‘Sopranos’ Star Wins Cash for Lustgarten Foundation
Vincent Pastore Won Prize On ‘Celebrity Apprentice’
By Multi Channel News Staff -- Multichannel News, 1/28/2008 6:14:00 AM MT
Vincent Pastore, who played the ill-fated Salvatore “Big Pussy” Bonpensiero on The Sopranos, won $50,000 in last Thursday’s episode of NBC's The Celebrity Apprentice, earmarked for The Lustgarten Foundation for Pancreatic Research.
Pastore chose to donate to the Lustgarten Foundation to honor a close friend, Mitchell Berke, who died of pancreatic cancer in 2007. Pastore won the prize in a challenge that pit two teams against each other to sell the most tickets to a hit Broadway show.
The Lustgarten Foundation for Pancreatic Cancer Research has awarded grants totaling more than $18 million in support of pancreatic cancer research.
Pancreatic cancer is the fourth leading cause of all cancer deaths in the United States and the third leading cause of cancer deaths in individuals ages 40 to 60. Approximately 37,000 Americans are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer each year, and, each year, approximately the same number die from it. Often, pancreatic cancer is found too late for surgical intervention, and chemotherapy and radiation treatments have little effect.
The foundation is named for the former Cablevision Systems vice chairman, who died of the disease in 1999.
