A man in a black tracksuit with silver winged hair approaches the pearly gates, turns to Saint Peter, and asks “how’s the gravy up here?”

Tony Sirico, who will forever be known as “Paulie Walnuts,” one of the principal henchmen on The Sopranos, and source of much of that show’s pitch black wit, died in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, on Friday. He was 79 years old. 

The news was made public on Saturday by Michael Imperioli, the Emmy Award-winning actor and screenwriter who co-starred with Sirico during the revolutionary show’s six seasons. As Christopher Moltisanti, the youngest high-ranking member of the Sopranos crew, Imperioli and Sirico were frequent scene partners, sent on assignments as classic sitcom “frenemies” whose amusing tasks would quickly turn gruesome and violent. Imperioli uploaded a photo from their time working together, and wrote in a caption that “Tony was like no one else: he was as tough, as loyal and as big hearted as anyone I’ve ever known.” He added “we found a groove as Christopher and Paulie and I am proud to say I did a lot of my best and most fun work with my dear pal Tony,” and “He was beloved and will never be forgotten. Heartbroken today.”

Other Sopranos alumni followed suit, including Steven Van Zandt, Lorraine Bracco, Steve Schirripa, and Jamie-Lynn Sigler. 

Sirico was born in 1942 in the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn. In his youth, he fell in with “the wrong type of guys,” as he put it in an interview, and eventually found himself with 28 arrests. He did two stints in prison—the first for possession of an illegal weapon, the second for armed robbery. But it was during that second stretch, at Sing Sing prison in the early 1970s, where he saw a theatrical performance put on by a group of ex-convicts. He felt he could do better, figuring that only two jail sentences on 28 arrests meant he had some natural charisma. Plus, “you get a lot of practice in prison. I used to stand up in front of these cold-blooded murderers and kidnappers—and make ‘em laugh,” as he once told the Los Angeles Times. 

He leaned into what he knew, playing tough guys. After taking work as an extra (including on The Godfather: Part II), he started landing roles on television shows like Kojak, in James Toback’s classic New York indie Fingers (starring Harvey Keitel), the goofy fashion world satire So Fine with Ryan O’Neal, and, eventually, a small role (as Tony Stacks) in Martin Scorsese’s 1990 lodestar for all future mafia movies (and significant influence on The Sopranos), GoodFellas. 

In 1994 he landed a key role mixing comedy and Italian gangster tropes in Woody Allen’s Bullets Over Broadway. Allen and Sirico worked together seven times in total, most recently on Wonder Wheel in 2017. (He went very against type playing a police officer in Deconstructing Harry.) 

He initially auditioned for the part of Uncle Junior in The Sopranos in 1997, but showrunner David Chase eventually went with Dominic Chianese. When Chase countered with the part of Paul Gualtieri, Sirico accepted on the condition that the character would never turn rat. 

And then magic happened. (Reminder, The Sopranos was not exactly a PG television program.)

Stories abound about Sirico from the set of the HBO series. He did his own hair. He lived with his mother and hated germs. The line between his own wardrobe and that of the character was eventually erased. And he famously pushed back when his character had to kill a woman.

“David, I come from a tough neighborhood. If I go home and they see that I killed a woman, it’s going to make me look bad,” he told V.F. in 2012. Chase did not relent, and wouldn’t change it to a more impersonal shooting; the scene had to be personal. Sirico was able to get him to adjust from strangulation to smothering the victim with a pillow. (“I said, ‘No, I’m not putting my hands on her.’”)

Following The Sopranos’s run in 2007, Sirico made continued appearances on sitcoms like Chuck and television commercials (“Go binge!”) that riffed on the character. He had a semi-regular gig as a voice actor on Family Guy, and also appeared with his Sopranos co-star Steven Van Zandt on Lilyhammer.

On the impact the show had on his life, Sirico told V.F. in 2012 about the time the show took them to Italy for the second season. “I’ve never been to Italy. I was so happy,” he said, and reminisced about a day off with Vincent Pastore (“Big Pussy”) on the island of Capri.

“We weren’t off the boat five minutes when a whole family—maybe 15 Irish people—started in with ‘Oh, Paulie, Pussy!’ We had no idea. That was the first realization that somebody’s actually watching this show. I wasn’t Tony Sirico anymore—I was Paulie Walnuts."