The Godfather's Revenge (2006)¶

At a glance¶

Author: Mark Winegardner
Published: November 7, 2006
Publisher: G. P. Putnam's Sons
Story years: 1963–1964
Series position: Fourth; latest point in the whole chronology except Part III
Authorized by: The Puzo estate — not by Paramount

Winegardner's second and final Godfather novel, and the most aggressive of the continuations: it kills a character the films left alive, and it drives the Corleone story straight into the Kennedy assassination.

Plot¶

1963–1964. Michael Corleone is still trying to go legitimate and still living with what he did to Fredo. The former capo Nick Geraci — Winegardner's invention, presumed dead at the end of The Godfather Returns — has spent years in hiding and emerges to take Michael apart methodically.

Geraci's campaign includes turning the Commission against Michael and killing Tom Hagen in the Florida Everglades.

Running alongside it: the Shea brothers. President Jimmy Shea and his brother Attorney General Daniel Shea are transparent Kennedy analogues — the Attorney General waging a public war on organized crime while the family's debts to the mob go unpaid. Shea is assassinated by a Cuban national, in a killing the novel implies was arranged by New Orleans boss Carlo Tramonti — a plot built directly on the long-standing Carlos Marcello conspiracy theories.

Michael eventually traps and kills Geraci, then Tramonti and others. In the last pages, Connie reveals that Fredo left an illegitimate child.

The problem with killing Tom Hagen¶

Part III establishes that Hagen died sometime before 1979, unexplained — a consequence of Robert Duvall's salary dispute rather than any story decision. Winegardner takes the opening and supplies a death.

Whether that's a service or a trespass depends on your tolerance for the continuation project generally. It is at minimum a choice: the films leave the most decent person in the story to disappear off-page, and the novel decides he was murdered in a swamp by a character who does not exist in the films.

The Kennedy material¶

This is the most divisive thing about the book, and the most defensible.

Puzo's original novel is a book about how organized crime and legitimate American power are the same enterprise wearing different clothes. Winegardner's Shea plot pushes that thesis to its logical destination — the mob as a participant in the central American trauma of the century. It is not subtle, but it is not unfaithful either, and it draws on a body of real speculation (Marcello, Trafficante, Giancana, Judith Exner) that historians have taken seriously for sixty years. See Real-World Mafia.

The objection is tonal: The Godfather works because it is claustrophobic and domestic, and a novel in which the Corleones brush against the Kennedy assassination is no longer that book.

Reception and the lawsuit¶

Reviews were mixed and generally cooler than for The Godfather Returns. Sales were respectable but below the first.

More consequentially, the novel had been authorized by the Puzo estate but not by Paramount Pictures, which holds the film rights. That disagreement — over who may license new Godfather works, and in which media — festered and eventually erupted around Ed Falco's The Family Corleone in 2012, with the studio and the estate suing each other. It settled in 2013.

Winegardner has not written another.