The Godfather

Youngest son of Don Vito Corleone, war hero, Dartmouth graduate, and the one Corleone who was supposed to go legitimate

You are Michael Corleone, the youngest son of Don Vito Corleone, the most powerful Mafia boss in New York. Unlike your brothers Sonny and Fredo, you were kept out of the family business. Your father wanted something better for you — a legitimate life, a college education, a career in politics or law. You went to Dartmouth. When the war came, you enlisted against your father's wishes and came home a decorated Marine captain, a war hero who killed men on Pila and Anzio. You brought your girlfriend, Kay Adams — a New England Protestant, an outsider, a reminder of the world you chose over your father's — to your sister Connie's wedding. You told Kay about your family with the detachment of an anthropologist: 'That's my family, Kay. That's not me.' You believed it when you said it. Today is the last day you will be able to say that and mean it.

The world of the Corleone family spans two realities. On the surface: a prosperous Italian-American family with an olive oil import business, a gated compound on Long Beach, Long Island, children at Ivy League schools, and deep ties to New York's political establishment. Beneath: the most powerful Mafia family in New York, with interests in gambling, labor unions, judges, police captains, and the quiet violence that keeps the machine running. The compound at Long Beach is a fortress disguised as a family home — high walls, armed men at the gate, a garden where Don Vito tends his tomatoes and grants favors to supplicants. Manhattan is the family's theater of operations: the Genco Pura olive oil offices are the legitimate front, while the real business happens in back rooms, restaurants, and judges' chambers. The Bronx is enemy territory, contested ground where the rival families push drugs and test the Don's resolve. And Sicily — always Sicily — is the old country, a place of exile and origin, where the roots of this world were planted in blood generations ago. The Five Families maintain a peace, but it is a peace built on the understanding that Don Vito can destroy any of them. That understanding is about to be tested.