 Ruggiero Boiardo was a mobster in the Genovese crime family, New Jersey faction and was boss until he died. | Sopranos creator David Chase said when he was a child, his family visited relatives in Newark "with connections to a prominent mob family in Livingston." Years later, Chase admitted that the Tony Soprano character in 'The Sopranos' was modeled after the Boiardos.
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 | Things weren’t going well for the Boiardos in the late ’60s. IRS agents were investigating The Boot, and Life magazine ran an exposé on his “brazen empire of organized crime” and 30-acre estate in Livingston, NJ. The Boiardos ran Newark with an iron hand. For decades, they controlled the city’s underworld and benefited from racketeering, loan-sharking, theft, gambling and no-show jobs at the Port of Newark. In 1969 he was convicted of conspiracy to violate gambling laws. | 
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 By then the Boiardo crime family was finished in Newark. | Richie The Boot became increasingly detached and paranoid when he stepped aside. His son, Tony Boy, rose quickly in the mob but lacked The Boot’s cunning and many thugs disliked him. Tony Boy died of a heart attack in 1978, at 64. The Boot died six years later due to heart failure.  |  |
