The Everything Mafia Book (41 page)

Many mob buffs argue over exactly who the titular character was modeled after. Some speculate that Carlo Gambino was the model for Don Corleone, while others point to Sam Decavalcante, Vito Genovese, or Joe Bonanno.

The main character through the three-film epic is Michael Corleone. The audience first meets him as a returning war hero who loves his family but has no interest in the family business. Life does not always unfold as per our plans, and by the last scene of the last movie, Michael Corleone has lived and died a very different life than he planned.

Part One

In
The Godfather
, we first meet the Corleones. The movie is as much about an American family as it is a gangster movie. It eloquently chronicles the dark side of the immigrant experience and the American Dream. The old don is a powerful crime lord who made his fortune in the criminal underworld yet craves respectability, if not for himself then certainly for his children. The fates have other plans for him. Though he dies rather benignly of a heart attack in his garden, one son dies in a hail of gunfire, and the other becomes the new Don Corleone. He could have been Senator Corleone or Governor Corleone, but there wasn’t enough time.

Several famous scenes in
The Godfather
are inspired by real incidents in mob lore, including the shooting of Don Corleone at a fruit stand, based on the real-life shooting of Gambino boss Frank Scalise in 1957. True, too, is the message sent to notify the Corleones of Brasi’s murder—a fish wrapped in newspaper. “Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes” has entered the pop culture vernacular.

Michael Corleone’s fate is sealed when he assassinates the men who attempted to kill his father (resulting in the famous line “Leave the gun, take the cannoli”). From then on he is corrupted, and his destiny is an inexorable juggernaut deeper and deeper into the underworld of the Mafia and a Hades-like underworld of his own tortured soul. Even though he does evil things, such as orchestrating the murder of the heads of the five families and his own brother-in-law, he is an oddly sympathetic character. However, his behavior only gets worse in the second movie.

Part Two

The Godfather: Part II
tells the parallel stories of the young Don Cor-leone, played by Robert De Niro, and Michael Corleone at the height of his power. The story follows the orphaned Vito Corleone’s arrival in America at the turn of the twentieth century and his immersion into a life of crime. It counterpoints Michael Corleone’s gradual descent into material and spiritual corruption.

The town of Corleone, Sicily, was too developed by the time the first Godfather movie was filmed, so instead filmmakers shot the Sicilian scenes in the countryside town of Savoca.

Real events also inspired elements of the script. The mob’s involvement in Cuba before Castro took over is a major element of the plot, as is the mob’s involvement in Las Vegas. Corruption of senators and politicians is of course one of the hallmarks of the mob’s dominance in the underworld. Another event that was captured was the congressional hearings in which Frank Pentagelli recants his previous testimony against Michael Coreleone. The colorful Jewish gangster Hyman Roth is based on the less colorful but chillingly competent real hoodlum Meyer Lansky.

Michael, who was somewhat sympathetic in the first film, becomes colder and more ruthless, finally ordering the execution of his own brother, the simple and harmless Fredo. Rival gangsters used Fredo as a dupe and Michael finds it hard to forgive, as he tells his brother, “Fredo, you broke my heart.” This is a sin of a biblical scale and Michael seems beyond redemption.

Part Three

Fredo’s death weighs heavily on Michael in
Part III
. It is a compelling final installment in the saga of a man who took the wrong path and spent the rest of his life trying (and failing) to get back on track. The old and ill Michael Corleone is still trying to go legit, but just when he thinks he’s out, they pull him back in. And just as the sins of Don Vito Corleone were visited on his offspring, Michael Corleone watches his sweet and innocent daughter murdered in front of his eyes.

There had been talk of a fourth Godfather film, but it looks like it isn’t going to happen. Just as The Godfather: Part II told the parallel stories of the young Don Corleone and son Michael, the fourth film would have counterpointed the lives of the young Sonny Corleone (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) and his illegitimate son Vincent.

The plot is somewhat convoluted but parallels the Vatican banking scandal of the late 1970s and the activities of Sicilian and American Mafiosi. The final scene, a series of assassinations occurring during an opera, was similar to the assassinations that were carried out during the baptism scene in the first movie.
The Godfather: Part III
brings closure to a family saga that tapped into the collective unconscious and captured the imagination of filmgoers.

The Scorsese Legacy

One of the most successful Mafia movie directors is Martin Scorcese. A modern artist, Scorsese took his New York Italian background and transformed not only the Mafia movie but the film world in general. His movies are street-level visceral and gritty. Scorsese also knew how to pick talent. Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro are one of the great actor-director teams in the history of film, rivaling John Ford and John Wayne, and Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune. Their collaborations include
New York, New York, Taxi Driver, Cape Fear, The King of Comedy
, and
Raging Bull
. And, of course, the mob classics
Mean Streets, Goodfellas
, and
Casino.

Marin Scorsese’s first movie, Mean Streets, was partly based on his years growing up in Manhattan’s Little Italy. But by the time it came to shoot the movie, Scorsese had to film in Brooklyn to get a real Italian neighborhood feel, as Little Italy had become a tourist destination more than a real ethnic neighborhood.

Goodfellas

Goodfellas
is based on the book
Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family
by crime reporter Nicholas Pileggi. It is the story of Henry Hill, an ex–wise guy turned “rat” who entered the Witness Protection Program to save his skin. The story chronicles the unsavory activities of the Lucchese crime family from the 1950s through the early 1980s, though the names have been changed to protect the innocent and the guilty.

Here one can see the Mafia in all its sleazy splendor. You meet a cast of low-life hoods and dangerous psychos who populate the landscape of New York City and its suburbs. You see how absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Goodfellas
, more than any mob film before it, shows that day-to-day drudgery and internal petty squabbling of the real street-level hoods who make up a majority of a Mafia family.

You also get a glimpse of how the mob members treat their women. The men all have girlfriends on the side while their wives turn a blind eye. It is a given that a Mafioso has a mistress. She is the one he squires about town and lavishes with gifts while the wife stays home with the kids and becomes no longer an object of desire but rather a maternal figure.

The most outrageous character in the movie is Tommy D., a deranged, psychotic cowboy played by Joe Pesci. He is disarmingly affable at one moment and he viciously kicks a man to death the next. He is exchanging quips with a gopher (played by a pre-
Sopranos
Michael Imperioli), but when the kid doesn’t get him his drink quickly enough, he shoots him. He is too much of a loose cannon even for his handlers, and he is eventually killed by some made guys as vengeance for killing another made guy without permission (and without being a made guy himself). This character is based on a real person, Tommy DeSimone. Joe Pesci won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for the role. Unlike his over-the-top character, after receiving the award Pesci demurely said, “This is an honor and a privilege. Thank you.”

The most famous scene in Goodfellas may be the walk into the Copa through the kitchen. The stedicam follows Henry and his soon-to-be-wife Karen from the streets of Manhattan through the kitchen of the hottest nightclub in town. This widely praised shot is coupled with another stedi-cam scene, this one introducing all of the mobsters around Henry Hill, as he enters the Bamboo Lounge.

Casino Another

Another great Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, Joe Pesci collaboration is
Casino
. It is the story of Las Vegas in the waning days of the Mafia’s control of Sin City. De Niro plays a Jewish gambler who runs a casino for the mob, and Pesci plays another of his patented frenetic psychos who meets an even more grisly fate than he did in
Goodfellas
. The characters were based on real-life Las Vegas gangland figures Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal and Anthony “the Ant” Spilotro.

This movie details the Mafia’s practice of “skimming.” The audience sees how money is taken off the top before being reported as income and how much of it is sent back to the bosses back East. You see the ruthless way that card cheats are dealt with. As in medieval times, the hand that cheats is crushed in punishment. You see an embittered Mafioso assigned to kitchen duty spit in the soup of a customer he does not like. The Corleones, one suspects, would never do such a thing. They are nothing more than sleazy and despicable punks in Scorsese’s films.

Irish Gangland

In 2007, Martin Scorsese finally won what he has deserved for decades, a Best Picture Oscar. He won it for
The Departed
, a remake of a Hong Kong flick, set in the Irish-dominated Boston underworld. The movie has an all-star cast: Jack Nicholson, Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio, Alec Bladwin, Mark Wahlberg, and Martin Sheen. Nicholson plays Frank Costello, an Irish mob boss modeled after noted fugitive and former Winter Hill Gang boss Whitey Bulger.

One other Irish gangster picture of note, though not made by Scorcese, is the 1990 film
State of Grace
. Based on the Westies, a violent Irish mob in New York City’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood,
Grace
teams Ed Harris as an Irish mob boss and Sean Penn as a former neighborhood tough who becomes a cop and works undercover to infiltrate the gang.