The actor who played closeted gay mobster Vito Spatafore on the TV series “The Sopranos” has accused a diet-drug manufacturer of hating homosexuals – and claims the company is suing him because it did not want its products associated with his television character.
NVE Pharmaceuticals, the maker of the Stacker 2 diet pill, filed a lawsuit in New Jersey on Thursday against Joseph Gannascoli, accusing him of not doing enough to promote the product after receiving $316,000 over the last 2½ years.
But Gannascoli – whose character was recently whacked on the show for being gay – says NVE stopped wanting to use him after his character was outed.
“That was their problem. They were anti-gay,” Gannascoli told The Post yesterday.
The president of NVE, Robert Occhifinto, strongly disagreed. He said the lawsuit had “nothing to do with the gay role,” but was launched because Gannascoli was so difficult to work with before he was ever outed on the show.
“He would take our product for a while, lose weight and looked good, but then a month or two afterwards when we would schedule an appearance, he would go and we weren’t able to use him,” Occhifinto said.
In early 2005, Gannascoli agreed he would start a diet and exercise program to shed as much as 80 pounds, the lawsuit claims.
While the star initially stuck to his five-day-a-week workout plan – and attracted huge publicity from his appearance on VH1’s Celebrity Fit Club – NVE alleges he began to slack off within a month, the complaint says.
Occhifinto also claims Gannascoli would not turn up at scheduled appearances, including an event at the Sunoco Motorsports Show in Fort Washington, Pa. The drug company chief said the relationship with the actor began in August 2003, when Gannascoli called him and said he’d been taking the Stacker 2 product. The actor claimed it had helped him lose weight.
“He was just coming up on the show and he thought he might be a good representative for the product,” Occhifinto said. “At that point I retained him.”
While Occhifinto was signing over Gannascoli’s first check of $150,000, court records show NVE was filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
The drug manufacturer’s financial difficulties arose out of the cost of fighting 140 wrongful-death claims that were filed from alleged victims of a previous version of Stacker 2, which contained the banned stimulant ephedra.
As the company’s fortunes turned downwards, Gannascoli’s star rose. His character Vito was given an increasingly prominent story line and the star began to lend his name to a range of foods – even penning a culinary crime novel, “A Meal to Die For.”
Gannascoli, who topped out at 334 pounds, lost 140 pounds before he returned to film the latest season of “The Sopranos.”
The star was quoted in several press articles and online saying he lost the weight due to a combination of surgery, dieting and the diet drug, Stacker 2.
“Joseph R. Gannascoli, who plays Vito Spatafore (and is expected to have a huge year), boasted that while the series was off the air, he lost 140 pounds using Stacker 2 XPLC,” The Post wrote in a article describing the film set. Gannascoli, however, terminated his relationship with Stacker 2 in April. He now endorses the dietary supplement H7 Hoodia, which is featured on his Web site.
Then, last week his character was killed off when Vito was beaten to death after his secret homosexual life was discovered.
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