Jim was the only non-industry person I ever consulted on prototypes, and when none of my watches really fit his oversize wrist, he designed his own: It’s called the Seal, and he’s wearing it in an ad that sold me a lot of watches. It’s a shot of Jim smirking while flipping off the camera—really, he was flipping me off because I was bugging him—and ran with the line, Even James Gandolfini thinks Kobold is No. 1. The ad, the most expensive I’d ever run, appeared in The Economist, and it got me some angry phone calls, including one from a concerned father who was upset that his 7-year-old had seen it. Jim decided to reply personally. Dear Mr. Smith, he wrote. If your 7-year-old son reads The Economist, you have nothing to worry about. Regards, James Gandolfini.

As the filming of The Sopranos’ last season drew to a close, Jim bought 450 Kobold watches, including forty made of gold, for the cast and crew. The retail value was more than $2 million.

Our friendship continued in the years after The Sopranos. Then, this summer, I woke at 5 a.m. Frankfurt time and learned the news: Jim had passed in Italy while vacationing with Michael. By 7 a.m., I was on a plane.

If you have a choice in the matter, don’t die overseas. Dying abroad is complicated. And dying in Italy, where the red tape is always knotted, is infinitely more so.

The initial news in Rome wasn’t good: Patricia Hill, the U.S. vice consul at the embassy, told me it would be as long as a week before the body could be cleared. Jim had passed on a Wednesday night and was already at the morgue by the time I got to Rome the next morning. After an autopsy, he would be held until we could get his remains repatriated. But in the near term, progress was looking grim.

By luck, Jim’s sister Leta had been on her way to Rome and was already at the hotel with Michael when I arrived a few hours later. I assumed the hotel would take me first to see them, but when the head of security slipped a card into a lock and pushed open a door, it was immediately clear that he’d taken me instead to Jim’s room. It looked basically like any other room housing two messy guys.

I knew that if it was this easy for me to get there, it was only a matter of time until a reporter or photographer managed to get in—already someone in the hotel was leaking details to the press—so I cleaned the scene, documenting every inch with photos to prevent anyone from faking pictures in the media. Then I packed my friend’s last suitcase and vacated the room. On my way out, I even photographed the room number. A few days later, the Daily Mail ran a story with shots of the room where Jim died; they had the wrong room.

Jim’s Hollywood team arranged for a few security guys, retired Italian commandos, to protect Michael and Leta from the media that were building outside. The hotel manager asked me what to do about the swarm, and I told her to say nothing; then I called Jim’s family. The only way to de-froth the media, we decided, was to give them something, anything, to report, and the family asked if I was comfortable doing a press conference. I said okay, thinking it would be, like, six journalists. They told me exactly what to say.