Politician who banned Sopranos from NJ ended up in prison

On The Judi and EJ Show, we have our "Sopranos Reference of the Day!"  Something about the show always relates to something happening these days.  My Gen Z co-worker Kyle Forcini is a fan and was very young when the show was current.  He and other Gen Zers and some Millennials may have never heard this story.

On May 6, 2001, two things I love deeply about New Jersey merged more smoothly than any merge on the Garden State Parkway has ever occurred. My favorite television show. And my ancestral homeland.

The episode was called Pine Barrens.

All that week I'd been looking forward to Sunday night. Season 3, Episode 11 of The Sopranos — and the title alone gave me chills. The Pine Barrens. My Pine Barrens. My father's family goes back in those woods to the days of the American Revolution — legend has it they manufactured cannonballs for the war. In the 1960s and 70s, we'd have family reunions at a place called Johnson Place, not far from Chatsworth, deep in the heart of South Jersey's most haunting and beautiful wilderness. So yeah, this episode felt personal before I'd seen a single frame.

Then Paulie and Christopher started running through the woods. Hills everywhere. Mountains in the background. Barely a pine tree in sight.

My heart sank.

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Why 'Pine Barrens' is still considered one of the greatest Sopranos episodes ever made

Pine Barrens is one of the greatest single episodes in television history rated 9.7 on IMDB, directed by Steve Buscemi, and written by Terence Winter from a story Tim Van Patten literally dreamed up during Season 2. Paulie and Christopher go to collect a debt from Valery, a Russian ex-special forces operative. Things go violently wrong, they drag what they think is a body into the frozen woods to bury it — except Valery isn't dead. He escapes, and two of the toughest mob soldiers in Jersey spend the night hopelessly lost, surviving on ketchup packets, bickering in the cold. Nobody ever finds the Russian. David Chase says he'll take that secret to his grave. The episode took a record 12 days to shoot and has never stopped being talked about since.

It is brilliant. But here's what still makes me crazy 25 years later.

Two failures combined to keep The Sopranos out of the real Pine Barrens

Let's be clear — the production never intended to film in the actual Pine Barrens to begin with. That's failure number one, and it belongs entirely to the producers. The real Pines were right there. The most cinematic, otherworldly landscape in all of New Jersey — flat, frozen, hauntingly silent, with a darkness that has no bottom. Instead, the plan was South Mountain Reservation in Essex County. Not the Pine Barrens. Not even South Jersey. Just a convenient patch of woods close to the production's base. A missed opportunity before the cameras even rolled.

Then came failure number two. Essex County executive James Treffinger pulled the permit at the last minute, calling The Sopranos "a disgrace to Italians." The crew scrambled and relocated to Harriman State Park — in New York — more than 100 miles from where the episode was supposed to feel like it was set. The hills, the hardwoods, the rocky terrain look nothing like South Jersey. Terence Winter later said it perfectly: "The funny coda to that story is that that politician, who happened to be Italian American himself, ended up going to jail for corruption. You can't make this stuff up."

He's right. Treffinger pleaded guilty to mail fraud and obstruction of justice in 2003 and served 13 months in federal prison. The man who called the show a disgrace was himself a disgrace.

What the real New Jersey Pine Barrens deserved — and never got

The actual Pine Barrens are one of the most unique landscapes in America — 1.1 million acres, a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve, and found nowhere else on earth. Imagine Paulie and Christopher lost in THAT. Scrub pines stretching flat to every horizon, frozen cedar swamps, total silence. That episode could have introduced the entire world to one of New Jersey's greatest natural treasures.

Instead, two failures — one creative, one political — sent the cameras to New York.

My family built something in those woods centuries ago. They deserved better. So did the Pine Barrens. So did all of us.

Bada bing.