Synopsis/Details
New York City, 1993.
Two mobsters, COSTANZO BARAONDA and GIANLUCA “JONNY LUCA” SBORDI, are dining at Forlani's Italian Restaurant in Chinatown one night. They notice the phenomenal wine skills of a young employee, ELECTRA AMBRA TORRE. They also make note of her heightened sense of smell and photographic memory.
Costanzo and Jonny Luca make an offer: they want to get Electra into blind tasting competitions and expand their operations in the New York wine business. Electra agrees.
Costanzo and Jonny Luca sponsor Electra’s trip to France; she is sent to harvest in Burgundy. The pilgrimage is a failure as Electra is distracted from her studies. To pay off her debts, Costanzo and Jonny Luca pivot Electra to their other rackets: selling expensive bubbly in the Champagne Room of their strip club, Cat O’Nine Tails; and her faking and selling expensive French wines.
Electra finds a new mark: legendary actor FERRO FAIRLANE. Electra sells Ferro fake French wines, Ferro uses Electra to sell fake Tuscan wines actually made in southern Italy.
Electra takes on two more partners: movie producer ELI SEVRANCE III and wine blogger VAKNIN VREELAND. They are front men who
help legitimize Electra’s fake French wines at auctions. Electra, Eli and Vaknin make millions.
A French winemaker, TRISTAN X. BRUNEL, learns that his family’s prized Clos St-Dimas wines are being forged and sold through the Electra-Eli-Vaknin connection.
Tristan goes to the Southern District of New York’s assistant attorney KARL WERNER and NYPD detective LUCIANO DUCO to file a complaint about Electra, but the case isn’t strong enough.
Electra gets ambitious and, after her younger brother PROMETEO DIONISO TORRE gets sick, she gets careless. She violates Costanzo and Jonny Luca’s rule about forging Italian wines. Her public profile as a New York party girl draws too much attention, gets Detective Duco hot on her trail.
All her schemes fall apart. After getting too much heat for Electra’s suspect wines, Eli and Vaknin break ranks with Electra and lay low. Ferro’s involvement in Italy’s “Brunellopoli” wine scandal and his screen depiction of Italians as criminals and abusers prompt Costanzo and Jonny Luca to kill Ferro. Before they can also kill Electra, she turns herself into protective custody. Karl and Luciano arrest her at a diner.
Electra refuses to rat out Costanzo and Jonny Luca for the death of Ferro Fairlane, or the wine forgery operations. She recalls Karl being one of her former strip club’s kinkier high-roller clients; she blackmails him into giving her a “head start” out of custody.
Electra escapes, goes straight to her apartment, where Prometeo is squatting. Karl counts to “1,000” during Electra’s escape.
By the time Karl alerts Luciano that Electra is on the run, Electra has made it crosstown. Cops and Feds track her down to her Upper East Side apartment. Prometeo takes the fall for Electra, who gets away for good.
Dark-haired Electra changes to become a Hitchcock blonde while sitting in a downtown movie theater, watching “Vertigo.”
She catches a Greyhound bus to San Francisco, with $3,200 in cash, and a bottle of rare Burgundy wine, which may or may not be the real thing.
