Tony Soprano's a Snitch, But It's the Fed Who Sings

Much has been made of the final scene in The Soprano's last episode where the family is eating at a restaurant and the screen unexpectedly, anticlimactically fades to black.

I was more interested, though, in the opening scene, where Tony wakes up in the middle of a snowy night to meet with his FBI handler Dwight Harris with whom he has a working, business-like relationship as an informant. Tony let him know he just happened to remember that his nephew knew the specifics about a bank account linked to two possible terrorist suspects.

The information between Tony Soprano and Harris, though, doesn't just flow one direction. In the previous episode the agent came to warn Tony that Phil Leotardo was out to murder him, and in this opening scene Tony tries to leverage his information on the Arabs' banking practices to get information about Leotardo's whereabouts, with the unstated subtext that Soprano would use the information to kill him.

"You're overreaching," said the fed. But later when Harris ran across the information he called Tony and told him where Leotardo was making his phone calls. When a colleague told him Leotardo had been assassinated, he slapped his hand on his desk and proclaimed in an awkward moment, "Damn, we're going to win this thing!"

Clearly by that point the agent's loyalties were muddy at best. He felt a more-than-collegial tie with Tony the same way Tony felt admiration for his work on the war on terror - from work strains to family problems, they probably had more in common with each other than most other people in their lives. Why else would a federal agent be celebrating when his informant committed a murder with the information he'd just given him?

But it's just a TV show, you might say, and so it is.

I couldn't help but think as I watched it, though, of the similar, spectacular case of Whitey Bulger in Boston (dramatized fictionally in the movie The Departed), the Irish mobster who spent more than two decades ratting out his rival Italian mafioso on his way to controlling most of the organized crime on Boston's South side. Even murders were tolerated. By the end, it was far from clear who was being "handled," Bulger or his FBI handler.

The Sopranos commemorized in art the same warning we may draw from the Bulger case, or even the revisionist Gospel of Judas: Though government likes to pretend it's using informants for its own purposes, as often as not the informant may be the one who's in charge.

At least, in this artistic rendition, I thought Tony Soprano got the better of the information exchange.

Let me know what you thought of the Soprano's final episode and of Tony's snitching arrangement?