One of the joys of GF is the ingenious and compressed lesson in justice that Vito gives Bonasera in the opening scene. Vito bridles over being asked to “do murder for money.” “I ask you for justice,” Bonasera replies. “That is not justice—your daughter is still alive,” says Vito, perhaps implying that he lived by a code based in the Biblical “eye for eye, tooth for tooth,” and its modern equivalent, “let the punishment fit the crime.” At the end of the scene, he tells Bonasera, “…accept this justice as a gift on my daughter’s wedding day.” Any Sicilian-born person of Bonasera’s generation would understand that “justice” isn’t a right conferred by law or government, but a gift from someone who has the power to grant justice. Now Vito made Bonasera understand that, in matters of official “justice,” the America that he believed in wasn’t any different than Sicily.
As if to cap his code of ethics, Vito tells Tom, “We’re not murderers.” In GF, we never see Vito order a murder, much less commit one with his own hands. The beating of the two punks was tit-for-tat for their beating of Bonasera’s daughter. Beheading Khartoum was a disgusting act of animal cruelty, but Khartoum was a surrogate for Woltz, who was hardly an upstanding character. Vito had to know that Carlo was responsible for Sonny’s assassination, but he evidently couldn’t bring himself to retaliate against his daughter’s husband. Young Vito did murder Fanucci, and it wasn’t, technically, a kill-or-be-killed situation. But Fanucci had already callously impoverished and potentially starved Vito and his family by forcing Sr. Abbandando to replace Vito with Fanucci’s nephew; and the alternative was for Vito to pay off Fanucci after he risked life and liberty in the dress factory holdup. He returned to Sicily to whack Don Ciccio and his two henchmen. That was vengeance, not survival, but it was proportional to their crimes: they had killed his father, mother and brother, and would have killed him if he hadn’t escaped. (In the novel, Vito does order the killing of Maranzano [sic] and two Capone gunmen, but those were definitely in self-defense.)
I’m not trying to romanticize Vito, who was first, last and always a gangster, and undoubtedly ordered plenty of murders and other mayhem on his way up and even in his maturity, I’m just commenting on how he was portrayed: someone who seemed to have applied a concept of “justice” and “proportion” when engaging in violence.
Contrast Vito’s “we’re not murderers,” with Michael’s “I don’t want to kill everyone, Tom-—just my enemies.” Lotta enemies, then. It’s not easy to total the number of killings Michael ordered after he got his own hands bloody with McCluskey and Sollozzo. Some-—many--of them might have qualified under Vito’s code of “justice” and “proportion”; or kill or be killed, considering the business he’d chosen. Other killings were questionable and were the kind of pure vengeance that Vito had chided Bonasera over (were Roth and Pentangeli dangerous to Michael at that point? And, while Kleinzig and Gilday were enemies, did they deserve to die?). Some were bystanders, like Barzini’s chauffeur, the hooker with Tattaglia, and the passenger and elevator operator during the Great Massacre of 1955, as well as Senator Geary's bedmate, whose death was a means to an end: blackmailing Geary. In comparison with Vito, Michael seemed to have few scruples when dealing out death: he was a regular murder machine.
