Sicilian Town Of Corleone Had Long, Bloody Past Before "Godfather" Fame

Back in 1975 I was a student of crime, an aspiring crime writer and a sailor stationed on a U.S. Navy tugboat at the American nuclear submarine base at Holy Loch, Scotland.

Undecided if I wanted to go home to the USA or stay in the Navy and get stationed in Italy, I visited Naples, Italy and Palermo, Sicily before I made my decision.

Being half-Italian on my mother's side, I wanted to see where the Guardino clan came from in Sicily. And having read Mario Puzo's The Godfather several times and having seen Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather and The Godfather, Part Two films several times, I simply had to visit the Sicilian town of Corleone.

I spent a day in Corleone, a quaint and quiet town that belies its' rich history of blood, murder and organized crime. Corleone is the town where The Godfather’s fictional Vito Corleone came from, and Corleone was also the town where true-life Cosa Nostra bosses, such as Salvatore "Toto" Riina, also came from.

I enjoyed my time in Naples, Palermo and Corleone, but I decided to leave the Navy and go home.

The San Francisco Chronicle offers a piece on today’s Corleone.

CORLEONE, Sicily (AP) — Corleone is a Sicilian medieval hill town whose bloody past began generations before "The Godfather" novels and films borrowed its name for a fictional Mafia don.

It is the birthplace of several convicted real-life Mafia bosses, among them Salvatore "Toto" Riina, the reputed "boss of bosses," who died Friday at 87 in a prison ward of a northern Italian hospital.

Corleone has witnessed recent signs of rebellion against an entrenched Mafia culture where religious pageants pay tribute to reigning mob bosses, with processions stopping outside the dons' homes.

A town square is named after two top anti-Mafia magistrates slain by Cosa Nostra bombings in 1992. Inaugurated in 2000, an anti-Mafia museum, together with the International Center for Anti-Mafia documentation, also educates visitors about the fallen heroes in the war against the Sicilian crime syndicate.

When native son Riina was arrested in 1993 in Palermo, schoolchildren ran into Corleone's streets in joy, rallying behind a banner that read "Finally" — their jubilation a reflection of a new and burgeoning resistance to the Mafia by a younger generation of Sicilians.

But the Mafia's grip on the town isn't easily removed.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.sfchronicle.com/news/crime/article/Sicilian-town-had-long-bloody-past-before-12365820.php#photo-14564371 

Long-Hidden Dashiell Hammett Stories Reveal Another Side

Eddie Muller at the San Franciso Chronicle looks at the new book of stories by Dashiell Hammett.

“When Samuel Spade knocked on the door it swung open far enough to let him see the mutilated dead face of a woman.”

Read more here: http://www.kansascity.com/2013/11/21/4639400/long-hidden-dashiell-hammett-stories.html#storylink=cpy

That’s the opening line of “A Knife Will Cut for Anybody,” the thin slice of a never-completed novel that will draw readers to this collection of previously unpublished stories by Dashiell Hammett, creator of Sam Spade and the sire of modern crime fiction. For aficionados of the genre, the unearthing of new Hammett stories is akin to Christians discovering an epilogue to the New Testament.
Although “The Hunter and Other Stories” contains many revelations, few of them — the above line one juicy exception — are of the hard-boiled variety that forged Hammett’s reputation.

In fact, this collection, compiled and edited by Hammett scholars Richard Layman and Julie M. Rivett (the author’s granddaughter), presents compelling evidence that the writer longed to shed the constraints that came with that reputation. Some of these stories are among Hammett’s best, yet they were summarily rejected by editors craving more of the violent action and snappy patter that made the creator of “The Maltese Falcon” and “The Thin Man” a household name.

You can read the rest of the piece via the below link:

http://www.kansascity.com/2013/11/21/4639400/long-hidden-dashiell-hammett-stories.html