The Hitman

How a poor kid from South Philly became a Mafia hit man, survived three gunshots to the head to become a federally protected witness who brought down the Philly mob … and then reinvented himself as a wildly successful car salesman.

Ralph Cipriano is a former newspaper reporter for the Albany Times Union, Los Angeles Times and Philadelphia Inquirer who now works as an author and freelance journalist. He's won more than a dozen national and state journalism awards, including a 2010 Sigma Delta Chi Award for Excellence in Journalism and a 2011 finalist for the Gerald Loeb Awards. In a career that spans 36 years, he's exposed corruption in local governments, police departments and Ivy League football, as well as lavish spending by the Philadelphia archdiocese of the Catholic Church.