by Mario Puzo
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Very special thanks to Carol Gino; my literary agents, Candida Donadio and Neil Olson; my attorneys, Bert Fields and Arthur Altman; my brother, Anthony Cleri; my editor at Random House, Jonathan Karp; and my children and grandchildren.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
MARIO PUZO was born in New York and, following military service in World War II, attended New York’s New School for Social Research and Columbia University. His bestselling novel The Godfather was preceded by two critically acclaimed novels, The Dark Arena (1955) and The Fortunate Pilgrim (1965). In 1978, he published Fools Die, followed by The Sicilian (1984), The Fourth K (1991), and the second installment in his Mafia trilogy, The Last Don (1996), which became an international bestseller and the highest-rated TV miniseries of 1997. Mario Puzo also wrote many screenplays, including Earthquake, Superman, and all three Godfather movies, for which he received two Academy Awards. He died in July 1999 at his home on Long Island, New York, at the age of seventy-eight.
ALSO BY MARIO PUZO
F I C T I O N
The Dark Arena
The Fortunate Pilgrim
The Godfather
Fools Die
The Sicilian
The Fourth K
The Last Don
N O N F I C T I O N
The Godfather Papers
Inside Las Vegas
C H I L D R E N ’ S BOOKS
The Runaway Summer of Davie Shaw
Copyright © 2000 by Mario Puzo
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York.
RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Puzo, Mario, 1920–1999.
Omerta / Mario Puzo.
p. cm.
1. Mafia—Fiction. 2. Criminals—Fiction. 3. Organized crime—Fiction.
I. Title.
PS3566.U9 046 2000b
813'.54—dc21 00-028082
Random House website address: www.atrandom.com
eISBN: 978-0-375-50568-3
v3.0