Vincent “Vinny Ocean” Palermo was born in Brooklyn in 1944 and earned his nickname working at the Fulton Fish Market. Decades later, he became the de facto boss of the DeCavalcante crime family, owner of a strip club called Wiggles, the same one that inspired The Sopranos’ Bada Bing.
His rise to power was not clean. When it was discovered that acting boss John “Johnny Boy” D’Amato was bisexual, the family had him killed. Palermo took his place. FBI recordings themselves show the real mobsters watching the series and recognizing themselves, even mentioning the pork store where they used to meet.
Those same recordings helped convict four men of murder and extortion. But Palermo, the man who inspired it all, never paid like they did: he confessed to several crimes and entered the witness protection program. While fiction punished Tony Soprano with paranoia and constant betrayal, the real man who brought him to life walked free under another name.
