With Lucky Land Slots, you can get lucky just about anywhere.
Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today. Has anyone seen the bride and broom?
Or sorry, we're here.
We were getting lucky in the limo when we lost track of time. No Lucky Land casino with cash prizes that add up quicker than a guess registered.
But in that case, I pronounce you lucky.
Play for free at lucky landslots dot com. Daily bonuses are waiting. No purchase necessary boid. We're prohibited by long eighteen plus terms and conditions APPLA. See website for details.
Lucky Land Casino asking people what's the weirdest place you've gotten lucky?
Lucky in line at the Delhi I guess ah, in my dentist's office more than once.
Actually do I have to say?
Yes? You do?
In the car before my kid's PTA meeting?
Really?
Yes, excuse me? What's the weirdest place you've gotten lucky?
I never win?
And tell well, there you have it.
You could get lucky anywhere playing at lucky landslots dot com.
Play for free right now?
Are you feeling lucky?
Nope?
Not necessary boid.
We we're gon be my low eighteen plus terms and conditions of.
Plus saying details.
Hey guys, it is Ryan. I'm not sure if you know this about me, but I'm a bit of a fun fanatic when I can. I like to work, but I like fun too.
It's a thing.
And now the truth is out there, I can tell you about my favorite place to have fun, Chumba Casino. They have hundreds of social casino style games to choose from, with new games released each week. You can play for free anytime, anywhere, and each day brings a new chance to collect daily bonuses. So join me and the fun. Sign up now at Chumba Casino dot com. No We're necessary, dapod where every boy lost in terms conditions of eating plus.
Lucky Land Casino. Asking people what's the weirdest place you've gotten lucky?
Lucky in line at the Delhi I guess ah, in my dentist's office more than once.
Actually do I have to say?
Yes?
You do?
In the car before my kids PTA meeting?
Really?
Yes, excuse me, what's the weirdest place you've gotten lucky?
I never win?
And tell well, there you have it.
You could get lucky anywhere playing at Lucky Landsloughts dot Com play for free right now.
Are you feeling lucky? Nope, We're just necessary for.
You.
Are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about them Gasey, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker BTK. Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host, journalist and author Dan Zufanski.
Good Evening. This episode is brought to you by square Space. Square Space is the easiest way to create a beautiful website, blog, or online store for you and your ideas. Squarespace features an elegant interface, beautiful templates, and incredible twenty four to seven customer support. Try Squarespace at squarespace dot com and enter offer COO True Murder at checkout to get ten
percent off square Space. Build it Beautiful. Until Vito Risuto went to prison in two thousand and six for his role in a decade's old Brooklyn triple murder, he ruled the Port of Montreal, the northern gateway to the major American drug markets. A master diplomat, he won the respect of rival mafia clans, bikers and street gangs, and criminal
business thrived on his turf. His family prospered, and his empire grew until one of North America's true Teflon Dawns, finally lost his veneer as he watched helplessly from his Colorado prison. The murders of his son and father made international head lines, the killings of his lieutenants and friends bills billed the pages of Canadian news, and the influence of Nadrangeta, the Calabrian mafia spread across Montreal faster than
the blood of Rizzuto's crime family. In twenty twelve, Vito Risuto emerged from prison, a sixty six year old man who could carefully rebuild his criminal empire or seek bloody revenge and damn the consequences from the events leading to his imprisonment to his shocking death in December twenty thirteen. Business or Blood is the final chapter of Vito's story. The book that we're featuring this evening is Business or Blood Mafia Boss Vito Rizzuto's Last War with my special
guest journalist and author Peter Edwards. Welcome back to the program and thank you for agreeing to this interview Peter Edwards.
Well, thanks for a green to have me. I really liked it last time and I'm looking forward to this one.
Thanks very much, Peter. Now for the audience, I just want to make sure that people know that this is You've co written this book, and it's not the first time you've had another person assisting in with his books. And so this person's Antonio Nicaso. So tell us about a little bit about the background of Antonio Nicaso and your collaboration with him for this book Business or Blood.
Antonio and I met around nineteen ninety. We did a book way back when called Deadly Silence, and we had a lot of I learned a lot working with him. That was when he just came over to Canada and he knew a huge amount about the Pure Mafia in Italy. He knew about its international ramification sort of how it intersected with a lot of places in the world, and
he was curious how it fit in Canada. I knew things about local things, but I didn't really know, you know, what they meant when you got across the ocean or when you got to South America. And so we thought would be fun, you know, for both of us to educate each other and then work together on something. And i've, you know, since then, he's become a good, really good
friend and someone I totally trust. And he also he's trained as a lawyer and as a journalist, and so he really knows how to access court documents and he has phenomenal sources in Italy, so that with him you can have an idea of what you'd like to know in Italy and you can actually find out. His connections are huge, and he travels the world lecturing on organized crime.
Right now. We spoke just before, just before we went on to air, and you had mentioned that it was interesting and I would want to give anything away, but it was interesting. The this certain dynamic in that you felt that the subject of this book, Vito Risuto, should have known or could likely have known, that you and Nicaso were planning to write this book. So tell us about the plan to write this book and why specifically you felt it was you and the Caso felt it was the time to write this book.
Peter Rosuto got out of prison in October twenty twelve, and at that time his father had been murdered right in front of his mother and his sister in the family home by a sniper, and so that was shocking. He could do nothing, and this is the guy who was a control freak, and to not be able to do anything when your family has, you know, is under attack like that is shocking. His eldest son was murdered on a street corner where he was obviously set up.
His brother in law was kidnapped and never seen again, and so he was pretty obviously he was going to have to do something, either flee or go after the attackers. And a month after he got out of prison, someone who should have been a mediator in Montreal, a guy who I actually talked to, Joe Demalo, he was murdered and Demalo was the guy who would have brought peace.
And so when Demalo was killed, and that was a really clear message that this is going to be a war, Antonio and I started thinking about what it would be like to have a book starting with FTO getting the news of his son being murdered and then just writing from that point on, and we we got kind of caught up in the idea, and so by December twenty twelve we were working on the book and we knew who the main characters would be, but we didn't know who would win the war, and so that was kind
of fascinating for us to be trying to anticipate who would do what to.
Yeah, it is a that's unusual for mob books. Certainly, he's a weird Joe, you know, when you're the author and you don't know the end. Yeah, Yeah, that's unusual for how many books you've written too now to be
able to really understand this story. And I know you start off and you and it's very interesting how you lay out this book in terms of you have Veto in prison in Colorado in two thousand and nine at Christmas time when he gets the news, but just before we get into that, give us a little bit of a background for those people that don't know. And I think most people don't know the real connection between that
do you cover in this book as well? And I guess Antonio Nicaso would have been instrumental in this too, is that you have the Sicilians, and we talked about and alluded in the introduction the Calabrasian, the Calabrian and the Sicilian. And you have the New York families and Montreal and we'll talk about South America and other places.
But tell us about this a little bit of the background of Sicily and the Calabrians and Sicilians in Italy, and then we'll talk about North America and that situation as well in Toronto, Montreal and Italy. So it's all us just a little bit about that.
Sure. Vita Rizzuto was born into a mafia family. So his grandfather was a huge deal in western Sicily. His father, Nicolo, who became a huge deal in Canada. He married up. It would be like marrying into into royalty if you were in the crime world, and so they were something in Sicily, but they were ambitious and they wanted to be more, and so what they did was moved to Canada when Vito was eight years old. Later they moved
to South America. What it meant was that by the time he was a young adult, Vito could function really well in four different languages, Like he could slip from English to Spanish to Italian to French with no problem, and he could get all the nuances of all the languages. And that really kind of informed the way he looked at the world, like everything was an opportunity to him, and everything was kind of laid out. He was the only son, so there's no doubt what he's going to do.
Now.
You talked about his father, Nicolo, and his immigration to Canada, So tell us about his father and the kind of power that he wielded in his position. Tell us a little bit about his father, his father.
When he came over, he very very quickly got going in construction, got a lot of different projects going, and within five years of setting foot in Canada, he really was as somebody. He was the person who people come in from Sicily would want to want to meet if they were going to go into that sort of a world, a crime world. He was the guy you wanted to meet when you got off the boat. Montreal was controlled mostly by Collabrians at that time, and he was Sicily,
and he was very very arrogant. He didn't he didn't argue with him, he didn't even acknowledge them, really and so tech he was a member of the Banano crime family in Montreal. But he just did what he wanted, which which absolutely infuriated one guy above him who wanted to have him killed. When he there's a contract that this guy wanted to put out on him, Paulo Violi, and it was rejected by the New Yorkers who ran
the family. When when the contract was rejected, and that meant that Vito had an absolute enemy and also that his enemy had appeared powerless, and so in time Vito killed that guy and killed his two brothers and then moved to the top himself.
Now you talk about Paulo Rioli and this rise to power in terms of an earner, because that's really what the mafia and organized crime are really about, is money earning. What was Vito really like? What was he in terms of there's others involved in terms of like leadership skills, but how was he as an earner?
That's a great question, and that really gets to the heart of the difference between the two. Paula Violi was kind of a neighborhood criminal who looked a bit to Italy, looked a bit to New York, but basically was a big deal on Montreal Island. Niccolo Russuto looked looked at things globally like he he counted in Europe. He was
a very big deal in South America. He lived in Venezuela for quite a while, and what he did was have a direct access to cocaine, and he when others in his family were cautioning about getting too heavily involved in drugs, he was. He was in with both feet and so he very quickly was a just sort of an international force financially, while Paula Violi was doing well financially but in a very small area. It would be like someone with a very good union job versus someone who's a multimillionaire.
Now you talked about Sicilian and Calabrian, and so before we get too far into this, let's talk about another thing that was introduced to and it's the the drong Gedda. So explain what the non Gretta is and it's allegiance to the Colabrian or Sicilian, and tell us about its position in Toronto.
It's the Calabrian mafia. And for a long time it was underestimated that people called it the lunch bucket mob and and kind of ridiculed it or didn't take it seriously. It really rose up in the nineteen seventies with kidnappings. One of them was one of the Getty family, you know, the fabulously wealthy folks from the States, and so they got into a lot of drug trafficking. They moved north of Toronto, like first to Toronto and then a little
bit north to Woodbridge, York region. They have a commission called a Camera Decontrolo, which is a governing body. And so they're a kind of an alliance of a little more than half a dozen families in Toronto and others across the province.
And they.
A lot of inner marriage and so they're very very hard to break because people are married into into the family and if you wanted to leave, you would be infuriating your blood family, also your in laws, like it would be a huge deal to to actually turn on the family. And also they're very Ontario based and Montreal was more Sicilian. Risuto's you know, very leaning towards the old ways with Sicily, and so there there was a
natural gap between the two families. Vito Zzuto was was fairly good at developing allegiances with them, but they always remained something different from them.
Now, what was the position with you say, the Banano family, not to go too far into the hierarchy of the American families, but where did they really where was their center? Was it Montreal or Toronto? And how did they deal with both factions. How did they deal with that dynamic?
Their center was really Montreal, and Montreal it's just three hundred and eighty five miles up from New York City, and so Montreal was a logical place for a long time to bring in smuggle in people, smuggle in drugs, and a place to run off to when there's too much heat in New York, a fun place to go to. And so their natural poll was to Montreal. And then they just by extension, thought they deserved the rest of Canada, but they didn't really have the feet on the ground to really control it.
Now, not in the beginning, but you could talk about the early metamorphosis of of organized crime at Montreal and Toronto.
But by the time you start this story with Vito Rizzuto in prison in Colorado, organized crime the mafia has changed completely changed into Canada and you have this hierarchy of organized crime syndicates mafioso and then street gangs and Hell's Angels and Rock Machine and so tell us a little bit about the situation that evolved where there was an organized hierarchy of power with mafioso and then street gangs and vikers.
A lot of that's because of the Rizzuto's Nicolo and Vito, where they were smart enough to be able to find common ground with other groups, and so instead of fighting for one thing, they'd try to develop three things. One guy from the Old Rock Machine By gang told me that he thought there was enough sun for everybody, you know, that why fight over one little thing when you can go for a big thing, And that was really a
Vita Rizzuto idea. He would, rather than fight over drug turf, he'd try and get all the drug dealers to agree to keep the prices high, and so that way they'd all profit, you know, rather than losing resources and people losing their lives fighting for tiny little bits of turf. It was better to for the big players to force up prices and make a profit and then to punish everybody who undercut them. And so there was a always Vita Rizzuto finding a way to connect groups. The Hell's Angels.
While they didn't have black members, they did have affiliated clubs that took in all sorts of different races, and so what that meant was that Vita Risuto could connect with them and then have a connection to Haitian street games, and so Even though you wouldn't think that Vito's group and the Haitian groups had much in common, there actually was a couple of people who were kind of lynchpins who pulled it all together and connected everybody.
Now, at what point with Vito Rizzuto residing over this crime organization, of course he has to come to power. So tell us some of the characters that have to go by the wayside for Veto to rise to power, and that will set us up for some of the alliances that come to haunt Vito later on.
I was pretty seamless with Vito and his father because Veto never embarrassed his father and never publicly tried to take the limelight from his father. But Veto would have assumed power, say easily by the mid nineteen eighties, and that's when he had killed three people or helped kill three people for the Banano family, giving him credibility down there. He he also basically wiped out the eclabriant wing of the Montreal mob. He killed the Violi brothers, three of them.
That was quite methodical, and what that did was it gave him power, But it also meant that there were some enemies that just never would never possibly go to his side no matter what he did. There were people who loved the Violis and who fled to Ontario, but could never ever possibly think of being on Vito side.
Now, let's talk about how Veto ends up in prison in Colorado in two thousand and we'll tell us when exactly he is sentenced, and how does he get sentenced and how does this come down?
Wait, the Lucky Landslide. You can get lucky just about anywhere.
It's your captain speaking. We've got clear runway and the weather's five. But we're just going to circle up here a while and get lucky. Oh, nothing like that. It's just these cash prizes add up quick. So I suggest you sit back, keep your trade table up right, and start getting lucky.
Pay for free at Lucky Landslides dot Com. Are you feeling lucky?
No?
For just necessary void. We're prohibited by Law eighteen plus. Terms and conditions apply. See website for details.
We can talk about the Charbonnel Commission, but let's talk about first about how Veto ends up in prison, the things that lead up to the circumstances of lead up to him being in prison.
Finally, he took part in three murders in nineteen eighty one. They're actually there's a fictional version of them shown in the movie Donny Brasco. He was in a closet with a couple other men. The targets, who were in the same crime family, were led into a main room. When they were all there and there was time for the shooting to start, someone who's with the targets ran his hands through his hair and that was the signal to
come out shooting. They killed those three guys. The reason they used montrealers was that they didn't want recognizable people like they won fresh faces to do it, and so Vito got away with it. He had a really charmed life. He stayed out of prison, he was driving around in extremely expensive cars, lots of girlfriends, that sort of thing. But he always had that hanging over his head that there's the possibility of a death penalty in the States
if people figured out what was going on. And then with the Banano family started to collapse in the two thousands, where they were full of informers and it was just a matter of time until someone squealed on Veto and everything collapsed. And so he fought a huge battle to keep from being shipped to the States, but ended up
down there in two thousand and six. The really bizarre thing about it is that he got what amounted to five and a half years in prison for three contract killings, which is amazingly light, especially in a country where there's a death penalty in some states.
Absolutely was there. You talk about that five and a half year sentence and the climate that he could get a five and a year half year sentence in a death penalty state. Tell us a little bit about that.
Part of it was that he you know, he had a huge amount of money for legal expenses. I that wasn't a problem, and he with the agreement was that he would allow them to extrad item but only if they took the death penalty off the table, and so
that that was something there. Then there also just wasn't There wasn't a huge outcry to to do anything, Like he was an unknown in New York to the average American, and so it kind of I wouldn't say, fell through the cracks, but but they'd gotten the major public targets and so there wasn't a it was easy to kind of wheel and deal and and just get veto off
the table, what he where. He's effort was that he got stuck in Colorado where he didn't know anybody and where his family couldn't come to visit, and all of his phone calls were monitored, so he couldn't really say all that much.
Now, you say he goes in in two thousand and six in the and you start the story in twenty twelve, So the in before two thousand and nine, tell us about two thousand and six to two thousand and nine, and how the you know, the power struggle proceeded, and how did things change in Montreal and Toronto.
It's pretty fascinating because when he was being driven to the airport, he went into a rent to police officers, saying that everything's going to fall apart. Now you're going to have more blood on the streets, that I'm the one who controls things. And it was odd because he was right. I mean he When Vito was at the top, it was the smart people could make money and the dumb people were shot and so things ran efficiently. When Vito was off the street, then everybody thought they should
be the boss. Everybody thought they should move up. Also, some people in his group didn't just didn't have the leadership skills. One of them was very racist, and so all of a sudden he lost the Haitian street gangs, you know, the group that they had gotten along with, well, all of a sudden became enemies just through stupid comments, you know, with absolutely no gain. That's the sort of thing that Vito wouldn't have wouldn't have allowed to happen.
And so you go from having one centralized group where there's a lot of money being made and where the people who feel who are upset either have to live with it or get shot. You go from that to a whole bunch of groups thinking that now it's my chance to move to the top. And so it was. It became chaos and extremely violent, and there was just
a matter of time until Vito's family was targeted. I think the idea was that if you're going to go after them, you'd better get them all out of the way before Vito gets out, and kill his son, kill his father, kill his advisor, kill all the people around him who really count, and then when Vito comes out, he either finish him off or send him away.
Now, talk about two thousand and nine and the assassination of his son, But tell us about his son and what kind of character he was, and was he a power at all? Was he anything like his father, or what was his position at all.
I remember how shocked I was when Antonio phoned me. He was a little after Christmas and he phoned and we were both absolutely amazed. I mean, nobody had ever laid a glove on a Rizzuto. They didn't have fences around their houses, they didn't have guard dogs, they didn't nobody saw them carrying guns. I mean they were they were untouchable. And all of a sudden, his eldest child is shot to death on a street corner. So it was really and there was just no way that you
couldn't have retaliation. I mean it was just too big of a thing. And so it came down to was it an isolated, stupid neighborhood thing or was it the start of something really big? You never really know when a mob war starts. You know it's you know, by murder number four, you can start to figure it out. But even there, sometimes when the killing starts, you get unrelated murders because it's a good time to settle your score.
If someone's going to lump it into something else. You know, they won't know that you're the one who did it. And so his son wasn't wasn't really a force. He wasn't that big of a deal. He was competent, he was bright enough, but he wasn't there. There was no way he was close to leading the family, and he wasn't trying to lead the family. But he was the logical person to go after if you are going to eliminate the Rizzuto family.
Now, as you talk about in this book, it is really the efforts of the authorities to bug and monitor organized crime, and that's where they get a lot of their leads, and that leads to pressuring these guys into giving up information. And so keeping with that, they were always monitoring a veto. So what do they find out after his son is assassinated in their monitoring of him in prison.
The one thing that came out during this, and it was something that kind of gave us a bit of a jolt when we're working on the book, was that people thought that their encryption was a lot better than it was. They thought that their cell phone security was a lot better. They thought that if they keep changing the same cards and changing the phones that they were untouchable,
and they weren't. And so there was a massive email trail that where you could follow who was with who, and who was setting who up, and who was where, and who was nervous and who was going by what name. And they didn't they didn't get it that, you know, there there was a new way of bugging them. They thought that the old ways, you know, the staying off a you know, a hardline of a phone was all they had to do or be being careful on their cell phones.
And they.
It was kind of fascinating that you quickly hit a three front war in Montreal and and authorities were able to to to get warrants, them get BlackBerry to agree and then to tap in on the whole thing.
Interesting. You also talked about where the r I M. M. BlackBerry was. They thought that they had this again, like the encryption that couldn't be cracked. Another thing that they shared with a lot of say government officials and people with incredible wealth is that they and you talk about it. And I thought it was amazing that they went to the same vehicle dealers that would armor plate their vehicles.
Yeah, and that was really fascinating. Because I went to the and it just blew me away, because they'd have diplomats in in West Africa that this is where they'd get the car that would be able to withstand a
machine gun attack. And it was it was really interesting that I was shown, you know, the levels of security you can put on different cars, and so if you were a diplomat, you could tell just how much you were valued by how much you know, how much how thick the glass was, and how how reinforced your car was. Like some levels of government official got a lot safer car than other levels. Vito's people caught onto this and
they started getting the cars themselves. And these were incredible gas guzzlers, but they they meant that you could you could open fire on them, you know, with a machine gun, and they wouldn't touch the guy inside. You could. You'd have SUVs that have little gun ports at the back,
really really really high end vehicles. And and as soon as the war really started then Veto's group was was driving around in those and you wouldn't have you wouldn't before Vita would be driving around in the convertible showing off you know, his car. He hit a ferrari at one point, you know, all that was gone. There was these big, big, clunky war vehicles.
Interesting. We're going to pause just for a second to talk about the sponsor of this program, which is Squarespace. I don't know if you happen to see the recent Super Bowl with the Dude aka Jeff Bridges. He has partnered with Squarespace to bring his unique project to life. Jeff and his friends have created an album of soothing and relaxing sounds, guided meditations, and stories designed to lull you to sleep. Check out TRIPLEW Dreaming with Jeff dot Com. Now.
Squarespace is simple, powerful, beautiful, twenty four to seven support via live chat and email, only eight dollars a month and you get a free domain if you buy Squarespace for the year. It's got a responsive design so your website scales to look great on any device. The commerce end of it is every website comes with a free online store and cover pages, a feature that allows you to set up a beautiful one page online presence in minutes. Start a trial with no credit card required, and start
building your website today. When you decide to sign up for Squarespace, make sure to use the opera code True Murder to get yourself a ten percent discount off your first purchase. We want to thank squarespace for their support of this episode of True Murder. Squarespace, Build it beautiful now, Peter, we just talked about the war and dis impending war. Veto's son has been murdered. Now is it that Veto can retaliate or does the blood letting of his own
organization occur? Tell us what happens in this ensuing period of time.
The terrible thing from his point of view was that he was someone who always had control, who had phenomenal intelligence of what was going on right across society, government and police and criminals. And now he's stuck in Colorado. Nobody can visit him without being really obvious, and so he didn't have the visitors. His phone calls are monitored.
He doesn't have a BlackBerry, obviously, and so all he can do is get the news people, phone them, listen to them, cry, listen to them, shout, not really say much because he can't be picked up, and then just hope that there's something left to build on when he gets out. And so he was someone who kind of controlled everything, a real puppet master and all of a sudden, he's stuck down in the States with people who don't know who he is or how important he is, and
who frankly don't care what he does. And he has a family that really grieving, really upset, really frightened, and there's not a thing he can do about it, about helping them except plot and think and wonder.
Who were some of the big characters that come to play right at the end and at this time as well, that emerge and become central characters to this tragic story. Tell us a couple of the people that emerge in Montreal.
There's one RENW. Dejar Dan. This is someone who had gotten along with them, who Vito quite well, who'd been almost like a little adopted brother, who had risen up under Veto, who had gone from being a waiter to being phenomenally rich and a big deal in construction. But dejar Dan had grown away from him. They had been separated. There was one big drug bust where dejar Dan got fifteen years and Vito skated on it, and so dejar Dan became hardened in prison, became a force in prison,
actually tried to have someone killed in prison. Had a jogging track built in prison, like he's a big, big deal in prison, and then when he got out, he was taking himself quite seriously and not one of Vito's men anymore, definitely separated from Vito. There was another guy who came up from the States, Salvatory Montagna. He was had been a Montrealer for a little while, gone off to Sicily, and then had risen up at a very young age to be head of the Banano crime family,
which on paper is a really big thing. But when he became head of the family, they were torn apart by rats. They just didn't didn't have any cohesion. They were a bit of a joke. And so when he came to Montreal, he thought he'd be taken very seriously, and these guys were I didn't know what to make of him, but they definitely weren't bowing down to him. And so you had these two different forces and for a while it looked like Dejardin and Montagnan I'd get along,
And then that that seemed to physicle. You also had people coming in from Toronto who are thinking, now is my chance, you know, now's my chance to get into this beautiful market, you know, with the big River, with the ocean access, with the easy access to New York. You know, it's way way better geographically than Toronto. And suddenly there was an opening. And so a lot of people were trying to decide, should I get along with dejar Dan, Should I try and get along with Montagna?
Should I do it on my own? There were a lot of opportunities.
Now you talk was interesting, is you there seems there is a separation regular or usually with the women of the mafia, but you talk about Libertina, and you also talk about Veto too, had a different relationship a lot of them to have the mistress, but talk about Libertina and the kind of power she wielded.
And Libertina she was the daughter of a big mafia boss and she he'd be like being born to royalty, and they were also she didn't have to order things. There was just sort of expectations. You know, there are ways of acting. And Antonio being part Sicilian, part Collabrian, my co author, he really understood these things and it
was a great education for me. He talked about how a woman could sit at the dinner table and just say, you know, here we are having a nice meal and the person I love is eating grass, is eating dirt, you know, was under the ground. And he would guilt everybody out, and everybody would think, you know, what do I do too to make her feel better? And so you could create a climate of you know, now we're going to do something. We have to do something without ever giving an order. And and she was a very,
very not a shrinking violet at all. And her husband, you know, someone she'd been married to for more than a half century, who she genuinely loved, was was shot to death standing right beside her in the kitchen, with the daughter on the other side.
And so.
You can't have a crewer murder than that. And it was also a lot like how how her husband had someone murdered a quarter century before, but when when that happens, Vedo's in the position where how he can't ignore it and and have his mother think that he's the you know, the man that she thought she raised. You know, he is the only son he's got a it doesn't take any words for him to know what he's supposed to
be doing now. And so it's odd you've got this guy in his mid sixties and yet he still has to his to act the way he thinks his mother wants him to act, and he's still not really actualized adult.
Now tell us about leading up to his release in twenty and twelve. Tell us about the state of the situation in Montreal, in Toronto and what Veto is going to eventually be walking out into.
See that was fascinating because I was actually at the airport when Vito came in and in Toronto, and the big thing was does he take off to Montreal? Does he go hide in Woodbridge? Does he It turned out he went to somewhere in York region to a compound and sort of analyzed everything was around, a few trusted people, plotted what to do, and then then moved. He shook off the Mounties within within hours, and he had to decide and people some people were wondering if he's just
gonna flee. I mean, if if he wanted to, he had enough money that he in enough language skills, he could go anywhere in the world. But then if he does that, it's very very public and it you know, it obviously is running. He'd be ridiculed. He was extremely proud, and so how does he handle it? If he stays in Montreal, will he get killed. Will that put the rest of his family in danger? Like? Will that be
an incitement tomorrow war? And so it was fascinating to be watching and you know, trying to get an idea of where he was going. He ended up in a apartment in downtown Montreal with really really trusted security people. I'm not appearing in public. And then a month after he arrived, the big mediator in Montreal was murdered. Joe Demalo. I actually met him, and he was quite a It sounds sort of odd, but he's quite jovial. He's a
guy who liked to joke around. He was a guy who hit a really good sense of humor and he was the natural one to calm things down. But Vito didn't want things calm down. His dad had been murdered, his kid had been murdered, his mother had been shocked, and he was going to going to set things right as far as he thought, as far as he thought the world should be.
What did the authorities think that he was coming back to Montreal to do to as you put in the in the introduction, was he going to re establish himself or was this pure in outright vengeance? And what did Antonio Nicaso, And what did you think the odd thing was?
You know, we we all were their theories, and in the end they all meant nothing because everything that had been all this Vedo sitting alone with no one to talk to in the States, not being able to talk on the phone, not being able to He's a very sociable guy who liked to have drinks late at night. All of a sudden he's stuck, you know, making furniture
in a an American prison where nobody knows them. And so it was all what's going on between this guy's ears, and he wasn't sharing it with anyone they were there. I thought that he might end up in Toronto, Like I thought that he had a pretty good power base in Toronto, that things are spread out a little a little wider, that there's no one big person to fear, or in Toronto, that he's got enough connections with supposedly respectable people. I thought that the safe thing to do
would be to go to Toronto. But he pretty quickly ended up back in Montreal, and he went right into the eye of the hurricane. You know, he went right into the center of the battle. He was and it's hard to think of now, But at the time people were telling jokes, like people thought that he was easy pickings. And his family owned a funeral home in Montreal and that had been firearmed by idiots, you know, like people didn't think he was that big of a force.
What I found fascinating too, is just a slight detour, was that this funeral home owned by the family, the authorities could tell really quite a bit about who got buried there or how they got buried there. So tell us a little bit about how that worked.
Yeah, it was a good kind of barometer. Were a good way of telling telling where things stood, if if different bodies went through the funeral home or if they if they didn't. You could tell, obviously, if you were a criminal's family and you thought that Vito had killed you, you're not going to give them the business of bearing
the body at the end of it. And so, and they had a pretty they've got a pretty good website, So it was kind of a natural thing for people like me to whenever there's a killing, you quickly go on the website and see if they're going to be buried out of there or not. And you could get some gossip about who was in the in the funeral home at the service. One thing they had that was, even if it wasn't Veto's home, that made it good for criminals was that you could drive in underground parking
without ever being seen. So if you had tinted windows, you didn't have to worry about the press and the police. You could you could just drive right in there and go up the stairs or elevator and not be seen by the public at all.
And with these funerals as well, in terms of against the authorities, but also for again anyone like yourself that may be watching it journalists, attendance pardon me, attendance at these funerals or non attendants was telling and important, wasn't it.
Oh, it's huge, And even what groups showed up and how were they treated, Who acted like an usher, who who acted like they were in charge. It's very interesting that a very senior Hell's Angel towards the end started to seem like a big deal at the funerals, and so that was a, you know, a sign that there there was a new a new alliance really between the
Rezuito people and some of the Hell's Angels. Because the Hell's Angels had been shaken up quite a bit by police action, so you're wondering are they are they crushed or where do they stand? And then someone knew, not really new, but someone who'd been in the States in prison and had been out of the scene for a while. All of a sudden he had reappeared as a as
a very big deal. And so it was a way of who's standing next to who's been taken seriously, who doesn't show up, From who sends a wreath who doesn't, you could really gauge who mattered and who didn't.
Now, Vito Rizzuto, the authorities are all over him, and the authorities have learned that when there's this vacuum or when there's this war, there's going to be bloodshed, so they're trying to contain it. And you have numerous examples in your book where mobsters are informed by the police that their life is in danger. So tell us about that climate of informers and the domino effect that that happens.
And then the change when you talked about Vito being in a condo for a little while, what is his behavior afterwards?
The police are kind of obligated if they know someone is under threat to let them know. And then also it's a great opportunity, you know that maybe the person will turn, maybe you'll get an informer out of it. Nobody really seemed to be be counting on the police too much in this, like none of their really heavy duty people. The police would go around also and try and it sounds odd, but encourage them not to do things in public places that they don't need. Bystanders shot.
You don't need things like you're shooting at the Eaton Center in Toronto or the Luis Russo shooting where an innocent woman is paralyzed. And so there was a police I wouldn't say pleading but almost pleading with them to control themselves and not in danger of the public, like not make a bad situation worse.
And what was Beatle's behavior after you say he was when he first was released, he was pretty guarded his bodyguards and he was careful. He was basically hiding out. But at some point he emerges and used to love golf.
So how does he behave I mean, it's very very confident, and he walked through an airport in the winter and he had a T shirt on because he had gotten in very good shape and he was almost showing off his muscles. And this wasn't a guy who fought like he wasn't someone who was you know, came up beating up people. But he was sort of showing off. He started to appear in public. He and that was when, you know, the war looked like it was one. Towards the end, he was out drinking at night. He was
becoming the old veto again. He he also was it was golfing quite a bit. Some of it was in the Dominican and he this is a guy likes to play golf one hundred times a year, and so he the Dominican was great for him because it was out of the eyes of Montreal police and also a good you know, close to big drug pipeline things, but also the drug the golf was fantastic and so he could invite criminals down to play golf with them and plot things.
It was interesting too, because some of the montrealers got into the whole golf thing, and so they'd be playing in charity tournaments. It's kind of odd that in Montreal you'll have a nice charity, but it'll be supported partly by gangsters who want to look respectable and who on a golf course. It's a good place to talk to people. That's reasonably hard to bug for police, and so you'd have people talking about murders, but they'd be heading off to a golf course to do it.
What we've also kind of not spoken about in which is a really one of the more fascinating aspects of your book, is the Charbonneau Commission into corruption into construction. And anybody that's a watcher of mob stories has heard about the mob owning a certain percentage of all the cement used in New York City will say, And anybody
whoever watch the Sopranos knows their ties to construction. So tell us about the Charbonneau Commission ties the construction and the entrenchment of government and mafioso in Montreal.
It's huge, and it's if if they're they're talking about concrete. In Canada, you could talk about fixing potholes. It's very, very hard to have a pothole fixed in in Quebec and not support a gangster. It was very tough to to have just basic repairs. It was tough to have things like ridges built in a safe way. At there was some environmental clean up stuff where a company got a permit or people got a permit before they hit a company, and so you're supposed to have all this expertise.
Some gang connected people actually hid the permits to run the business before they hit the business. So just an extremely high level of corruption and kind of dizzying. But it was uh and a lot of and I mean, I'm I'm a union member and I'm happy to be one, but there's some pretty dirty labor stuff going on there, and the Vitos group and his rivals. We were pretty deep into.
That interesting fact that you'd throw in there too, just for American audience. Percent of Quebec workers are union as opposed to twelve percent in America.
Yeah, and that's that's a lot of dues and it's a lot of cloud One thing to do with the Charbonneaux Commission. So it showed a huge amount of things going on in Quebec, but it never it never reached
out of Quebec into Ontario. And right at the start of the Charbonneaux Commission, a police officer came from York region and said, the stuff is very, very big in our province and talked about it was very very on the money when he described he was I wouldn't say it was a plea for his government, for the government to do something, but it was pretty close and the premier didn't do a thing with it. Kind of it
quickly dismissed it. It wasn't theked up at all. And what I hear a lot from from my colleagues in Quebec is that at least in Quebec they work to clean things up. In Ontario they just bury it. And it's kind of amazing that you have the same people, the same money, the same businesses being done in Ontario
and Quebec. And for some reason, Ontario authorities seem to think that everybody becomes a virgin when they cross the border and get into Ontario, and everybody becomes clean and nobody's a crook, and it's it's kind of it's kind of laughable really when you look at it. And that's why they have such a good power base. You know, you can always go somewhere else if Quebec squeezing you to her.
Interesting, but you know, to not their credit. They had two mayors in a row embroiled in scandal. So for that, you know, people looking on the outside.
There's that joke about how when it's a tough time for the mafia they have to lay off a couple of politicians. Yeah, there's always somebody else.
Now, on a less slight note, tell us about the unraveling at near the end here we're talking about this war as it progresses. There are some people that are obviously being killed in this fight in this war, So tell us before his demise and won't give away what happens to Veto, but tell us about what's happening all around him in terms of this war.
It's kind of amazing because there were people who would be on our radar and then they'd leave the country and we would think they're probably safe. Now. I mean, one guy went to Akapoco, and so he had been he had been rumored to be a force in Montreal, that he might be trying to rise up against Veto, that he might have encouraged some of the people who rose up against Veto. But then he he took off to Acapoco, and so you he just think he's out
of the picture. And then Vito had him killed on the anniversary of one of the murders that hit his family, and so it showed that even when he went to a Collabrian mafia stronghold in Mexico, which should have made him extremely safe, he was killed at his favorite restaurant, and they knew his patterns and they got him and got away with it. There were a couple other guys who went to Sicily and they just didn't want to
take sides. Like they liked Vito and they thought the world of him, but they also liked someone who Vito was fighting, and so they thought that sooner or later they'd patch it up and in the meantime they'd get along with everybody. That didn't work, and they made the mistake of telling a lawyer what they thought. They didn't realize that the lawyer who's not a member of the Rizzuto family.
Who's.
Just someone they know, that that person passed it on to the Rizzutos, and then one of them was invited to three meetings with Veto. One of them was a golf meeting. He found excuses for avoiding all the meats, and then he was just murdered. He was if he turned Veta down three times the first time, you're going to be a mean event to the funeral.
MM hmm uh. What I found interesting too is all of the I mean, these guys got a wicked sense of humor. Some of these guys. Uh, one guy goes, I think it's his anniversary, him and his wife go to a showing of the Godfather, and they kill him right outside the film theater. Tell us just a couple of these antidotes. They're just you can't write this stuff, you know, you can't write fiction like this.
Well, there there's one where these guys went went to a stag and they joking around, walked out to the to the car by people who they think are friends. Friend beat the shaking hands to say good night, and then kaboom they bow shot. And so it was a whole night of joking around and drinks and then you know,
let me walk you to your car. And that was done right right across the street from a police station, and it was there's sort of a joke or not, I don't even know it's a joke, but the idea that in him off your murder, you know, start by looking at the friends and then work out from there.
It's generally the ones that you trust that there are the ones who sell you out, and there was another guy who and it's odd because I was trying to find him and talk to him, and I went to his bakery in Woodbridge, and I'd heard he was kind of nervous and ended up buying all these canolis that actually were extremely good, but he had high tailed it out of the country and was running around with a
bullet proof vest on. There's another guy went on a extended vacation, like he must have toured every part of of southern Europe, and then when he came home, the war was still on. The people sort of dyeing their hair and running and hiding. And it was odd because when they eventually popped up, if he wanted them killed, he had them killed. And there he was odd too
that they would plan. People be invited to weddings and they wouldn't know if they're if they were like a value guests, or if they're going to be shot in the parking lot. And if you were invited to something, we knew who was having a stag when, and it was fascinating because we'd want to know who showed up. And so on Saturday morning you'd be checking who showed up at the stag because if someone didn't go, and
they didn't have a good excuse. It meant they probably were guilty of something, and they probably knew that the other side knew they were guilty, and so they thought they'd be shot at the stake, and so it was. It was interesting just the attemtive. Being invited to their stuff didn't mean that they liked you. It could mean that they were getting ready to shoot you.
Now, I don't want to give this this too much away. I don't I don't know if this is or not, But what was the reason? Like we anybody watch the Sopranos sees the last episode where they think they're safe. They have this conversation about being safe, that they won't get hit. There was at one time some unwritten rules. I guess that you wouldn't do the kind of murders of the Rizzuto family. But of course you talk about Polo Violi and revenge. So tell us how this all
really occurred. Why did they murder his son and his father in such as a spectacular way.
The Risuto is in a way talking more about Nicolo Vito's father. He broke a lot of rules and that came back to haunt him as well like he when he wiped out the Violi family, he shot one of them when he was eating eating breakfast in front of his kids, you know, in front of his family. He had the guy shot to death by a sniper, and they just they just don't use snipers. I mean, snipers are how you kill a farmer on the farm, or how you kill a deer. It's not not the way
you're supposed to kill a human being. You're supposed to have the nerve to walk up to the person and do it. And so that was considered godless and very cruel to the family. But that was done. There was another guy who was killed who was in the same family, and he hadn't really done anything, but they just thought since they'd killed two of his brothers, he's probably going to want to do something, so they better kill him too.
And so again a cruel thing, and you end up with kids being raised where the Rizzutos were especially nick We're hated. There's one of the neighbors who they lived on the small little street where they basically had it all developed themselves, and so everybody he moved onto that street with someone who they were friendly with. But then they had one of those guys whacked because he basically
became inconvenient. He didn't do anything disloyal to them, but he became hated by John Gotti, and so was more convenient to have him killed than to argue with John Gotti. And so you have that guy's kid growing up who idolized his father. Suddenly he thinks the Risutos are his friends, and then he thinks they're his worst enemies in the world. And you know, these are people who you can count on for revenge.
Now Vito Rizzuto, everyone believes that he's out for revenge, and there are people on that are in his way, that are in his path to this completion of this vengeance. So tell us about again what the authorities were trying to do to contain this war, and then, finally, without again, tell us what happened to Vito Rizzuto.
Yeah, it's hard to you know, in a way, they just wanted them to not do it with a whole bunch of people around. There was one Toronto shooting I'm not directly connected to Vito, where the shooters didn't get out of their car, where they just sprayed a sandwich shop. They didn't kill the people they wanted to kill, and they shot an innocent woman, and so that's bad for everybody.
I mean, that brings a big public crackdown, It makes people's wife upset, It doesn't even get the guy you're trying to get, and so they didn't want that sort of sort of wildness veto the kind of the amazing thing was how surgical he was. I mean, he didn't use bombs, he didn't shoot from a distance.
It was.
It was very, very precise what he was doing, and there was a certain logic to who was being killed when it was interesting to watch because it never really
got wildly out of control. I know someone my previous book was on bikers, and I know someone who saw Vito Risuto in this time, and the idea was that this was a guy who was absolutely totally focused and that you just didn't want to argue with, Like even tough people didn't want to run across him because he was sort of on a mission, you know, very a real tunnel vision, very focused.
So can you tell us or do you want to you want to keep this?
Uh, what happened to Vito in the end?
Yeah, tell us what happened to him?
Oh, sure, you know. That was a part that shocked us. And Vito was doing very well. He was, he actually put on some weight, he was starting to relax. People were afraid of him. He sent out the message in Toronto that he doesn't want anyone's money, he does want their loyalty. What that meant was that he wasn't going to tax them for crimes, but if he thought anyone was disloyal, he'd have them killed. And so for if
you were a criminal, that was a golden age. It meant you could make all the money in the world and as long as you're loyal to Vito, you didn't have to worry about it.
And so it was.
It was just the extremely smart way of taking Toronto out of the equation. And the people who weren't loyal to Vito had to run and hide because there was an economic reason for having them killed or for not working with them. So Vito was prospering. He was socializing. Bit he did like to drink, He did like a beautiful woman. He actually had a bodyguard for one of his mistresses, and so he did like the high life, and he was getting back into that again, and then
suddenly he was dead. I mean, and he put on weight, he was looking in shape, and then he was suddenly dead and the story that quickly was created was that he had died of cancer. But Antonio and I had really good antenna at that time, and nobody had hinted even a bit that he was sick. He was out laid, he was younger than him, and I couldn't have kept
that social pace. And it was interesting because very very shortly after his death, and like within hours, it was announced there wasn't going to be an autopsy, that he was just going to be buried and that's it. His death was very, very similar to the death of a guy who a very tragic figure in the whole thing, who had turned against Vito and who was poisoned into a con apenditentiary. And there's a guy killed with cyanide
in there who had turned on Veto. This guy had a huge personal tragedy where his wife snapped under the pressure of him I'm running from the loss. She murdered their two kids, and then the guy couldn't get back to even go to the kid's funeral because he's on the run, and he basically blamed Vito for how everything went wrong. That a Vito had been better to him than his world wouldn't have collapsed. And so he was a huge enemy for Vito, and he was fearless because
he really didn't care if he lived or died. And that guy was murdered by what looked like Vito's people in prison, and it was interesting that Vito's own death was a lot like his. And Vito had been drinking a fair bit, and so it would have been extremely easy to slip something into one of his drinks, and you.
Talk about the poison that might have been the choice of the killer.
Cyanide would have been, you know the thing views and by drink number three, drink number four, it would have been pretty easy. It's pretty fascinating because a lot of people just bought the cancer theory because Veto had said that he had a spot on his lung back in two thousand and six, but nothing was done. He didn't get any medical treatment. And this is a guy who's fabulously rich, and if he had any kind of a medical problem when he's in prison, it was a good
excuse to get back to Montreal. So it would have been a great way he could have played it up and got back to Montreal and saw his family and maybe got a little more control of his family and so his crime family. So that it just is incredible at all that you've got this guy partying, laid into the night, drinking quite a bit, looking fit, putting on weight, and then suddenly he drops dead of cancer. And it wasn't a rumor at all. There was nothing at all
to suggest that. I mean, there's nothing in prison records suggesting.
He had the And do you think it's based on your research too? I know it's unusual, but how unusual is it for autopsy not to be conducted.
They're supposed to be done when there's a suspicious death, And when you have the suspicious death of the top mafia person in Canadian history, I think that rates a Look the you know that isn't suspicious?
What is?
And but there there's no law you don't have to and if you're people close to Vito, you can have your own private autopsy. You don't have to have to have a public one. You don't have to share it with the world. How the how the guy died? And but I mean, if that wasn't suspicious, then you know, what do we consider suspicious?
How did the media report his passing?
People were pretty stunned, And it was right around Christmas, so you're not there's a quick acceptance that he must have had cancer. But you know, we'd really been following this thing, and we had been both of us were talking to people who would know a lot about him, and we wanted to know who's he socializing with, where's he going, how out in the open was he, what kind of car did he have? You know, all this
sort of thing. And in all of that, never a hint about Vito being tired, Vito staying home, Vito feeling sick. For a guy in is who's sixty seven years old to be keeping up that sort of pace and then suddenly to be written off as a sickly old man when he just hadn't been acting even close to that way. It's pretty passive by the media.
Really interesting, And what kind of timing was his death in terms of relation to this book and it's it's writing and come.
He died about I guess thirteen months or thirteen months before the book came out, And so there were a couple more murders after his death, and it seems that the family is being run now by kind of a concertium that that you have about four or five people who are fairly powerful, but none of them is his the chrisma or the or the control that Veto had, and so it's almost a mafia by committee thing. And there were some some kind of logical murders that that
were carried on after that. There were some There's one guy who bragged about about shooting Vito's father. That guy, I mean, there's no way they're going to let that guy live.
There.
There was another guy who I thought would get murdered who wasn't. And I'm sure he I'm sure he's still, you know, not sitting by the window for a while. And so we actually had a list of logical suspects to be murdered and he got between half and then say two thirds of their way through when he died himself.
Wow, incredible.
Yeah, they would have known they're on the list. It wasn't like we had any inside thing on.
It, right, right, So is there was there a you say, that's sort of run by a consortium now, so there is a sort of a piece at least not getting civilians involved in their business seemed to be a relative piece.
Yeah, and in the crime family still exists, and in an odd way, they're almost more dangerous because if you have five people with a fair amount of power and other people who are getting out of prison, like they'd been hit pretty hard with court cases in the early two thousands. Now a lot of those guys are getting out again. Then in a way it's kind of interchangeable.
If someone attacks one of them, then they have to worry about the other four, and so it in an odd way almost makes them them more dangerous.
I guess it's not rising to some people, and I'm sure it's not surprising to you, but your book is filled with murder. I mean, these guys sell drugs, they do other uh, they do other rackets. But really, these guys they kill a lot, don't they.
Yeah, it's it was. It was really odd doing a book where we kind of had the premise of you know, what's Vito gonna do? And and it was sort of like in real time where people would keep getting killed, like you'd be introducing a character in chapter four and then chapter eight, the guy's been killed and you haven't
written chapter eight yet. Like it was sort of odd too, and there would be a certain logic to them, like it would it would they'd all kind of make sense, you know, like they weren't real random things and there were surprising things. But then when you thought about him, it all sort of fell into place and you could I mean, this is something that Veto had a lot of time to think about. You know, he had five and a half years, very smart guy fitting alone in prison.
You knew that he was running through everybody in their world, you know, what did you think of them? And you also knew that mercy wasn't one of the big options here. You know that if he was angry, he was going to act on it.
And you do, you really do capture to his anger because he really there is an option for these guys when they are in prison to be able to go to a funeral. Again, you would want to be with your family. Everyone would want to be with their family, but he didn't do that, and you really sort of intimate that that would really not help a guy's disposition when he got out either.
Yeah, that was an interesting one because his his family told him that you really don't want to be the center of a freak show. You really don't want to to be you know, stared at like some animal in the zoo. You don't want to be there in handcuffs and everybody jostling to get a picture of you, everybody jostling to get a look at you. And so you have this extremely proud guy who likes to think he's
the big protector of the family. And then women in the family are saying, why don't you just stay home or not stay home, stay in prison, And it does make sense. He did acquest to them and he did agree not to go when at first he really wanted to go. It was the women who were close to him that talked him out of it.
Yes, well, it's an incredible tale of vengeance as well to beato Risuto. If anybody had any doubt what he was going to do, they soon found out what his real mission was. Once he was released.
You anew with you with an odd one because you know, in the end we started thinking about how he kind of played the role that he was raised to play, and then when he really did it, well, it all exploded on him. I mean it just was a you're sort of odd that that everything he sought to do
came back to Burnham. You know, he sought to become like his father, and by him making the family stronger, it made them more of a target in a way that people were worried his son was going to turn out like him, so they murdered his son as well. You know, you think you're passing something on to your kid, but you become so feared that people kill your kid because I think he's going to be like you. That's got to be a terrible feeling.
But the way you describe as character, it wasn't like he was ashamed of what had happened with his father and with his son. He was really one of those people that are captured in books and movies. He was of the life, wasn't he.
Oh definitely. I Mean it's interesting to use the word shame because that's a word that a couple of years of both of us researching the book, we never heard it once. We never heard of him being ashamed of anything. Yeah, this is someone who who didn't really have the boundaries the rest of us have, or even close to them. But we never once ever heard of him saying sorry. We never heard of him saying he's ashamed. We never heard of him, you know, any of those kind of emotions at.
All incredible And with this book, what has been the reaction, I would say internationally in terms of people that watch and write these kinds of the authorities of organized crime, What has been the reaction so far to this book.
I've been really happy with it. Like Jerry Kapisi, who's a huge deal in this sort of world, writing about it. I had a guest column for him last week, or actually three of them, and that was something where they approached me to just talk about Veto. There's a fascination with him. We've gotten quite a bit, you know, from California to New York and across Canada. We have been very,
very happy with it. I think some of it is because it's almost Shakespeare, you know, the idea of have a control freak all of a sudden losing control when he needs it the most. I mean, there's something there that you just can't make it up. You know, this guy who through his entire life has always been the guy in charge, and then he he becomes so impotent he can't even go to his kids funeral and he
can't do a thing about it. And his mother is in shock because her husband's been killed and he can't even give her a hug. I mean, it was some of the stuff. As much as you don't like what Vito did, you can't help, but on a human level feel sorry for him.
Well, it's incredible that these people choose his life. I mean I always thought, and this just reinforces it. You know, these guys get again, an armored car, a bodyguard, and a nice suit, and that's about what you get. I mean, there are some perks, but it's incredible. The life that these guys live in paint a really vivid portrayal of these guys and this life. I don't think anybody is going to be motivated to join the mafia after reading this book.
So absolutely. I mean, I drive a car that nobody on the street is jealous of me when I drive by. But I'm a lot happier than Vito was, you know, in his Ferrari. So you don't you know that At first you might be think, Wow, they have all this money, But after a while, when you take a hard look at him, you think this is a life I wouldn't wish on the worst enemy.
Yeah, and all the connections too, from the street gang guys that get murdered to the Hell's angels that get involved with again in prison, so it's nothing but prison and or murder, or and or misery. Like you say, the guy that his wife flipped out and killed the kids and again sitting in prison. There's nothing more helpless than somebody sitting in prison. So even these guys that are used to the power realize the impotasy that they
face in prison. There's a joke I heard a long time ago from a bad guy who said, help them being chased by paranoids, and is kind of true. They get such a paranoid world that that it is. It's realistic, not paranoid to be worried about the paranoid people chasing after you. Yeah, incredible. Well, Peter, I want to thank you very much for those that may want to find out a little bit more information. Do you have a website or how my people contact you? Have more about business or blood?
Got a website? Peter Edwards, author dot com and people can also email me p Edwards at the Star dot ca A. I'm always happy to talk to people, so I've and I talked to an extremely wide range of people. So you know, any of your listeners, I'd be happy to talk to them.
Sounds great. Well, I want to thank you very much, and I want to thank actually Antonio Nicaso for helping you and collaborating with you on this fine book business or Blood the Beadle, Rizzuto's Last War. Thank you very much on your well, it's always a pleasure speaking with you, Peter, and I hope you have a great evening and hope to talk to you again soon.
Right, another one so I can get back on in a couple of years.
Absolutely, thank you, Okay,