The Godfather

 “The Godfather” By Mario Puzo
 
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The uncle, in his seventies, was also the doctor for the district. The capo-mafioso was a 
man in his late fifties named Don Tommasino and he operated as the gabbellotto for a 
huge estate belonging to one of Sicily’s most noble families. The gabbellotto, a sort of 
overseer to the estates of the rich, also guaranteed that the poor would not try to claim 
land not being cultivated, would not try to encroach in any way on the estate, by 
poaching or trying to farm it as squatters. In short, the gabbellotto was a mafioso who for 
a certain sum of money protected the real estate of the rich from all claims made on it by 
the poor, legal or illegal. When any poor peasant tried to implement the law which 
permitted him to buy uncultivated land, the gabbellotto frightened him off with threats of 
bodily harm or death. It was that simple. 
Don Tommasino also controlled the water rights in the area and vetoed the local 
building of any new dams by the Roman government. Such dams would ruin the 
lucrative business of selling water from the artesian wells he controlled, make water too 
cheap, ruin the whole important water economy so laboriously built up over hundreds of 
years. However, Don Tommasino was an old-fashioned Mafia chief and would have 
nothing to do with dope traffic or prostitution. In this Don Tommasino was at odds with 
the new breed of Mafia leaders springing up in big cities like Palermo, new men who, 
influenced by American gangsters deported to Italy, had no such scruples. 
The Mafia chief was an extremely portly man, a “man with a belly,” literally as well as is 
the figurative sense that meant a man able to inspire fear in his fellow men. Under his 
protection, Michael had nothing to fear, yet it was considered necessary to keep the 
fugitive’s identity a secret. And so Michael was restricted to the walled estate of Dr. 
Taza, the Don’s uncle. 
Dr. Taza was tall for a Sicilian, almost six feet, and had ruddy cheeks and snow-white 
hair. Though in his seventies, he went every week to Palermo to pay his respects to the 
younger prostitutes of that city, the younger the better. Dr. Taza’s other vice was 
reading. He read everything and talked about what he read to his fellow townsmen, 
patients who were illiterate peasants, the estate shepherds, and this gave him a local 
reputation for foolishness. What did books have to do with them? 
In the evenings Dr. Taza, Don Tommasino and Michael sat in the huge garden 
populated with these marble statues that on this island seemed to grow out of the 
garden as magically as the black heady grapes. Dr. Taza loved to tell stories about the 
Mafia and its exploits over the centuries and in Michael Corleone he had a fascinated 
listener. There were times when even Don Tommasino would be carried away by the 

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