It’s 7:48 on a Friday night. Standing at the corner of Washington and Nutley Avenues, the only sound you hear is the whirring hum of Joe Camelia’s sewing machine. It is well past closing time, but Camelia is fussing over the low gorge—the point where the collar is attached to the lapel—of a suit he’s made from scratch. Camelia hunches over the suit, examining each stitch that unites brown silk with yellow piping. Silvio Dante, consigliere of the notorious Soprano crime family and manager of the equally notorious strip joint, the Bada Bing, is waiting. This is a guy Camelia doesn’t want to disappoint.
Dante, of course, is in real life Steven Van Zandt, famous as Bruce Springsteen’s lead guitarist even before taking on the role of the sly chief advisor to Anthony Soprano, head of the “family.”
Van Zandt has arrived in a limousine. But that’s no big deal. For years, limos have made frequent round-trips between the series’ production offices at Silvercup Studios in Queens and Camelia’s Custom Clothiers.
How did a Nutley tailor become clothier to TV’s most glamorous gangsters?
“I met him by asking guys who knew guys who knew guys who knew the man I should see about taking care of these things,” says the wisecracking Van Zandt. “He should be in The Sopranos.”
Camelia, his father before him, and his grandfather before that, have crafted suits worn by some of the area’s most influential men. “These are people who live in a world where dropping $40,000 or $50,000 a year on their attire is a business expense,” Camelia says. “They wouldn’t be caught dead wearing Armani off the shelf. It would raise questions about their business decisions.”
For decades, the family business was anchored on Branford Place in Newark until Joe moved to Nutley in 1999. Nearly a decade ago, he was in the Newark shop when he got a visitor who unnerved him.
“The shop was down near the Federal Court, which kind of attracted the kind of guys you see on The Sopranos,” Camelia recalls. “So this guy comes in wearing a bandana and these beat-up clothes. I didn’t know who he was, and I thought, ‘Here I am in Newark and I am going to get robbed by a white guy.’ He tells me he’s a musician, but I knew he wasn’t playing with Benny Goodman.”
Identifying himself as Steven Van Zandt, the visitor said he had an audition for a TV show. “So I asked him, ‘What are you trying to do?’ He says, ‘My character is not from the ’50s or ’60s. I need to look like the Mob from the ’90s… sharkskin or something.’ And I said, ‘Steven, stop right there.’ I knew what he was looking for ’cause I did work for the real Mob. I pull out a silk designer number and he flipped. I told him, ‘You can’t just go down to the Willowbrook Mall and look like these guys. Whatever else they’ve got, they’ve got taste.’ ”
Van Zandt pledged, “If I get this part, I’ll get you involved with the show.” Within a week, the calls from the wardrobe people at Silvercup started and never ceased. For rush jobs, they even send a car to ferry him from Nutley to the studio.
Camelia says his Sopranos work got him through the death of his wife, Deanna, in 1992. “She was my soulmate,” he says. “We had four beautiful daughters and my wife and I never once had an argument.” He admits he let business slide a bit, but he says he recovered thanks to his daughters—Christine, Lisa, Denise, and Jennifer—his new wife, Jacqueline, and stepdaughter, Kelly. “Jacqueline keeps me on my toes,” he says. “With her, we fight.”
A few years ago, Silvio’s “boss,” James Gandolfini, walked into the shop. “I loaned Joe to Jimmy for one suit and he loved it,” Van Zandt says. “I told him, ‘Don’t get used to looking so good. That’s my job.’ ” Gandolfini and Camelia soon became friends.
One day last autumn, a row of four identical, intricately crafted checked suits hung by the door of the shop, waiting to be picked up by the Sopranos wardrobe department.
“Can you believe this?” Camelia relates. “It’s a fight scene. So they needed one for Gandolfini, a backup for him, one for his stuntman, and a backup for his stuntman in case he rips the first one getting thrown into a dumpster and they need to do another take.”
It’s an awful fate for a Camelia suit, but a point of pride for its maker.