Zasa, Altobello & Lucchesi¶
The three tiers of Part III's conspiracy — street, Commission, and state — and the film's argument that the higher you go, the worse it gets.
Joey Zasa¶
At a glance¶
- Played by
- Joe Mantegna
- Position
- Runs the Corleones' old New York operations
- Died
- 1980, Little Italy festa — shot by Vincent
The gangster as public figure. Zasa gives to charity, courts the press, has been named Italian-American of the Year, wears extremely good suits, and is on a first-name basis with journalists. He is also a drug dealer running the neighborhood the Corleones abandoned.
Michael despises him for exactly one reason, stated plainly: Zasa is a pimp who has made himself famous, and fame is death in this business. It's the same judgment Vito passed on Philip Tattaglia in 1945, thirty-five years later, and it's still correct.
Zasa's function is to be the visible enemy while the real conspiracy operates above him — the same shell game the first film ran with Sollozzo and Tattaglia in front of Barzini. When Michael pays off the Commission and Zasa gets nothing, Zasa declares a vendetta and machine-guns a room full of bosses from a helicopter. Then Vincent kills him at a street festival, without permission, on Connie's say-so.
Joe Mantegna — a Mamet regular, and one of the few Part III performances that drew no complaints — plays him with total conviction as a man who thinks he's the future.
Don Osvaldo Altobello¶
At a glance¶
- Played by
- Eli Wallach
- Position
- Elder New York boss; Connie's godfather
- Died
- 1980, Teatro Massimo — poisoned cannoli
The richest man is the one with the most powerful friends. Don Altobello
The old friend, and the film's best character.
Altobello is courtly, affectionate, apparently harmless, and genuinely fond of the family — he has known Connie since she was a baby. He asks Michael to be included in the Immobiliare deal, is refused, and then quietly organizes everything: Zasa's rage, the helicopter, the assassin Mosca, and his own alignment with Lucchesi in Rome.
He does it all without a hard word. He is Vito Corleone as an antagonist — the same manners, the same patience, the same lethal generosity — and the film knows it, which is why Michael is so slow to see it.
His death is the trilogy's most sardonic: Connie brings him poisoned cannoli in his opera box, kisses him, and sits with him while he eats and dies. Leave the gun, take the cannoli, closing a loop opened in 1972.
Eli Wallach got the part after Frank Sinatra agreed to it and couldn't clear the schedule. Wallach — The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, The Magnificent Seven, a founding Actors Studio member — is the most purely enjoyable thing in the film.
Don Licio Lucchesi¶
At a glance¶
- Played by
- Enzo Robutti
- Position
- Chairman, Internazionale Immobiliare; Italian political power broker
- Died
- 1980, Rome — stabbed in the throat with his own glasses by Calò
The top of the pyramid, and the point of the film.
Lucchesi is not a gangster. He is a politician and a chairman, with a hand in the Vatican Bank, the holding company, and the Italian state, and he steals more money in one transaction than the Corleone family made in fifty years. When he is finally cornered, he does not deny anything; he simply notes that Michael cannot touch him.
Then Calò, Michael's old Sicilian bodyguard from 1948, kisses his hand, says power wears out those who don't have it, and drives Lucchesi's spectacles into his throat.
That line is Giulio Andreotti's — the seven-time Italian prime minister on whom Lucchesi is directly modeled, right down to the heavy-framed glasses. Andreotti was tried for Mafia association in the 1990s; the case's outcome remains one of the most contested in modern Italian jurisprudence.
The Vatican tier¶
Behind Lucchesi:
- Archbishop Gilday (Donal Donnelly), who has run the Vatican Bank into a $769 million hole and needs Michael's $600 million to cover it. Modeled on Paul Marcinkus, the American archbishop who headed the Vatican Bank during the Banco Ambrosiano collapse.
- Frederick Keinszig (Helmut Berger), the Swiss banker who disappears with the money and is found hanged from a bridge. Modeled on Roberto Calvi, "God's Banker," found hanging beneath Blackfriars Bridge in London in June 1982 with bricks in his pockets — ruled suicide, then murder, and never solved.
- Cardinal Lamberto (Raf Vallone), the reformer who hears Michael's confession and is elected Pope John Paul I — and is dead in thirty-three days, poisoned. Modeled on Albino Luciani, whose 1978 death remains the subject of a permanent conspiracy literature.
Full mapping: Real-World Mafia § The Vatican Bank affair.
The argument¶
Part III's thesis, and the reason its detractors underrate it: Michael spends the film trying to buy his way into a legitimate world that turns out to be more corrupt than the one he came from, and less honest about it.
Zasa is a thug and looks like one. Altobello is a killer with beautiful manners. Lucchesi has never held a gun and has more blood on him than either. The Church takes Michael's $600 million and murders its own Pope over it.
Michael's line in the confessional — that he is beyond redemption — is the film's answer to its own question. There was no clean place to go. There never was one. See Part III Reassessed.