My Books

I am the author of best-selling, non-fiction books, published around the world and in three languages: English, French and Italian.

 

THE WEASEL: A Double Life in the Mob

“A delicious, delightful and dirty read about a guy who should have been dead a long time ago.” — Maclean’s

“An exquisite tale: revelatory, deeply layered and, best of all, true.” — National Post

In the world of organized crime, the bosses grab the headlines. But a crime family has many working parts and the young mobster known as The Weasel was a crucial, invisible cog: the soldier, the muscle, the driver, the gopher. By a quirk of fate, Marvin Elkind — The Weasel — was placed in the Toronto foster home of a tough gangster family, which immersed him from the age of nine in a daring world of con men, cheats, bootleggers, bank robbers and Mafia bosses. During a golden age of underworld life in New York, Detroit and across Canada, The Weasel found himself working with a surprising cast of colorful characters. He befriended powerful gangsters by smuggling bottles of Scotch to their tables at New York’s famed Copacabana, and was pushed to be Jimmy Hoffa’s chauffeur. But his disenchantment with broken promises put him in the hands of law enforcement, and he made an abrupt career change, becoming Canada’s most prolific police informant. As he traveled the world befriending and betraying a stunning array of mobsters, terrorists, mercenaries, spies, drug traffickers, pornographers, union fat cats and corrupt politicians, The Weasel learned he was a far better fink than he ever was a crook.

“A Machiavellian mystery tour of the mob’s underworld. Essential reading.” — The Globe and Mail

“Eye-opening… A fascinating book, which turns many assumptions about the mob on their heads.” — The Mirror

Authors Adrian Humphreys and Lee Lamothe chronicle a 40-year war by a Montreal family to become the world’s wealthiest and most influential Mafia clan — a “perfect” Mafia that eclipsed each ofthenotorious Five Families of New York and the bloody clans of Sicily. Quickly becoming a national bestseller, this dramatic, major work reveals the hidden history of Vito Rizzuto, the head of “the Sixth Family.” It was May 5, 1981, when a daring bloodbath took place inside a Brooklyn social club. When the bullets finally stopped, three captains of the powerful New York-based Bonanno crime family lie dead. For 25 years, the details of the slaughter remained a guarded secret. The killings brought a power-shift to the New York underworld but this was only one act in a lengthy cross-border campaign of murder and treachery to secure the key transit points necessary to flood America with drugs. One of the gunmen was Rizzuto, who would rise to the top of the underworld in Canada and then expand his reign across continents to become a global superboss. The Sixth Family is the chilling modern-day underworld saga of a criminal cult.

“A faithfully rendered, riveting account of the rise and fall of Canada’s most powerful Mafia don. This is The Godfather as it really is, not as Hollywood romanticizes.” — The Spectator

“Takes you behind the scenes into the backrooms of the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s where deals were made, relationships forged, and double-crosses plotted… A fascinating and educating read.” — Vancouver Sun

Shortly after lunch on the last day of May in 1997, Johnny Papalia, a man known as Johnny Pops, Canada’s Capone, Godfather and the Enforcer, was gunned down outside his office. Before he slumped, dying, to the pavement at the age of 73 — on the same small, working-class street in Hamilton, Canada, where he was born and raised — he was universally feared as one of North America’s longest-reigning Mafia bosses. From his father’s Prohibition roots through a profitable alliance with Buffalo’s Mafia boss Stefano “The Undertaker” Magaddino and setting up a piece of “The French Connection,” the notorious heroin ring, with Joe Valachi, Papalia became a boss unlike any other. After becoming a top, national bestseller and burning through numerous reprints, this trade paperback edition of The Enforcer is a fully revised edition — with important new stories, remarkable new discoveries and updates throughout the text as well as a major new epilogue featuring Humphreys’ interviews with Papalia’s assassin, who is both a serial killer and a mob hit man. This edition also adds 29 new photographs to the already impressive collection. A true-crime classic in every sense, The Enforcer is an absorbing read for any fan.