Mob Mistress

On April 1,1986, CBC-TV's the fifth estate broadcast a lead item entitled "Mistress to the Mob". In the program, a former playgirl with Hamilton's notorious Papalia crime family spoke frankly of her life within the mob, of the events that led her to become an undercover operative with the "family", and of her present life as a protected witness, living under an assumed name in a city far from Hamilton. The woman was Shirley Ryce, and Mob Mistress is her story.

Here, through award-winning crime writer James Dubro, she tells of her upbringing as the spoiled daughter of a local bookie and card-game organizer, of her early marriage, and of the fateful meeting that turned a bored housewife and mother into a mob mistress.

Shirley Ryce moved in organized-crime circles for almost two decades, and had many mob affairs. Although she knew little of the mobsters' "business", she saw a great deal of the mob at play. Her break with the Papalias and their cohorts, and her co-operation with the police, marked a dramatic change in her life, and in Mob Mistress she looks back at who and what she was with self-deprecating frankness. At the same time, she and Dubro both give an informed and clear-eyed view of her former "playmates"—and of the law-enforcement officers who fight them daily.

Shirley Ryce spent almost two decades as a playgirl within the orbit of Hamilton's notorious Papalia crime "family". In Mob Mistress, award-winning crime writer James Dubro, author of the best-selling Mob Rule, tells her story.