Leonardo DiCaprio is all set to produce and star in an adaptation of a book by Stephan Talty for Paramount Pictures. The movie will be produced by Gotham Group's Ellen Goldsmith-Vein and Jeremy Bell along with DiCaprio's Appian Way banner.
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The book 'The Black Hand: The Epic War Between a Brilliant Detective and the Deadliest Secret Society in American History' follows Joe Petrosino, an NYPD cop, who is nicknamed the 'Italian Sherlock Holmes,' who goes after a ruthless gang in the early 1990s. The gang comes to the US from Italy and kidnaps people to get ransom from their families. Then they get loathed by law-abiding Italian families, who are frightened but nevertheless help out Petrosino behind the scenes.
Stephan Talty is a New York Times best-selling author of six non-fiction books focusing on history. A Captain's Duty, where he contributed as a ghost writer, has been adapted for the Oscar-nominated Tom Hanks starrer Captain Phillips.
In his post-Oscar days, DiCaprio starred in a documentary Before the Flood (2016), a documentary about climate change directed by Fisher Stevens. He will next play Sam Phillips, a pioneer in the music industry during the 1950s who helped launch the careers of Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and Jerry Lee Lewis.
However, apart from this, DiCaprio has several projects in hand including Martin Scorsese's The Devil In The White City (adapted from the book written by Erik Larson), and a mystery project with The Revenant writer Mark L Smith called Conquest.
According to Amazon, the review of the book says:
Beginning in the summer of 1903, an insidious crime wave filled New York City, and then the entire country, with fear. The children of Italian immigrants were kidnapped, and dozens of innocent victims were gunned down. Bombs tore apart tenement buildings. Judges, senators, Rockefellers, and society matrons were threatened with gruesome deaths. The perpetrators seemed both omnipresent and invisible. Their only calling card: the symbol of a black hand. The crimes whipped up the slavering tabloid press and heated ethnic tensions to the boiling point. Standing between the American public and the Black Hand's lawlessness was Joseph Petrosino. Dubbed the "Italian Sherlock Holmes," he was a famously dogged and ingenious detective, and a master of disguise. As the crimes grew ever more bizarre and the Black Hand's activities spread far beyond New York's borders, Petrosino and the all-Italian police squad he assembled raced to capture members of the secret criminal society before the country's anti-immigrant tremors exploded into catastrophe. Petrosino's quest to root out the source of the Black Hand's power would take him all the way to Sicily—but at a terrible cost.
