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aside or let his rivals sink a dagger into his back.
    As we worked on this book, Quebec’s Charbonneau Commission into corruption within that province’s construction industry was diving deep into the industry’s particularly murky waters, underscoring in daily headlines how Mafia violence is inextricably linked to political and economic interests. We were nearly finished writing when Vito Rizzuto died in circumstances that were never made clear. Many people predicted his death, of course, but few thought it would be the result of natural causes, as was quickly and widely accepted by authorities and the press.
    News of Vito’s sudden passing brought relief in some powerful circles, criminal and otherwise. By the time of his death, he had actually become bad for business. Revenge was more important to him than making money, and every day brought news of fresh bloodletting among men known to be his enemies. Exactly what killed Vito himself will most likely remain a mystery, but even in his absence the Mafia tradition he embodied will thrive and evolve—growth that Vito’s last war may have ensured will continue for another generation to come.

CHAPTER 1
Blow to the heart
    V ito 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.
    First, he should go to the funeral. That meant he needed to approach authorities—the same people he had spent his life deceiving—and ask for permission to leave the prison and cross the border. The prospect of asking anyone’s permission for anything served as another reminder of how far he had fallen.
    If permission were granted, Vito would have to travel with guards and he would most likely be handcuffed. Maybe he would be required to wear a bulletproof vest, too, like he had worn during his extradition to the United States. He would also have to pay his own travel costs, but that was no problem. Vito could afford to buy a fleet of jet craft and hire an army of guards.
    In the days following the news, Vito phoned his wife, Giovanna, every chance he could. Many times, Vito had come home in the early hours of the morning smelling of wine and the perfume of a mistress, but there was never talk of their marriage ending. They had been man and wife for forty-three years, and Nick Jr. had shared in that life together for forty-two of them. Giovanna knew life was often hard, even for the powerful; she was the daughter of Leonardo Cammalleri, himself a Mafia killer who emigrated from the Sicilian province of Agrigento to Canada, in part to evade murder charges. But with Vito behind bars, Giovanna needed sedatives to sleep at night. And now things had got worse, as she undertook the