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His Godfather Corleone.
The eldest, baptized Santino but called Sonny by everyone except his father, was looked at askance by the older Italian men; with admiration by the younger. Sonny Corleone was tall for a first-generation American of Italian parentage, almost six feet, and his crop of bushy, curly hair made him look even taller.
He was built as powerfully as a bull and it was common knowledge that he was so generously endowed by nature that his martyred wife feared the marriage bed as unbelievers once feared the rack. It was whispered that when as a youth he had visited houses of ill fame, even the most hardened and fearless putain, after an awed inspection of his massive organ, demanded double price.
Sonny Corleone had strength, he had courage. He was generous and his heart was admitted to be as big as his organ. Yet he did not have his father’s humility but instead a quick, hot temper that led him into errors of judgment. Though he was a great help in his father’s business, there were many who doubted that he would become the heir to it.
The second son, Frederico, called Fred or Fredo, was a child every Italian prayed to the saints for.
Inclined to dourness, he was still a crutch to his father, never disputed him, never embarrassed him by scandalous behavior with women. Despite all these virtues he did not have that personal magnetism, that animal force, so necessary for a leader of men, and he too was not expected to inherit the family business.
The third son, Michael Corleone, did not stand with his father and his two brothers
Michael Corleone was the youngest son of the Don and the only child who had refused the great man’s direction. He did not have the heavy, Cupid-shaped face of the other children, and his jet black hair was straight rather than curly. His skin was a clear olive-brown that would have been called beautiful in a girl. He was handsome in a delicate way. Indeed there had been a time when the Don had worried about his youngest son’s masculinity.
Michael had been his favorite before the
war and obviously the chosen heir to run the family business when the proper moment came. He had all the quiet force and intelligence of his great father, the born instinct to act in such a way that men had no recourse but to respect him. But when World War II broke out, Michael Corleone volunteered for the Marine Corps. He defied his father’s express command when he did so.
He had long ago learned that society imposes insults that must be borne, comforted by the knowledge that in this world there comes a time when the most humble of men, if he keeps his eyes open, can take his revenge on the most powerful. It was this knowledge that prevented the Don from losing the humility all his friends admired in him.
Carlo Rizzi smiled. It was only the beginning. He had, after all, married into a royal family. They would have to take care of him.
The Don always taught that when a man was generous, he must show the generosity as personal.
The hell with it, he thought. He said, straight out, “Nearly fifteen years ago some people wanted to take over my father’s oil importing business. They tried to kill him and nearly did. Luca Brasi went after them. The story is that he killed six men in two weeks and that ended the famous olive oil war.” He smiled as if it were a joke.
Luca Brasi did not fear the police, he did not fear society, he did not fear God, he did not fear hell, he did not fear or love his fellow man. But he had elected, he had chosen, to fear and love Don Corleone. Ushered into the presence of the Don, the terrible Brasi held himself stiff with respect. He stuttered over the flowery congratulations he offered and his formal hope that the first grandchild would be masculine. He then handed the Don an envelope stuffed with cash as a gift for the bridal couple.
When the door closed Don Corleone gave a small sigh of relief. Brasi was the only man in the world who could make him nervous. The man was like a natural force, not truly subject to control.
Sandra and the other women teased Connie about the terrors of the nuptial bed. “My God,” Sandra had giggled, “when I saw that pole of Sonny’s for the first time and realized he was going to stick it into me, I yelled bloody murder. After the first year my insides felt as mushy as macaroni boiled for an hour. When I heard he was doing the job on other girls I went to church and lit a candle.”
You let women dictate your actions and they are not competent in this world, though certainly they will be saints in heaven while we men burn in hell.
“Friendship is everything. Friendship is more than talent. It is more than government. It is almost the equal of family. Never forget that. If you had built up a wall of friendships you wouldn’t have to ask me to help.
“He’s a businessman,” the Don said blandly. “I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse.”
Hagen said formally, “The hospital called. Consigliere Abbandando is dying, he won’t last out the night. His family was told to come and wait.” Hagen had filled the Consigliere’s post for the past year, ever since the cancer had imprisoned Genco Abbandando in his hospital bed. Now he waited to hear Don Corleone say the post was his permanently. The odds were against it. So high a position was traditionally given only to a man descended from two Italian parents.
THE FAMILY OF Genco Abbandando, wife and three daughters dressed in black, clustered like a flock of plump crows on the white tile floor of the hospital corridor.
The Consigliere was also
Woltz, as if he had been waiting for
He was physically a vigorous man despite his age, but he could be aroused now only by very young girls and had learned that a few hours in the evening were all the youth his body and his patience could tolerate.
Severed from its body, the black silky head of the great horse Khartoum was stuck fast in a thick cake of blood. White, reedy tendons showed. Froth covered the muzzle and those apple-sized eyes that had glinted like gold, were mottled the color of rotting fruit with dead, hemorrhaged
Woltz was not a stupid man, he was merely a supremely egotistical one. He had mistaken the power he wielded in his world to be more potent than the power of Don Corleone. He had merely needed some proof that this was not true.
They think gambling is something like liquor, a harmless vice, and they think narcotics a dirty business. No, don’t protest.
The first thing he saw was a photo of his father lying in the street, his head in a pool of blood. A man was sitting on the curb weeping like a child. It was his brother Freddie. Michael Corleone felt his body turning to ice. There was no grief, no fear, just cold rage.
Michael said softly, “That’s not how Pop would have played it.”
Clemenza finally narrowed down the list of candidates to three men. The first was an enforcer who worked with the colored policy bankers in Harlem, a big brawny brute of a man of great physical strength, a man with a great deal of personal charm who could get along with people and yet when necessary make them go in fear of him. But Clemenza scratched him off the list after considering his name for a half hour. This man got along too well with the black people, which hinted at some flaw of character. Also he would be too hard to replace in the position he now held.
And now of course despite being so tough he must be shitting in his pants because the old man was still alive. He’d be as skittish as a donkey with ants up his ass.
“Just say that you’ve met a brave, handsome guy of Italian descent. Top marks at Dartmouth. Distinguished Service Cross during the war plus the Purple Heart. Honest. Hard-working. But his father is a Mafia chief who has to kill bad people, sometimes bribe high government officials and in his line of work gets shot full of holes himself. But that has nothing to do with his honest hardworking son. Do you think you can remember all that?”
Sonny broke in curtly, “It has to be Mike. For a million different reasons. Most important they got him down as faggy.
Michael shook Hagen’s hand. “Do your best,” he said. “I don’t want to do another three-year stretch away from home.” Hagen said gently, “It’s not too late to back out, Mike, we can get somebody else, we can go back over our alternatives. Maybe it’s not necessary to get rid of Sollozzo.” Michael laughed. “We can talk ourselves into any viewpoint,” he said. “But we figured it right the first time. I’ve been riding the gravy train all my life, it’s about time I paid my dues.” “You shouldn’t let that broken jaw influence you,” Hagen said. “McCluskey is a stupid man and it was business, not
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“I’ll reason with him,” Vito Corleone said. It was to become a famous phrase in the years to come. It was to become the warning rattle before a deadly strike. When he became a Don and asked opponents to sit down and reason with him, they understood it was the last chance to resolve an affair without bloodshed and murder.
But great men are not born great, they grow great, and so it was with Vito Corleone.
It did not happen in a day, it did not happen in a year, but by the end of the Prohibition period and the start of the Great Depression, Vito Corleone had become the Godfather, the Don, Don Corleone.
Lawyers can steal more money with a briefcase than a thousand men with guns and masks.”
The Don considered a use of threats the most foolish kind of exposure; the unleashing of anger without forethought as the most dangerous indulgence. No one had ever heard the Don utter a naked threat, no one had ever seen him in an uncontrollable rage. It was unthinkable. And so he tried to teach Sonny his own disciplines. He claimed that there was no greater natural advantage in life than having an enemy overestimate your faults, unless it was to have a friend underestimate your virtues.
“My wife was weeping before she fell asleep,” Don Corleone said. “Outside my window I saw my caporegimes coming to the house and it is midnight. So, Consigliere of mine, I think you should tell your Don what everyone knows.” Hagen said quietly, “I didn’t tell Mama anything. I was about to come up and wake you and tell you the news myself. In another moment I would have come to waken you.” Don Corleone said impassively, “But you needed a drink first.” “Yes,” Hagen said.
right by his “people,” who cheated them unmercifully. This could be forgiven, each man measures his own greed.
If the Chicago Mafia were savages, then the Boston people were gavones, or uncouth louts; ruffians. The Boston Don’s name was Domenick Panza. He was short, squat; as one Don put it, he looked like a thief.
The closest ally to the Tattaglia Family was Don Emilio Barzini.
The last to arrive was Don Phillip Tattaglia, the head of the Tattaglia Family that had directly challenged the Corleone power by supporting Sollozzo, and had so nearly succeeded.
For the Tattaglia Family dealt in women. Its main business was prostitution.
The Don of Detroit, more friendly to Corleone than any of the others, also now spoke against his friend’s position, in the interest of reasonableness. “I don’t believe in drugs,” he said. “For years I paid my people extra so they wouldn’t do that kind of business. But it didn’t matter, it didn’t help. Somebody comes to them and says, ‘I have powders, if you put up the three-, four-thousand-dollar investment we can make fifty thousand distributing.’ Who can resist such a profit? And they are so busy with their little side business they neglect the work I pay them to do. There’s more money in
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I would try to keep the traffic in the dark people, the colored. They are the best customers, the least troublesome and they are animals anyway. They have no respect for their wives or their families or for themselves. Let them lose their souls with drugs. But something has to be done, we just can’t let people do as they please and make trouble for everyone.”
Sonna cosa nostra,” Don Corleone said, “these are our own affairs.
We will manage our world for ourselves because it is our world, cosa nostra.
