As if racking up a huge body count in the latest Expendables film (we assume) wasn’t enough, Sylvester Stallone is now attached to play real-life mob enforcer Gregory Scarpa in a new crime drama called, simply enough, Scarpa.
Nicholas Pileggi, no stranger to mobbed-up movies thanks to his work on GoodFellas and Casino to name just two, has penned the script for the new project, which Millennium Films’ Avi Lerner is trying to put together.
The Lincoln Lawyer’s Brad Furman – who may still be trying to forget that his last film was **Runner Runner **– is aboard to call the shots for the story, which follows Scarpa’s violent life. A sociopath suspected of the murder of his own biological clan, he worked for the Colombo crime family and boasted he’d killed at least 50 people. Also known as 'The Mad Hatter' and 'The Grim Reaper', he spent his life involved in feuds, shoot-outs and violence.
He later turned FBI informant, but was still charged with multiple murders. He lost an eye in a shoot-out in his sixties, despite being under house arrest at the time, and died in 1984 from AIDS-related complications in prison.
All involved want the film shooting early next year. The Expendables 3, meanwhile, arrives in the UK on August 14.