How crazy perfect is it that Tony Darrow (Anthony Borgese, b. 1938) shares a birthday with Fatso Marco Marcella? They could share a nice torta di compleanno. Or perhaps squabble over who it belongs to.
I was a huge fan of the first movie Darrow ever appeared, in the low-budget comedy horror classic Street Trash (1987). It's an appalling film and it has since developed a cult following. I was just fortunate enough to catch it at an art house in Providence, and was impressed with Darrow, for he's kind of the best thing about the movie, apart from the disgusting and colorful special effects (as I recall it's about a batch of bootleg booze that has been contaminated with toxic waste). I liked Street Trash so much that I wrote a letter raving about it to my girlfriend who was living in Portland, Maine at the time. We later got married and moved to Greenpoint, Brooklyn, where Street Trash was shot, though that's not why we moved there. Street Trash ought to convince anyone to give that area a wide berth.
Darrow was nearly 50 when he made his debut in Street Trash. Originally from East New York, he had sung in bars and night clubs, but not been an actor. But he soon would be. The next movie he turns up in is Goodfellas (1990), as Sunny Bunz, that restaurant owner who gets run roughshod over by Pesci, Sorvino, and company. I am astounded to learn how he got that role. Scorsese saw him in Street Trash! Haha! The idea of Scorsese checking out Street Trash is at once dumbfounding and hilarious to me. But he clearly saw the same (patently obvious) quality that I saw. The guy was a natural, funny, touching, and realer than real.
Darrow went on to dozens of others screen projects, invariably cast as Italian mobsters. He's in no fewer than six Woody Allen movies, 15 episodes of The Sopranos (as Larry Barese), three episodes of Law and Order, and other such odds and ends as Teamster Boss: The Jackie Presser Story (1992), the Danny Aiello show Dellaventura (1997), Analyze This (1999) with Robert DeNiro, Kill the Irishman (2011), and Once Upon a Time in Brooklyn (2013), among other things.
Why's Darrow so authentic? Well, let me put it this way: In 2009 he was charged, along with a couple of other Gambino associates, of ordering the working over a welcher on a loan shark debt in Monticello, New York (that's where the harness race track is). Darrow, 73 at the time of his sentencing, got six months of house arrest. Probably spent it playing cards at the Democratic Club.
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