The Godfather

 “The Godfather” By Mario Puzo
 
274
balmy air, the fruity, intoxicating wine, the elegant and quiet comfort of the garden, and 
tell a story from his own practical experience. The doctor was the legend, the Don the 
reality. 
In this antique garden, Michael Corleone learned about the roots from which his father 
grew. That the word “Mafia” had originally meant place of refuge. Then it became the 
name for the secret organization that sprang up to fight against the rulers who had 
crushed the country and its people for centuries. Sicily was a land that had been more 
cruelly raped than any other in history. The Inquisition had tortured rich and poor alike. 
The landowning barons and the princes of the Catholic Church exercised absolute 
power over the shepherds and farmers. The police were the instruments of their power 
and so identified with them that to be called a policeman is the foulest insult one Sicilian 
can hurl at another. 
Faced with the savagery of this absolute power, the suffering people learned never to 
betray their anger and their hatred for fear of being crushed. They learned never to 
make themselves vulnerable by uttering any sort of threat since giving such a warning 
insured a quick reprisal. They learned that society was their enemy and so when they 
sought redress for their wrongs they went to the rebel underground, the Mafia. And the 
Mafia cemented its power by originating the law of silence, the omerta. In the 
countryside of Sicily a stranger asking directions to the nearest town will not even 
receive the courtesy of an answer. And the greatest crime any member of the Mafia 
could commit would be to tell the police the name of the man who had just shot him or 
done him any kind of injury. Omerta became the religion of the people. A woman whose 
husband has been murdered would not tell the police the name of her husband’s 
murderer, not even of her child’s murderer,, her daughter’s raper. 
Justice had never been forthcoming from the authorities and so the people had always 
gone to the Robin Hood Mafia. And to some extent the Mafia still fulfilled this role. 
People turned to their local capo-mafioso for help in every emergency. He was their 
social worker, their district captain ready with a basket of food and a job, their protector. 
But what Dr. Taza did not add, what Michael learned on his own in the months that 
followed, was that the Mafia in Sicily had become the illegal arm of the rich and even the 
auxiliary police of the legal and political structure. It had become a degenerate capitalist 
structure, anti-communist, anti-liberal, placing its own taxes on every form of business 
endeavor no matter how small. 

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