Page 174 of Marcello

Just like my own brothers Rolando and Gilberto.

Then there was Tom Hagen, played by Robert Duvall. Tom was both Don Corleone’s adopted son and consigliere, or counselor.

My father had a consigliere. His name was Avellino Costa.

What he counseled my father on, I had no idea – but I knew Papa called him Consigliere.

Then there was Luca Brasi, the hulking enforcer for the Corleone family.

Papa had a scary man who worked for him named Jino Aceto.

I had even heard some of the other men who worked for Papa jokingly call Jino ‘Luca Brasi.’

Until that moment, I hadn’t understood why.

When the realization finally hit, it felt like ice-cold water trickling through my body.

When the movie was over, I sat there in stunned silence.

Not just because of the devastating emotional toll of watching Michael Corleone turn to the dark side…

But because I thought, That’s us.

That’s my family.

I went to find my father. He was sitting in his library looking through some papers.

“Papa?” I asked, my voice trembling.

“Yes, my darling?” he asked absent-mindedly.

“…are you in the Cosa Nostra?”

He froze – then looked up at me angrily. “Who told you that?!”

“No one.”

“Then why did you ask?!”

“I just watched The Godfather.”

“Ah,” he said…

And his shoulders slumped as though a secret he’d been carrying for years had finally been lifted.

To his credit, Papa didn’t lie to me or try to sugarcoat it. He told me everything.

Our family was indeed part of the Cosa Nostra, the mafia organization that had started in Sicily hundreds of years ago.

The American branch – the one depicted in The Godfather – had actually emerged during the late 1800s and early 1900s as Italians immigrated in waves to the U.S. These days, the American mafia’s connection to ‘the Old Country’ was tenuous at best.

But that wasn’t the only time the Cosa Nostra spread beyond the shores of their birthplace.

In the 1980s, a number of powerful Sicilian families realized the government had finally gotten serious about breaking the spine of the Cosa Nostra.

They were right: dozens of trials in the 1990s put hundreds of gangsters in jail.

Those powerful families’ foresight led them to leave Sicily and branch out to the mainland. Rome, Venice, Florence, Milan… those cities now belonged to names I’d heard mentioned my entire life: