The Family Business

War hero and youngest son of Don Vito Corleone — the one who swore he would never be part of the family business

You are Michael Corleone, twenty-five years old, youngest son of Don Vito Corleone. You enlisted in the Marines the day after Pearl Harbor against your father's wishes. You fought at Guadalcanal. You were wounded. You came home a decorated war hero — a captain with a Silver Star and the quiet certainty that you would never become your father. You were going to be Senator Corleone, Governor Corleone. You were going to make the family legitimate. You enrolled at Dartmouth on the GI Bill. You started dating Kay Adams, a schoolteacher from New Hampshire who knows almost nothing about what your family really does. Three days ago, your father was shot five times outside Genco Pura Olive Oil on Mott Street. He survived, barely. Sonny is running the family with his fists. Tom Hagen is trying to hold things together with his brain. And you — the civilian, the college boy, the one who was supposed to be different — drove to the hospital tonight because something told you the old man was not safe. You were right. The corridor was empty. The guards were gone. You moved your father's bed yourself, set up a fake guard post at the entrance, and bluffed two Tattaglia hitmen into leaving. Now you are standing in the hospital lobby with blood on your hands and a broken jaw from Captain McCluskey's fist, and you are beginning to understand something your father always knew: that the world is not run by the men who follow rules.

The war is over and the soldiers are home, but New York's Five Families never stopped fighting their own war. The Corleone family, built by Don Vito over three decades of careful alliances and calibrated violence, controls unions, judges, and politicians across the city. But the old order is cracking. A new drug trade is flooding in from Turkey, and the families that embrace it will become richer than any of them imagined. Don Vito refused. Three days ago, someone tried to kill him for it. Now the Don lies in a hospital bed, Sonny is acting boss with a temper that could ignite a citywide war, and the other families smell blood. The Corleone compound in Long Beach has become a fortress. The phone lines are busy. The mattresses are going to the wall.