Mafia dad who cared for his little girl by offering to kill her husband
SIR Trevor McDonald has friends, know what i’m saying? He knows people. People you don’t wanna mess with. Bada bing, bada boom. Capeesh? What began as contacts, made during the research for his investigations into the lives of reformed mobsters, have become trusted connections. The former newsreader, now 77, is writing a new chapter in his career, as a psychoanalyst of organised crime.
Ex-Mafia enforcers and consiglieri, the one-time hitmen and middle managers of New York and Vegas, spoke to him guardedly last year, and Sir Trevor did not betray them. instead of sensationalising their accounts, as many TV journalists might have done, he let the mobsters tell their own stories.
That did not go unnoticed. And now a secret layer of Mafia life, underpinning the lurid scams and killings, is being revealed to him, as the mob’s wives and daughters emerge to talk, for Mafia Women (ITV).
The veteran newsman had already met Anthony russo, a ‘capo’ or gangland captain in the Colombo crime family in Brooklyn before he cut a deal with the FBI to turn informant and avoid a lifetime in jail.
Now russo wanted the cameras to see his new girlfriend, Amy, a Florida nurse he met while walking his dog.
russo trusts Sir Trevor, but in a wiseguy way: he had to be present throughout every conversation and if he didn’t like the direction an answer was headed, he cut in. He treated Amy the way a strict father talks to his favourite daughter, encouraging her to tease him just a little and then scolding her.
All the women interviewed in Mafia Women had relationships with their fathers that were complex enough to make Sigmund Freud’s head whirl.
Maria Scarpa was just two years old when her dad Greg Jnr was jailed. She speaks to him daily by phone in prison and has done since she was a toddler — family video shows her chatting to Poppa on the telephone shortly after he was arrested in the late Eighties.
But it was her aunt Linda who really qualified for a lifetime’s free therapy. Her father, Gregory Scarpa Snr, was the Mafia’s most prolific killer. He said he stopped counting bodies after the first 50, though the FBI puts his tally at 100 or more. Gangland knew him as the Grim reaper.
When he was dying from Aids (caught from a contaminated blood transfusion, so he said) Greg Snr asked Linda if she wanted him to kill her husband.
He wasn’t going to be around for ever, he explained, so if she wanted it doing, she’d better speak up. Though she refused the offer, Linda still sees that as a loving gesture.
As she too grew to trust Sir Trevor, she let him view footage of her 16th birthday party, a huge family party featuring a waltz with her father as its centrepiece. She wept as she watched herself nestling in his arms.
‘Does that look like someone who would want to hurt somebody?’ she sobbed. ‘No! He was the love of my life.’
With great skill, Sir Trevor nursed answers from these wary women. Often he did no more than repeat their evasive phrases, prompting them to elaborate.
it was highly effective, and much less eccentric than the tics revealed by Ardal O’Hanlon as he took over the detective’s role on Death In Paradise (BBC1).
Ardal has a hard act to follow. Kris Marshall, as Di Humphrey Goodman, often played the buffoon, but he had hidden depths. As Di Jack Mooney, Ardal has irritating habits, which isn’t the same thing.
When he’s puzzling over the suspects’ faces pinned to the whiteboard, he sings to himself. And when he’s baffled, he turns all naive and irish — there were moments of Father Dougal, his gormless priest from Father Ted, so there were, to be sure.
He wasn’t helped by one of the weakest storylines for a while, a cold case murder where the clues were laboured and the killer wore an ‘i Dunnit’ badge.
But Mooney’s tender relationship with his daughter Siobhan (Grace Stone) is promising. Give him time — we might grow to love him.