Looks like The Sopranos were better at evading RICO than The Donald | Stile

It was two decades ago that gangster Tony Soprano first entered our living rooms by entering New Jersey, snapping up a turnpike toll ticket on his westbound journey home.

Now, after the unsealing of the 98-page indictment against former President Donald Trump and associates in Fulton County, Georgia, we have a new, real-life alleged racketeer prowling New Jersey’s highways: The Donald — or maybe now it should simply be “The Don” — heading in a chauffeur-driven SUV to his golf club nestled in Bedminster.

Tony is complete fiction. The Don, the capo di tutti i capi of “The Enterprise,’’ as it's described in the indictment, allegedly spearheaded a stranger-than-fiction operation to overthrow the 2020 election.

Yet as you plow through the sprawling document detailing the scheme, stretching from Arizona to Washington to Atlanta, there are some striking similarities between the Soprano crew leader's actions and the alleged real-life operation led by the ex-president who just also happens to be the runaway favorite for the GOP presidential nomination in 2024.

Both operations relied on the tactics of witness tampering, intimidation, theft and even impersonating public officers. Both were consumed with maintaining power regardless of the collateral damage to those around them.

The Soprano crew and The Enterprise also conducted themselves with the sociopathic reasoning that the laws didn’t apply to them. The Sopranos lived outside the law; members of Trump’s “Enterprise” simply ignored the law and made up their own rules (and slates of electors) when it suited them, prosecutors say.

Tony lived in mortal fear of being dragged down by the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), the sweeping law that targets large criminal conspiracies. The Trump Enterprise got snagged in a real RICO dragnet.

And while there is no suggestion or evidence that The Enterprise “whacked” its enemies with guns or baseball bats or piano wire, Trump ultimately allowed the violence to rampage at the U.S. Capitol when all else failed. He let it happen, even as his followers threatened to let his vice president swing from the gallows.

Seasoned thugs vs. white-collar goons

But in this comparison between the real world and television make-believe — a realm where Trump thrived before running for president — there are some stark differences.

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Tony ran a crew of seasoned thugs and managed the competing factions with Machiavellian shrewdness.

Trump ran a crew of white-collar goons and crackpots who -- metaphorically speaking, of course -- couldn't shoot straight. They made moves that would have been laughed right out of Satriale’s Pork Store — even if most of Tony’s crew would probably have been reliable MAGA voters.

For one thing, Tony or his lieutenants would never be so stupid as to shake down a person of significance over the phone, as Trump is accused of doing when he pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to find 11,780 votes that would have delivered him the state — and the national election. And worse, to do it with other people on the phone?

Racketeers and gangsters talk in code, or not at all.

“You know that other party who said he saw something that we know didn't happen?” Paulie “Walnuts” Gualtieri reports in a phone call to Tony about a witness recanting his testimony. “He realizes now he didn't see what we know didn’t happen.”

(It was not a hard-and-fast rule, however. Soprano crews could get surprisingly candid on the cellphone with each other at times.)

The Enterprise goons also proved to be rank amateurs in the art of intimidation. When Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows flew to Georgia to personally observe the auditing of votes, officials basically made him cool his heels in the hallway. Can you imagine Paulie Walnuts or Silvio Dante being politely shown the door when tasked with intimidating someone? They would have torn the door off its hinges — for starters.

Even The Don, a protégé of the notorious mob boss Roy Cohn, puffed himself up with goon talk on Twitter, in an attempt to pressure Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp to "open up" the signature verification process during the ballot audit.

"Could have been so easy but we got to do it the hard way,'' Trump posted, sounding like a mob thug who now has to pulling out finger nails with a pair of pliers from a resistant stool pigeon.

Kemp didn't budge.

Parade of intimidators

Then there is the bizarre account of Ruby Freeman, a Georgia election worker, and her daughter, Wandrea “Shaye” Moss, who were accused of illegally counting phony mail-in ballots stuffed in suitcases. They denied any skullduggery, and a probe found that ballots were properly counted and that the suitcases were routine containers for ballots.

Still, showing up mysteriously on Ruby Freeman’s doorstep in January — days before the official certification of the election in Washington — was Trevian Kutti, a self-professed “crisis manager” who has claimed to work for the rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, and the queen of Jordan.

Kutti, another one of those glam-grifters who drift in and out of Trump World, offered to help Freeman. But she arrived to pressure Freeman to falsely admit that she conducted fraud, prosecutors say. Kutti was part of a small parade of intimidators who showed up at her house, including a former police officer from Illinois.

This was an effort that required dark-arts thuggery. The Trump team sent a clown show that would have been better off hosting a talk show on TikTok.

A real racketeer conducts nefarious deeds quietly in the shadows, and, according to the indictment, at one point there is an attempt to show discretion: Rudy Giuliani, organizing a vote of fake electors in Georgia, told two other conspirators that he wanted to “keep this quiet until after the voting is done.”

It was all bluff

But for the most part, the campaign was all over the news with Giuliani — sweat and mascara running down the side of his face — and his sidekick, the lawyer and conspiracy-monger Sidney Powell, spinning false stories about hacked voting systems and fraud without evidence or facts.

It was all bluff. In the end, Kemp resisted him. So did Raffensburger. And Pence. And Rusty Bowers, the Speaker of the House, who said he voted for Trump, supported him, but wouldn't break the law for him. In the end, Trump was just a last-gasp president who didn't have the real juice to get it done -- a goon-wannabe with beer muscles.

"He couldn't sell it,'' as Corrado "Uncle Junior" Soprano mused after an underling failed to persuade others to take out Tony. "He's not respected."

Under normal times, charges of this magnitude would have kept the indicted out of the public eye. Tony Soprano, sensing a looming indictment, stayed away from his crew for a long stretch at the mere possibility of trouble.

Not The Don. He’s expected to continue on the campaign trail, where he will likely offer a gusher of misinformation, lies and grievances in an attempt to begin contaminating a potential jury pool with confusion and doubt. And he sure has a lot of doubt to sow, with four trials looming.

You can still watch reruns of "The Sopranos." New episodes of The Don will be dominating the airwaves for months to come.

This article originally appeared on NorthJersey.com: The Sopranos were better at evading RICO than Donald Trump