Tony Blundetto¶
At a glance¶
- Played by
- Steve Buscemi
- Relation
- Tony Soprano's cousin
- Served
- 17 years, federal
- Trained in
- Massage therapy, in prison
- Died
- 2004 — shot by Tony, "All Due Respect" (S5E65)
The best guest arc in the series, and the one that gets closest to a genuine alternative life.
The debt¶
The two Tonys were arrested together on a job in 1986. Tony Soprano didn't show up that night — he'd had a panic attack, brought on by an argument with his mother, and told everyone he was jumped.
Blundetto went alone, got caught, and did seventeen years.
Tony has carried that for two decades, and it makes him incapable of thinking clearly about his cousin. He gives him money, opportunities, and latitude that would get anyone else killed, because the alternative is admitting what happened.
Going straight¶
Blundetto comes out genuinely intending to change. He got certified in massage therapy inside. He has a plan: a legitimate business, a normal life, a woman who runs a nail salon.
The show takes this seriously for six episodes, and it's the closest anyone gets to leaving — closer than Vito, because Blundetto is smart enough to actually build it.
What kills it is small and humiliating: a job interview where he's patronized, a client who treats him like staff, and the daily arithmetic of legitimate money against what he could make in an afternoon.
The moment he goes back is one of the show's best pieces of writing, and there's no drama in it at all. He just takes an easy job.
The war¶
Blundetto kills Joey Peeps, a Lupertazzi soldier, on Little Carmine's side of the New York succession fight — freelance, without sanction, for a payday.
Johnny Sack wants him. Tony, drowning in seventeen years of guilt, refuses to give him up. The refusal escalates until it threatens open war between the families, and Tony's own crew begins to lose confidence in him.
In the end Tony finds Blundetto first, at a farmhouse, and kills him with a shotgun himself — quickly, from the front, before New York can take him and do it slowly.
It is presented as a mercy and it is also self-preservation, and Tony spends the rest of the series unable to say which it was. Johnny Sack never forgives him for the theft of it.
Steve Buscemi¶
Buscemi had already directed four episodes of the show — including "Pine Barrens" (S3E37) — before being cast in it, which is an unusual route into an ensemble.
He was Emmy-nominated for the performance, and it's a genuinely different register from the rest of his career: quiet, tired, and mostly played in the eyes of a man doing arithmetic he already knows the answer to.
He went on to lead Boardwalk Empire (2010–14), created by Terence Winter — one of several Sopranos alumni projects that defined HBO's next decade.