LODI, NJ—The classic HBO gangster drama The Sopranos ended its six-season, 86-episode run on the premium cable network in 2007, and now, 10 years later, the iconic strip club that served as the headquarters for fictional New Jersey mob boss Tony Soprano has finally been cancelled as well.
The Bada Bing! Club, which in real life goes by the name Satin Dolls, was ordered to stop offering live entertainment—that is, exotic dancing aka stripping—no later than December 17, by New Jersey’s attorney general Christopher Porrino, according to a report Thursday by the NJ.com local news site. Perhaps not surprisingly the strip club, located about 15 miles northwest of midtown Manhattan in Lodi, New Jersey, was shut down for allegedly being a Mafia operation.
Satin Dolls served as the location where most of the scenes in The Sopranos’ Bada Bing! were filmed. The owner, reputed mobster Anthony “Tony Lodi” Cardinalle was revealed in 2014 to be an organized crime informant. In addition, Cardinalle owned A.J.’s Gentlemen’s Club in Secaucus, New Jersey, which was also ordered to shut down on December 17, as well as The Harem, a Lodi “juice bar” that apparently demonstrated the beneficial health effects of juicing by having its servers work totally nude. The Harem was closed down more than a decade ago.
Cardinalle, 64, was busted by the feds in 2013 along with more than 30 other mobsters as part of an investigation into infiltration of New Jersey’s waste management industry by New York’s venerable Genovese crime family. Trouble was, Cardinalle's guilty plea to racketeering and extortion charges rendered him “criminally disqualified” to operate his strip clubs.
But the alleged mobster didn’t let that stop him from continuing to maintain control over Satin Dolls anyway, according to a statement by the New Jersey Attorney General’s office on Thursday.
In classic Tony Soprano fashion, Cardinalle also “failed to account for large amounts of cash flowing in and out of the businesses,” the state charged.
“The Cardinalles may have wanted to keep the business in the family, but that’s not how it works. Their continued flouting of Alcoholic Beverage Control laws cannot and will not be tolerated,” Porrino said in the prepared statement. “Illegal activity was glorified at the ‘Bada Bing’ in the fictional world of Tony Soprano, but it has no place in modern-day New Jersey It’s time to shut it down.”
Cardinalle has also entered a 1995 guilty plea on income tax evasion charges, for hiding money he pocketed from his network or strip clubs.
In addition to ordering the strip clubs to stop all stripping, the state ordered Cardinalle to sell or transfer his liquor licenses “to a bona fide third party” no later than January 3. But if live strip shows are still taking place after December 17, the clubs will be stripped of their licenses immediately.
