Throughout its celebrated run, The Sopranos featured some of the most intriguing characters on television: an overweight homosexual mobster; a comely hostess who suffered from Irritable Bowel Syndrome and her murderer/addict/screenwriter husband; and of course Tony Soprano himself, the heavy-breathing physical embodiment of American entitlement. But no character on the HBO show—save perhaps for the man in the Members Only jacket—was as enigmatic as one who was introduced to the world after the screen went dark: the elusive Johnny Salami.
The Bing (aka Satin Dolls) is Salami's last-known whereabouts.
Courtesy HBO.com
Shortly after midnight on June 11, while millions of Americans were still scratching their heads about The Sopranos' confounding finale, Reuters launched one of the first volleys of an all-out media assault on how it all ended. In an article entitled "Sopranos Ends in Crescendo of … Nothing," Reuters reporter Mark Egan documented the experience of watching the finale at the Satin Dolls gentlemen's club in Lodi, New Jersey. Satin Dolls is the setting for scenes filmed at the fictional Bada Bing club where Tony conducts much of his business. The strippers at Satin Dolls commemorated the evening's significance by wearing G-strings emblazoned with the Bada Bing logo. Egan interviewed patrons at the club—and at least one who wasn't, but more on that later—in a typical man-on-the-street style. One of those was a man identified as Johnny Salami, 43, of Rutherford, New Jersey. "David Chase should have put some bite into it. He left us hanging," said Salami.
The name and quote sounded too good to be true. Johnny Salami, a Sopranos fan, wanted some more "bite" in the ending. He felt that he was left "hanging," not unlike a piece of cured Italian meat in a butcher shop window. After Egan's article appeared, several other journalists felt compelled to mention Salami. Richard Roeper of the Chicago Sun-Times called him "the too-perfectly named Johnny Salami." Jeffrey Goldberg from Slate.com's TV club referred to him as "a man identified, unbelievably, as Johnny Salami."
Word of Salami quickly spread over the internet. Some readers expressed doubt about his authenticity. Comments on Gawker included, "Seriously, Johnny Salami? When did Reuters become a lame Saturday Night Live sketch?" and "Eh, man on the street stories suck. I can't blame the Reuters reporter for it… though s/he probably should've fact-checked because that name is fake." And so, while viewers across America were frantically trying to figure out if Tony Soprano was dead or alive, I was wrestling with an equally difficult question: Is Johnny Salami real?
*
The first place I looked was the last place anyone seemed to have seen Johnny Salami: Satin Dolls. Surely, somebody there would remember meeting a man with such a memorable name. I called them up and spoke to one-name-only manager Rouz. "There were a lot of people here that night," he said in a voice that could have easily belonged to one of Tony's muscle guys, "but I don't remember no Johnny Salami." I went to visit the club to see if anyone else might recall such a character. While I can think of few outings as depressing as a daytime visit to a New Jersey strip club, the place had an odd glamour about it. Outside was where Silvio Dante once instructed a worker to go up to an exotic dancer sign and "clean the shit off her tit," and inside was the stage where Paulie Walnuts once saw the Virgin Mary. Tony may have been teasing Paulie in the last episode when he suggested that they turn "the Bing" into a shrine, but in some ways, Satin Dolls has become exactly that. Fans of the show regularly make pilgrimages to the club on "Sopranos Tour Buses" and grab any souvenir they can get their hands on. While every person who works there could tell me about a conversation they once had with James Gandolfini, not one of them could recall ever meeting Johnny Salami. Like many a Satin Dolls patron before me, I went home empty-handed and frustrated.
"I thought Reuters journalist Mark Egan would be willing to help an intrepid young reporter get to the bottom of a quirky story. I was wrong."After being shut out at the Bing, I decided to contact the author of the Reuters piece, Mark Egan. If anyone would have contact information for Johnny Salami, it would have to be the man who introduced him to the world. Egan is the New York bureau chief for Reuters and a serious news writer who has reported on issues ranging from sodomy hearings to Hurricane Katrina. I thought Egan would be willing to help an intrepid young reporter get to the bottom of a quirky story. I was wrong. Egan was curt, to put it mildly. The following is a rough transcript of my conversation with him:
Me: Hello, I'm Michael Gluckstadt from Gelfmagazine.com. I have a question about Johnny Salami, a person mentioned in one of your articles.Egan: What about him?
Me: Well, we're doing a piece on the internet buzz that he's generated and we'd like to interview him.
Egan: What do you want from me?
Me: Do you have any contact info for him?
Egan: No. Isn't that your job?
Me: Can you tell me what he looked like?
Egan: No.
Me: Short? Skinny? Foreign?
Egan: No.
Me: Did you verify that he's real?
Egan: One of our guys looked at his driver's license. I have to get back to work. (click.)
It was clear that Egan was not about to help me in my search for Salami—at least not directly. However, Egan quotes other patrons in the Reuters article, people who would have been at the club the same night as Salami. One of these people appears in the article as follows:
"This show is just short of being a caricature of Northern New Jersey, but we all love it," said patron Eileen Schley, 36. "I don't know now what I'm going to do on Sunday nights."
A little bit of sleuthing (i.e., checking the phone book) revealed that Schley lives in Rutherford. Just like Salami. Two people from the same city, at the same place, and quoted in the same article would have to know each other. Only Eileen Schley says she never was at Satin Dolls. She described her Reuters interview to me over email:
"The reporter looked like he was in his early 20's. I was at Maggie's Restaurant in Carlstadt with a friend. He overheard us speaking of the Sopranos and asked us a couple of questions in regard to our reaction to it ending. We said a couple of things and that was about it. He asked us to spell our names and our age. He then said he was heading over to Satin Dolls. This was about 7:00 PM, Sunday evening. I'm guessing it was one of [Egan's] assistants."
Schley was surprised to see it reported that she was in a strip club, and at first found the whole thing to be funny. That reaction did not last long, though. "I didn't laugh so much when my boss mentioned it to me, and a woman I had an interview with a couple years back also emailed me about the quote," Schley tells Gelf. I couldn't believe how far reaching [it was]." Regarding Johnny Salami, Schley echoes the common sentiment on the internet: "I never heard of this man and almost feel his name may be made up."
With this new information in hand, I went back to Mark Egan, thinking he might be more willing to speak with me. He was not.
Me: Hi, this is Michael Gluckstadt, I spoke to you about a week ago about Johnny Salami.Egan: Yes?
Me: One of the other people quoted in the article, Eileen Schley, wasn't at Satin Dolls. She was interviewed by one of your assistants at a restaurant beforehand. Can you put me in touch with the assistant who may have contacted her or Salami?
Egan: I'm not interested in helping you with your article.
Me: You should know that I plan to print that Eileen Schley wasn't at the club.
Egan: Do whatever you want.(click)
Discouraged but not ready to give up, I turned to another source for help: Whitepages.com. Of course, I had looked up Johnny Salami previously, but I had not found anything substantial. Now, I broadened my search. There were a number of candidates, with varying degrees of plausibility. There was a John Salami in Michigan—maybe he recently relocated? How about an Adriana Salami in New Jersey—maybe she had a local relative named Johnny? I called any Salami I could find. Some didn't return my calls. Of those who did, none of them knew a Johnny from the Garden State.
Searching DMV records in New Jersey yielded nothing, either, so I went to my old standby: Google. One promising but enigmatic lead I came across on in my searches was the email address hobokensausage@aol.com. That's exactly the kind of screen name one might expect from Johnny Salami. Unfortunately, the email address is now defunct and the contact for the Hoboken Sausage Co. was quick to disavow any connection to a Mr. Salami.
There were others on Google. There was Johnny Salami, the New York comic. And Johnny Salami, the diminutive Vegas radio personality. And then there was Johnny Salami, photographer for bellavendetta.com, a pornography website that features naked women covered in blood. (According to his bio on the website, this Salami's turn-ons include: "Bones!, bruises, bloody lips, guns, cameras, burping.") There's also a popular New Haven deli by the same name. But none of them are our Johnny Salami. (Update: Gelf has now located the Johnny Salami, and it is the comic mentioned above. Here's how we finally tracked him down.)
I like to think of Johnny Salami as New Jersey's own Loch Ness monster. A man makes an appearance at a well-known strip club the night of the Sopranos finale, inarguably our state's biggest night in the spotlight. He produces a driver's license, gets interviewed, and creates an internet sensation. Then he retreats back to his den next to Jimmy Hoffa's body, never to be heard from again. I'll always wonder who he was and if he was real. Some might be content to just let it go, but in the words of Salami himself, "Maybe if you’re from Oklahoma or California you don’t care, but if you're from New Jersey, you want some closure."
Update: Following publication of this article, Reuters appended the following correction to the top of Egan's Sopranos article: "In June 10 story, clarifies identity given by man in paragraphs 5 and 6, and in paragraph 9 corrects location for Eileen Schley, 36, a patron of Maggie’s Restaurant in nearby Carlstadt, New Jersey." Clarifying Salami's identity meant adding the qualifying phrase "a man who identified himself as Johnny Salami," and, in the next paragraph, adding, "the man who, when questioned about his name, showed a business card with a name and photo." That's not quite the same as a driver's license.
Related in Gelf: Here's the story of how we finally tracked down Johnny Salami.
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