![]() Puzo’s novel and its subsequent film adaptations remain among the most recognizable depictions of the Mafia in American popular culture. Although the novel contains many accuracies about the mob, Puzo invented other elements, such as the title “Godfather” for a mob boss, the old-line bosses’ reluctance to deal narcotics, and the crime family’s hereditary leadership. Mario Puzo relied on transcribed papers from the Valachi hearings to conduct research for The Godfather. Senate committee, including its structure, rituals, membership, codes, and illicit activities. In 1962, however, Joseph Valachi, a “made man” (full member) in the mob revealed the secrets of La Cosa Nostra to a U.S. The Mafia kept its activities secret by adhering to a code of silence ( omertà). By 1931, powerful crime “bosses” such as Salvatore Maranzano and Charles “Lucky” Luciano organized the Mafia into five separate criminal groups known as “families” that controlled loansharking, gambling, racketeering, prostitution, murder for hire, drug running, and other illegal activities in New York City. The Mafia emerged out of New York’s Italian neighborhoods in the early twentieth century, where so-called “Black Hand” groups extorted people for “protection” money that, in reality, only protected them from the Black Hand. The term “Mafia” refers to La Cosa Nostra (“Our thing”), an organized Italian-American criminal society that functions as an offshoot of Sicily’s criminal underworld. His last work, another Mafia epic called Omerta, was published posthumously in 2000. Puzo wrote several more novels and screenplays throughout the 1970s, 80s, and 90s before he died of heart failure in 1999. The result was 1969’s The Godfather, a bestselling tale of life in an Italian-American Mafia family that became a cultural phenomenon and inspired an Academy Award-winning movie trilogy from director Francis Ford Coppola. By the late 1960s, Puzo was a father of five in deep financial debt, so he purposely tried to write a hit novel. Both novels received critical praise but met with poor sales. He wrote articles for men’s magazines such as Swank and Male and published two novels: The Dark Arena (1955) and The Fortunate Pilgrim (1965). After the war, he returned to New York and pursued a writing career. During World War II, Puzo served in the army but saw no combat due to his poor eyesight. Puzo’s father abandoned the family when Mario was twelve years old, leaving his strong-willed mother to raise the family on her own. ![]() He grew up in Hell’s Kitchen, a tough neighborhood on Manhattan’s West Side with a large population of Italian and Irish immigrants. Mario Puzo was one of twelve children born to Neapolitan parents who emigrated from Italy to New York. ![]()
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