In The Godfather's most violent scene, Sonny Corleone is ambushed at a toll booth on the causeway that connects Long Beach with Long Island and New York City. The story was fiction. The place is real. We passed this toll booth every Sunday when we drove to visit my grandmother at her summer home in Long Beach, a very real place with very real Mafia connections. The ambush was, of course, completely fictional. As my "uncle" Louie "The Greek" recalled, Long Beach, along with neighboring Point Lookout, was a demilitarized zone. It was where the Dons lived and they kept their business separate from their families. Long Beach was in Nassau County outside the jurisdiction of New York City where the Dons had their "businesses."
My grandmother was the daughter of an Irish immigrant who started a carting business and parlayed it into trading iron and steel. As his wealth grew, he moved from the waterfront and the Five Points area in lower Manhattan to Carnegie Hill. He outlived three wives and had children by all of them. When he was gone, my grandmother inherited the Carnegie Hill brownstone and for some reason decided to build a large, three-story summer home at Long Beach, much to the dismay of her older sisters, an unlikely extravagance since all the sisters were devoted to financially supporting nuns and priests doing missionary work in faraway lands. Unfortunately, the builder built other homes with most of the money she gave him and went bankrupt before he finished my grandmother's. She was completely undaunted. To entertain herself and to further her teaching career, she'd allegedly taken courses in shop (carpentry, etc.) at Columbia Teachers College. She rounded up Long Beach's unemployed men, taught them what to do and finished the house. It was such a good job that you wonder where my grandmother's talent for organizing things left off and my father's talent for storytelling took over: 276 E. Beech Street, judge for yourself.
My grandmother's older sister Margaret was a leader of the Silk Stocking District Republicans. This was very puzzling to me since as long as I could remember my grandfather was a proud supporter of Bob Wagner and Tammany Hall. My father explained his Aunt Margaret by saying Republicans aren't all bad and were very good for commerce, which of course was important to everyone especially Aunt Margaret's side of the family. Her brand of Republican was different from the anti-immigrant crowd then and now. Her partner in "crime" was Ken Simpson a rising Progressive star, unknown today because his flame burned out too soon when he suffered a fatal heart attack during his first week in the U.S. Congress. Aunt Margaret's protégé was a young man named Tom Dewey. Aunt Margaret and my grandfather were the model of political cooperation. They traded favors primarily jobs, which were hard to come by during the Depression. One was Mr. Katz. Grandpa laid out a compelling case for Aunt Margaret to find Mr. Katz a position. He was a family man with a lot of mouths to feed. After he'd been placed and it was discovered Mr. Katz had no family. Aunt Margaret confronted Grandpa: "James, Mr. Katz has no kittens." Not to worry, James's good friend Wagner was available to help Aunt Margaret's boy Tom find a job as a federal prosecutor.
If you like conspiracy theories you can read into this that the choice of Dewey was no accident and that Grandpa had a score to settle with people who needed to learn a thing or two about conducting themselves, and that Irish Democrats were strongly invested in having someone not a party to the feud deliver the message. And it came to pass that Lucky Luciano, protégé of Arnold Rothstein, and head of the Mafia in the USA soon enough found himself in court facing Aunt Margaret's protégé, Tom Dewey. Mr. Luciano was defended by a bright young lawyer named Lorenzo Carlino, Republican political leader of Long Beach, New York. Now you know where Mario Puzo's Godfather, Don Corleone, actually came from.
