How the Real Mob First Tried to Kill The Godfather — Then Made It Their Bible
When Paramount announced it would turn Mario Puzo’s 1969 bestseller into a movie, New York’s underworld did not greet the news as flattery. It treated the project as an insult that needed to be shut down.
Joe Colombo, boss of the Colombo crime family, had already built a public-relations machine called the Italian-American Civil Rights League. Its official purpose was to fight stereotypes. Its unofficial purpose was to deny that the Mafia existed at all. Colombo liked to tell reporters there was no such thing as the Mafia. “Am I head of a family?” he asked. “Yes — my wife, four sons and a daughter. That’s my family.” The League had already forced advertisers to pull commercials and pressured the Justice Department to drop the word “Mafia” from official statements. A Hollywood epic about a Sicilian crime family looked like the next target.
Producer Al Ruddy quickly learned the campaign was not limited to press releases. Windows were shot out. Threats arrived by phone. Cars followed him. Gulf & Western, Paramount’s parent company, evacuated its Manhattan headquarters after bomb scares. Neighborhoods that the crew needed for locations refused to cooperate. The Teamsters, whose trucks and drivers were essential, threatened to walk. Without New York, the film as Coppola envisioned it could not be made.
Ruddy did what the script would later call making an offer. In early 1971 he sat down with Colombo and his son Anthony. The producer handed over the shooting script and agreed to three conditions: the words “Mafia” and “Cosa Nostra” would disappear from the dialogue, League members would get jobs and extra work, and proceeds from the premiere would go to the League. A public announcement in March 1971 declared that the film had the League’s blessing. The word “Mafia” had appeared only once in that draft anyway. Colombo thought he had won. Gulf & Western thought Ruddy had sold the studio to gangsters; stock dropped and Ruddy was briefly fired before Coppola insisted he be rehired. The promised premiere donation was quietly dropped.
Once the deal was struck, the same men who had tried to stop the picture began showing up on set. They watched Brando get shot in the street and complained that a man of that stature would never pinch a hat that way. They critiqued how actors held guns. Lenny Montana, a former Colombo enforcer, was cast as Luca Brasi; his real-life nerves in front of Brando became part of the performance. James Caan spent time with Colombo figures. Carlo Gambino was said to have watched filming from a café across the street. Coppola, following Puzo’s advice, kept his distance. Ruddy did the opposite. He later said that without the Mafia’s help the picture would have been impossible to finish.
On June 28, 1971, while the crew was shooting fictional assassinations a few blocks away, Colombo walked toward a podium at a League rally in Columbus Circle. A man posing as a photographer shot him three times in the head and neck. Colombo’s men killed the gunman on the spot. Colombo survived but never recovered; he lingered in a vegetative state until 1978. The production kept going.
The film opened on March 14, 1972. The men who had once wanted it buried now treated it as their own.
Selwyn Raab, who spent decades covering the Five Families, wrote that no group was more fascinated or proud of the movie than the Mafia itself. Federal and local investigators on surveillance duty watched made men and wannabes imitate the mannerisms and language of the screen gangsters. They kissed and hugged more theatrically. They quoted dialogue. They played Nino Rota’s score at parties and weddings as if it were a private national anthem. The term “Godfather,” which Puzo had invented, entered their everyday speech. The film, Raab observed, validated their lifestyles and their decision to join. It fed a belief that they belonged to a respected society of superior men rather than a network of extortionists and killers.
Sammy “the Bull” Gravano, then a young Colombo associate who would later become John Gotti’s underboss, saw the movie and felt enlarged by it. “I looked up to them even more than I ever did,” he recalled. “It was so true to life. Not just the Mafia life, but the parts of being Italian, the wedding, the whole nine yards. It seemed like it was us.” He said he floated out of the theater. In later years he admitted using Corleone lines in real conversations: “I’m gonna make you an offer you can’t refuse.” He identified with Michael — a man who came home from the military, kept the rules, and stayed quiet. The movie, he said, confirmed the path he was already on.
Henry Hill, whose life later became Goodfellas, remembered that Paul Vario’s crew loved it because it made them feel big-time. A mob wife wrote that her husband watched the film “like six thousand times” and that the men who came to their house began acting like the actors, kissing more and dropping lines from the picture. Joseph Pistone, the undercover agent known as Donnie Brasco, sat in a Little Italy restaurant years later when a girlfriend requested the Godfather theme from a strolling guitarist. The guitarist knew the version they wanted.
The irony was complete. Colombo had fought the movie because he thought it would make Italian-Americans look like criminals. The finished film made the criminals look like aristocrats. Real street life was often petty, brutal, and chaotic. Coppola’s version offered family dinners, codes of honor, whispered respect, and a Don who spoke in measured sentences. Wiseguys preferred the version on screen.
Art and life then swapped places. Investigators noticed the change almost immediately: the posture, the language, the rituals. Diego Gambetta, a sociologist who studied criminal communication, later argued that Mafia movies did not merely depict the mob. They supplied the visual and social cues the mob used to depict itself. The movie became a training film no one had assigned.
Ruddy kept one last promise of sorts. When the studio refused to let the men who had “cooperated” attend the official premiere, he snuck out a print and held a private screening. The projectionist later told him the wise guys had tipped him a thousand dollars.
Fifty years on, the pattern still holds. New generations of mobsters still quote the film, still play the music, still measure themselves against Vito and Michael. The organization that tried to stop The Godfather ended up living inside it. The movie they feared would expose them instead gave them a mythology they were happy to wear.
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