Speaker 1: How would you feel if you went back to prison.
Speaker 2: I'll have to protect myself again, Senatent. I'd have to
Speaker 2: kill or.
Speaker 3: Be killed again. September nineteenth, nineteen sixty three, A dead
Speaker 3: broke writer is lying on his couch in suburban New York.
Speaker 3: He's glued to his television set, but he's not watching
Speaker 3: a mob movie. He's watching a Senate hearing.
Speaker 1: This is a special report from CBS News in Washington,
Speaker 1: the Congress and Cozanostra.
Speaker 3: The testimony is from Cozonostra insider Joseph Wallachi, who would
Speaker 3: become better known as the first man to rat on
Speaker 3: the mob on national television.
Speaker 1: The sworn testimony you just heard came from the lips
Speaker 1: of Joseph Vallachi, lips that supposedly were sealed thirty three
Speaker 1: years ago when he joined America's underworld crime syndicate, Cozonostra.
Speaker 3: The world he describes has a name, name that's new
Speaker 3: to most Americans, Mafia.
Speaker 2: Would it be fair to say that you went back
Speaker 2: to prison, that you'll be a dead man if they
Speaker 2: got up me. I wouldn't be in the five minute Senator.
Speaker 3: Meanwhile, the man watching his television set would say he
Speaker 3: had never met a real gangster, but he knows enough
Speaker 3: to see the story for what it is.
Speaker 2: As a senator put it before, what did I get
Speaker 2: out of it?
Speaker 3: Why'd you get out?
Speaker 2: But misery? Or you know, as you all understand, once
Speaker 2: you're in, you're in. You can't get out.
Speaker 3: The man on the couch sees a true American story,
Speaker 3: a web of family and brutality, loyalty and betrayal, fathers
Speaker 3: and sons, immigration, and the American dream. The man doesn't
Speaker 3: know it yet, but this inspiration will stay with him
Speaker 3: for years to come. The man's name Mario Puzo. I'm
Speaker 3: Mark Seal.
Speaker 4: And I'm Nathan King.
Speaker 3: And this is Leave the gun, Take the Canoli. In
Speaker 3: today's episode, we're taking a closer look at the real
Speaker 3: life mafia stories that influence Mario Puzo's.
Speaker 4: Book and diving into the life and career of the
Speaker 4: unlikely author who ascended from the depths of Hell's Kitchen
Speaker 4: to the glitz and glam of Hollywood.
Speaker 3: We'll also learn how Puzo's novel landed in the hands
Speaker 3: of Paramount executive Robert Evans when he needed him most.
Speaker 4: So let's get started.
Speaker 5: Did you do anything for the family at all in
Speaker 5: this time.
Speaker 6: Or did they just do things for you?
Speaker 2: Just go out kill for them?
Speaker 4: You'd go out what kill mark? The Vallacci hearings are infamous.
Speaker 4: Joseph Vallacci was a made man, a member of the
Speaker 4: Genovese crime family and longtime henchmen for mob boss Vito Genovese.
Speaker 3: Yes, and it was absolutely shocking at the time, especially
Speaker 3: since Joe Blacci knew exactly how the mob treated snitches.
Speaker 4: Well, he had some first hand experience. He was intimately
Speaker 4: familiar with the story of Alberto Aguici.
Speaker 3: And it's a particularly gruesome story. When I was researching
Speaker 3: for the book, it stood out as an incredible example
Speaker 3: of the brutality of the mafia.
Speaker 4: Aguici was a baker from Toronto. But Baker is sort
Speaker 4: of in quotes, isn't it.
Speaker 3: Baker is definitely in quotes. He was really a heroin
Speaker 3: smuggler and an associate of the Magadino crime family in Buffalo.
Speaker 3: And in May of nineteen sixty one, he was indicted
Speaker 3: along with nineteen others in one hundred and fifty million
Speaker 3: dollar heroin smuggling ring.
Speaker 4: We're talking about the notorious French Connection heroin smuggling ring.
Speaker 4: That started in the thirties and stretched from Indo, China
Speaker 4: all the way to France, then to Canada in the US.
Speaker 3: And one of those nineteen others was our mobman turned informant,
Speaker 3: Joseph Balacchi, and while in jail together, Billacchi listened as
Speaker 3: Aguiici absolutely railed against Magadino, who he had expected to
Speaker 3: raise money for his bail but instead was letting him
Speaker 3: rot in jail.
Speaker 4: It's generally not a good idea to talk badly about
Speaker 4: a crime boss as you're in prison.
Speaker 3: Not at all. Aguici ended up having to sell his
Speaker 3: house to make bail and was apparently threatening to flip
Speaker 3: on Maganino.
Speaker 4: But it didn't last long because in October of nineteen
Speaker 4: sixty one, Alberto left his wife and daughters in Toronto
Speaker 4: to meet Magadino. He never made it, though he ended
Speaker 4: up badly beaten, burned, really gruesomely disfigured in a cornfield.
Speaker 3: I wrote in the book that it was like encountering
Speaker 3: an animal or something the police couldn't even tell that
Speaker 3: it was human. It was in the middle of a
Speaker 3: circle that had been burned into the grass, like a
Speaker 3: demented sign from hell.
Speaker 4: And no one really knows who did it, but people
Speaker 4: suspect that Magadino had caught wind to the fact that
Speaker 4: Aguichi was railing against him and speaking poorly and taking
Speaker 4: his name in vain and had something done about it. Now,
Speaker 4: the rest of the story is incredibly complicated, and we
Speaker 4: don't have time to tell it here, but it's a
Speaker 4: tale of brotherhood and betrayal and threats on people's lives,
Speaker 4: and ultimately Joseph Vallacci ends up fearing for his life.
Speaker 1: It was at this point, apparently, when Vallachi decided to
Speaker 1: sing for protection and i FBI agent was assigned to
Speaker 1: him full time, and the Justice Department began filling in
Speaker 1: the blanks on its chart of Kzonostra. This is Vlachi's
Speaker 1: great value, says the department. He is the first member
Speaker 1: of Cozanostra publicly to confirm its existence.
Speaker 4: And this is how we get hours of televised senate
Speaker 4: testimony about the inner workings of the mafia.
Speaker 3: And it's the first time the word mafia was ever
Speaker 3: heard by most Americans.
Speaker 4: But Americans had some understanding of organized crime.
Speaker 3: Yes, in the nineteen fifties, there was something called the
Speaker 3: Cupaver hearings, which were televised in fourteen cities across America,
Speaker 3: and it was something else. It was a hit. It
Speaker 3: was like a primetime reality show that people were glued
Speaker 3: to their television sets to watch. It was a parade
Speaker 3: of what one publication called six hundred gangsters, pimps, bookies,
Speaker 3: and shady lawyers who testified about the activities of organized crime.
Speaker 4: Up until that point, this is something that had existed
Speaker 4: in the shadows, and suddenly it's in living rooms across America.
Speaker 4: You have these gangsters on screen talking about or in
Speaker 4: some cases not talking about their crimes. This was pretty
Speaker 4: electrifying stuff in its day.
Speaker 3: Yes, it sure was. Thirty million Americans tuned in. And
Speaker 3: remember this is still in the early days of TV.
Speaker 4: Was this the hearing where Frank Costello testified without showing
Speaker 4: his face?
Speaker 3: Yes, Frank Costello, the all powerful leader of the Luciano
Speaker 3: crime family, was shot only from the neck down, so
Speaker 3: you couldn't see his space and he wouldn't really say anything.
Speaker 3: But still, just to watch him in the hearings was
Speaker 3: a huge hit. The New York Times headlined in his
Speaker 3: article Costello TV's first headless star. Only his hands entertained audiences.
Speaker 2: You must have in your mind something you've done that
Speaker 2: you can speak off to your credit as an American citizen.
Speaker 4: If so, what are they.
Speaker 3: Paid by tax? This was like the Sopranos in real life.
Speaker 4: But nothing compared to the Ballacci hearings.
Speaker 3: Ten years later, Yes, ten years later, Joseph Bolacchi did
Speaker 3: what Costello would not. He told and showed everything.
Speaker 2: May I ask you this time, when did you become
Speaker 2: a member of this organization nineteen taty what is the
Speaker 2: name of it? Causing us?
Speaker 3: In Italian?
Speaker 2: Our thing and our family in English?
Speaker 4: And he said a lot in those thirty one hours
Speaker 4: of testimony.
Speaker 3: Yeah, he gives almost everything. He tells about what the
Speaker 3: initiation rights were, He tells the codes, He tells the hierarchy.
Speaker 2: Well, this is a secret organization. How do you get
Speaker 2: to know this member of the same family. He'll introduce
Speaker 2: him to you, for instance, as a friend of oz
Speaker 2: that means a member. Nah, happens to be with someone
Speaker 2: that isn't a friend of ours. He would just simply
Speaker 2: say met a friend of mine, which means nothing. That's
Speaker 2: the code between us.
Speaker 3: The mob put out a hit on him, offering one
Speaker 3: hundred grand to anyone who could take him out, but
Speaker 3: it was too late. He had already spilled everything on
Speaker 3: national television and he even used the word godfather.
Speaker 4: And on the other side of the television screen, Mario
Speaker 4: Puzzo was so all of this in like a sponge.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's right. I mean, the testimony was authentic, it
Speaker 3: was real. But Mario Puzo was a writer, an author,
Speaker 3: who a great researcher. So he's sitting at home in
Speaker 3: the suburbs of New York, lying on his couch, watching
Speaker 3: these hearings like everybody else, but he did what nobody
Speaker 3: else did. He was able to take these hearings and
Speaker 3: fictionalize them and create a family that was even more romantic,
Speaker 3: more dangerous, more influential than anything he's seen on television.
Speaker 3: He created the Corleone family.
Speaker 4: You've described Puso as a white whale in your reporting
Speaker 4: of the story because you never actually got to speak
Speaker 4: to him. But how did you get to the heart
Speaker 4: of his story and his background.
Speaker 3: To my eternal regret, Mario Puzo had passed away by
Speaker 3: the time I started working on the magazine article and
Speaker 3: of course later the book, But he would tell his
Speaker 3: incredible story himself in numerous newspapers and magazine articles. Later
Speaker 3: in interviews, and I was able to speak to his
Speaker 3: eldest daughter, Dorothy Puso, who told me in an email
Speaker 3: that she thought most likely her father had tossed all
Speaker 3: of the research, all of the writing that he had
Speaker 3: done on the movie and the book The Godfather. She said,
Speaker 3: you know, he was a poor, aspiring writer who would
Speaker 3: know to keep that stup. But to my astonishment and
Speaker 3: amazement and good fortune, those things weren't tossed. They were saved,
Speaker 3: and they're now on display at Dartmouth University in a library. There.
Speaker 3: You can see his writing on the back of folders
Speaker 3: which he liked to use with the red sharpie. You
Speaker 3: can see his typewriter. You can read early drafts of
Speaker 3: both the novel and the screenplay of The Godfather. And
Speaker 3: then later in my research for the book, I was
Speaker 3: able to speak with his son, Anthony Puso, who was
Speaker 3: invaluable in telling me about his illustrious father, the frog
Speaker 3: who became a prints of Hollywood and the true hero
Speaker 3: of the Godfather.
Speaker 4: Where did Puso come from? Because in a lot of ways,
Speaker 4: he's the most unlikely character of all in this story.
Speaker 3: Yes, his life was like an unlikely fairy tale, as
Speaker 3: he wrote in various accounts, including his nineteen seventy two
Speaker 3: memoir The Godfather Papers, and other confessions, Mario was born
Speaker 3: into one of the worst sections of New York, whose
Speaker 3: very name evokes this depravity, Hell's Kitchen. And he was
Speaker 3: born into a family of immigrants, many of them illiterate,
Speaker 3: including his mother, who he said could not even read
Speaker 3: or sign her name, but who employed language like a weapon.
Speaker 3: Many of the terms that Mario used in The Godfather,
Speaker 3: he said, were straight out of his mama's mouth.
Speaker 2: It's a man who doesn't spend time with his family
Speaker 2: can never be a real man.
Speaker 3: He grew up in a large family in a tenement flat,
Speaker 3: and Pusa claimed he never met an honest to god gangster,
Speaker 3: even though they were all around him.
Speaker 4: Was his mother worried that he would fall prey to
Speaker 4: the back element in the neighborhood.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, his mother was very protective of Mario, but she
Speaker 3: wasn't worried about guns so much as girls. Mario claimed
Speaker 3: he never had that many dates.
Speaker 4: Though, and he was one of thirteen kids.
Speaker 3: Yes, and from the beginning he was different from the rest.
Speaker 3: He loved gambling. He loved to pitch pennies and play cards,
Speaker 3: and he liked to read, and early on he would
Speaker 3: read Dostoyevski and go to the library.
Speaker 4: And for a long time he was sort of a
Speaker 4: hopeless character. Fame and fortune eluded him, right.
Speaker 3: Mark, Yeah, for a long long time. He grew up.
Speaker 3: He was very impoverished. They were so poor that Mario
Speaker 3: said that once his teacher asked all the students to
Speaker 3: bring a can of food for the poor, and Mario
Speaker 3: was saying, they didn't know we were the poor. And
Speaker 3: he went out anyway with the other kids in his
Speaker 3: neighborhood and they went out and stole cans of food
Speaker 3: to be able to bring it to school.
Speaker 4: What did his mom think about his professionist writer.
Speaker 3: Well, her greatest aspiration for Mario was that he would
Speaker 3: become a railroad clerk and get a steady salary. He
Speaker 3: liked to say, every family has a chooch, the Italian
Speaker 3: word for donkey, and he goes in my family, the
Speaker 3: chooch was me. College, he would later write, wasn't an option.
Speaker 3: There were two high schools in his neighborhood, and his
Speaker 3: mom and sister thought he should go to the one
Speaker 3: that didn't prepare you for college. He asked, why didn't
Speaker 3: you urge me to attend college, and his sister says,
Speaker 3: because you were stupid.
Speaker 4: And he didn't become a writer right away, did he?
Speaker 3: No, Poor Mario, he suffered so much before finding his
Speaker 3: future as a writer. Things were so grim for Mario
Speaker 3: Puzo that when World War II broke out, he was
Speaker 3: excited to get away from home. So he joined the military.
Speaker 3: You know, it was a dream to him. He was
Speaker 3: assigned to the fourth Armored Division, Private Puso. He's deployed
Speaker 3: to Europe. He drove a jeep, He had affairs, He
Speaker 3: found a wife, a German woman who he fell in
Speaker 3: love with and brought back to America. And best of all,
Speaker 3: he found material for his first novel.
Speaker 4: That sounds like World War Two was the best thing
Speaker 4: that ever happened to him.
Speaker 3: Well, not immediately. Typical to Mario is the suffering. He
Speaker 3: had dreams of being a writer, but he didn't know
Speaker 3: where to start. So he went to the City College
Speaker 3: of New York on the GI Bill and he studied
Speaker 3: literature and creative writing. And then he did what would
Speaker 3: become his trademark. He struggled. His weight went up, his
Speaker 3: bank account went down. He was broke all the time,
Speaker 3: he was gambling. He was a drift. He got a
Speaker 3: job as a clerk at the Manhattan Armory, but he
Speaker 3: never had enough money to quit his day job to
Speaker 3: become a writer. He wanted to write high art. He
Speaker 3: wanted to be an artistic writer. He wanted to be
Speaker 3: like Dostoyevsky or other writers he admired. But it was
Speaker 3: all just a struggle for him. Some of his diaries
Speaker 3: still exist, and it's just full of torment and loss
Speaker 3: and the theme that money is just ruining everything.
Speaker 4: And does he sit down and write his war novel.
Speaker 3: Yes. All along he's writing his first novel, The Dark Arena,
Speaker 3: which gets published by Random House in nineteen fifty four,
Speaker 3: and he thinks, wow, this is it. You know, I'm
Speaker 3: a published author. But the reviews were mixed. It didn't
Speaker 3: do for him what he expected. And Mario got an
Speaker 3: advance of thirty five hundred dollars which was quickly gone.
Speaker 3: His weight was way up, his hopes were way down.
Speaker 3: And then on Christmas Eve, something incredible happened. He was
Speaker 3: at home and he suffered a severe gallbladder attack. He
Speaker 3: called a taxi, which drove him to New York City
Speaker 3: in excruciating pain. He arrived at the VA Hospital and
Speaker 3: just then the attack worsen. He opened the door of
Speaker 3: the taxi and he fell out, and he landed in
Speaker 3: a gutter. And he wrote about it later in Time magazine.
Speaker 3: Here I am a published author, and I'm lying in
Speaker 3: a gutter, dying like a dog. At that moment, I decided,
Speaker 3: I'm going to become rich and famous.
Speaker 4: Wow. So he had really hit rock bottom. How long
Speaker 4: did it take for him to pull himself up by
Speaker 4: his bootstraps?
Speaker 3: Well, a long time, because just because you say you
Speaker 3: want something to happen doesn't mean it will. By nineteen sixty,
Speaker 3: Mario's family had grown to five kids and his job
Speaker 3: was in danger because the FBI was investigating his unit
Speaker 3: for helping young soldiers obade the draft. Mario was never charged,
Speaker 3: but he ended up quitting his job and pursuing the
Speaker 3: most unusual path for a writer who aspired to high art.
Speaker 4: He decided to become a pulp fiction writer.
Speaker 3: Exactly. It was a company called Magazine Management, and if
Speaker 3: there was any man who was destined to write pulp fiction,
Speaker 3: it was Mario Puzo. I was able to speak with
Speaker 3: one of his colleagues, John Bowers, and he said Mario
Speaker 3: was just able to use his research to invent whole worlds.
Speaker 5: But Mario had definite energy at writing. He just could
Speaker 5: write nobody's business.
Speaker 3: So he walked into pulp fiction offices of magazine management.
Speaker 3: It's a smoke field office. It's full of men and women,
Speaker 3: city over, clattering typewriters pumping out copy for like this
Speaker 3: never ending flood of trash magazines with names like Mail
Speaker 3: and Stag and for men only. They were called magazines,
Speaker 3: but they were really sort of rags. And soon Mario
Speaker 3: Puza was pumping out salacious stories of brave gis, of
Speaker 3: damsels in distress.
Speaker 4: He even wrote a story that took place in Hawaii
Speaker 4: where mobsters busted in a gambling parlor, right exactly.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that was just one of the many stories. But
Speaker 3: I think that was the first of all the ones
Speaker 3: that I saw that really tackled some instance of the mafia.
Speaker 4: And of course most of it was just dreamed up,
Speaker 4: not most of it, All of it was dreamed up.
Speaker 3: I mean, he said once that he would take a
Speaker 3: real life battle where seven thousand people got killed and
Speaker 3: turn it into a bloody battle where one hundred thousand died.
Speaker 3: I wish you could.
Speaker 5: Read some of those, imagine the stories. It was larger
Speaker 5: than life. It didn't have to depend upon fact checking
Speaker 5: at all.
Speaker 3: He'd amp up the action no matter what, and that
Speaker 3: became his trademark. He became one of the top pulp
Speaker 3: fiction writers of all time. Before you know, he was
Speaker 3: aspiring to high art, he was spending these time on
Speaker 3: these novels that didn't make him any money. He had
Speaker 3: enormous expenses, not only the bookies that he owed money to,
Speaker 3: but also you know, he had a family of five kids.
Speaker 3: He had to make a living. He had to bring
Speaker 3: money home, and he owed money to the irs. He
Speaker 3: owed money to his family, he owed money to the bookkeepers,
Speaker 3: and he kept gambling, he kept eating, he kept living
Speaker 3: this life that was just way beyond his means.
Speaker 4: And as much as he aspired to high art, it
Speaker 4: seems like he was almost destined to write pulp fiction.
Speaker 4: I mean, after eight years doing it, he was pretty
Speaker 4: much the most successful of any of them.
Speaker 3: Well, yeah, but he was not making a huge amount
Speaker 3: of money.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I believe we got something like one hundred and
Speaker 5: fifty dollars something like that for the week.
Speaker 3: So he went back to his publisher and said, you know,
Speaker 3: I'm ready for my third book, my third novel, and
Speaker 3: his publisher said, forget about it, Mario. They weren't ready
Speaker 3: to assign him a third book. And one of the
Speaker 3: editors said, well, you know, if the Fortunate Pilgrim had
Speaker 3: a little bit more of that mafia stuff in it,
Speaker 3: maybe it would sell. And those words rang and Mario
Speaker 3: Puzo's head a little bit more of that mafia stuff.
Speaker 4: And that's when it all clicked for him. He remembered
Speaker 4: how he had been engrossed by the Volacci hearings.
Speaker 3: It's like a scene out of a movie. I mean,
Speaker 3: here's this overweight, overwrought in debt writer. And he pays
Speaker 3: ten bucks for the ten volume transcripts of the Kufaver hearings,
Speaker 3: and he gets access to his friend Peter Mass's book
Speaker 3: on the Bolacchi hearings, and he gets a lot of
Speaker 3: other research, and he sits down in his basement and
Speaker 3: he cranks out a ten page outline and he takes
Speaker 3: it to his agent, the legendary Candido Dinadio, and she
Speaker 3: sends it out to various publishers, and much to Mario's surprise,
Speaker 3: one of them gives him five thousand dollars. And what
Speaker 3: does he do? Of course, he spends the money. He
Speaker 3: doesn't work on the book. God, seriously, Yes, he gambles.
Speaker 3: He spends some money on his family, obviously, and soon
Speaker 3: the money is all gone.
Speaker 4: But the important thing is that he has a fire
Speaker 4: lit under him and he has to deliver the book.
Speaker 3: Not so fascinate than there's one place a struggling writer
Speaker 3: can turn to for some fast cash.
Speaker 4: This must be when he goes to Hollywood. Allegedly, Evan says,
Speaker 4: Puzzo shows up at the gates of Paramount thirty five
Speaker 4: pages under his arm, looking broke, and sells the option
Speaker 4: of Paramount for twelve five.
Speaker 3: And Mario claims he sold the option through his agent
Speaker 3: and the story editor at Paramount, and then he never
Speaker 3: even went to California.
Speaker 4: Well, regardless of what happened, he sold the option to Paramount.
Speaker 3: For big money for Mario too, twelve five hundred.
Speaker 4: So now he writes the book.
Speaker 3: Yes, he goes home. He walks down the stairs to
Speaker 3: his basement, and there between the pool table and the
Speaker 3: constant racket of his five kids. A mafia family rises
Speaker 3: up from his typewriter, and what a family it is.
Speaker 3: He gets the name from a town in Sicily, one
Speaker 3: of the most mafia invested towns in the country, Corleone.
Speaker 3: There's Don Vito Corleone, the godfather. There's the eldest son
Speaker 3: and heir apparent, Santino, known as Sonny. There's the middle son,
Speaker 3: the poorest, suffering, subservient, Fredo. And there's the youngest, the future,
Speaker 3: the college boy who chose to enlist in the military
Speaker 3: instead of the mafia. Michael Mario, of course, claimed he
Speaker 3: had never met an honest to goodness gangster, but he
Speaker 3: looked for inspiration wherever he could. One story I just
Speaker 3: loved from when he was writing the book was that
Speaker 3: one night in nineteen sixty six, the author Gaytalise and
Speaker 3: his wife Nan invited Mario to dinner at the home
Speaker 3: of Talisea's aunt, Susan Peleggi. And Susan Pelegi, of course,
Speaker 3: is the mother of the also famous writer Nick Poleggi,
Speaker 3: who had gone to write the novel Wise.
Speaker 4: Guy, which was the foundation for Goodfellas.
Speaker 3: Exactly, and Gaytalse had written the organized crime classic Honor
Speaker 3: Thy Father, and so here's a newcomer to the realm,
Speaker 3: Mario Puzzo, the author of the Fourthcoming Godfather the same table.
Speaker 3: So he takes one look at Nantelice, who'd grown up
Speaker 3: on the you know, up pretty side, who was from
Speaker 3: a different world, very genteel educated, and he immediately found
Speaker 3: a model for the wife of Michael Corleone.
Speaker 5: Kay.
Speaker 4: So he was really pulling from all around him for inspiration.
Speaker 3: That was the brilliance of Mario Puzo that he would
Speaker 3: find inspiration in unlikely places. So another thing I was
Speaker 3: able to discover is that Mario, being Mario and loving
Speaker 3: Las Vegas more than any other place on Earth, probably
Speaker 3: would go to Las Vegas regularly and gamble at, among
Speaker 3: other places, the Sands Hotel. And I was able to
Speaker 3: interview ed Walters, who worked as a pit boss at
Speaker 3: the Sands. Tell me when you first saw Mario Puzzoo.
Speaker 5: Came to Vegas. He has to play and he has
Speaker 5: Vegas ARONI.
Speaker 3: He was a relint being he played a Roulin and
Speaker 3: he said that Mario would come in and gamble and
Speaker 3: the same time asked questions for his forthcoming book about the.
Speaker 6: Mob he was a little pudgy guy, and I met him.
Speaker 6: So he was talking to this dealer on the roulette wheels,
Speaker 6: and I was on the wheels at that time, and
Speaker 6: I understanding, I'd listen to I'd answer question with all
Speaker 6: he'd asked questions about.
Speaker 5: Sinatra and a mob and honey and because of me.
Speaker 6: Then I opened up about because he had things wrong,
Speaker 6: and I said, oh no, you got.
Speaker 5: To mix up. The mob and the mafia are not
Speaker 5: the same thing.
Speaker 6: He got the mafia all Italians, the old blood guys
Speaker 6: from a certain place of thing or the momb a difference,
Speaker 6: and then I trained them.
Speaker 5: They outfit all his terms.
Speaker 3: And of course Ed Walters, who knew a bit about
Speaker 3: the mob because he had come from New York City
Speaker 3: where he had known a lot of people that were,
Speaker 3: let's say, somehow connected, told Mario a bit, you know,
Speaker 3: to keep him gambling there. And Mario would ask questions
Speaker 3: about who who and what was what? And as long
Speaker 3: as he kept gambling, Ed Walters kept talking.
Speaker 5: Was he taking notes and everything while you were telling
Speaker 5: him this? No, he didn't have first, but then he
Speaker 5: started to.
Speaker 3: And pretty soon Mario had an insight into the Vegas
Speaker 3: aspect of the mob, which figured into the Godfather quite
Speaker 3: a bit.
Speaker 6: He'd say, so, Eddie, tell me how keep this Saunder
Speaker 6: in the mob? And I said, haul it all it hold,
Speaker 6: I said, Sanra ain't in the bob.
Speaker 5: He said, guys told me in the mom I said,
Speaker 5: out of shit, I SAIDs ran in the mob. He
Speaker 5: worked for us, he said, fucking entertainer. And he thought, wow,
Speaker 5: that's interesting. So Mario would be playing while he's talking
Speaker 5: to him. Yeah, yeah, all the time. Oh, he couldn't
Speaker 5: never just sit there and take notes.
Speaker 6: No, why they were Oh we weret a fucking guy
Speaker 6: sitting in a n because he don't take a notes?
Speaker 5: So you let him do it because he was playing, Yes,
Speaker 5: because he's playing. Oh so that was good for you,
Speaker 5: they're yeah, of course I told some people I was
Speaker 5: writing a book from shit on the fine the guy
Speaker 5: that was sitting there takeing. What should we come down to?
Speaker 5: What do you write a book? Ye? Get the front?
Speaker 4: Are So do you think Mario knew he had to
Speaker 4: do something different here? I mean you mentioned his daughter
Speaker 4: Dorothy saying that he couldn't have known this book would
Speaker 4: be a success.
Speaker 3: No, of course, he didn't think it was going to
Speaker 3: be a great success. While he was writing, he was
Speaker 3: writing as he always did, he liked to say, for
Speaker 3: a paycheck. But at the same time he had decided
Speaker 3: to give up on high art and those aspirations to
Speaker 3: be a Doustoyevski or something like that, you know, to
Speaker 3: be a fine art writer. He was writing a sensational
Speaker 3: story about a sensational family in a sensational world, and
Speaker 3: he had no aspirations of writing high art. He wanted
Speaker 3: to turn this book into bucks. He wanted to make
Speaker 3: money on the god bother.
Speaker 4: Funnily enough, with his back against the wall, he ends
Speaker 4: up turning out the most dust of skiesque of all
Speaker 4: of his novels.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I know it. It became something of a masterpiece.
Speaker 3: I mean, I wouldn't say it was, you know, incredible literature,
Speaker 3: but at the same time it was a page turner,
Speaker 3: a pot boiler. It had all the attributes of Valley
Speaker 3: of the Dolls or something like that. But said in
Speaker 3: the world of organized crime, I don't think he expected
Speaker 3: it to do what it did. Though still I think
Speaker 3: he thought he was going to, you know, write a
Speaker 3: book for money, get his five thousand dollars advance and
Speaker 3: maybe some royalties, pay off some debts, and then get
Speaker 3: onto the next project. Instead, it took the world by storm.
Speaker 4: Well, and when he was down in that basement and
Speaker 4: the kids were screaming, he would shout, quiet, don't you
Speaker 4: know I'm writing a bestseller here?
Speaker 3: Yeah? But I think that was a joke. You know,
Speaker 3: the kids would laugh, he would laugh. I think he
Speaker 3: had no idea that he was writing a bestseller, And
Speaker 3: I don't think he ever dreamed The Godfather would become
Speaker 3: a national bestseller and a model for possibly the greatest
Speaker 3: movie of all time.
Speaker 4: When he does eventually finish the book, what happens?
Speaker 3: So he leaves the pages with his agent, Candido di Nadio,
Speaker 3: and in true Mario Puzo's fashion, he takes his money,
Speaker 3: He takes his family, and he flies off to Europe
Speaker 3: for a big vacation with lots of food and gambling.
Speaker 4: But isn't he still broke?
Speaker 3: He's broken than he ever has been. He doesn't have
Speaker 3: the money to go to Europe. He finances the trip
Speaker 3: by getting cash advances on his credit card. He and
Speaker 3: his family have a great time, but when he returns
Speaker 3: home he's eight grand in debt. Can you imagine eight
Speaker 3: grand back then is a fortune. He goes straight to
Speaker 3: his agent's office and hopes that she can, as he
Speaker 3: would later write, pull a slick magazine assignment out of
Speaker 3: her sleeve and bail him out. Instead, she informs him
Speaker 3: that Putnam, his publisher, has offered money for the paperback
Speaker 3: rights to the Godfather. And Mario goes how much? And
Speaker 3: she goes three hundred and seventy five thousand dollars. Wow.
Speaker 4: Even now, that's a really good offer. So does he
Speaker 4: take it?
Speaker 3: Well, he doesn't believe it. He says, this must be
Speaker 3: some kind of Madison Avenue. Come on. He thinks they're joking.
Speaker 3: After all, the biggest advance up to that point for
Speaker 3: paperback rights had been four hundred thousand. So Candida Denaudio,
Speaker 3: his agent, picks up the bone, calls his editor at Putlam,
Speaker 3: Bill targ and the editor says the amount is not correct.
Speaker 3: The offer had already gone up to four hundred thousand.
Speaker 4: Wow.
Speaker 3: And when the dust had settled and the deal was done,
Speaker 3: Mario Puzo had sold the paperback rights to the Godfather
Speaker 3: for four hundred and ten thousand dollars, setting a new record.
Speaker 4: Does he get that all? At once, of course.
Speaker 3: Coruse not. They give him one hundred thousand dollars and
Speaker 3: he takes it to the bank where he said the
Speaker 3: teller had always, you know, looked at him in a
Speaker 3: skance when he needed money or you know, cash his
Speaker 3: little checks, and he showed him one hundred thousand dollars
Speaker 3: just to watch him grovel. He said. He quit his
Speaker 3: job at magazine management, and he went home and promptly
Speaker 3: spent the one hundred thousand. And he was back at
Speaker 3: his publishers a few months later saying, could you give
Speaker 3: me another hundred And they said, Mario, we just gave
Speaker 3: you a hundred thousand, and he said, one hundred grand
Speaker 3: doesn't last forever.
Speaker 4: Well, broke or not. The Godfather was published on March tenth,
Speaker 4: nineteen sixty nine, and it shot to the top of
Speaker 4: the best seller list.
Speaker 3: Absolutely, it was an instant success.
Speaker 4: But Puzo is sort of the most critical about the
Speaker 4: lack of artistic merit and The Godfather it's not as
Speaker 4: good as the preceding two novels. He said, I wrote
Speaker 4: it to make money.
Speaker 3: Yeah, Puso said, if he knew it was going to
Speaker 3: be such a hit, he would have written a lot better,
Speaker 3: But The Godfather was a sensation. The reviews were ecstatic.
Speaker 3: Even the New York Times gave it a rave pozo.
Speaker 3: All of a sudden, this nobody writer begins living very large.
Speaker 3: He's a superstar on his way to becoming one of
Speaker 3: the best selling writers in the world. He's on the
Speaker 3: Today Show, he's being courted in restaurants. All of a sudden,
Speaker 3: Champagne would appear at his table from a certain interested
Speaker 3: party across the room, which were made men who felt
Speaker 3: sure that he would have some kind of insight information,
Speaker 3: or maybe he was a man himself. He became a superstar.
Speaker 3: The book spent sixty seven weeks on the bestseller list.
Speaker 4: Miraculously, his vow in the gutter to become rich and
Speaker 4: famous had suddenly become true.
Speaker 3: And in Hollywood too. All of a sudden, Bob Evans
Speaker 3: remembered the dead broke writer who appeared in his office
Speaker 3: with those thirty five pages under his arm.
Speaker 6: And the book came out and it became the biggest
Speaker 6: book of the day.
Speaker 3: The only problem the distribution department at Paramount didn't want
Speaker 3: to make the movie.
Speaker 2: Nobody wanted to make it. As a matter of fact,
Speaker 2: Paramount refused to make it for a while.
Speaker 5: They said, mafia films don't sell.
Speaker 3: We did the cover two years ago failed, so you're
Speaker 3: going to make this. Apparently, the studio told Evans that
Speaker 3: the only way it could be made was if he
Speaker 3: could do it for under two million dollars. So Evans
Speaker 3: turned to a producer at Paramount who is known for
Speaker 3: getting stuff made on the cheap. The soon to be
Speaker 3: legendary Already, I get a call worker. Do I want
Speaker 3: to produce The Guard Father? I got of the Joe? Yeah,
Speaker 3: of course, that was my favorite book. I never read it.
Speaker 3: He'd went happy in New York, could be Jolie Budor.
Speaker 3: So I go to New York. I read the book
Speaker 3: on the Plane that Fell a Low, Leave the Gun,
Speaker 3: Take the Canoli. As a production of Airmail and iHeartMedia.
Speaker 4: The podcast is based on the book of the same name,
Speaker 4: written by our very own Mark Seal.
Speaker 3: Our producer is Tina Mullen.
Speaker 4: Research assistance by Jack Sullivan.
Speaker 3: Jonathan Dressler was our development producer.
Speaker 4: Our music supervisor is Randall Poster. Our executive producers are
Speaker 4: Meet Nathan King, Mark Sieal, Doan Fagan, and Graydon Carter.
Speaker 3: Special thanks to Bridget Arseno and everyone at CDM Studios.
Speaker 4: A comprehensive list of sources and acknowledgments can be found
Speaker 4: in Mark Seal's book Leave the Gun, Take the Canoli,
Speaker 4: published by Gallery Books. An imprint of Simon and Schuster