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Mr. Sorvino had been cast as the stately but menacing mob boss Paulie Cicero, a character based on convicted mobster Paul Vario, and was having trouble with the role.

Martin Scorsese tapped Sorvino at age 50 to play Cicero, a quiet but formidable character based on the real-life mobster Paul Vario, in 1990's "Goodfellas."

In “Wise Guy,” the nonfiction book that was the basis of “Goodfellas,” the author Nick Pileggi wrote, “It was understood on the street that Paul Vario” — the mobster’s surname was changed for the movie — “ran one of New York’s toughest and most violent gangs.”

In the Brownsville-East New York area of the city, “the body counts were always high, and in the 1960s and 1970s the Vario thugs did most of the strong-arm work,” Pileggi explained, adding later, “There were always some heads to be bashed on picket lines, businessmen to be squeezed into making their loan-shark payments, independents to be straightened out over territorial lines, potential witnesses to be murdered, and stool pigeons to be buried.”

Vario, then, was a middle manager of mayhem.