The Godfather - Mario Puzo [3]
The mob story as Mario Puzo envisioned it provided some terribly satisfying elements lodged deep in the American heart. It included a rags-to-riches immigrant story and tales of social and neighborhood benevolence, but it linked these with narratives of revenge, vigilante justice, and machismo. Part of the thrill of the book was the intimate look it afforded us into a dark and violent demimonde, a delicious taste of a dangerous lifestyle that most readers would, it would be hoped, never encounter up close. But more important, it provided a strikingly tempting alternative to the official and legal authorities of the day.
As the Western pioneers carved a system of justice out of the wilderness, the Corleones create one within the chaos and corruption of the city. Though the glory of the American experiment is its laws, courts, checks and balances, and deterrents to abuses of power, these things often don’t make for satisfying storytelling. In the world of The Godfather, no guilty person ever got off on a technicality.
Take the case of Amerigo Bonasera. His first name, which evokes the Italian explorer for whom our nation is named, is the first word of the novel. Amerigo is an American, working hard and doing his best, playing by the rules of his new nation. His good citizenship has brought him to grief at the opening of the book, however. Two young men who have viciously attacked his daughter have been released on a suspended sentence by a New York judge. While his daughter lies in a hospital, her assailants are back on the street. As a last resort, he comes for help to Don Corleone, who reprimands him for bothering with the courts in the first place:
“Why do you fear to give your first allegiance to me? . . . You go to the law courts and wait for months. You spend money on lawyers who know full well you are to be made a fool of. You accept judgment from a judge who sells himself like the worst whore in the streets. . . . If you had come to me for justice those scum who ruined your daughter would be weeping bitter tears this day. If by some misfortune an honest man like yourself made enemies they would become my enemies . . . and then, believe me, they would fear you.”
(p. 28)
The Don and his associates see themselves as more than an excessively proactive neighborhood watch group, however. There is in what they do an appealing, if ultimately unworkable, political philosophy. When discussing the inevitable “war” between the Tattaglia and the Corleone families, one associate theorizes:
“These things have to happen every ten years or so. It gets rid of the bad blood. And then if we let them push us around on the little things they wanta take over everything. You gotta stop them at the beginning. Like they shoulda stopped Hitler at Munich, they should never let him get away with that, they were just asking for big trouble when they let him get away with that” (p. 134)
Michael Corleone, Don Vito’s son, recalls his own father making a similar observation back in 1939: “If the Families had been running the State Department,” Michael muses to himself, “there would never have been World War II” (p. 134).
THE GODFATHER is an American story, Horatio Alger for big boys. Caught up in a feud that leaves his father dead, twelve-year-old Vito Andolini, like so many immigrants before and after him, finds the old country no longer hospitable. He is sent to New York with little more than the name of his village, with which he is baptized into his new identity as an American, Vito Corleone. He secures work in a grocery store, marries a Sicilian woman as fresh from the boat as he is, and starts a family. When a notorious neighborhood extortionist causes him to lose his job, Vito supports his wife and two children by joining a gang that specializes in hijacking trucks filled with silk dresses. When the same extortionist demands a piece of the hijacking action, Vito kills him with ruthless, premeditated efficiency.
His reputation in the neighborhood established, Vito becomes an urban Lone Ranger. Rather than take