Gay Vito Sued For Not Sufficiently Pimping Diet Pills
Who of us did not find ourselves getting lost in the melodrama of the "Gay Vito" Spatafore plotline on The Sopranos this season? After dieting his way down several velour tracksuit sizes, Vito followed his heart and found johnny cake-flipping love, only to lose it all in one of the show's all-time ugliest whackings. Joseph R. Gannascoli, the straight actor who brought Gay Vito to life, has made no secret of his shady, pharmaceutical-hustling past, but his more recent, legitimate pill-pushing dealings are now the source of a lawsuit:
The maker of Stacker 2 filed a lawsuit Thursday claiming Gannascoli hasn't been doing enough to promote the product after receiving about $316,000 from the company over the last 2 1/2 years.
He was very difficult to work with all the time," Robert Occhifinto, president of Sussex County-based dietary supplement maker NVE Pharmaceuticals, told The Star-Ledger of Newark for Friday's newspapers. [...]
"I begged them to do things but they wouldn't," he told the newspaper. "They didn't like I was doing the gay thing" in his TV role.
The gay angle, however, seems like a perfect fit for a company that sells diet supplements: Had Stacker 2 signed Gannascoli purely on the assumption that he'd appeal to chubby goombah consumers, the plot twist that turned him into a body fat percentage-obsessed out n' proud Gay could only have expanded their product's visibility into the highly profitable, waist-size-conscious leather-disco-queen markets.
