“Peter Edwards knows how the real bad guys eat, sleep and breathe, and on the page brings them to life – even the dead ones – better than any other true crime writer.”—Linwood Barclay, international bestselling author
Peter Edwards is the organized crime beat reporter at The Toronto Star.
He spent the first eleven years of his life in Lytton, British Columbia, a strange but happy village with no streetlights or elevators between several First Nations communities. There, his father Kenneth was the region’s only doctor, sometimes paid with salmon speared from the Fraser River. His mother Winona was an avid, perceptive, passionate writer who pioneered the benign neglect school of child-rearing while raising their four children. His father sometimes dabbled in journalism, and once wrote in a medical journal that it’s better to have a fence at the top of a cliff than an ambulance waiting at the bottom of it. Edwards remains best-known in Lytton for winning the junior boys’ category of a baking contest with a French apple pie, in a competition marred by the disqualification of several competitors for using store-bought mixes. He plans to buy a summer home on the outskirts of Lytton immediately after winning the lottery.
There were about twice as many people (about 700) in his high school, Central Secondary in London, Ont. as in all of Lytton. He went to Western University (formerly University of Western Ontario) where he received an Hons. BA in Canadian History and a Masters degree in Journalism.
Edwards was named to the university’s Alumni Gallery of Distinction in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies. Not long after that, the university changed its name and erased all mention of the Gallery of Distinction. Edwards claims not to take this personally.
Before heading off to the work world, Edwards took a year off school to pursue his love of judo while supporting himself working in a pub in Soho, London. He was thrown, choked, arm barred and pinned by some of the best fighters in the world and still considers that year a great investment of his time.
He has since worked for newspapers in Woodstock, Ont., London, Ont., Vancouver, Saskatoon, Whitehorse and Regina before landing in Toronto. He worked as a copy editor, sports writer and briefly as an entertainment editor, before drifting into organized crime reporting. He has written for The Toronto Star for more than thirty years.
He’s the author of fifteen non-fiction books, ten of which are on organized crime. A young adult novel, The Biker’s Brother, will be published in October 2017 by Annick Press. Business or Blood: Mafia Boss Vito Rizzuto’s Last War, which was co-written with Antonio Nicaso, was optioned by New Metric Media and developed into a six-part series, starring Anthony LaPaglia, Kim Coates and Paul Sorvino. It’s marketed internationally by Sky Vision.
Bad Blood debuts on City and FX in September 2017. Random House will re-release Business or Blood under the title Bad Blood at the same time.
Edwards was a consultant for the movie One Dead Indian, which won three Gemini Awards and was nominated for another four. He covered Ipperwash with Harold Levy of the Toronto Star for years, benefitting both from Levy’s idealism and keen sense of humour. Edwards’s coverage earned him an eagle feather from the Union of Ontario Indians and a gold medal from the Centre for Human Rights. A particularly poignant moment came when he was a pallbearer at the funeral of the late Sam George, who sacrificed his health in a tireless effort to obtain justice after his brother Dudley’s death.
Edwards has received awards from Amnesty International’s Orillia chapter, the Saskatchewan Reporters Association and the Ontario Reporters Association but still secretly smarts about the university’s Gallery of Distinction debacle. He was a member of a Toronto Star team that won a National Newspaper Award for spot news coverage and also received an honourable mention in sports-writing for a series he worked on with the late Randy Starkman.
His books on organized crime has been translated into French and German and published across North America and the United Kingdom. His book Delusion on Victorian superspy Henri Le Caron made it onto the CIA’s “Intelligence Officer’s Bookshelf” and was called a “well-documented corrective to an intriguing spy story.” Edwards has been interviewed about organized crime for the BBC, CBC, CTV, CBS.com and the Mob Stories series for History Television and frequently lectures on organized crime and journalism at several universities and colleges. He often begins his talks by paraphrasing Keith Richards and saying, “It’s great to be here. It’s great to be anywhere.”