Word: gangsters
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...begin with, Puzo avoids the opera buffa nicknames that newspaper rewrite men use to lend a tint of life to their gangster stories. Secondly, Puzo's Corleone family has manly standards. Gambling, labor extortion, an occasional unavoidable murder and some judicious bribery are all in order. But no prostitution or drugs. These enterprises offend the strait-laced sensibility of the Godfather, Don Vito Corleone...
...death, to his brother Aleksander, a Trieste businessman and once captain of the yacht of Yugoslav President Josip Broz Tito. In that letter Stevan told his brother that "if anything happens to me, address yourself to Alain Delon, to his wife and to his associate Francois Marcantoni, a real gangster . . ." Police seized Marcantoni, once linked with the Corsican Mafia, and began putting him through a long series of interrogations that are still going on. So far, however, he has not incriminated himself. "They want me to wear the hat," he said, "but I can assure them that...
Joseph Michael Valachi looks a bit like a Damon Runyon gangster-the tough guy who really is all heart. Short (5 ft. 6 in.) and bandy-legged, he could pass as one of those middle-aged truck drivers who spend their days oiT lifting weights at the local gym, then go home and cook up a dinner for the wife and kids-"Joe's Special Recipe for Spaghetti Sauce and Meatballs...
Bonanno is better known as "Joe Bananas," the gangster overlord of a New York Cosa Nostra "family." A Sicilian-born Mafioso who entered the U.S. illegally in 1924, Bonanno rose to a seat on the twelve-man "Grand Council" of organized crime. Though he has been semiretired as an active hoodlum since 1964, he is now embroiled in what has come to be known as "the Bananas war" -a death struggle between rival gangs that reaches from Joe's Brooklyn turf to Tucson's tree-lined pleasances. Open hostilities in the battle to succeed Joe as head...
...cheap legend, you understand; the prevalent romanticism of American narrative cinema provides a most captivating, not always inaccurate, cultural history of the U.S.A., sometimes useful as a frame of reference, always in our minds. Our grasp of the twenties and thirties cannot be divorced from icons remembered from countless gangster films and screwball comedies--anymore than we know the old west apart from the one given us by John Ford. These films are our memories of American life styles and geographies instinctively accessible although they existed before we were born...