Apologies for the light posting; as I mentioned a couple weeks back, I had some paternity leave coming up. Funny thing about paternity leave, at least when you (thankfully!) have a healthy baby: there's a lot of sitting around on the couch while the baby feeds and sleeps. With so much time on our hands, the wife and I decided to go re-watch a few seasons of The Sopranos. And while doing so I came to the realization that the most important character on the show isn't Tony or any of his flunkies. No. It's Sal Vitro.
You may not remember Sal, and I wouldn't blame you. He's introduced in the fifth season as a sub-ancillary character. Indeed, his role is so minor he doesn't even merit a page to himself at the Sopranos' Wikia. But his experiences help us understand the true horror of the world of organized crime.
Sal is a gardener. He's just a regular guy doing his job, putting his kid through school. But because of the way Jersey works—the way mobsters intimidate and harass and hurt people—he is made to suffer. Turns out that a newly released con and member of the Soprano family, Feech La Manna, has a relative who wants to work the area that Sal works. So Feech tells Sal to take a hike. When Sal responds that he's worked these blocks for years, Feech viciously beats him and breaks his arm. When Paulie Walnuts hears about this—Sal cuts his aunt's grass—he goes to bat for Sal, throwing a beating of his own on Feech's relative and getting Sal his yards back. In exchange for this "favor," Sal is now expected to throw Paulie a few percent of his earnings and do a few yards for free. Big yards. Yards owned by the bosses. Yards that take whole days to manicure.
For the rest of the series, we see Sal pop up here and there in the background. Carmela notes with sadness later on that Sal's son was forced to drop out of school so he could help his dad. The sadness is not occasioned by Sal's misfortune, exactly, but because Carmela doesn't see the same kind of work ethic out of her own worthless son. Sal often toils in the background, throwing woeful, impotent glances at the boss whose house he has been forced to maintain. Eventually, He's given a reprieve when a Brooklyn boss pleads guilty and he's no longer required to do the killer's acres of foliage. The look of joy on his face as he's let out of this extra duty—and, perhaps, given a chance to escape the penury to which he has been consigned—is both hilarious and heartbreaking.
Now, none of this is particularly extraordinary. We see normal folks hurt by these hoods all the time. And we see multi-episode tales of woe play out for ancillary characters, though they tend to have it coming in one way or another. But Sal is really the only repeatedly shown civilian who has done literally nothing wrong and whose life is made worse by the Soprano family and its shenanigans. He exists in the background, a constant reminder of the human toll organized crime has. With the possible exception of the montage that closes the show's second season*, it's the harshest moral indictment that David Chase and company file against Tony and his crew. To understand the world of The Sopranos, you have to understand, and sympathize with, Sal Vitro.
*That montage is pretty gut wrenching. We see Tony and his friends cavorting around the boss' mansion, enjoying fine food and drink as they celebrate another successful year. Cut in between the laughing, smiling faces are the reminders of the wreckage the Sopranos have left in their wake: a sporting goods store owner whose life is in shambles, a hotel run by Hasids that has come to ruin, the ocean in which the body of his best friend has been dumped.