Mob Stories – Short Synopsis !SEASON 1 - THE FOUR DONS !Ep. 1 Rocco Perri: King of the Bootleggers Rocco Perri was Canada’s first Mafia “don”. Just before the heyday of Prohibition, this penniless Italian immigrant meets Bessie Starkman, a spirited Russian Jew. Romance blossoms and so does a criminal empire an empire drenched in contraband booze. Together, this unlikely couple builds the largest liquor smuggling operation around, quenching the dry American market with their top-quality Canadian liquor. But in the underworld, enemies abound and they always covet the success of their rivals. Ep. 2 John ‘Pops’ Papalia: Born to the Mob Johnny ‘Pops’ was the scowling face of organized crime for decades. Johnny never chose the Mafia, he was born to it. Life for Johnny started at a modest address on Railway Street in Hamilton and it ended 73 years later in a pool of blood just steps from his birthplace. But Johnny’s journey from the French Connection to illegal gambling to his fatal last stand was as long and twisted as the underworld has ever seen. Ep.3 Paolo Violi: Don of St. Leonard Paolo Violi controlled Montreal’s underworld with an iron fist but he took orders from the powerful U.S. Mafia. Sheer ambition dared him to dream of a ‘Made in Canada’ Mafia. His quest for independence grew as his star in the underworld soared. His U.S. masters believed Violi was a loyal don strengthening bridges between families and countries, but all along he was a rebel intent on burning them down. ! !Ep. 4 Frank Cotroni: The Big Guy Frank Cotroni was one Mafioso who really didn’t measure up, but then, he didn’t have to. Frank was a Cotroni, heir-apparent to a vast Mafia empire built by his older brother Vic. As Vic’s health fails, murder, insurrection and dishonour cripple that once-powerful Family. Now, the most unlikely Cotroni must take control of the organization and prove he is capable of returning the Family to its former glory. SEASON 2 !Ep. 1: Domenic Racco: Unto The Son Anyone who’s watched The Sopranos knows that life in the Mob ain’t what it used to be. The first couple of generations, with their Old World morals and ways, have been replaced by their sons and grandsons – men who were shaped by very different forces: the changes brought about by the 1960s, and easy access all the privileges afforded to Mob !“royalty.” Mob Stories – Short Synopsis No one illustrates this better than Domenic Racco, golden child of Toronto’s Calabrian Mafia, only son of Mike Racco, the universally !respected head of the group’s governing committee. Mike Racco is a discreet man. He lives above his family’s bakery in Toronto’s Little Italy, keeps a low profile, and uses violence only as a last !resort, when less ostentatious means of persuasion have failed. His son Domenic is a hothead. At an early age, he goes to prison for shooting two men in a testosterone-fueled dispute in a strip-mall parking lot. Mike does everything in his power to get his son’s head right, and to shorten his stay in the joint. But Domenic doesn’t exactly help his own cause: caught ordering a hit on someone over a petty insult, he avoids !conviction only thanks to his father’s Mafia methods. Domenic is paroled in 1978, the height of the disco era, the early days of cocaine. And that’s where he focuses his efforts. From his corner table at a downtown nightclub, surrounded by hot women and gangster hangers- on, he wholesales coke to after-hours-club owners. And what he doesn’t sell goes up his own nose. It’s no wonder that, when his father dies of cancer two years later, the old men pass him over for the godfather job he !had thought of as his birthright. With his father’s protection gone, Domenic forms an alliance with a minor mob family, who supply the coke he both peddles and consumes. But his addiction is taking over his life, and attracting the wrong kind of attention. Unsurprisingly, he falls behind on his bills. And in the Mafia, that can only lead to one thing. His powerful protectors turn away, and Domenic dies a lonely death in a hail of bullets, the golden child who could have had everything but threw it all away. ! Ep. 2 – Shirley: Mob Mistress ! The gangster’s moll is a familiar stereotype: not too bright, sexually available, with a taste for expensive things. But what’s the reality? This episode of Mob Stories tells the story of Shirley, who played with the Mob !for almost two decades, until the Law came calling. Hamilton, Ontario – Canada’s steeltown – is just down the highway from Toronto, halfway to the U.S. border. That location, plus its blue-collar !nature, has made it the epicentre of mob activity in Canada. That’s the town that gives birth to Shirley, the daughter of a smalltime bookie, who grows up to become a fairly typical young ’60s housewife. But Shirley isn’t that typical. Beautiful and restless, she isn’t satisfied with raising three kids in the suburbs. When she crosses paths with young Mafia scion Rocco Papalia, she happily becomes a mob mistress. Soon enough, Shirley leaves her family, and abandons the pretense of a modelling career. Instead, she goes to work at the Gold Key Club, a !mobbed up joint owned by Rocco’s family, the Papalias. Mob Stories – Short Synopsis And the Papalias… well, the Papalias – Tony and his three sons, Johnny (Pops), Frank and Rocco – they run Hamilton. They see value in Shirley’s charms, and soon she has moved up from Rocco to his big brother Frank, and has become a popular hostess at the Gold Key Club. She’s not just dating Frank but entertaining important people – mobsters and their !clients – sometimes for money, and sometimes just for the thrill. But the Gold Key Club attracts attention. As a known Mafia gathering place in the midst of a Hamilton crime wave, it becomes the focus of an intense police investigation. After many months of fruitless surveillance and wiretapping, police still don’t have anything they can act on, until they hear Frank Papalia telling Shirley to take care of his lawyer… for money. They now have enough to threaten Shirley with a prostitution charge, and that’s enough to convince her to flip. Shirley’s testimony puts her old boyfriend / boss away on an obstruction of justice charge. Shirley herself, 17 years into the life, takes the opportunity to enter witness protection and start again, a survivor who played the mob-mistress game well, and lived to tell the tale. ! !Ep. 3 – Paul Volpe: Fox Hunt For a group comprised entirely of outlaws, the Mafia is notoriously conformist. So when a gangster comes along who doesn’t quite play by the rules, everyone notices. That was Paul Volpe – a criminal who was happy to work with everybody, but chose an unorthodox path that !ultimately triggered his undoing. You might say Volpe is born to his métier. In Italian folklore, the seventh son of the seventh son is branded the devil’s child. What’s more, Volpe’s family name means “fox” in Italian. He comes up in the 1940s and ’50s, in the Ward, Toronto’s dirt-poor immigrant slum. But the small-time hoodlum life is not for him – he’s much more ambitious than that. Volpe soon discovers, though, that to get ahead in the world of crime, he has to have a protector, to be part of a family. He makes his inquiries, and manages to !befriend one of the toughest – the Bonanno family of New York. Ultimately joining the Buffalo crime family of Stefano “the Undertaker” Magaddino, Volpe spends a good part of the 1960s operating a crooked casino in Haiti, with the cooperation of the country’s notorious dictator, Papa Doc Duvalier. But Volpe becomes disillusioned with the life of a simple Mafia soldier – he’d rather be his own man, his own boss. He moves back to Toronto and puts together his own ethnically diverse gang, active in everything from numbers and extortion to the real moneymaker, !fixing union problems for the construction industry. Leaving Toronto when his business starts getting too much attention, Volpe heads back across the border and further into white-collar crime, making millions laundering Mafia money in Atlantic City. And when things inevitably get too hot down there, he takes his winnings and goes home, moving into comfortable semi-retirement. But the early 80s, police pay him a visit with an interesting offer: there’s a hit out on him, and Volpe can save his skin by cooperating with the cops and helping them fake his death. The Fox decides to take the offer – a surprising and dangerous Mob Stories – Short Synopsis move for a lifelong mobster. In the underworld, he’s now seen as a rat. And within two years Volpe is dead, found shot in the trunk of a car. His murder is still unsolved. ! Ep. 4 – Vic Cotroni: Puppet Master ! It’s a rare mobster who is allowed to die peacefully in his sleep, at the end of a 50-year career in the Mafia. That’s one thing that makes Vic Cotroni such an unusual figure. The other is, quite simply, the power that he !wielded... and lost. Cotroni comes to Canada as a teenager in the 1920s. Soon he’s spotted by a local gangster, and recruited to be a professional wrestler and part- time debt collector.