Stranger Than Pulp Fiction

How would you feel if you went back to prison.

I'll have to protect myself again, Senatent. I'd have to kill or.

Be killed again. September nineteenth, nineteen sixty three, A dead broke writer is lying on his couch in suburban New York. He's glued to his television set, but he's not watching a mob movie. He's watching a Senate hearing.

This is a special report from CBS News in Washington, the Congress and Cozanostra.

The testimony is from Cozonostra insider Joseph Wallachi, who would become better known as the first man to rat on the mob on national television.

The sworn testimony you just heard came from the lips of Joseph Vallachi, lips that supposedly were sealed thirty three years ago when he joined America's underworld crime syndicate, Cozonostra.

The world he describes has a name, name that's new to most Americans, Mafia.

Would it be fair to say that you went back to prison, that you'll be a dead man if they got up me. I wouldn't be in the five minute Senator.

Meanwhile, the man watching his television set would say he had never met a real gangster, but he knows enough to see the story for what it is.

As a senator put it before, what did I get out of it?

Why'd you get out?

But misery? Or you know, as you all understand, once you're in, you're in. You can't get out.

The man on the couch sees a true American story, a web of family and brutality, loyalty and betrayal, fathers and sons, immigration, and the American dream. The man doesn't know it yet, but this inspiration will stay with him for years to come. The man's name Mario Puzo. I'm Mark Seal.

And I'm Nathan King.

And this is Leave the gun, Take the Canoli. In today's episode, we're taking a closer look at the real life mafia stories that influence Mario Puzo's.

Book and diving into the life and career of the unlikely author who ascended from the depths of Hell's Kitchen to the glitz and glam of Hollywood.

We'll also learn how Puzo's novel landed in the hands of Paramount executive Robert Evans when he needed him most.

So let's get started.

Did you do anything for the family at all in this time.

Or did they just do things for you?

Just go out kill for them?

You'd go out what kill mark? The Vallacci hearings are infamous. Joseph Vallacci was a made man, a member of the Genovese crime family and longtime henchmen for mob boss Vito Genovese.

Yes, and it was absolutely shocking at the time, especially since Joe Blacci knew exactly how the mob treated snitches.

Well, he had some first hand experience. He was intimately familiar with the story of Alberto Aguici.

And it's a particularly gruesome story. When I was researching for the book, it stood out as an incredible example of the brutality of the mafia.

Aguici was a baker from Toronto. But Baker is sort of in quotes, isn't it.

Baker is definitely in quotes. He was really a heroin smuggler and an associate of the Magadino crime family in Buffalo. And in May of nineteen sixty one, he was indicted along with nineteen others in one hundred and fifty million dollar heroin smuggling ring.

We're talking about the notorious French Connection heroin smuggling ring. That started in the thirties and stretched from Indo, China all the way to France, then to Canada in the US.

And one of those nineteen others was our mobman turned informant, Joseph Balacchi, and while in jail together, Billacchi listened as Aguiici absolutely railed against Magadino, who he had expected to raise money for his bail but instead was letting him rot in jail.

It's generally not a good idea to talk badly about a crime boss as you're in prison.

Not at all. Aguici ended up having to sell his house to make bail and was apparently threatening to flip on Maganino.

But it didn't last long because in October of nineteen sixty one, Alberto left his wife and daughters in Toronto to meet Magadino. He never made it, though he ended up badly beaten, burned, really gruesomely disfigured in a cornfield.

I wrote in the book that it was like encountering an animal or something the police couldn't even tell that it was human. It was in the middle of a circle that had been burned into the grass, like a demented sign from hell.

And no one really knows who did it, but people suspect that Magadino had caught wind to the fact that Aguichi was railing against him and speaking poorly and taking his name in vain and had something done about it. Now, the rest of the story is incredibly complicated, and we don't have time to tell it here, but it's a tale of brotherhood and betrayal and threats on people's lives, and ultimately Joseph Vallacci ends up fearing for his life.

It was at this point, apparently, when Vallachi decided to sing for protection and i FBI agent was assigned to him full time, and the Justice Department began filling in the blanks on its chart of Kzonostra. This is Vlachi's great value, says the department. He is the first member of Cozanostra publicly to confirm its existence.

And this is how we get hours of televised senate testimony about the inner workings of the mafia.

And it's the first time the word mafia was ever heard by most Americans.

But Americans had some understanding of organized crime.

Yes, in the nineteen fifties, there was something called the Cupaver hearings, which were televised in fourteen cities across America, and it was something else. It was a hit. It was like a primetime reality show that people were glued to their television sets to watch. It was a parade of what one publication called six hundred gangsters, pimps, bookies, and shady lawyers who testified about the activities of organized crime.

Up until that point, this is something that had existed in the shadows, and suddenly it's in living rooms across America. You have these gangsters on screen talking about or in some cases not talking about their crimes. This was pretty electrifying stuff in its day.

Yes, it sure was. Thirty million Americans tuned in. And remember this is still in the early days of TV.

Was this the hearing where Frank Costello testified without showing his face?

Yes, Frank Costello, the all powerful leader of the Luciano crime family, was shot only from the neck down, so you couldn't see his space and he wouldn't really say anything. But still, just to watch him in the hearings was a huge hit. The New York Times headlined in his article Costello TV's first headless star. Only his hands entertained audiences.

You must have in your mind something you've done that you can speak off to your credit as an American citizen.

If so, what are they.

Paid by tax? This was like the Sopranos in real life.

But nothing compared to the Ballacci hearings.

Ten years later, Yes, ten years later, Joseph Bolacchi did what Costello would not. He told and showed everything.

May I ask you this time, when did you become a member of this organization nineteen taty what is the name of it? Causing us?

In Italian?

Our thing and our family in English?

And he said a lot in those thirty one hours of testimony.

Yeah, he gives almost everything. He tells about what the initiation rights were, He tells the codes, He tells the hierarchy.

Well, this is a secret organization. How do you get to know this member of the same family. He'll introduce him to you, for instance, as a friend of oz that means a member. Nah, happens to be with someone that isn't a friend of ours. He would just simply say met a friend of mine, which means nothing. That's the code between us.

The mob put out a hit on him, offering one hundred grand to anyone who could take him out, but it was too late. He had already spilled everything on national television and he even used the word godfather.

And on the other side of the television screen, Mario Puzzo was so all of this in like a sponge.

Yeah, that's right. I mean, the testimony was authentic, it was real. But Mario Puzo was a writer, an author, who a great researcher. So he's sitting at home in the suburbs of New York, lying on his couch, watching these hearings like everybody else, but he did what nobody else did. He was able to take these hearings and fictionalize them and create a family that was even more romantic, more dangerous, more influential than anything he's seen on television. He created the Corleone family.

You've described Puso as a white whale in your reporting of the story because you never actually got to speak to him. But how did you get to the heart of his story and his background.

To my eternal regret, Mario Puzo had passed away by the time I started working on the magazine article and of course later the book, But he would tell his incredible story himself in numerous newspapers and magazine articles. Later in interviews, and I was able to speak to his eldest daughter, Dorothy Puso, who told me in an email that she thought most likely her father had tossed all of the research, all of the writing that he had

Where did Puso come from? Because in a lot of ways, he's the most unlikely character of all in this story.

Yes, his life was like an unlikely fairy tale, as he wrote in various accounts, including his nineteen seventy two memoir The Godfather Papers, and other confessions, Mario was born into one of the worst sections of New York, whose very name evokes this depravity, Hell's Kitchen. And he was born into a family of immigrants, many of them illiterate, including his mother, who he said could not even read or sign her name, but who employed language like a weapon.

It's a man who doesn't spend time with his family can never be a real man.

He grew up in a large family in a tenement flat, and Pusa claimed he never met an honest to god gangster, even though they were all around him.

Was his mother worried that he would fall prey to the back element in the neighborhood.

Absolutely, his mother was very protective of Mario, but she wasn't worried about guns so much as girls. Mario claimed he never had that many dates.

Though, and he was one of thirteen kids.

Yes, and from the beginning he was different from the rest. He loved gambling. He loved to pitch pennies and play cards, and he liked to read, and early on he would read Dostoyevski and go to the library.

And for a long time he was sort of a hopeless character. Fame and fortune eluded him, right.

Mark, Yeah, for a long long time. He grew up. He was very impoverished. They were so poor that Mario said that once his teacher asked all the students to bring a can of food for the poor, and Mario was saying, they didn't know we were the poor. And he went out anyway with the other kids in his neighborhood and they went out and stole cans of food to be able to bring it to school.

What did his mom think about his professionist writer.

Well, her greatest aspiration for Mario was that he would become a railroad clerk and get a steady salary. He liked to say, every family has a chooch, the Italian word for donkey, and he goes in my family, the chooch was me. College, he would later write, wasn't an option. There were two high schools in his neighborhood, and his mom and sister thought he should go to the one

And he didn't become a writer right away, did he?

No, Poor Mario, he suffered so much before finding his future as a writer. Things were so grim for Mario Puzo that when World War II broke out, he was excited to get away from home. So he joined the military. You know, it was a dream to him. He was assigned to the fourth Armored Division, Private Puso. He's deployed to Europe. He drove a jeep, He had affairs, He found a wife, a German woman who he fell in

That sounds like World War Two was the best thing that ever happened to him.

Well, not immediately. Typical to Mario is the suffering. He had dreams of being a writer, but he didn't know where to start. So he went to the City College of New York on the GI Bill and he studied literature and creative writing. And then he did what would become his trademark. He struggled. His weight went up, his bank account went down. He was broke all the time,

And does he sit down and write his war novel.

Yes. All along he's writing his first novel, The Dark Arena, which gets published by Random House in nineteen fifty four, and he thinks, wow, this is it. You know, I'm a published author. But the reviews were mixed. It didn't do for him what he expected. And Mario got an advance of thirty five hundred dollars which was quickly gone. His weight was way up, his hopes were way down. And then on Christmas Eve, something incredible happened. He was

Wow. So he had really hit rock bottom. How long did it take for him to pull himself up by his bootstraps?

Well, a long time, because just because you say you want something to happen doesn't mean it will. By nineteen sixty, Mario's family had grown to five kids and his job was in danger because the FBI was investigating his unit for helping young soldiers obade the draft. Mario was never charged, but he ended up quitting his job and pursuing the most unusual path for a writer who aspired to high art.

He decided to become a pulp fiction writer.

Exactly. It was a company called Magazine Management, and if there was any man who was destined to write pulp fiction, it was Mario Puzo. I was able to speak with one of his colleagues, John Bowers, and he said Mario was just able to use his research to invent whole worlds.

But Mario had definite energy at writing. He just could write nobody's business.

So he walked into pulp fiction offices of magazine management. It's a smoke field office. It's full of men and women, city over, clattering typewriters pumping out copy for like this never ending flood of trash magazines with names like Mail and Stag and for men only. They were called magazines, but they were really sort of rags. And soon Mario Puza was pumping out salacious stories of brave gis, of damsels in distress.

He even wrote a story that took place in Hawaii where mobsters busted in a gambling parlor, right exactly.

Yeah, that was just one of the many stories. But I think that was the first of all the ones that I saw that really tackled some instance of the mafia.

And of course most of it was just dreamed up, not most of it, All of it was dreamed up.

I mean, he said once that he would take a real life battle where seven thousand people got killed and turn it into a bloody battle where one hundred thousand died. I wish you could.

Read some of those, imagine the stories. It was larger than life. It didn't have to depend upon fact checking at all.

He'd amp up the action no matter what, and that became his trademark. He became one of the top pulp fiction writers of all time. Before you know, he was aspiring to high art, he was spending these time on these novels that didn't make him any money. He had enormous expenses, not only the bookies that he owed money to, but also you know, he had a family of five kids. He had to make a living. He had to bring

And as much as he aspired to high art, it seems like he was almost destined to write pulp fiction. I mean, after eight years doing it, he was pretty much the most successful of any of them.

Well, yeah, but he was not making a huge amount of money.

Yeah, I believe we got something like one hundred and fifty dollars something like that for the week.

So he went back to his publisher and said, you know, I'm ready for my third book, my third novel, and his publisher said, forget about it, Mario. They weren't ready to assign him a third book. And one of the editors said, well, you know, if the Fortunate Pilgrim had a little bit more of that mafia stuff in it, maybe it would sell. And those words rang and Mario Puzo's head a little bit more of that mafia stuff.

And that's when it all clicked for him. He remembered how he had been engrossed by the Volacci hearings.

It's like a scene out of a movie. I mean, here's this overweight, overwrought in debt writer. And he pays ten bucks for the ten volume transcripts of the Kufaver hearings, and he gets access to his friend Peter Mass's book on the Bolacchi hearings, and he gets a lot of other research, and he sits down in his basement and he cranks out a ten page outline and he takes it to his agent, the legendary Candido Dinadio, and she sends it out to various publishers, and much to Mario's surprise,

But the important thing is that he has a fire lit under him and he has to deliver the book.

Not so fascinate than there's one place a struggling writer can turn to for some fast cash.

This must be when he goes to Hollywood. Allegedly, Evan says, Puzzo shows up at the gates of Paramount thirty five pages under his arm, looking broke, and sells the option of Paramount for twelve five.

And Mario claims he sold the option through his agent and the story editor at Paramount, and then he never even went to California.

Well, regardless of what happened, he sold the option to Paramount.

For big money for Mario too, twelve five hundred.

So now he writes the book.

Yes, he goes home. He walks down the stairs to his basement, and there between the pool table and the constant racket of his five kids. A mafia family rises up from his typewriter, and what a family it is. He gets the name from a town in Sicily, one of the most mafia invested towns in the country, Corleone. There's Don Vito Corleone, the godfather. There's the eldest son and heir apparent, Santino, known as Sonny. There's the middle son,

Guy, which was the foundation for Goodfellas.

Exactly, and Gaytalse had written the organized crime classic Honor Thy Father, and so here's a newcomer to the realm, Mario Puzzo, the author of the Fourthcoming Godfather the same table. So he takes one look at Nantelice, who'd grown up on the you know, up pretty side, who was from a different world, very genteel educated, and he immediately found a model for the wife of Michael Corleone.

Kay.

So he was really pulling from all around him for inspiration.

That was the brilliance of Mario Puzo that he would find inspiration in unlikely places. So another thing I was able to discover is that Mario, being Mario and loving Las Vegas more than any other place on Earth, probably would go to Las Vegas regularly and gamble at, among other places, the Sands Hotel. And I was able to interview ed Walters, who worked as a pit boss at the Sands. Tell me when you first saw Mario Puzzoo.

Came to Vegas. He has to play and he has Vegas ARONI.

He was a relint being he played a Roulin and he said that Mario would come in and gamble and the same time asked questions for his forthcoming book about the.

Mob he was a little pudgy guy, and I met him. So he was talking to this dealer on the roulette wheels, and I was on the wheels at that time, and I understanding, I'd listen to I'd answer question with all he'd asked questions about.

Sinatra and a mob and honey and because of me.

Then I opened up about because he had things wrong, and I said, oh no, you got.

To mix up. The mob and the mafia are not the same thing.

He got the mafia all Italians, the old blood guys from a certain place of thing or the momb a difference, and then I trained them.

They outfit all his terms.

And of course Ed Walters, who knew a bit about the mob because he had come from New York City where he had known a lot of people that were, let's say, somehow connected, told Mario a bit, you know, to keep him gambling there. And Mario would ask questions about who who and what was what? And as long as he kept gambling, Ed Walters kept talking.

Was he taking notes and everything while you were telling him this? No, he didn't have first, but then he started to.

And pretty soon Mario had an insight into the Vegas aspect of the mob, which figured into the Godfather quite a bit.

He'd say, so, Eddie, tell me how keep this Saunder in the mob? And I said, haul it all it hold, I said, Sanra ain't in the bob.

He said, guys told me in the mom I said, out of shit, I SAIDs ran in the mob. He worked for us, he said, fucking entertainer. And he thought, wow, that's interesting. So Mario would be playing while he's talking to him. Yeah, yeah, all the time. Oh, he couldn't never just sit there and take notes.

No, why they were Oh we weret a fucking guy sitting in a n because he don't take a notes?

So you let him do it because he was playing, Yes, because he's playing. Oh so that was good for you, they're yeah, of course I told some people I was writing a book from shit on the fine the guy that was sitting there takeing. What should we come down to? What do you write a book? Ye? Get the front?

Are So do you think Mario knew he had to do something different here? I mean you mentioned his daughter Dorothy saying that he couldn't have known this book would be a success.

No, of course, he didn't think it was going to be a great success. While he was writing, he was writing as he always did, he liked to say, for a paycheck. But at the same time he had decided to give up on high art and those aspirations to be a Doustoyevski or something like that, you know, to be a fine art writer. He was writing a sensational story about a sensational family in a sensational world, and he had no aspirations of writing high art. He wanted

Funnily enough, with his back against the wall, he ends up turning out the most dust of skiesque of all of his novels.

Yeah, I know it. It became something of a masterpiece. I mean, I wouldn't say it was, you know, incredible literature, but at the same time it was a page turner, a pot boiler. It had all the attributes of Valley of the Dolls or something like that. But said in the world of organized crime, I don't think he expected

Well, and when he was down in that basement and the kids were screaming, he would shout, quiet, don't you know I'm writing a bestseller here?

Yeah? But I think that was a joke. You know, the kids would laugh, he would laugh. I think he had no idea that he was writing a bestseller, And I don't think he ever dreamed The Godfather would become a national bestseller and a model for possibly the greatest movie of all time.

When he does eventually finish the book, what happens?

So he leaves the pages with his agent, Candido di Nadio, and in true Mario Puzo's fashion, he takes his money, He takes his family, and he flies off to Europe for a big vacation with lots of food and gambling.

But isn't he still broke?

He's broken than he ever has been. He doesn't have the money to go to Europe. He finances the trip by getting cash advances on his credit card. He and his family have a great time, but when he returns home he's eight grand in debt. Can you imagine eight grand back then is a fortune. He goes straight to his agent's office and hopes that she can, as he would later write, pull a slick magazine assignment out of

Even now, that's a really good offer. So does he take it?

Well, he doesn't believe it. He says, this must be some kind of Madison Avenue. Come on. He thinks they're joking. After all, the biggest advance up to that point for paperback rights had been four hundred thousand. So Candida Denaudio, his agent, picks up the bone, calls his editor at Putlam, Bill targ and the editor says the amount is not correct. The offer had already gone up to four hundred thousand.

Wow.

And when the dust had settled and the deal was done, Mario Puzo had sold the paperback rights to the Godfather for four hundred and ten thousand dollars, setting a new record.

Does he get that all? At once, of course.

Coruse not. They give him one hundred thousand dollars and he takes it to the bank where he said the teller had always, you know, looked at him in a skance when he needed money or you know, cash his little checks, and he showed him one hundred thousand dollars just to watch him grovel. He said. He quit his job at magazine management, and he went home and promptly

Well, broke or not. The Godfather was published on March tenth, nineteen sixty nine, and it shot to the top of the best seller list.

Absolutely, it was an instant success.

But Puzo is sort of the most critical about the lack of artistic merit and The Godfather it's not as good as the preceding two novels. He said, I wrote it to make money.

Yeah, Puso said, if he knew it was going to be such a hit, he would have written a lot better, But The Godfather was a sensation. The reviews were ecstatic. Even the New York Times gave it a rave pozo. All of a sudden, this nobody writer begins living very large. He's a superstar on his way to becoming one of the best selling writers in the world. He's on the

Miraculously, his vow in the gutter to become rich and famous had suddenly become true.

And in Hollywood too. All of a sudden, Bob Evans remembered the dead broke writer who appeared in his office with those thirty five pages under his arm.

And the book came out and it became the biggest book of the day.

The only problem the distribution department at Paramount didn't want to make the movie.

Nobody wanted to make it. As a matter of fact, Paramount refused to make it for a while.

They said, mafia films don't sell.

We did the cover two years ago failed, so you're going to make this. Apparently, the studio told Evans that the only way it could be made was if he could do it for under two million dollars. So Evans turned to a producer at Paramount who is known for getting stuff made on the cheap. The soon to be legendary Already, I get a call worker. Do I want to produce The Guard Father? I got of the Joe? Yeah, of course, that was my favorite book. I never read it.

The podcast is based on the book of the same name, written by our very own Mark Seal.

Our producer is Tina Mullen.

Research assistance by Jack Sullivan.

Jonathan Dressler was our development producer.

Our music supervisor is Randall Poster. Our executive producers are Meet Nathan King, Mark Sieal, Doan Fagan, and Graydon Carter.

Special thanks to Bridget Arseno and everyone at CDM Studios.

A comprehensive list of sources and acknowledgments can be found in Mark Seal's book Leave the Gun, Take the Canoli, published by Gallery Books. An imprint of Simon and Schuster