Ed Falco. The Family Corleone. New York: Hachette, 2013. Print.

Here is my excuse. I had a long layover in an airport on my way to vacation. Between the flight ahead and the downtime on vacation, I figured I should get something enjoyable to read at the airport bookstore. And I am a fan of Mario Puzo. He was a skilled writer. Both his Godfather novel and screenplays are done well and good stories to boot.

The Family Corleone is an authorized “prequel” to The Godfather. I have read some other works authorized by estates of famous authors. Some of the post-Fleming James Bond books are OK. But I knew I could be taking a chance. There are two estate-authorized novels to go along with Gone with the Wind. Scarlett is so ridiculously unbelievable—Scarlett O’Hara after the war goes to Ireland to buy horses and become head of the O’Hara clan, really?—that I am sure Margaret Mitchell would have sued. However, Rhett Butler’s People is a lot of fun and takes few liberties with Mitchell’s prototype. So which would The Family Corleone be? A Scarlett? or a Rhett Butler’s People?

The Family Corleone is a well told story. It is mostly set in 1933 and early 1934 in New York. It tells how Don Vito Corleone became the capo di tutti capi, the chief of all chiefs, of the New York crime syndicate. Some readers may recall the flashbacks in The Godfather II film. Puzo had a hand in those, but the flashbacks are mostly about how Vito Corleone got his start in crime and began his own gang. By 1933 his gang and several others are well established. But Corleone sees the handwriting on the wall. He knows his gang has to branch out because Prohibition is coming to an end.

Even though the overall story is about Corleone’s rise to prominence, the story focuses on two other characters: Luca Brasi, Vito Corleone’s ruthless enforcer, and Santino “Sonny” Corleone, the Don’s oldest son and presumptive heir to the family business. At the beginning of the story, Sonny is turning eighteen and already an aspiring hoodlum. His siblings Michael, Fredo, and Connie are thirteen, nine, and six, and while they figure in the story a little, they are too young to be involved in the father’s business yet.

The first half of the novel tells us about how Luca Brasi became the way he was. There are many hints about him dropped in the original Godfather novel, that The Family Corleone explains or embellishes. We learn that Brasi’s father was an abusive alcoholic. Luca killed his father in self-defense and then killed his mother’s boyfriend to make it look like an accident. He was only twelve at the time. After that he just did not care. As we witness how Vito Corleone treats him with respect instead of contempt, Brasi becomes undyingly loyal to him. It is quite a tale that I believe Puzo would be happy with since it is largely based on Brasi’s backstory as alluded to in The Godfather.

Most people in The Family Corleone hate Luca Brasi. About half a dozen gang leaders and hit men want him dead. Even by gangland standards, he is repulsive and immoral. It appears as though his death is inevitable, as when Davy Crockett and the others cross the line in the sand at the Alamo. Yet many readers know that Luca Brasi is an important figure in The Godfather. (An oft-quoted line from the film is “Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes.”) We know he survives. We want to see how he does it. We half believe him when he smiles “crookedly” and says, “I made—a deal with the devil.” Of course, perhaps Don Vito is that devil.

The story of Sonny in The Family Corleone is also effective. There is a reason Puzo nicknamed him Sonny: Even as a man and as the heir presumptive to the Corleone dynasty, he is immature. He is immature in his looks, his womanizing, his temper, and his lack of common sense. He does say one clever thing—clearly anticipating one of his father’s most famous lines in The Godfather. When he is explaining his job in olive oil sales to his fiancée Sandra, she asks him how he can get so many grocers to sell only his Genco brand of olive oil. He tells her, “I make them offers any reasonable man would accept.” (374)

We quickly learn that since Sonny was a boy he has known what kind of business his father is in. This knowledge brings him pride rather than shame. He wants to be like his Pop. We also find out the curious circumstances surrounding Vito Corleone’s “adoption” of Tom Hagen who is orphaned at an early age, attends the NYU Law School, and eventually becomes the Corleone consigliere in The Godfather. Yes, Tom and Sonny were friends, but there is a lot more.

Sonny wants to do things to make his father proud. So he starts his own little gang of Italian and Irish guys, plus one Greek, from his neighborhood. They make their illegal gains by robbing an Italian rumrunner’s liquor and selling it to another Italian gangster. Sonny is proud of what he is doing because no one knows who is doing it. His buyer is not talking because he thinks Don Vito is behind it.

Sonny’s actions do get his father’s attention, but not in the way he had hoped. His father wants all the gangs at peace, respecting each other, and not getting in each other’s way. Vito Corleone has to move in and straighten everything out, but the strongest mob boss at the time, Don Mariposa, does not trust him. That is partly Sonny’s fault because Sonny was robbing Don Mariposa’s booze shipments.

There is a lot of detail that makes for a fascinating story, but we begin to see that in spite of his enthusiasm for the rackets, Sonny is not going to get it. Even his father tells him that in the mob he is just a bambino, a baby, and that he has to learn the business from him and from men like Pete Clemenza (probably the most sympathetic mobster in the book and film: “Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.”). But Sonny keeps shooting his mouth off, and there is a sense that he is doomed.

We see Sonny “earn his bones,” that is, kill his first person, a requirement for any mobster to get respect. (I believe it was The Valachi Papers where Joe Valachi recalls that everyone, male and female, treated him with much more courtesy and even admiration after he made his first hit.) Yet even this is low. Sonny does not botch it, but he never should have done it. There was no justice, even in the gangland sense of righteous vendetta. I can say little more without giving too much away, but Sonny again lives up to his nickname.

Sonny’s first hit is such a contrast to the well-known first hit of his war hero brother Michael when Michael makes the fateful decision to join the family business because he believes he has to. Michael’s hit was not only clever (the pistol hidden in the bathroom), but there was a sense that justice was being served.

Even in The Family Corleone there is a sense that Michael is the future of the family. He is a good student, though still naïve about the family business, and he is really interested in government. Vito gets a city councilman, a friend of his, to give Michael a tour of the city hall for a school report he is doing. Later his father gets him an autograph from the mayor. Michael is thinking that he might like to be a city councilman or maybe even a congressman when he grows up. He is the smart one. He is the one who will get it. He is the one who is going to get respect. He will learn—whether from the teachers at school or from his father.

As I was reading about young Michael’s political ambitions, I also thought of the novel The Godfather’s Revenge (or perhaps even The Last Don). Those novels are set in the fifties and sixties mostly in Las Vegas and Hollywood. As Vito Corleone in the thirties wants his children to go into legitimate businesses, those two books suggest that a lot of the traditional businesses themselves, especially gambling casinos and entertainment, have gone legitimate, and the authorities largely wink at the high end drug trade. That is why in the one book the protagonist is called the last don.

Both “sequel” novels have a few things to note about the Kennedy family. There is a brief scene in one of The Godfather II flashbacks where Vito Corleone runs into to Irish bootleggers who work for Joe Kennedy. Since they have different sources and clientele, they do not compete and there is no conflict. The sequels build on that.

Part of the thesis of both books (one by Puzo, one by someone else) is that Joe Kennedy got what Vito Corleone wanted. Both men had many connections to government and legitimate businessmen. In The Family Corleone, Clemenza is reluctant to give a state senator the bribe he demands, but Vito tells him the price is worth it. After Prohibition was repealed, Kennedy’s business became legitimate. And Kennedy’s sons became what Corleone hoped his sons would become.

There are some parallels between Michael Corleone and John Kennedy. They are smart. Kennedy did become a congressman, the job Michael thought he would like. JFK did pretty much go legitimate—hints of underworld connections, while undeniable, are still vague. He went to the best schools (Harvard compared to Michael’s Dartmouth). He had been a World War II hero, as had Michael. He married a stylish high society woman not unlike Kay Adams Corleone.

There is a recurring theme or image, more concrete in the sequel novels, that there is often a very blurry line between criminal behavior and government behavior, even in a democratic republic. Similarly, the epilogue of The Family Corleone which describes Sonny’s wedding reception makes this clear. We meet all the various wedding guests, mobsters, small businessmen, policemen, and politicians who are friends of capo Corleone.

It is perhaps notable, too, that two of the three sons of Vito Corleone are killed just as were three of the four sons of Joseph Kennedy. While one was killed in war, two others were assassinated. Yes, they were political assassinations rather than gangland assassinations, but this reminds us that politics is a brutal business as well.

While this has nothing to do with The Godfather stories or any of the spin-offs, thinking about these things made me realize that on a symbolic level, the deaths of the three Kennedy brothers represent the three existential enemies of the United States—the nation all three brothers represented—since the end or World War I. Joseph, Jr., was killed in war while fighting German fascists. President John Kennedy was assassinated by a Communist (whether Russia or Cuba was involved we may never know, but Oswald was a Communist sympathetic to both countries). Senator Robert Kennedy was killed by a radicalized Muslim (again we may never know for sure if Sirhan had direct connections with the Muslim Brotherhood, but the Brotherhood would use him as an example of how to successfully operate in an infidel nation).

Anyway, such speculations aside, The Family Corleone is an entertaining story. Perhaps it is not as elegantly written as The Godfather, at least the way I remember it, but it is a terrific yarn. There are numerous other subplots that I have not even mentioned in this review. There is a lot to it.

On three separate occasions in The Family Corleone, Don Mariposa tries to eliminate Vito Corleone. Once he uses a local Irish gang, a group that has a detailed backstory for us and is the most destructive to Corleone’s cause. The two other times, Don Mariposa hires hit men—the first pair from Cleveland, the second pair from Chicago. The Chicago men are enforcers of Capone’s who have been working with Frank Nitti. Their story is alluded to in The Godfather, but Falco provides the whole tale. Clearly, they do not succeed since Vito Corleone is still alive after World War II. One big reason that all three attempts fail is that Vito Corleone had Luca Brasi as his bodyguard. Enough said.

• N.B.: The Family Corleone also contains a great essay by Mario Puzo on the writing of The Godfather. That essay is reviewed separately.