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When you're just starting out, trying to make your bones, Mob-ing is hard. There's a lot of leg work -- both in terms of running all over town hijacking cigarette trucks and such, and in terms of breaking the legs of poor saps who can't pay their vig. You don't need to go to the gym because your daily business gives you enough of a cardio workout: why else would so many made guys live in their sweatsuits?

Once you've worked your way up the ladder, there's very little hands-on Mob-ing you need to do. At every level of your organization, there are guys kicking money up to you, and all you have to do is sit -- behind a desk at your legitimate front, or in your social club -- on your ever-widening ass. And before you know it, you have a huge house, more cars than fingers to count them on, and diabetes.

James Gandolfini's Tony Soprano, in HBO's hit series The Sopranos -- finally returning Sunday for what we're told will be its final season -- hasn't been diagnosed with any obesity-related illnesses yet. But there's still another season coming, and given how loud our boy's been wheezing as the series has worn on -- even when he isn't doing anything more strenuous than the aforementioned sitting -- a cautionary storyline has to be on an index card somewhere in the writers' room.

But before he was a multiple award-winner for playing Tony, Gandolfini was a H!ITG!, playing small-time mobsters and enforcers, with names like "Angelo" and "Bear." Post-Tony, he hasn't really tried to stretch very much -- still playing Mob enforcers like a gay hit man in The Mexican, a corrupt prison warden in The Last Castle, and an embezzling, adulterous department-store owner in The Man Who Wasn't There. The news that he will play the title character in a biopic about Ernest Hemingway later this year is, therefore, especially odd, unless the story reveals Papa's heretofore unknown obsession with cold cuts and ducks.