Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli

The Epic Story of the Making of The Godfather

Mark Seal

• Publisher: Gallery Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781982158613
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This "wickedly pacey page-turner" ( Total Film ) unfurls the behind-the-scenes story of the making of The Godfather, fifty years after the classic film's original release. The story of how The Godfather was made is as dramatic, operatic, and entertaining as the film itself. Over the years, many versions of various aspects of the movie's fiery creation have been told—sometimes conflicting, but always compelling. Mark Seal sifts through the evidence, has extensive new conversations with director Francis Ford Coppola and several heretofore silent sources, and complements them with colorful interviews with key players including actors Al Pacino, James Caan, Talia Shire, and others to write "the definitive look at the making of an American classic" ( Library Journal, starred review).On top of the usual complications of filmmaking, the creators of The Godfather had to contend with the real-life members of its subject matter: the Mob. During production of the movie, location permits were inexplicably revoked, author Mario Puzo got into a public brawl with an irate Frank Sinatra, producer Al Ruddy's car was found riddled with bullets, men with "connections" vied to be in the cast, and some were given film roles.As Seal notes, this is the tale of a "movie that revolutionized filmmaking, saved Paramount Pictures, minted a new generation of movie stars, made its struggling author Mario Puzo rich and famous, and sparked a war between two of the mightiest powers in America: the sharks of Hollywood and the highest echelons of the Mob.""For fans of books about moviemaking, this is a definite must-read" ( Booklist ).

1

“I JUST GO OUT AND KILL FOR THEM”

It was difficult to tell if the body was even human.

Soaked in gasoline and set ablaze, it lay burned at the center of an eight-foot circle that had been scorched into the grass like some demented sign from hell. The hands had been bound behind the back and a plastic clothesline had been wrapped around the neck as a garrote. Jaw and ribs broken, skull fractured, teeth missing. Both eyes had been brutally burned out—probably with a blow torch—and lacerations covered the body where thirty pounds of flesh had been removed. Most viciously, the genitals had been chopped off and stuffed into the victim’s mouth “because he was threatening to talk,” an FBI agent would write—all while the individual was still alive, over several unthinkable days of intense torture.

When the body was found, on Thanksgiving Day in 1961, a critical clue remained: one fingerprint. The corpse belonged to Alberto Agueci, a baker from Toronto whose real profession was importing heroin from Italy—via fake-bottom suitcases carried by unknowing Italian immigrants sailing to America—a lucrative business, until he made the mistake of running afoul of Stefano Magaddino, the crime boss of Buffalo, New York. It was Agueci’s gruesome murder—and his brother’s vow to avenge it—that would ultimately become a part of providing the world with its most detailed and graphic glimpse into the shadowy crime syndicate known as La Cosa Nostra. The man who would reveal this secret world, a midlevel mobster named Joseph Valachi, was an associate of the bloody corpse with his dick in his mouth.

In 1959, Valachi was indicted on federal drug-trafficking charges and, after holing up in a trailer in Connecticut for three months, was arrested and returned to New York City. He had jumped bail and was desperate to avoid prison when Agueci offered him a way out. Valachi met Agueci at Maggie’s bar, a few blocks from Grand Central Station. Agueci said he could sneak him over the border, into Canada, where Valachi would hide out for a time in Toronto.

A year later, both men were indicted—along with seventeen others—for their involvement in a $150 million heroin smuggling operation. While in jail together, Valachi listened as Agueci raged against Magaddino, who had been expected to bail Agueci out, but instead was letting him rot in jail. Valachi warned Agueci not to let his complaints get back to Magaddino, the man they called the Undertaker—whose family really did run a funeral home—or else he’d be looking at a fate far worse than prison.

Agueci didn’t heed Valachi’s warning. He threatened to rat out Magaddino for his role in narcotics trafficking if he didn’t help him with his bail and defense. Big mistake. After his wife sold their house and bailed him out, he returned home to Toronto—only to travel to Buffalo to meet with Magaddino. His mutilated body was soon found in a cornfield on the outskirts of Rochester.

The bad news for Valachi was that Agueci’s brother, Vito, was dead set on revenge. When Vito heard that Alberto had been murdered, he insisted that Valachi was a snitch. True or not, the intel reached Vito Genovese, capo of the New York–based Genovese crime family, who became convinced of the same. Genovese had once been close with Valachi, who was one of his soldiers, even serving in Valachi’s wedding party. But now in 1962, they were in an Atlanta prison together, and the friendly ties evaporated. Vito Genovese wanted Valachi dead, Alberto Agueci style, before he could spill a word about anything.

In prison, Valachi saw danger everywhere, real and imagined. Especially after Genovese kissed him, which Valachi took to signify “the kiss of death.” But Valachi was a hit man himself: When a prisoner he thought was a would-be assassin approached him, he beat the man’s head in first. The problem was that the guy had nothing to do with him—he was an innocent victim with no ties to the Genoveses or any other Mob family. Valachi pleaded guilty to second-degree murder.

Desperate for protection, Valachi employed the one thing that could shield him from the grisly fate that had befallen Alberto Agueci: his mouth. He began to talk—first to the FBI, then to a Senate subcommittee, providing eyewitness testimony that would make him the most famous mobster-turned-informant in history.

Valachi was not the first mobster to come before Congress. In 1951, a freshman senator from Tennessee named Estes Kefauver had led televised Senate hearings on organized crime in fourteen cities across America that had gripped the entire nation. The hearings proved to be a ratings extravaganza for the TV industry, still in its infancy—an estimated 30 million Americans tuned in. “Never before had the attention of the nation been riveted so completely on a single matter,” Life reported. “The Senate investigation into interstate crime was almost the sole subject of national conversation.”

The highlight of the hearings was the testimony of the mobster considered the “boss of bosses,” Frank Costello, the all-powerful leader of the Luciano crime family, whose appearance riveted television audiences even though they mostly saw only his hands. In a feeble attempt to shield his identity, the Mob boss would be filmed only from the neck down. Costello proved an uncooperative witness, evading questions in his gravelly voice before pleading laryngitis and walking out of the hearings. Still, his appearance was a hit. “Costello TV’s First Headless Star,” proclaimed a front-page headline in the New York Times. “Only His Hands Entertain Audience.”

Kefauver ran into even more trouble when he tried to investigate Hollywood’s ties to the Mob. His committee claimed to have pictures of Frank Sinatra—dogged for years by rumors of involvement with organized crime—talking with mobsters. And for a star witness, the committee hyped the upcoming testimony of Sidney Korshak, a Mob lawyer who had represented Al Capone’s associates in Chicago before transforming himself into one of the top fixers in Hollywood, soon to become consigliere of Paramount’s senior vice president in charge of production, Robert Evans. “It was a reflection of his power that when Mr. Korshak showed up unexpectedly at a Las Vegas hotel during a 1961 Teamsters meeting, he was immediately installed in the largest suite, even though the hotel had to dislodge the previous occupant: the union’s president, Jimmy Hoffa,” the New York Times would report.

But for all the revelations Kefauver was promising, his committee wouldn’t get a single thing from Korshak, a man who made his living in the movie industry by staying out of the spotlight. Korshak “had no intention of blowing his cover,” wrote Peter Bart, who served as a top executive at Paramount during the production of The Godfather, in his book Infamous Players. “Arranging a private meeting with Kefauver at a Chicago hotel before his scheduled appearance, Korshak produced photographs purportedly showing the senator in a hotel room in the company of two underage girls. Upon glancing at the photos, Kefauver canceled Korshak’s appearance.” (Some accounts reported that it was a young woman.)

It was a scene that would make its way, in somewhat altered form, into The Godfather, Part II—and one that foreshadowed the kind of backroom tactics Korshak would employ to ensure the success of the first Godfather.

In 1963, it was Valachi’s turn to come before Congress. At the time, Robert Kennedy, who had been appointed US attorney general by his brother, the president, was pressuring the FBI to provide the sort of insight into the Mob that the Feds simply didn’t have. “If we do not on a national scale attack organized criminals with weapons and techniques as effective as their own,” Robert Kennedy had warned a few years earlier, “they will destroy us.”

Enter Valachi, a “made” man desperately seeking a way out. What he told the FBI was borne out by the bureau’s wiretaps of major American Mafia figures. It was Valachi who revealed that the secret term, “Cosa Nostra,” meaning “Our Thing,” was used by organized-crime figures to identify their organization, soon to be known by the singular term “Mafia.”

The Mob put out a hit on Valachi to prevent him from testifying before Congress, offering $100,000 to anyone who could take him out. But it was too late. In September 1963, millions of Americans tuned in to watch as Valachi testified before a televised congressional hearing on organized crime, spelling out in gripping detail how the Mafia was run: how different crime families owned each major American city; how resort towns like Las Vegas and Miami were “open” for any family to operate in; how each family employed the same rigid hierarchy, from the lowliest foot soldiers to the capos to—and he used the term—“the Godfather.”

And Valachi, as a trusted soldier, had been one of the Mafia’s enforcers, taking his orders from the men at the top. “I just go out and kill for them,” he confessed in his deep, raspy voice, with the TV cameras rolling and mobsters across America aching to kill him. “You live by the gun and by the knife, and you die by the gun and by the knife.”

It was incredible television, a historic moment. Valachi’s testimony provided most Americans with their first detailed glimpse into the inner workings of the Mafia. The term was born in nineteenth-century Sicily—from the adjective mafiusu, meaning swagger, boldness, bravado—but its rise was an all-American crime story, one that began when impoverished Sicilians began immigrating to New Orleans in the nineteenth century. By 1869, the New Orleans Times noted that the city’s Second District had been overrun by “well-known and notorious Sicilian murderers, counterfeiters and burglars, who, in the last month, have formed a sort of general co-partnership or stock company for the plunder and disturbance of the city.”

Over the next one hundred years, fueled by successive waves of Italian immigrants, the Mafia steadily expanded its territory and economic influence, establishing its control over a host of illegal activities, from gambling and prostitution to Prohibition-era alcohol and drugs.

But the stark, factual account laid out by Valachi touched on something deeper and more emotional than any Senate hearing could capture. It wasn’t about the gruesome hit jobs or secret lingo or vast criminal enterprises. It was mythic in proportion, a story that encompassed the intertwined elements of family and brutality, of loyalty and betrayal, of fathers and sons, of immigration and the American Dream. Capturing its essence, its raw and epic power, would seemingly require a storyteller of immense talents—a modern-day Shakespeare, a Homer, or a Virgil, capable of peering into the blackest depths of human nature and drawing forth something vital and real. Yet the man who would ultimately realize the dramatic possibilities inherent in the Senate hearings would turn out to be the unlikeliest of messengers, a dead-broke writer who was lying on his couch in his middle-class home in the suburbs of New York, glued to his television set like everyone else. A writer who would claim to have never even met a genuine gangster, but who would create a fictional story so authentic that it seemed real, a saga that would be adopted by the Mob as its own, emulating its language and titles and creed. An abject failure who once lay in a gutter, staring up at the night sky and vowing that he would rise above his debts and his disaster of a life and redeem himself as writer.

His name was Mario Gianluigi Puzo.

2

THE MAN IN THE GUTTER

Mario Puzo was, by his own admission, “going downhill fast.”

The only thing that wasn’t clear was which of his vices would kill him first.

Maybe it would be the food: pasta and other Italian fare he’d grown up with; Chinese takeout, always served with a side of spaghetti; late-night snacks that had him struggling with diabetes and fighting off heart disease. Maybe it would be the gambling: a lifelong addiction that began with pitching pennies as a kid, graduated to poker, and culminated with betting on the ponies and ballgames, far more than he could afford, bets that had him constantly in debt to loan sharks and borrowing money from friends and family. Or maybe it would be the writing: the endless drudgery and humiliatingly low wages for literary fiction, the kind that took forever to write well, to which the market responded with polite reviews and thin sales, nothing near enough to support his growing, hungry family and his even more insatiable gambling habit. By the time Valachi testified before Congress, Puzo was $20,000 in debt, soon to be rejected by his publisher, and under investigation by the FBI. None of the bookies he frequented would have given odds on him becoming one of the bestselling authors in America, setting a new record for paperback rights, and cowriting screenplays that would lead to eight Academy Awards.

Puzo grew up poor, in a tenement flat in Hell’s Kitchen, then the roughest part of the city, its name a testament to its depravity. But his story, like those he spun, had its roots in the Italian countryside. His mother, Maria Le Conti, grew up in the hills outside Naples. Her family was so poor that Maria was not allowed to even sample the ham produced from the lone pig the family slaughtered each year—it was far too precious to eat themselves. Fleeing the poverty of her homeland, Maria moved to New York to marry another Italian immigrant as poor as herself, a dockworker she barely knew and would not know for long. He died in an accident on the docks, leaving her a widow with four small children.

Maria soon had another suitor, a railroad laborer named Antonio Puzo, who asked her to marry him. “Perhaps out of ignorance, perhaps out of compassion, perhaps out of love,” Mario would write of his estranged father. “Nobody ever knew. He was a mystery, a Southern Italian with blue eyes.”

Antonio and Maria had three children together. On October 15, 1920, their son Mario, the future writer whose parents were both “illiterate, as were their parents before them,” was born.

Soon there were seven kids in the cramped apartment in Hell’s Kitchen, overlooking the stockyards of the New York Central Railroad, which Puzo would remember as “absolutely blooming with stinking boxcars freshly unloaded of cattle and pigs for the city slaughterhouse.”

During Prohibition, the neighborhood was overrun by illegal distilleries and ruled by gangs, which would evolve into organized-crime families. By the time the Great Depression arrived, Hell’s Kitchen was known as the “most dangerous area on the American continent.”

The Puzos were impoverished but occupied “the best apartment on Tenth Avenue,” Mario would write in his 1971 essay “Choosing a Dream.”

It was a top floor of six rooms with access to the roof and a fire escape off the kitchen where young Mario could slip out on warm summer nights. “I remember it as comfortable, slum or not.” Here, in “the heart of New York’s Neapolitan ghetto,” life was not exactly West Side Story. “I never heard an Italian singing,” he wrote. “None of the grown-ups I knew were charming or loving or understanding. Rather they seemed coarse, vulgar and insulting.”

The family ate well: “My mother would never dream of using anything but the finest imported olive oil, the best Italian cheeses.”

With his father’s easy access to the goods coming off the railcars, fresh produce could be had without the markups that stores tended to charge. Food, glorious Italian food, became a lifelong passion for Mario.

Antonio didn’t stay long. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, he deserted the family when Mario was twelve, leaving Maria now with seven children to feed. The Puzos were forced to go on welfare to survive. Mario’s school asked each student to bring in a can of food to help feed the poor. “The teachers didn’t seem to realize we were the poor,” he recounted. “We didn’t, either.”

So each of the Hell’s Kitchen kids “went out and stole a can of food from a local grocery store.”

The kids stole ice from the refrigerator cars of the railroads and made “easy money” reselling the silk from trucks they hijacked from the garment factories of Thirty-First Street. Graft and petty theft were as much their education as phonics and algebra, and Puzo’s mother was an encouraging tutor. When Mario was ten or eleven, he saw the cops chasing down a chicken thief into their apartment, where his mom screamed at the officers to stop. “She believed he was entitled to steal the chickens,” Puzo said, “and she was entitled to buy them.”

One of Puzo’s uncles, an assistant chef at a famous Italian restaurant, tucked “six eggs, a stick of butter, and a small bag of flour” under his shirt each day, the sales of which would earn him enough money after thirty years to buy a house on Long Island for himself, and another for his son, and a third for his daughter. Another cousin, using his college degree and materials he “borrowed” from the manufacturing plant where he worked, created a floor wax that he sold door to door.

Crime paid. It was the route—for some, the only route—for the poor, stuck in dead-end jobs with lousy pay, to move up to the middle class. And yet, surrounded by opportunities to enrich himself through crime, Puzo remained on the straight and n...