What real-life mobsters really thought of The Godfather

On June 28, 1971, the Italian-American Civil Rights League held its second annual Unity Day rally at Manhattan’s Columbus Circle. An estimated 15,000 people were there, brought together by the League’s founder and main man, Joseph Colombo – an immaculately-dressed, headline-nabbing salesman and family man. Joe Colombo was on a mission to rid America of the word “Mafia” – which he claimed was a myth – and stop the defamation and harassment of decent, law-abiding Italian-Americans. 

The League, with a paid membership of 45,000, had support from celebrities and politicians. In November 1970, Frank Sinatra sang a benefit gig at Madison Square Garden. Two months later, New York Magazine named Colombo as one of the city’s 10 most powerful men.

There was a catch: Joe Colombo was indeed a family man – the boss of the Colombo crime family. Joe Colombo’s official business was real estate; but the real moolah was in gambling, loan sharking, heists, and shakedowns. “It was unprecedented,” wrote Mark Seal in his 2021 book Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli, about the making of The Godfather, “a Mafia boss doubling as a civil rights leader.”

The Unity Day rally turned to bloody carnage before Colombo even reached the stage. A gunman with bogus press credentials shot Colombo three times in the head and neck, paralysing the mobster and putting him into a coma. The shooter was a 25-year-old African-American named Jerome Johnson, who was also shot and killed in the fracas. A previously-unheard-of Black Power group took credit for Colombo’s shooting, but investigators suspected that Johnson had been sent by rival mobsters – punishment for Colombo’s League putting a spotlight on the mob, and for chastising the FBI too publicly, which invited a potential retaliation from the Feds.

Among Colombo’s public campaigns was a war against The Godfather, which ended with a high-profile handshake deal between the producers and mobsters. As Colombo was gunned down Francis Ford Coppola was just four blocks away, filming climactic scenes with an eerie parallel – Michael Corleone’s men carrying out a series of hits on rival bosses.

Though The Godfather was initially targeted by the mob – including threats and intimidation tactics – the film and its themes of honour and old-time loyalty were embraced by the mob. “No group was more fascinated, appreciative, or proud of The Godfather theme than the Mafia,” wrote organised crime reporter Selwyn Raab.

Joseph Colombo had been a capo (the captain of his own crew) within the Profaci family, one the “Five Families” of organised crime in New York. When his boss, Joe Magliocco, conspired to kill Carlo Gambino (described as the “boss of bosses”), Colombo warned Gambino about the plot. Colombo’s loyalty to Gambino – or betrayal of Magliocco, depending on your viewpoint – was rewarded: Joe was made boss of the Profaci family, renamed the Colombo family, at the relatively young age of 41.

Colombo formed the Italian-American Civil Rights League in response to the extra scrutiny put upon his activities, and the indictment of his son, Joseph Jr, as part of a $300,000 conspiracy to melt down nickel coins and sell them as silver ingots. Colombo picketed FBI offices over his son’s indictment (he was later acquitted) and was outspoken in the media.

Colombo was cashing-in on a growing culture of protest and distrust in the powers that be. “That’s the new trend,” an unnamed FBI agent told the press. “Everybody, even the Mafia, is demonstrating now.” Indeed, Colombo had brazenly turned the FBI’s investigations against them – framing it as institutionalised harassment and discrimination of Italian-Americans. The League railed against film and TV depictions of Italian-Americans as goombahs and gangsters, and picketed newspapers and networks.

“We were always being defamed,” said Godfather actor Gianni Russo, speaking on the documentary, The Godfather and the Mob. “Every Italian-American was ‘in the mafia’. If you were successful, no matter how hard you worked, you were labelled that you were in the mob. [The League] really was a good cause, when it first initially was developed.”

The League had success. It pressurised Attorney General Nicholas Katzenbach into preventing – though actually just postponing – the publication of The Valachi Papers, a biography of mobster-turned-government witness Joe Valachi. The Justice Department and New York State Police, also under pressure from the League, banned the words “Mafia” and “Cosa Nostra” from press releases and statements. 

On June 11, 1970, the League’s inaugural Unity Day rally attracted a huge crowd, reported as anywhere between 50,000 to 250,000 people. “The League is under God’s eyes and protection,” Colombo told a reporter. “As long as it does good things, the League will get stronger and stronger, and those who go against the League will feel His sting.”

In an article for Vanity Fair, Mark Seal noted that the word “Mafia” had gained notoriety in the US after the 1951 report by the Kefauver Committee, an investigation into organised crime led by Senator Estes Kefauver. “Mafia” was the planned title for Mario Puzo’s novel, which was renamed The Godfather and published in 1969.

Puzo admitted that he “never met a real, honest-to-god gangster” but he researched the Mafia intensely. A keen gambler, Puzo hung around the tables in Vegas and questioned a well-connected pit boss, Ed Walters, about the mob’s inner workings. As noted by Mark Seal, Walters and his dealers were happy to give up the info – as long as Puzo kept putting chips on the table.

Puzo – thanks to his gambling – was up to his neck in debt. He wrote The Godfather purely as a commercial venture. Robert Evans, the head of Paramount, told Seal that Puzo had visited his office to sell the option before the book was even written. When it became a best-seller, Paramount put The Godfather into production. Francis Ford Coppola didn’t want to direct it, but like Puzo, he was in the red. Paramount made Coppola an offer he couldn’t refuse.

Coppola fought numerous battles against Paramount executives, over the casting of Marlon Brando and shooting the film as a period piece in New York. Robert Evans had wanted it to be authentic enough that audiences could “smell the spaghetti”, but the studio apparently drew the line at the extra cost of shooting in New York. Coppola ultimately won the battle to make the film in New York, but production soon met resistance from the mob.

Publicly, Joe Colombo sent out a press release against the production, in which he called Puzo’s original novel “spurious and slanderous”. Away from the public eye, the campaign was more insidious. Back in Los Angeles, producer Al Ruddy received threatening calls and was warned by the LAPD that he was being followed. To throw them off the trail, Ruddy switched cars with his assistant Bettye McCartt. In the middle of the night, someone shot out the car windows. McCartt found a note where the windscreen had once been, warning them not to make The Godfather. “We were getting subtle messages,” said Ruddy, speaking on The Godfather and the Mob.

Robert Evans also received threats. “Take some advice,” he was warned over the phone. “We don’t want to break your pretty face, hurt your newborn. Get the f___ outta town. Don’t shoot no movie about the family here. Got it?” Evans said that he wasn’t the producer of the film, but the caller was unimpressed. “When we kill a snake, we chop its f___ing head off,” the voice said.

When production set up in the New York offices of Paramount’s parent company, Gulf and Western, bomb threats were made. Meanwhile, businesses and families who had agreed to let the filmmakers use their premises for shooting, suddenly withdrew their permissions – someone was piling on the pressure. When Coppola stopped for lunch while doing test shots in Little Italy, the crew emerged from the restaurant to discover their van had been stolen. 

The biggest threat to production was the mob’s infiltration of the unions. Joe Colombo could initiate strikes that would prevent crucial deliveries and transport. Al Ruddy had to face the mobsters and strike a deal.

After attending a Italian-American Civil Rights League meeting and assuring them that The Godfather didn’t discriminate against Italian-Americans – the film featured crooked Jews and Irishmen too, he insisted – Ruddy had a private meeting with Joe Colombo and his heavies. Presented with the script, Colombo didn’t make it past the first page. Instead, they made an agreement: the word “Mafia” would not be used in The Godfather. Colombo didn’t know that the word only appeared once in the script anyway.

The next day, Colombo tricked Ruddy into attending a major press conference. The deal between the film and the mob was all over the newspapers. Gulf and Western’s stock plummeted two and a half points – worth billions – overnight. Ruddy was sacked but quickly reinstated at Francis Ford Coppola’s insistence. Coppola knew The Godfather couldn’t be made without Ruddy’s connections.

When filming finally began, the mob maintained a presence. For the scenes of Brando's Don Corleone being gunned down, mobsters turned up to watch and critiqued the authenticity – Brando’s suit and hat; the way the actors held their guns. Carlo Gambino watched from a café across the street. Brando recalled in his autobiography that Pennsylvanian mobster Russell Bufalino – whom he called “Joe”, later played by Joe Pesci in The Irishman – came to his trailer and talked about his treatment by the US government and calamari. Brando gave him a tour of the set.

The shops and apartments which had previously withdrawn permissions were now open to the film for business – most of the money paid by the studio to use them went straight to the mob. Real mobsters were also cast, playing extras in the classic wedding scene. Lenny Montana – a former wrestler and Colombo family enforcer – played Luca Brasi, Don Corleone’s hitman. 

Al Martino, who plays Sinatra-like singer Johnny Fontaine, told Mark Seal that he went to his godfather, Russel Bufalino, to help secure the role – mirroring his character in the movie, who asks Don Corleone to strong arm a Hollywood producer. There was an FBI presence too. James Caan, playing Sonny Corleone, was under surveillance due to his friendship with Carmine Persico Jr – a member of the Gambino crime family.

The shooting of Joseph Colombo began a so-called gang war. Some believed that “Crazy” Joe Gallo had orchestrated the shooting, as ordered by the Commission (the mob’s governing body) over the Italian-American Civil Rights League drawing undue attention to mob activities. Less than a year later, Crazy Joe was shot in a Little Italy restaurant while celebrating his 43rd birthday. Joe Colombo remained in a coma for seven years and died of cardiac arrest in May 1978.

The Godfather opened on March 14, 1972. Anthony Colombo, Joe’s son, was upset that he and his associates weren’t invited to the premiere. Al Ruddy arranged a private screening. The projectionist told Ruddy that wiseguys had tipped him $1,000.

Indeed, The Godfather was embraced by real-life mobsters. “The film validated their lifestyles and decisions to join the mob and accept its credo,” wrote Selwyn Raab in his book, Five Families. “Moreover, it apparently justified a warped belief that Mafiosi were members of a respected, benevolent society of deserving superior people.”

The FBI saw mobsters emulating the movie – kissing rings, carrying themselves like the characters, and using the term Godfather (which was invented by Puzo – possibly inspired by the Kefauver report, which noted crime boss Frank Costello was godfather to another criminal’s child). The film’s score was played at weddings and parties – the Mafia’s “national anthem,” said Selwyn Raab. 

Salvatore “Sammy the Bull” Gravano – who said he “floated” out of the cinema because of how brilliantly The Godfather depicted their lifestyle – admitted to pilfering Don Corleone’s catchphrases. “I would use lines in real life like ‘I’m gonna make you an offer you can’t refuse,’” he told The New York Times. “And I would always tell people, just like from The Godfather, ‘If you have an enemy, that enemy becomes my enemy.’”

In 2001, a former Pennsylvania police officer told the Irish Independent how every raid on a mobster's house found the Godfather films on video. Joe Coffey, a former rackets investigator, told the documentary the same thing. “When we come in, with the guns out and the whole routine, they’ve got the tape of The Godfather in the television VCR,” he said.

Its influence may be even more sinister. In May 1991, building contractors from Palermo, Sicily found a horse’s head in a car. Ten years later, also in Palermo, another horse’s head was found in a car – this time with a knife between its eyes. In 2008, a bread shop owner in Villafranca Padovana, northern Italy was sent a donkey’s head after refusing to pay protection money to a low-level gang (“The man didn’t know the donkey, he didn’t own the donkey, he doesn’t care about donkeys. It didn’t make sense. It was the work of idiots,” a police spokesman said). 

Sammy the Bull credited the film for his own crimes. “I killed 19 people,” he told The New York Times. “I only did, like, one murder before I saw the movie.”