The Godfather

 “The Godfather” By Mario Puzo
 
163
Book Three 
Chapter 14 
The Don was a real man at the age of twelve. Short, dark, slender, living in the strange 
Moorish-looking village of Corleone in Sicily, he had been born Vito Andolini, but when 
strange men came to kill the son of the man they had murdered, his mother sent the 
young boy to America to stay with friends. And in the new land he changed his name to 
Corleone to preserve some tie with his native village. It was one of the few gestures of 
sentiment he was ever to make. 
In Sicily at the turn of the century the Mafia was the second government, far more 
powerful than the official one in Rome. Vito Corleone’s father became involved in a feud 
with another villager who took his case to the Mafia. The father refused to knuckle under 
and in a public quarrel killed the local Mafia chief. A week later he himself was found 
dead, his body torn apart by lupara blasts. A month after the funeral Mafia gunmen 
came inquiring after the young boy, Vito. They had decided that he was too close to 
manhood, that he might try, to avenge the death of his father in the years to come. The 
twelve-year-old Vito was hidden by relatives and shipped to America. There he was 
boarded with the Abbandandos, whose son Genco was later to become Consigliere to 
his Don. 
Young Vito went to work in the Abbandando grocery store on Ninth Avenue in New 
York’s Hell’s Kitchen. At the age of eighteen Vito married an Italian girl freshly arrived 
from Sicily, a girl of only sixteen but a skilled cook, a good housewife. They settled down 
in a tenement on Tenth Avenue, near 35th Street, only a few blocks from where Vito 
worked, and two years later were blessed with their first child, Santino, called by all his 
friends Sonny because of his devotion to his father. 
In the neighborhood lived a man called Fanucci. He was a heavy-set, fierce-looking 
Italian who wore expensive light-colored suits and a cream-colored fedora. This man 
was reputed to be of the “Black Hand,” an offshoot of the Mafia which extorted money 
from families and storekeepers by threat of physical violence. However, since most of 
the inhabitants of the neighborhood were violent themselves, Fanucci’s threats of bodily 
harm were effective only with elderly couples without male children to defend them. 
Some of the storekeepers paid him trifling sums as a matter of convenience. However, 
Fanucci was also a scavenger on fellow criminals, people who illegally sold Italian 
lottery or ran gambling games in their homes. The Abbandando grocery gave him a 

---