Meeting the Mafia… what would my Mum say? Sir Trevor McDonald on his latest documentary series

THEIR menfolk are violent criminals, some of whom face death for turning against the Mob.

And their extraordinary lives are laid bare as never before in new ITV series, Mafia Women With Trevor McDonald.

So, sitting in a back of a car with them on America’s mean streets, does Sir Trevor McDonald, 77, ever fear he may find himself in the way of a stray Mafia bullet?

“All the time,” he admits. “Every single moment I’m out there I think that.

“I frequently think my mother, who’s no longer with us, would say, ‘Trevor, you should never have done that.’

“Look, if you view all your life from that perspective, then you’ll never get out of bed.

“And I have this terrible journalistic bug.”

The two-part series sees Sir Trevor meet Mafia wives, girlfriends and daughters, many of whom have never spoken publicly before.

He travels to New York and Florida to tour streets of crime and speak to them at the hideaways their Mob men have been forced to call home.

“When I did the last series on the Mafia we showed the families it in advance, in case we’d revealed something that put them in danger,” explained Sir Trevor.

“The women felt the men had had too much of a say and they wanted to give their side of the story.

“It’s a very secretive world, but in a strange way they were proud to share some of it with us.

“Most of them are on the run, moving from one location to another, so we had to make arrangements to meet where it wouldn’t give too much away.

“But they lived behind high walls with a lot of security and if someone had tried to follow us in, they would have been stopped.”

In New York he meets Linda Scarpa, daughter of the late hit man Greg Scarpa, so notorious he was known as the Grim Reaper.

He murdered so many people in his days as an executioner for the Colombo crime family, he stopped counting at 50.

Linda takes the veteran broadcaster to the spot where her father’s car was hit by a hail of gunfire in an ambush and where her car, with her son sitting beside her, was also blasted.

She also speaks of how, when she’d been experimenting with drugs as a kid, her father almost beat the friend who’d given her them to death.

“You could see a lot of the pain he’d caused her in her life on her face when she spoke to us,” Trevor adds.

“The story about the beating of that friend was beyond anything. You pick on people your own size, you don’t beat up young people.

“And then he had the boy brought to confront her with his eyes closed from the blows which had rained down on his head.

“I just felt that was one of those moments you don’t forget.”

Sir Trevor says he’s been thrilled at the range of documentaries and other presenting projects he’s been asked to do since stepping down after decades as the face of ITV’s News At Ten.

But there are no regrets over not presenting the flagship programme.

“When I left it was one thing that absolutely tore me up,” he confides.

“I wondered how I was going to live my life, was it over? But I haven’t missed it for a day.

“Just occasionally, though, I see something happening in Moscow, for example, and think back to being there when Reagan and Gorbachev strode through the grounds of the Kremlin.”

A personal White House tour by President George W. Bush is another memorable moment.

“He didn’t like being interviewed much so he gave me a 15-minute interview and a 15-minute look round,” he adds.

“He took me to the Oval Office and I did think, having being born in a little village in Trinidad, ‘If only my mother could see me now’.”

Mafia Women With Trevor McDonald, ITV, Thur, 9pm.