Genco PuraEdit

With the profits he was gaining, Corleone started an olive oil importation business, Genco Pura, with his friend Genco Abbandando. The company eventually becomes the biggest olive oil importer in the nation, thanks to Vito's subtle "reasoning" with store owners. While a excellent moneymaker in it's own right, in the later years he used it as a legal front for his growing organized crime syndicate, while amassing a fortune with its illegal operations, which started during Prohibition, when he used his olive oil trucks to smuggle alcohol in from Canada. Corleone soon started to protect small neighborhood speakeasies, learning early the value of political protection. In 1923, he returned to Sicily for the first time since leaving 24 years earlier. Corleone quietly located and killed the thugs who Don Ciccio had sent to kill him as a child during his exodus from Sicily. He and his partner, Lionele Tommasino then set up a meeting with the aging Don Ciccio under the pretense of gaining his blessing for the olive oil business, where he kills him by carving his stomach open—thus avenging his murdered father, mother and brother.

By the early 1930's, Vito Corleone had established the Corleone family along with old friends Peter Clemenza and Salvatore Tessio, who would become his Caporegimes. Genco Abbandando would become the first Consigliere of the family. By this time, everyone, even his closest friends, were referring to him respectfully as "Don Corleone" or "The Godfather". He soon intervened in a problem involving a dangerous thug named Luca Brasi, making the man his personal enforcer. During the Depression, when most people demeaned themselves to make mere pennies a day, Don Corleone offered good-paying, secure jobs to anyone willing to work for him. Anyone who came to him for help, Don Corleone helped with goodwill and encouraging words. He planned for the future by financing the education and careers of bright young neighborhood boys who would soon become lawyers, assistant DA's, even judges. Large numbers of grateful Italians asked his advice on who to vote for in office elections, giving him a great deal of political power. He even hired a lawyer to organize a system of police payoffs, and insisted on paying as many officers as possible, whether they were needed at the moment or not. When Prohibition ended, Don Corleone decided to offer a partnership with Salvatore Maranzano, the big shot gangleader who controlled all the gambling in Manhattan. Corleone offered a political umbrella which would help Maranzano expand his rackets into new areas, and Corleone would get a share of the profits. However, the short-sighted and short-tempered Maranzano, thinking that Corleone was trying to forcibly buy him out, declared war on the "upstart" Corleone, touching off the Olive Oil War.

When the war started, it seemed that Maranzano had the upper hand, with business contacts, and alliances with the Tattaglia family and Al Capone in Chicago. However, the Corleones were far better organized, had far greater intelligence contacts, had greater political power and police protection, and had deceived Maranzano into believing that Tessio's operation in Brooklyn was a separate gang. The War turned into a stalemate until Maranzano called on Al Capone to send his two best gunmen after Vito. Thanks to their contacts in the telegraph business the Corleones learned of this early on, and Don Corleone sent his enforcer Luca Brasi to intercept and eliminate the hitmen in a most horrifying fashion. Brasi and several men abducted the two hitmen, drove to a warehouse, tied them up, and Luca personally hacked one of the men to pieces with an axe, while the other swallowed his gag in terror and suffocated. Corleone sent a letter to Capone a few days later, the message being clear: you can either join me, or else stay out of my way. Not wanting to lose any more valuable men, Capone decided to remain neutral. This was a turning point in the War, Maranzano had severely underestimated just how powerful and crafty the Corleone family really was, and was soon losing soldiers who had lost faith in his ability to win. While Clemenza's regime hacked away at Maranzano's power structure (and in the process gaining loyalty of the unions who had been oppressed by Marazano's thugs), Corleone then sent in the held-back Tessio regime for the deathblow. By New Year's Eve 1933, the Corleones eliminated Maranzano and his empire, and established themselves as the most powerful of the families in New York.

While he oversaw a business founded on gambling, bootlegging, and murder, he was known as a kind, generous man who lived by a strict moral code of loyalty to friends and, above all, family. He tried to spread these values throughout the New York crime world; he disagreed with many of the vicious crimes carried out by gangs and so sought to control crime in New York by either consuming or eliminating rival gangs. This was known as the Pacification of New York, which left the area under the control of Five Families. He also started the Commission, in an effort to pacify America's underworld in preparation for WWII. He also disapproved of hard drugs, such as those peddled by his fellow Don, Phillip Tattaglia, who resented Vito for this. A straitlaced man concerning sexual matters, he also held himself above prostitution. Don Corleone was also said to be able to find multiple profits and opportunities in everything. An example of this occurred when his daughter Connie became engaged to a friend of her brother's, a hoodlum from Nevada named Carlo Rizzi. The Don sent several men on his payroll to Nevada to learn about Rizzi, and came back with information regarding legalized gambling there, which the Corleone family capitalized on in the years to come.

By this time, he was married with four children, and had several godchildren as well, including big-time singer and actor Johnny Fontane. While he loved all of them, he was most proud of Michael, an intelligent college graduate who's future the Don had "special plans" for. Unfortunately Michael (and everyone else) assumed these "plans" as involving the "family business", and often defied his father, enlisting in the military against his father's wishes and becoming a decorated World War II veteran. In actuality, Don Corleone had wished for a life away from the "family business" for his son, for him to gain power publicly and legitimately, like a governor or senator. It wasn't until after Michael had voluntarily took over as Don that his father explained this to him, exposing the grand irony: both had tried to keep him out of the Mafia, yet he still wound up following in his father's footsteps.

Дата добавления: 2015-11-16