Joseph Bonanno spends nearly a century inside the American Mafia, from his birth into a Sicilian crime family to his rise as head of one of New York's Five Families. The film traces his path to becoming a founding member of the original Mafia commission in 1931, the body created to settle disputes between families and keep the peace after years of gang warfare. That peace does not last for Bonanno himself: by the early 1960s he faces a revolt from within his own organization and mounting pressure from federal investigators, a period of open conflict among the New York families that came to be known as the Banana War. He survives it, outlasting rivals and prosecutors alike, and in 1983 publishes a memoir, making him the only Mafia boss to put his own account of that world into print. The film uses his life to walk through the commission's origins, its internal power struggles, and what a boss's version of events looks like once he decides to tell it himself.