by Gus Russo
The next morning, Russo, Colombo, and his entourage sat across the table from the G&W suits on the thirty-third floor of the Gulf building. Also there were the film's producers Al Ruddy, Gray Frederickson, Fred Roos, and their lawyers. "They were as white as ghosts," Russo said of the executives. "They did not know what they were about to hear or if they were all gonna get thrown out a window."35
In short time, it was agreed that Colombo could see the script, and he turned to an underling and said, "Butter, read it." After some give-and-take, the producers agreed to remove all anti-Italian references, such as Mafia (the term never appears in the movie). They also agreed to the black-tie events, but, as the group started to rise and shake hands, Russo worried about his reward for brokering the deal. "I leaned over to Joe Sr.," recalled Russo, "and I say, 'What about me?' "
With that, Colombo raised his hands, and everyone sat back down like puppets on a string. "What about my boy here? What are we gonna do for him?" the boss asked. The producers said that the first two roles were spoken for, but they had not yet gotten to the part of Carlo, Don Corleone's son-in-law.
You're gonna get to Carlo right now," Russo ordered.
"Oh, yes, please," added Colombo. "Gianni is playing Carlo."
No one present was about to argue, and Russo got the part. However, when filming commenced, Marlon Brando, playing the lead role of patriarch Don Corleone, informed Coppola that he would not perform with the unknown Russo. When Russo heard, he put his arm around Brando and walked him to a back room, where they could speak privately—"because I didn't want to embarrass the guy in front of the other actors," Russo later said.
"Let me tell you something, okay?" Russo told the acting icon. "This is my fucking break in life and you or nobody else is gonna fuck it up. Do you understand what I'm tellin' you? I don't give a fuck who you are, I'm staying in this fucking movie." To which Brando responded meekly, "That was brilliant, great acting." As Russo wrote in his autobiography, "That was the end of the story."36
Russo was not the only "connected" person to appear in the movie. "All the extras in the wedding scene were Colombo hoods," producer Gray Frederickson recently said.37 Predictably, some of the actors were infatuated by the hoods—but not Coppola, who remarked, "I never wanted to know them. I never started hanging out with the big one, like Jimmy Caan." When asked who "the big one" was, Coppola said he believed it was Carmine Per-sico. 38 G&W reneged on the black-tie events after Colombo was shot on the league's dais during a June 28, 1971, rally, soon after the New York filming wrapped. (The assassination attempt, which ironically occurred right in front of the G&tW building, left Colombo in a vegetative state until his death on May 23, 1978.)
When the film was screened for a party of Hollywood insiders at a Malibu estate, television icon and antimob crusader Steve Allen somehow made the guest list. "There was the usual crowd there," Allen said in 1997, "but there were also a few swarthy Vegas boys who had 'organized crime' written all over them. After the movie, my wife Jayne made a remark about gangsters that caused one producer, who was friendly with the mob, to get in her face. 'You have no idea what you're talking about, lady,' this character told her." Allen said he intervened before the face-off got ugly, and soon thereafter, he and Jayne made their exit.
"The next morning, while I'm just waking up," Allen said, "our housekeeper came banging on our bedroom door."
"Mr. Allen! Mr. Allen!" called the frantic woman. The entertainer rushed out and followed his housekeeper to the front porch, where, in a scene reminiscent of the movie he had just seen, he found an enormous severed leg and shoulder of a horse. Allen knew the name of the producer who had the set-to with Jayne and, in a show of defiance, had the carcass delivered to his home. (The producer, whom Allen identified to this writer, was a close friend of Johnny Rosselli's, who Allen believed also attended the screening.)39
On March 14, 1972, the night before the gala New York premiere of TheGodfather, Bob Evans put out still another fire for his precious film; this time the quixotic star, Marlon Brando, had decided to skip his own premiere. A frantic Evans reached his good friend Dr. Henry Kissinger, who was dealing not only with a Washington snowstorm, but a setback at the Paris Peace Talks with the North Vietnamese, who were threatening to walk out. Incredibly, Evans convinced Kissinger to come to New York and stand in for Brando. When Evans informed Korshak, in town with Bernice for the event, the Fixer was not impressed.
"You sure it's all right?" Korshak asked. When Evans asked why there might be a problem, Korshak explained, "It ain't no ordinary film. That's why. It's about the boys—the organization. It's a hot ticket." When Evans demanded to know exactly what the problem was, Korshak said tersely, "Nothing and everything."
At the postpremiere party at the St. Regis Hotel, Evans strolled over to Sidney and Bee's table and told Bee, "Without the big man, none of this could have happened. Join our table, will you?" An unsmiling Korshak said, "No." When Evans again demanded an explanation, Korshak's fuse was lit.
"And give the press a fuckin' field day?" Korshak asked.
"Come on, Sidney, it's your night too," Evans persisted.
At that, Korshak grabbed Evans's arm "like a vise" and fixed him with "the Look" he had mastered forty years earlier on the mean streets of the Outfit's West Chicago domain. "Don't ever bring me and Kissinger together in public. Ever! Now go back to your table, spend some time with your wife, schmuck."40
The Godfather netted $86.2 million in its first run domestically, going a long way toward both reinvigorating Paramount Pictures and justifying Evans's hiring to the disbelievers. Francis Ford Coppola quickly used his new clout (and his profit share of the movie as collateral) to secure a $700,000 loan from Al Hart's City National Bank of Beverly Hills so that he could help finance the film American Graffiti for his friend director George Lucas. However, before he actually took the money, Sid Korshak talked Coppola out of it, explaining that if Graffiti flopped, Coppola's children would suffer by losing their future royalties from The Godfather.41
coppola's profits, however, are far less interesting, and less ironic, than those of the Sicilian industrialist who had been brought into the Paramount ownership structure two years earlier. It will never be known how much profit was funneled by Michele Sindona from the iconic Mafia movie to the real Mafia, but it is a certainty that some was. However, Sindona's star had reached its apogee and was soon to start a steep descent into eventual burnout. It was a complicated drama, with the following highlights:
• In 1972, Sindona bought a 21 percent interest in New York's Franklin National Bank, which collapsed two years later, leading to Sindona's conviction for massive bank fraud and to a chain reaction in Italy that saw Im-mobiliare stocks crash and the Vatican Bank, or IOR (Istituto per le Opere di Religione), which Sindona had tied to Immobiliare, lose $30 million. In addition, much of the $1.3 billion invested in the Bahamian shell companies simply vanished when the IOR stock collapsed. The IOR eventually acknowledged "moral involvement" with Sindona and Calvi and was forced to pay back $241 million to the creditors involved with Banco Ambrosiano.
• In 1974, after Sindona was indicted in Milan for bank fraud, he retained the law firm of Nixon's former attorney general John Mitchell to represent him in fighting the extradition from the United States. However, he was found guilty in absentia on twenty-three counts of misappropriating funds and sentenced to three and a half years in prison.
• On August 6, 1978, Pope Paul VI died after fifteen years in the papacy.
Three weeks later Pope John Paul I assumed the papal throne. On September 28, Cardinal Jean Villot, the former Vatican secretary of state, was asked to stay on temporarily and begin an investigation into the financial dealings of the IOR. Later that night the pope was found dead, allegedly due to natural causes. He had been pope for only thirty-three days.
• On July 11, 1979, Italian magistrate Giorgio Ambrosoli, who had been compiling evidence against Sindona for five years, was shot to death, as were two
other prosecutors. Enrico Cuccia, an Italian banker who had met with Sindona in New York three months earlier, testified that Sindona had told him that "he wanted everyone who had done him harm killed, in particular Giorgio Ambrosoli."
• In February 1980, Sindona went to trial on charges stemming from the collapse of the Franklin National Bank. Soon after, on March 27, 1980, he was found guilty of sixty-five counts, including fraud, conspiracy, perjury, false bank statements, and misappropriations of bank funds, and sentenced to three twenty-five-year terms and one twenty-four-year term.
• The Vatican bank scandal was effectively swept under the carpet in 1982. However, in Sicily, Sindona and sixty-five mafiosi were indicted for smuggling $600 million worth of heroin a year.
• On March 18, 1986, Sindona was sentenced in Milan to life for the murder of Ambrosoli. Two days later he died of cyanide poisoning—a favorite Mafia method to silence prisoners who know too much.42
Eighteen years after The Godfather premiered, The Godfather Part HI was released, which drew heavily on the actual history of the Sindona-Immobiliare-Vatican bank scandals and the cross-pollination of the Sicilian and New York Mafias. It went so far as to use the name Immobiliare and to suggest that the pope had been murdered because of his intent to clean house. The film's closing credits include the following: "Dedicated to Charlie Bluhdorn, who inspired it."*
Before 1972 ended, Charlie Bluhdorn had still one more face-off with the Mafia. At the time, Italian producer Dino DeLaurentiis had just completed filming The Valacbi Papers, about the infamous Mafia turncoat Joseph Valachi. According to DeLaurentiis's assistant to the producer, Fred Sidewater, the film was another that proceeded only with the sage counsel of Sid Korshak:
We had three production assistants working as drivers who were really the greatest gofers around, and they were running around the lots and using their cars to run errands. Well, I got into the office and was told the Teamsters were shutting down the studio because we were using non-Teamster-affiliated drivers.
I said, "Korshak can help," and I asked him and he said, "Don't let those kids drive anymore," and I said I couldn't join the Teamsters 'cause it would have changed my independent position and I'd get in trouble with all the other guilds. So finally he told me to go meet these three Teamster guys in Culver City Park and stand near a phone booth and talk to the guys standing next to it and answer the phone when it rings. I did what he said, and I told them that we weren't taking business away from them and that we couldn't afford to pay for a driver. Then the phone rang and it was Sidney. "Let me speak to one of the guys," he said—I think it was Andy Anderson. Anyway, I spoke to the guy after he got off the phone and he said, "Look, just don't let them do anything that Teamsters guys would be doing."43
Hoping to corner the market on mob cinema, Paramount was set to distribute The ValachiPapers—Paramount had distributed DeLaurentiis's films since 1955. However, at the last moment, Bluhdorn called the producer in a panic and pulled out of the deal after the Mafia had threatened to bomb the Gulf & Western building if he proceeded. DeLaurentiis then took the film to Warner Brothers, which was interested, but begged off after hearing of the threat to Bluhdorn. To save the film, DeLaurentiis went to Miami and met with Meyer Lansky's right-hand man, Vincent "Jimmy Blue Eyes" Alo, who promised to have the mob back off if DeLaurentiis would set one of Alo's Mafia friends up in Hollywood, which DeLaurentiis readily admitted he did.* From that point on, DeLaurentiis was dogged by rumors of his own Mafia connections, stories that alleged that he laundered mob money to finance his extravagant foreign-financed films.44 Fuel for that fire also came from the fact that DeLaurentiis was a longtime friend of Michele Sindona's, who had personally approved a $1 million loan from his Franklin Bank for DeLaurentiis's move to New York and into his new offices on the fiftieth floor of Bluhdorn's Gulf & Western building.45
The King of Cool Meets the Fixe
Helping his ward Evans with The Godfather production was but the first of two favors that the Fixer performed for the young Paramount chief that year. However, the second series of intercessions had little to do with business, and much to do with Bob Evans's third sinking marriage.
While wrapping The Godfather in early 1972, forty-one-year-old Evans was weakly attempting to navigate the stormy waters of marriage number three, this one to actress/model Ali MacGraw, eight years his junior. After marrying the beautiful former Wellesley art history major in 1969, Evans cast her in the blockbuster Paramount film Love Story. But MacGraw, now the hottest young actress in America, was soon to learn that Evans's workaholic lifestyle was not the stuff of a good marriage. (Evans spent one night in January 1971 in Hollywood meeting with Coppola instead of with Ali in New York when she gave birth to their son Joshua.46 In 1972, when Ali picked up a serious case of adult mumps while the two were in Europe, Evans flew back to the United States to put out more fires on The Godfather, leaving her with a strange French doctor in Antibes.)
In early 1972, Evans strongly suggested that Ali costar with macho actor Steve "the King of Cool" McQueen in a movie to be entitled The Getaway. Ali, who had met McQueen briefly once before, resisted—the sexual tension between the two was an affair waiting to happen. Ali later said that after the first meeting, "I had to leave the room to compose myself. He walked into my life as Mr. Humble, no ego, one of the guys. Steve was this very original, principled guy who didn't seem to be part of the system, and I loved that. He was clever, demure, exciting, and had all the answers. I bought that act in the first second. We had this electrifying, obsessive attraction." Ali knew that if she accepted the role, she and McQueen would become lovers, and her floundering marriage to Evans would be over.47
But Evans prevailed, MacGraw moved to El Paso to start the picture, and the sparks between the two actors flew immediately. According to Paramount's distribution chief Frank Yablans, Evans intentionally torpedoed the marriage. "Evans pushed them together," Yablans said. "He didn't give a shit. It didn't matter to him. He's a very strange man. He couldn't be married, couldn't live a normal, sane life. He drove her out."48
By July 1972, as the Evans-MacGraw union was crumbling, Henry Kissinger offered to go to Texas for Evans to attempt to broker a peace between the two sides—hopefully with more success that he was seeing in his efforts with the warring Vietnamese factions. However, Evans declined the offer, citing Kissinger's more pressing concerns.49 Eventually, Sid Korshak was brought into the fray for the first of many Evans-MacGraw minidra-mas. The occasion was a marital breakdown at one of Evans's and Korshak's favorite getaways, The Hotel Du Cap on the French Riviera. For this impasse, Evans called Sidney in Bel-Air, and his friend hopped a jet for the six-thousand-mile marriage-counseling trip. "On to the rock flew Sidney Korshak," Evans wrote, "my consigliere, for one purpose and one purpose only—to keep my rocky marriage from falling into the sea. Each day Sidney would sit with Ali for hours, trying to persuade her to make the marriage work." Korshak's attempt at damage control temporarily forestalled the inevitable. 50
When Evans learned of the MacGraw-McQueen affair, he again called on Korshak. According to Bistro owner Kurt Niklas, who overheard the conversation, Evans met with his mentor in the restaurant's private room upstairs and informed him that he wanted his rival McQueen murdered.
"Just calm down, Bobby," Korshak said. Over the next few minutes, Korshak succeeded in cooling off Evans, who left the restaurant. "He hadn't been gone ten minutes," Niklas wrote, "when McQueen arrived, asking for Korshak." Now, not only Niklas but the entire wait staff strained to eavesdrop on the confab. According to one good source, McQueen had met Korshak years earlier, an occasion that supposedly left McQueen shaken. In a recent interview, the source related, "It was at a New York post-movie-premiere party for one of McQueen's movies. Korshak happened to be there as well. McQueen was drunk—he was known to have a 'short guy' chip on his shoulder. Anyway, Korshak turns from the bar and spills McQueen's drink. So McQueen winds up to punch Sidney, who he didn't know, and Sidney puts u
p one finger and says, 'Wait, you may be a big star, but if you lay one finger on me, I will have your fucking eyes ripped out.' McQueen either was told or realized who Sidney was and left his own premiere party."
Perhaps with this memory in mind, an obsequious McQueen, known far and wide as a macho figure, appeared before Korshak at his Bistro lair.
"Mr. Korshak, please—I don't want any problems, but he's threatening to kill me," McQueen implored.
"Nobody's gonna get killed, unless things keep going sour," Korshak assured him.
"But I'm talking about my life!" persisted McQueen.
"Just shut up and listen to me," Korshak demanded. Then the two began speaking in hushed tones that Niklas et al. were unable to divine. Finally, Korshak spoke up:
"You do as I say, and nobody's gonna get hurt."
A "sheepish" McQueen then left, only to continue the affair with MacGraw soon thereafter.51
MacGraw moved in with McQueen, and after marrying him in 1973, sought to obtain custody of her son with Evans, Joshua. Evans relented on that, but drew the line when the new couple informed him that they were legally changing the toddler's name to Josh McQueen. McQueen sealed his fate when he had the temerity to call up Evans and criticize the sybarite's
lifestyle.
"Your butler's a homosexual," said McQueen. "Your surroundings, the way you live, is not the environment that's right for Joshua . . . I intend to change his name to McQueen . . . have full control." Of course, McQueen had a good point; Evans was well-known to engulf Woodland in hedonism of all sorts. Lastly, McQueen added, his attorney was drawing up custody papers.