The Godfather's Influence on Organized Crime Perception

Introduction: Fiction and the Public Mind

In Organized Crime in America, Dennis Kenney and Jim Finckenauer note that the movie The Godfather "had more influence on the public mind and the minds of many public officials than did any library filled with scholarly works that argued for the true nature of organized crime" (Mario pp). This observation frames a striking paradox: a commercially motivated work of fiction came to define public and official understanding of the Mafia more powerfully than decades of academic research.

The Origins and Commercial Intent of The Godfather

The scenes from The Godfather are among the most often recalled and parodied in screen history (Fox pp). Released in 1972, it won three Oscars, including Best Picture, as did the sequel, The Godfather Part II, two years later (Fox pp). Both films have become legendary landmarks of American film history; however, when Mario Puzo wrote the novel, he had no intention of revealing hard truths about gangsters (Fox pp).

Puzo, the son of illiterate Neapolitan immigrants, had grown up in the Hell's Kitchen area of New York City and saw writing as a way out of working-class Italian culture (Fox pp). In 1965, after his proposal for a serious novel was rejected, he wrote an intentionally commercial Mafia novel that drew on memories from his youth (Fox pp). It captured the American imagination because, in the late 1960s, the American underworld looked not that much different from the "upperworld" (Fox pp).

In fact, in 1967, a writer named Nicholas Pileggi published a letter in the Saturday Evening Post stating, "The Mafia has been dependable, ubiquitous and a friend to those in need … was far more a symbol of contemporary American society than an aberration" (Fox pp). Puzo's novel meshed perfectly with that sentiment. In the film, although the gangsters betray and kill, they only harm one another, and the movie offers no real sense of what they actually do to earn their money (Fox pp).

There are, however, revealing references. In one scene, the character Tom argues for entering the narcotics trade, warning that rival families would gain enough money to "buy more police and political power" and threatening the Corleones' existing holdings in unions and gambling (Puzo pp). Similarly, the Sollozzo character appeals directly to the Corleone family's political reach, telling Don Corleone, "I need those politicians that you carry in your pocket, like so many nickels and dimes" (Puzo pp). Yet throughout the film, the words "Mafia" or "Cosa Nostra" are never uttered; milder terms such as "family" and "syndicate" are used instead (Fox pp).

Organized Crime in Italy: The Real Picture

While Puzo's fiction softened the edges of organized crime, the reality in Italy was considerably darker. According to police and senior magistrates, by 1984 organized crime in Italy — embodied in the Mafia of Sicily and the Camorra of Naples — represented a greater threat to the internal security of Italy than did political violence (Kassander pp). In early 1984, officials of the Sicilian regional government were forced to resign after the arrest of the deputy premier on corruption charges, while the premier himself was under investigation on similar grounds (Kassander pp). The involvement of these officials illustrated the power and reach of organized crime throughout Italian institutions (Kassander pp).

The decisive factor in the spread of organized crime was the drug trade, which operated primarily from the Rome area, where serious crime figures exceeded the national average (Kassander pp). Mafia involvement in the international narcotics market proved extremely serious: opium derivatives were brought to Sicily, processed into heroin, and smuggled throughout Europe and the United States (Kassander pp). The expansion of the Sicilian banking system was also linked to Mafia narcotics activity. During the 1970s, the number of Sicilian bank branches increased by 400%, compared with an average increase of 80% in the rest of Italy (Kassander pp). Customs police and investigating magistrates strongly suspected that laundered narcotics money was being invested in construction, tourism, and the broader economy (Kassander pp).

Conclusion

New York City, of course, was the inspiration and backdrop for Mario Puzo's novel The Godfather. The convergence of Puzo's commercially crafted fiction with the real historical development of organized crime discourse in America created a feedback loop in which popular culture and official perception mutually reinforced one another — a dynamic whose influence, as Kenney and Finckenauer observed, far exceeded that of the scholarly record.