Just did my first casting call and got a call back which means so far so good..more to come!!
Little Chicago is not in the state of Illinois. It's 75 miles from Niagara Falls, New York.
Stefano Magaddino, cousin of Joseph Bonanno, and his brother Antonio stood by the roaring waters of Niagara Falls on a freezing day in January of 1920, a day that changed the drinking habits of Americans. This was the day the Volstead Act -- Prohibition -- went into effect.
"We’re going to be rich, Antonio," Stefano said, looking over the Niagara River. "I'm glad I voted Republican."
They made a fortune moving alcohol, the golden key of bootleg whiskey, across the Canadian border. Magaddino would become the man to be reckoned with in Western New York. No one would dare cross one of the last "Dons" in America.
Like a giant conglomerate, the illegal booze racket ran wild. Speakeasies saturated the landscape, small-time hoods battled for power and Wild-West-style gang wars raged in small towns in Western New York and northern Pennsylvania.
The smell of big money reached the noses of ambitious young thugs.
Murder numbers ran out of control. It was a wide-open franchise as long as the Magaddinos received a generous return.
Out of the gunsmoke surfaced Al Ritchie, an ex-boxer and small-time thug who was given a gold badge by the district attorney and ran a successful bootleg operation.
The main character, Richie, an outside Mafia renegade, was behind many of the 14 unsolved murders in "Little Chicago." When he came to town he was a tall, handsome, 26-year-old Italian immigrant. He was a womanizer with a hypnotic charm. His jet-black hair, deep set eyes and slender build gave him a Valentino appearance. He always wore expensive suits and a $1,000 diamond pin in his lapel. He was the target of at least five attempts on his life but always walked away unscathed. To stay alive, he had to be clever, cunning and ruthless. He always wore a smile on his face, but kept a sinister hate in his heart. He trusted no one. His involvement with a 16-year-old beauty was taken as a passing fancy, but the affair carried a dark shadow with it. Rose Parente, a wide-eyed cupie-doll high school senior, was a constant companion of Ritchie’s.
Al Ritchie would go on to live his immigrant dream. He made a fortune with bootleg booze, ran a nightclub, the Sunset Inn, a few miles outside of Olean. He had cars, clothes, action and a reputation to be reckoned with. What more could one ask out of life?
He was a Robin Hood to the poor and downtrodden, but a chilling person to his enemies.
The movie is based on the true story described in a chapter of the book “Invisible Ink" by Carl A. Veno.
A little bit of Hollywood came to Bradford in 2007 when movie crews began planning for and shooting segments of the movie “Little Chicago,” which focuses on the city’s well-chronicled gangster past during the 1920s and 1930s.
While actual filming began in November — with cast members and movie crews fanning out across the city to capture shoot-outs and explosions, among other special effects — planning for the movie began much earlier in the year with the announcement that executive producer Carl Veno of Olean, N.Y., would be using Bradford and Olean as locations for the gangster flick.
