The Godfather

 “The Godfather” By Mario Puzo
 
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influence with the legal apparatus. But this was a formidable concession. 
The Don of Los Angeles, Frank Falcone, spoke to answer. “There’s no way of stopping 
our people from going into that business..They go in on their own and they get is 
trouble. There’s too much money in it to resist. So it’s more dangerous if we don’t go in. 
At least if we control it we can cover it better, organize it better, make sure it causes less 
trouble. Being in it is not so bad, there has to be control, there has to be protection, 
there has to be organization, we can’t have everybody running around doing just what 
they please like a bunch of anarchists.” 
The Don of Detroit, more friendly to Corleone than any of the others, also now spoke 
against his friend’s position, in the interest of reasonableness. “I don’t believe in drugs,” 
he said. “For years I paid my people extra so they wouldn’t do that kind of business. But 
it didn’t matter, it didn’t help. Somebody comes to them and says, ‘I have powders, if 
you put up the three-, four-thousand-dollar investment we can make fifty thousand 
distributing.’ Who can resist such a profit? And they are so busy with their little side 
business they neglect the work I pay them to do. There’s more money in drugs. It’s 
getting bigger all the time. There’s no way to stop it so we have to control the business 
and keep it respectable. I don’t want any of it near schools, I don’t want any of it sold to 
children. That is an infamita. In my city I would try to keep the traffic in the dark people, 
the colored. They are the best customers, the least troublesome and they are animals 
anyway. They have no respect for their wives or their families or for themselves. Let 
them lose their souls with drugs. But something has to be done, we just can’t let people 
do as they please and make trouble for everyone.” 
This speech of the Detroit Don was received with loud murmurs of approval. He had hit 
the nail on the head. You couldn’t even pay people to stay out of the drug traffic. As for 
his remarks about children, that was his well-known sensibility, his tenderheartedness 
speaking. After all, who would sell drugs to children? Where would children get the 
money? As for his remarks about the coloreds, that was not even heard. The Negroes 
were considered of absolutely no account, of no force whatsoever. That they had 
allowed society to grind them into the dust proved them of no account and his 
mentioning them in any way proved that the Don of Detroit had a mind that always 
wavered toward irrelevancies. 
All the Dons spoke. Ail of them deplored the traffic in drugs as a bad thing that would 
cause trouble but agreed there was no way to control it. There was, simply, too much 
money to be made in the business, therefore it followed that there would be men who 

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