Bad Blood
Amazon
Published by: Random House Canada (Netflix Series)
Release Date: September 17, 2017
Pages: 336
ISBN13: ISBN: 978-0345813763
Synopsis
Bestselling crime writers Peter Edwards and Antonio Nicaso reveal the final years of Canada’s top Mafia boss, Vito Rizzuto, and his bloody war to avenge his family and control the North American drug trade.
Until Vito Rizzuto went to prison in 2006 for his role in a decades-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 dons finally lost his veneer.
As he watched helplessly from his Colorado prison, the murders of his son and father made international headlines; the killings of his lieutenants and friends filled the pages of Canadian news; and the influence of the ‘Ndrangheta, the Calabrian Mafia, spread across Montreal faster than the blood of Rizzuto’s crime family.
In 2012, Vito Rizzuto emerged from prison, a 66-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 2013, Bad Blood is the final chapter of Vito’s story.
Netflix is now showing the first season of Bad Blood. The second season was nominated for four Canadian Screen Association Awards. Learn more.
Praise
“Canadian gangsta shit. That stuff is hard.”
–Snoop Dogg, television critic and rapper
“Peter Edwards knows how 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
Excerpt
Vito Rizzuto was agonizingly far from his Montreal home when he learned of the murder. Violent death was a fact of life in his world, no more out of place than the slaughter of chickens and cattle on a farm. Murder had been necessary for Vito’s family to rise to power in Montreal’s underworld, and murder helped them expand that power and make money beyond his ancestors’ wildest dreams. And murder—three, in fact, that Vito had a hand in twenty- eight years earlier—explained why he was stuck in a prison cell in the dusty former cowboy boom town of Florence, Colorado, about an hour and a half south of Denver. That said, no murder that the mobster had ordered, witnessed or committed in his sixty-three years of life readied him for what the prison chaplain had come to tell him: this time, the bullet-scarred corpse was that of his own eldest child, Nick Rizzuto Jr.
A prison guard that day—three days after Christmas 2009— witnessed something that people who knew Vito well could not imagine: the face of Canada’s top Mafia don contorted with pain and shock. Life as a perpetrator didn’t mean Vito knew how to assume the role of a victim. Blindsided by the news, he didn’t cry. No one ever talked of Vito crying. But Vito was stunned and hurt and desperately needed to plan his next move. Vito always had a next move.