And the show is equally careful that being owed makes him worse rather than better. Phil's grievance is bottomless — nothing can settle it, so everything is permitted.
He is also, unlike Johnny Sack, not a businessman. He doesn't want an arrangement with New Jersey. He wants to be paid in humiliation, and he says so: at one point he explains that he isn't interested in negotiating, he's interested in taking.
Vito¶
The clearest statement of what Phil is.
Vito Spatafore — Phil's wife's cousin, and the DiMeo family's best earner — is outed as gay, flees to New Hampshire, finds a genuinely happy life, and comes back anyway.
Tony's calculation is financial and he's inclined to let it slide. Phil is not. He has Vito beaten to death in a motel room in a killing the show declines to show in full and makes unmistakably clear.
Phil's stated reason is family honour. The show suggests something more specific and never spells it out.
The war¶
As boss, Phil escalates deliberately: he refuses to negotiate over the asbestos business, orders the deaths of the DiMeo leadership, and gets Bobby killed and Silvio shot in "The Blue Comet."
Tony, with almost nobody left, gets word to Butch DeConcini — Phil's own underboss — who is tired of the disruption and quietly gives permission.
The death¶
At a gas station in Oyster Bay, in front of his wife and grandchildren, Phil is shot in the head by Walden Belfiore.
His wife, screaming, leaves the SUV in gear. It rolls forward. His head goes under the front wheel, and there is a sound, and two bystanders react.
It is the most graphic death in the series, played with a bystander's queasy, almost comic revulsion — and it happens with three episodes' worth of buildup dispatched in about fifteen seconds.
Notably, it is not the climax. It happens in the middle of the final episode, and the show moves straight on. Whatever the finale is doing, it isn't building to Phil.
Frank Vincent¶
A veteran of the genre — Billy Batts in Goodfellas (go home and get your shining box) and Raging Bull and Casino — which makes the casting another piece of the show's deliberate lineage. He is one of 27 actors in both Goodfellas and The Sopranos.
He died on September 13, 2017, aged 80.