The Godfather

This is the tale of the mafia in the US, spanning two generations from the 1920s. In Italy, the mafia sprung up as a sort of grass-roots political movement to protect the interests of locals from foreign invaders. It was thus an alternative government, an alternative social order with its own systems of laws and punishments. Typical of its culture was the idea of omerta or silence, not talking to strangers and especially the police. Transported to America by Italian immigrants, the mafia also became an alternative secret society distrustful of the wider society. Several mafia families sprung up in New York and across the States, each headed by a “Don” that operated through a layer of people in carrying out activities both legitimate and often criminal and illegitimate. Each don had his consigliere, the highest-ranking officer in the family that assisted and advised him and issued his orders to the people below; and then one or more caporegimes, men that headed armies of men for the purposes of waging war, or carrying out specific assignments. These families of mafia secret societies flourished because they were able to buy favors from important members of the bigger society, like judges and politicians. And they employed often violent means to get their points across and promote their businesses: If persuasion failed they resorted to physical assault, arson or even professional killers.

The Godfather is Don Vito Corleone, an Italian immigrant from Sicily. So called because—as head of the mafia political unit called the Corleone Family—he lives a life of dishing out favors to people (of Italian descent). Such as helping someone in need of money, either giving cash directly or getting a bank to give a loan; or getting a judge to give a favorable ruling or even withdrawing an unfavorable one; or having more appropriate justice dished out to injured people when the regular justice system fails to do so; or even getting a shy-lock landlord to re-admit an evicted poor tenant. But all these favors put one in debt to him, and so should be prepared to render some needed service to him in future. Corleone’s consigliere is Tom Hagen, unusual for the post in that he is not of Sicilian or even Italian descent. His two caporegimes are Tessio and Clemenza.

The story opens with instances of how the services of a don become necessary: A trial of two young men that physically assaulted a young woman, their being set free because one had a father in a powerful position; a declining musical legend whose boss is denying a desired role in a new movie; an Italian boy in love with his baker boss’ daughter but in danger of being deported to Italy. All these go to see The Godfather, and he helps them out one by one. He is able to do this through his personal army of violent men or his contacts in high places in the bigger society. We are then taken through an odyssey of his rise in America, the lives of his children, and life in Italy where one had fled to escape being murdered by the mafia. Officially, his family is into the business of olive oil imports. But more lucrative is the organized gambling they control. They compete for spheres of influence in the city of New York with other Italian mafia families. When he is shot and bed-ridden in hospital, his first son Santiano takes over the running of the family, waging war against the offending families, until he is gunned down to death. The youngest son Michael that has kept aloof from the family business, finally gets involved, and he is the one to shoot down the masterminds wanting his father dead. Then he has to flee to hide in Sicily, coming back years later to take up the leadership of the family.

While in hiding in Sicily, Michael realizes that the mafia system bred mediocrity: People that were not qualified for professional positions got there on the whims of the local mafia don. So when he takes over from Vito as the head of the Corleone family, he decides his children would not follow after him and his father, but would enter the broader American society carrying out solely legitimate business and work, but of course retaining the insurance of political and financial power the family has amassed over the years. But first, he must consolidate the family’s power and influence, and relocate them to Nevada to take up the more legitimate business of casino and hotel operators. Shortly after The Don dies from a heart attach, he leads a campaign that saw the elimination of the heads of two other families and his own sister’s husband that had been instrumental to Santiano’s ambush. Realizing this brutal part of her husband, Michael’s wife is suddenly driven to the Catholic faith as the only way of still remaining with him, to go to church daily to pray for his soul, just like she observed his own mother doing for the soul of his late father.

In telling this tale the author was probably frank in mentioning the racial prejudices against blacks by the Italian mafia families and probably most Italian Americans at the time (1930s to 1940s). To them, blacks were of no account having allowed “society” to keep them down for so long; they were drug addicts and criminals that did not value their wives, family or children. And I guess this story was the genesis (or a good part of it) of titles and terms popularly used now, especially by musicians, like The Don, Don Corleone, Godfather. Some Nigerian radio personalities now bear these names.

January 13, 2015. Review initially written in 2010. Novel first published in 1969, this Signet edition being published in 1978, ISBN 0-451-16771-6.