IN YEARS PAST, HBO HAS RELIED on three ingredients for success: mobsters, plus New Jersey, plus screenwriter-producer Terence Winter. This fall, the Sopranos network is putting that tried-and-true recipe to work again.

Brooklyn-born Winter won four Emmys for his work on the blockbuster series, which earned comparisons to Shakespeare with its complex portrayal of a tormented mob boss. Now, three years after Tony Soprano and friends took their final bows, Winter is revisiting the Garden State’s seamy side with Boardwalk Empire, chronicling the life and crimes of an Atlantic City power broker at the height of the Roaring ’20s. Will Empire, executive produced by the legendary Martin Scorsese, capture the public imagination as The Sopranos did? Will it mine the same kind of gold during awards season? Perhaps most importantly for Atlantic City boosters, will it reignite interest in the resort’s outrageous, colorful, entertaining and frequently corrupt history?

Ladies and gentlemen, place your bets.

Inspired by the book of the same name by author and historian Nelson Johnson, Boardwalk Empire tells the story of Nucky Thompson, a fictionalized version of Enoch “Nucky” Johnson, the Atlantic City sheriff who not only ran the shore town during Prohibition, but whose influence extended to the halls of power in Trenton and beyond.

Early buzz on the series is overwhelmingly positive; James Hibberd of the Hollywood Reporter, who has viewed the first six episodes, took issue with actor Steve Buscemi as Nucky, but otherwise gave the show high praise, and even likened it in drama and scope to the Godfather trilogy. Washington Post scribe Lisa DeMoraes called Empire HBO’s “most lavish series in ages;” unlike Hibberd, she called the quirky Buscemi the “icing on the cake” of the highly anticipated series, which debuts September 19. And Vanity Fair’s September issue, which features the female cast of the series in vintage ’20s garb, says “no show is more eagerly anticipated” this fall than Boardwalk Empire.

The odds are looking better and better. 

Winter first got his hands on Johnson’s book as The Sopranos was coming to an end. “It was optioned by Steve Levinson and Mark Wahlberg, who produce Entourage,” he told Casino Connection. “They gave it to me and said, ‘Why don’t you look and see if anything jumps out at you as a TV series?’ When I got to the part on Nucky”—just one of many Atlantic City characters in the book—“I thought, what an amazingly duplicitous, cunning, suave, intelligent, corrupt, charming person. He was everything in one guy, at a time in history that was incredibly volatile. And it was set in the ‘World’s Playground.’ So it had everything: time, circumstance, location, and an amazing character at its core.”

The TV version of Nucky is different from the historical figure. For one thing, the TV Nucky is not averse to getting a little blood on his hands, and author Nelson Johnson says no evidence suggests that the real-life boss ever resorted to violence.

“The series was not based on the book, but inspired by a couple of chapters,” Winter explains. “We spun it off into a whole new fictional dynamic, with a lot more interaction between Nucky and Al Capone, Arnold Rothstein and Lucky Luciano”—notorious Chicago mob bosses who actually did hold court in Atlantic City in 1929, with Nucky’s apparent knowledge and blessing. That meeting, held at the Ambassador Hotel shortly after the St. Valentine’s Day massacre, coincided with Meyer Lansky’s honeymoon. Nucky was so cozy with the mob, he met the New York mobster in the presidential suite of the Ritz-Carlton, bearing French champagne and a fur coat for the new Mrs. Lansky.  

The Ritz is still standing—it is now luxury condos—but unfortunately for Atlantic City and the show’s producers, many more of the grand old hotels that dominated the city skyline at the turn of the 20th century were demolished, some to make way for casinos. As a result, Boardwalk Empire—the quintessential Atlantic City yarn—was filmed in Brooklyn.

HBO spokeswoman Tobe Becker says New York state tax credits, and an overflowing talent pool of actors, technicians and other TV people, were the primary reasons the series was not filmed where the real action occurred.

“It was the architecture in New York, too,” Becker says. “It’s so vast. If you’re looking for a building from 1915, you can be pretty certain you’ll find what you need. All those things made it very advantageous to film there.”

When scouting locations, “Our first stop was in Atlantic City,” Winter says. “Right out of the gate we thought about it, but looking at it with a filmmaker’s eyes, there are just not a lot of places left from that period. If those hotels still existed, we might have made a different choice.”

So a 300-foot Boardwalk was constructed in Brooklyn, and much of the background detail—hotels, Ferris wheels, even the Atlantic Ocean—were digitally inserted. Winter is confident the effect is authentically gaudy, gritty and in its way, glamorous—just like the real City by the Sea. And he is hopeful that audiences will take to Nucky as they did to that other famous TV gangster, Tony Soprano.

“There’s been a longstanding tradition of government run by guys who bent the rules a little bit,” he says. “Maybe in some weird way, corruption is part of our fabric. That’s what Nucky thought, that he was greasing the wheels and hopefully doing more good than bad. Not to romanticize it, but people like to live vicariously through people who break the law.”

NELSON JOHNSON STARTED studying Atlantic City’s florid political history in the 1980s.

“No one had told the story before,” he says. “You heard about the beauty pageant, the hotels, Atlantic City as a tryout town for entertainment. But there was no history of the entire town, and any discussion of political corruption was sorely lacking.”

Johnson took on the task. He prowled local libraries for information (“I’m a nerd, and I love to do research”), and interviewed any old-timers who were willing to gab.

Though Boardwalk Empire is exhaustively researched and historically precise, Johnson is unperturbed by the TV producers’ decision to embellish the plot and depart from the record. With a new edition of his book now on the stands (with a foreword by Terry Winter, and photos from the TV series), and the international press swooning about the character and era he recreated, “I’m having a good time,” Johnson says. 

“There was not enough material there to do 12 hours this season, and the next, and the next,” he says. “The book is a jumping-off point for what they want to do, to tell, 90s years later, how Prohibition played out the law of unintended consequences.”

That law, of course, states that actions taken for seemingly exalted reasons can go very wrong—and there’s no better example than the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, or the Volstead Act, which made it illegal to manufacture and sell alcohol in the U.S. Prohibition went into effect at midnight on January 16, 1920. Within an hour, the first bootleg whiskey was sold, and for the next 14 years, the so-called “Noble Experiment” turned ordinary citizens into lawbreakers and crooks into kingpins. It wasted billions of taxpayer dollars in futile attempts at enforcement, and helped create a network of organized crime that took decades to dismantle. Atlantic City flourished in those years because it simply refused to go dry.

“Before Prohibition, just about every state had ‘bishop’s laws,’ which said no booze on Sunday,” says Johnson. “Atlantic City’s response was, ‘Whaddaya mean? That’s the busiest day of the week! Prohibition just didn’t happen here, because of Nucky Johnson and his connections and his power.”

Johnson also aided and abetted illegal gambling and prostitution rings—and he was unapologetic about it. He once said, “We have whiskey, wine, women, song and gambling machines. I won’t deny it and I won’t apologize for it. If people didn’t want them, they wouldn’t be profitable.”  

Though he never claimed more than $5,000 in income at tax time, at the height of Prohibition Johnson “was making more than a half million a year from vice alone,” says historian David G. Schwartz. “In those years, Nucky leased an entire floor of the Ritz Carlton hotel. He held court on the Boardwalk, where he dispensed business advice, political favors and charity (Johnson was known for his generosity). At night, dressed in one of his 100 tailored suits, he’d make the rounds of the city’s nightclubs and gambling spots.”

Under his iron rule, the city solidified its reputation as a “Saturnalia of vice” (the immortal words of onetime New Jersey Governor John Franklin Fort), and Nucky Johnson reigned almost unchallenged from about 1914, when he was appointed county treasurer, to the mid-1930s, when Prohibition was repealed and the feds began investigating his finances. Ultimately, he was convicted of tax evasion and sentenced to 10 years in jail.

Johnson calls the Jazz Age wheeler-dealer “a fascinating, larger-than-life person” who was both a benevolent man of the people and a corrupt pol who didn’t mind rubbing shoulders with thugs. The small screen version of Boardwalk Empire, Nelson Johnson says, brings that character to life.

“Nucky Thompson has many fine attributes and many sinister, devious attributes,” he says. “It will be interesting to see how the American public responds to this character from a bygone era.”

The Miami Vice Effect

On paper and in practice, urban renewal is difficult to pull off. The expense, red tape and sheer resistance to change can hobble the best solutions for reviving a city.

But sometimes, miracles happen. During the 1970s, South Beach in Miami was little more than a retirement village for the poor, and a storefront for drug dealers called “cocaine cowboys.” Its salvation came from an unlikely source: TV’s Miami Vice.

The community’s waterfront and beautiful-if-dilapidated Art Deco look was the perfect backdrop for the crime drama, with Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas as cool cops in designer duds. Soon, activists, artists and historians rallied to save the fabulous buildings, and the renaissance was on. Architecture Week called the South Beach story “one of the most successful urban restoration projects in the history of American architecture.” Today, the community is home to the rich and famous (Gloria Estefan, Jennifer Lopez, Sylvester Stallone), along with a young, multi-ethnic community.

Will Boardwalk Empire do the same for Atlantic City? Could be, says Bob Ingle, co-author of The Sopranos State: New Jersey’s Culture of Corruption.

“People love to read about mobsters and they like to see where they hang out,” Ingle says. “Somebody gives tours of where Tony Soprano and his wiseguys did their thing—and they’re not even real! The Untouchables didn’t hurt modern Chicago, and Boardwalk Empire is not going to hurt Atlantic City. If the show is a hit, it will help business. People will want to see where it all happened.

“Atlantic City is in need of some new attractions,” Ingle says, “and this could be the ticket.”

By Marjorie Preston

Marjorie Preston is a contributing editor of Global Gaming Business magazine and managing editor of Casino Connection Atlantic City.