Barzini & the Five Families¶
The New York power map, and the quiet man who was behind everything.
Emilio Barzini¶
At a glance¶
Barzini has perhaps a dozen lines in the film and is its actual antagonist.
The structure is a shell game. The audience is directed at Sollozzo, then at the Tattaglias, and the film lets that stand for over an hour. Then Vito, at the peace conference, watches who talks and how — and afterward tells Michael, privately, the thing that reframes the entire plot: Tattaglia is a pimp. He never could have outfought Santino. But I didn't know until this day that it was Barzini all along.
Everything follows from that. Barzini financed Sollozzo, ordered the hit on Vito, had Sonny killed via Carlo, paid the bodyguard who blew up Apollonia, and turned Tessio. He does it all without raising his voice and without ever being in a scene with Michael.
His death is the most theatrical of the baptism killings: Al Neri, in a stolen police uniform, on the steps of the New York Supreme Court building at Foley Square, shooting Barzini and his bodyguard in bright daylight and then walking away through a crowd.
Richard Conte was a veteran of film noir — Cry of the City, The Big Combo, Thieves' Highway — and had, in a piece of casting-history symmetry, been considered for Vito. He plays Barzini as an executive: bored, watchful, entirely without menace, which is what makes him menacing.
The Five Families¶
| Family | Boss | Business | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Corleone | Vito → Michael | Olive oil, gambling, unions, political influence | Refuses narcotics; relocates to Nevada 1955 |
| Barzini | Emilio Barzini | The most powerful; narcotics via Sollozzo | Behind the entire war |
| Tattaglia | Philip Tattaglia | Prostitution, then narcotics | The visible enemy; a front for Barzini |
| Cuneo | Carmine Cuneo | Trucking, upstate New York | Least developed |
| Stracci | Victor Stracci | New Jersey, gambling | Least developed |
All four rival bosses are killed on Michael's order during the baptism sequence, along with Moe Greene in Las Vegas. It is the most complete decapitation of an organized crime structure ever depicted in fiction and it takes about six minutes.
Bruno Tattaglia (Philip's son) runs the nightclub where Luca Brasi is killed and is himself killed on Sonny's order during the war.
The Commission¶
The peace conference at which Vito ends the war is a version of the real Commission — the governing body of the American Mafia, established by Lucky Luciano in 1931 to stop exactly the kind of open warfare the film depicts.
The scene is Coppola and Puzo at their most anthropological: a dozen middle-aged men around a boardroom table, with an agenda, discussing narcotics distribution as a policy question and territorial encroachment as a matter of principle. One of them observes that they are not communists, and it draws a laugh. It looks exactly like a trade association meeting, which is the point.
Vito's speech there — accepting narcotics traffic in principle while insisting it be kept away from schools and children, and guaranteeing Michael's safe return on his own life — is the last piece of statesmanship in the trilogy.
See Real-World Mafia.
In Part II and Part III¶
The Five Families structure recedes after 1955. Part II's power map is national and international — Hyman Roth in Miami and Havana, the Rosato brothers in the Bronx, senators in Nevada. The enemy is no longer a family; it's a syndicate with lawyers.
By Part III the Commission is a room full of old men who can be killed with a helicopter, and the real power sits in a Vatican bank and an Italian holding company. See Zasa, Altobello & Lucchesi.
That trajectory — street to syndicate to institution — is the trilogy's economic argument. See Themes.