The Godmother Strikes Back

In modern-day New York, Lucia Vitale, the matriarch of Brooklyn's most powerful mafia family, was poisoned and left for dead by her husband Vito five years ago, and fled into exile in Sicily. Now, living under a false identity, she has returned to New York. Her only weakness — her 16-year-old daughter Bella — is interning at the Vitale's nightclub, which bears Lucia's own name. Bella doesn't know her mother's true identity. She's cornered in the back by Gina, Vito's mistress — a former stripper who calls herself "Mrs. Vito" — and Gina's arrogant nephew Tony. They force her to eat slop, yank at her collar, and humiliate her in every way. The front-of-house staff look down their noses at her, the bouncers enable the abuse, and no one in the whole building recognizes this silent mother. Lucia kicks the door open. She doesn't cry or make a scene — she simply, coldly opens the hidden vault beneath the club that no one has ever seen: walls lined with gold bars, bundled stacks of cash, antique jewelry so dazzling it's blinding. The building's entire security system was installed by her own hands, and the city's most lethal squad of bodyguards answers only to her. But this is only the beginning. Vito — the man she once lifted from a street vendor onto the Five Families' table — had long been in league with Gina. He embezzled her assets, shattered her 1.3-billion black onyx family seal ring, and even condoned Tony assaulting Bella. When Gina points a finger at Lucia at the family dinner and calls her a "homewrecker," the ninety-year-old godfather Salvatore enters leaning on his cane and announces to the room: Lucia is the family's one and only heir. The reversal comes one after another: Vito kneels, Gina is forced to swallow slop, and Tony is punished for his many crimes. But Vito, eyes red with greed, has gone mad — he murders Gina to silence her, poisons the family's rib soup to kill them all, and finally raises a pillow to smother his own daughter as she lies sick in her hospital bed. The family dog, "Wangwang," tasted the poison first. Vito is pinned down in the courtyard on the spot. The final verdict: Vito, guilty of intentional murder, sentenced to death; Tony, life in prison; the thug, ten years. Behind the prison's glass window, Bella picks up the phone and calmly tells the man crying, "Do you hate Daddy?" — "I don't hate you. I just hate that you wasted my life. You never treated me as your daughter. What you owe me, heaven has already repaid on your behalf. We're even."