Wednesday night at dinner with JG, SC, and Don Cardi, one of the subjects that came up was how lousy Weingardner's The Godfather Returns was, and how any one of us could have written a better sequel.

Don Cardi also mentioned that he had once written about ten pages of a sequel, told from the POV of the Tattaglia Family, which I thought was a rather interesting idea.

Anyway, I decided to put the "any one of us can do better" theory to the test.

What I've written here is the beginning of a sequel. Maybe it'll wind up being a novel (I doubt that very much. I have 2,000 words here; I'll need about 200,000 to fill an entire book. Besides, after Weingardner's bomb, who'd publish it or buy it?), maybe a "longish" short story (more likely), or perhaps (most likely), this will be as far as I go with it.

I've tried to do a few things here besides introduce the characters and give some backround to the story: This is intended as a sequel to both the original novel and the first two films of the trilogy. If completed, it will span at least some of the time period between the end of GF II and the beginning of GF III. I also wanted to tie up some of the loose ends and inconsistencies left over from both the book and films, and also capture the writing style of Mario Puzo, to the extent that such a thing is possible.

So, here 'ya go. Like anyone else, I love praise, but constructive criticism will also be appreciated (I know I may have some problems with the timeline, for example).

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Rocco Lampone lay in his hospital bed, his bullet-ridden body close to death.

Out side the door, waiting to question him, were agents of the F.B.I., anxious to learn the details of his participation in the assassination plot against the gangster, Hyman Roth, at Miami’s International Airport that morning, and hoping that Lampone would live long enough to make a statement implicating Michael Corleone, the head of the American Cosa Nostra, about which, at that time, very little was known.

Attached to intravenous feeding tubes with the huge doses of morphine he was receiving made almost unnecessary by his lapses in and out of consciousness, the doctors had held out little hope for Lampone’s survival. But Lampone was the highest ranking member of the Corleone family ever to be taken into custody – of higher rank, even, than the Underboss Frankie Pentangeli, who had cut his wrists in his bathtub one evening that very same week and quietly bled to death while his guards innocently played hearts outside the bathroom door – and the agents waiting outside his hospital room were under strict orders from no less than J. Edgar Hoover himself to attempt to obtain a statement from Lampone in the unlikely event that it should become possible to do so.

And so the F.B.I. agents, duty-bound and following the strict orders given them only hours before, waited hopefully for Rocco Lampone to regain consciousness. If and when he did, when the questioning was over and Lampone, loyal to the very end, had told the emissaries of Hoover nothing, he would learn that he had but one regret: That because of his personal misfortune despite his success in the murder of Hyman Roth, his confinement to his hospital bed had caused him to miss the funeral of Fredo Corleone.

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Michael Corleone stood at the window, watching as Albert Neri expertly maneuvered the small motorboat, docking it just outside the boathouse of the Corleone estate on Lake Tahoe, Nevada.

He watched as Neri climbed from the boat onto the dock, taking with him the fishing gear belonging to both himself and Fredo Corleone. Standing on the dock, Neri looked towards the boathouse and saw the familiar figure of Michael Corleone standing impassively at the window, watching to make sure that only he, Neri, had returned.

Slowly, almost sadly, he walked to the boathouse to report on the details of the act of murder he had just committed: That of Michael’s older and only remaining brother.

Michael turned from the window before Neri entered the boathouse.

"It was something that had to be done, Al. "
“I know, Michael. I’ve never questioned your judgment.”
“Are you prepared to speak to Connie?” Michael asked. “She’ll want the details”.
“Just as we talked about” Neri replied. “That Fredo stood up in the boat, lost his balance, and fell in the lake. How I jumped in to try and save him, and how he almost drowned us both by holding on and almost pulling me down with him. Connie knows he didn’t know how to swim.”
“She won’t believe it at first, you know” Michael said. “She’ll see right through that story. But she’ll make herself believe it, she’ll want to believe it. She’ll have no choice. Without me, she has nothing.”
“I know” said Neri. “You have everything figured perfectly, just as you always do.”

Michael seemed to pay no attention to Neri’s last remark, as he thought it gratuitous. This was business, and he considered such compliments to be unnecessary.

“Remember the rest of the plan”. Michael was all seriousness, as he always was now. He couldn’t remember the last time he had laughed, or even smiled. Sometimes it seemed as though it had been years.

“Go change your clothes. Make sure that what you’re wearing now gets good and wet when you take your shower. Not even Tom knows what really just happened out on the lake, so be prepared for him to be surprised, too, when he gets back from Las Vegas. We’ll wait for Tom, and after you’re dressed the three of us will go and talk to my sister together. I think I’ll let her make all of the arrangements for the funeral.”

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It was late afternoon when Tom Hagen returned to his rooms in The Tropicalla Hotel in Las Vegas.

Hagen’s suite was small, and although well appointed, bore no resemblance to some of the better accommodations in the hotel. The Tropicalla was the most luxurious of the four Corleone Family-owned properties in Las Vegas, and the better suites were reserved mostly for the “High Rollers”, those casino customers who thought nothing of betting thousands of dollars at a blackjack table on the turn of a single card or on one roll of the dice at a craps table.

Although in his role as the Corleone Family attorney Hagen was rarely involved in the gambling end of the business, he was still amazed at the mentality of the gambler. How they were willing to go against the odds and percentages that always favored the house, and so willingly lost huge sums of money, almost as if they desired and wished to do so.

Hagen slowly removed his tie, then his jacket. He was more tired than hungry, and decided to order dinner from room service. Today had been a full day: Visiting the counting rooms – rooms in which technically he should not have been permitted to enter – of all four casinos in the morning, and then appearing that afternoon at a hearing before the Licensing Commission to represent a family-sponsored applicant for an important management position at one of the casinos who had brought in especially from Cuba at great expense and who happened to have a criminal record in the United States.

He placed his room service order, and then walked out onto the terrace of his suite. In front of him lay the city of Las Vegas, already one of the fastest growing in the entire country. In addition to the four hotels they already owned, the Corleone Family had an interest in the construction of at least five more, already begun or still in their planning stages.

It was a time of unsurpassed prosperity and success, financial and otherwise, for the family. In a final meeting before leaving for Las Vegas, Hagen had discussed with Michael Corleone, Rocco Lampone, and Al Neri, the elimination of Michael’s last remaining real enemy, the ancient Hyman Roth. Indeed, he had read in the newspaper that very morning how Roth had been killed in Miami’s airport by "an as yet unidentified gunman". He didn’t need to know the details. It was enough to know that Rocco Lampone was behind it. And Hagen himself had been instrumental in convincing Frankie Pentangeli that suicide was the honorable way out, just as it had been in the times of ancient Rome, when, as he had put it, “a plot against the emperor failed.”

Hagen should have been happy. He should have been at peace with himself. He had his wife, he had his children, he had his mistress. The Corleone Family was moving slowly towards total legitimacy in the casino and real estate business in Nevada.

He should have been happy, but he wasn’t. His instincts told him that something was happening – perhaps that very day – that was wrong. He wasn’t sure what it was, or that he even wanted to know yet. But he knew that it was something terrible. He just didn’t know what it was.

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Lucy Mancini sat in her living room in a residential section of the growing city, wrestling with the same problem that had been bothering her more than ever for the past three months, ever since she had agreed to marry Dr. Jules Segal.

It was the same problem that she had been unable to resolve since moving to Las Vegas some seven years before, at the behest of the Corleone Family, after the murder of her married lover, Sonny Corleone, the oldest son of Don Vito Corleone.

Her problem was a simple one, the solution, however, not so: How to tell her fiancée about her illegitimate son Vincent, and how to tell her benefactor and protector, Michael Corleone, about the nephew he had never met.

It had been easy at the beginning. Lucy’s family was from Chicago, and she had come east to go to college, where she had met and become best friends with Connie Corleone, Michael's younger sister. She knew she was pregnant before Sonny’s death, but Sonny had wanted her to have the baby. Knowing the dangers in the life he lived, Sonny had secretly made provisions for her in his will, and after his murder she told the Corleones that she needed to go back to Chicago to be with her family.

She stayed with them for more than a year, giving birth to a boy who she named Vincent, and had planned to stay longer, when she received a message from Tom Hagen, offering her the opportunity to relocate to Las Vegas and begin her life anew.

Lucy had always found the weather in Chicago to be disagreeable, and when she received the offer from Hagen she was torn between staying in Chicago and raising the baby who no one in the Corleone family knew about, and moving out west. It was her older sister Theresa who finally provided the solution to her problem. Theresa, married for several years but unable to conceive a child of her own, offered, along with her husband, to raise Vincent as their son until such time that he was old enough to be told and understand the conditions of his birth. Under no circumstances, they assured her, would it ever be kept from Vincent who is mother and father really were.

Finally she decided to leave Vincent in the care of her sister and brother-in-law, and move to Las Vegas. She started there by managing the gift shop in one of the Corleone hotels, and now, seven years later, was responsible for all of the shops in all four hotels. Two or three times a year she visited her family in Chicago and saw Vincent, and her problem was compounded further by the fact that Vincent, now eight years old, was rapidly approaching the age at which he had to be told the truth. From the time he was a toddler, Vincent had been told that it was “Aunt Lucy” who was really his mother, but all he had been told about his father was that he had died shortly before Vincent was born.

Now, with her wedding only three weeks away, Lucy felt that the time had come to make a clean breast of things and expose the secret she had been keeping inside for all of these years. Certainly, Jules must be told that she had a son. And Michael certainly should be told as well.

And Vincent, of course, who even at the young age of eight was already showing the signs of the murderous temper he had inherited from his father, needed to be told that his father was none other than the legendary gangster from the 1940s, Santino Corleone.

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Willi Cicci was in his hotel room packing. It was amazing, he thought, how meager his possessions were. A life of crime spanning nearly twenty of his forty years, and now everything he owned could be fit into one suitcase.

Cicci had started out as a soldier in the Corleone family in the regime of the Capo , Peter Clemenza. He had quickly risen through the ranks, making a name and reputation for himself during the Five Families War which had begun in 1946 and culminated in total victory for Michael Corleone. By the war’s end, he was a trusted member of the family, and had even been selected to carry out the murder of the trusted, but ultimately traitorous, Sal Tessio.

After that day, his position in the family was assured. He served faithfully under Clemenza, heading his own crew of ferocious killers and reporting directly to Clemenza’s Underboss, Frankie Pentangeli. When Clemenza was found dead in his driveway one morning, in front of the very same house that once belonged to Don Vito Corleone himself and was now his, Cicci suspected foul play. Although the autopsy ruling was a heart attack, and although there were no bullet wounds or blood, Cicci knew that somehow, in some way, Clemenza’s enemies, the Rosato brothers, were behind it. Payoffs had been made, doctors had been bought, and, as Willi was fond of saying, “That was no heart attack.”

With Clemenza’s death, Pentangeli had taken over the New York operations of the Corleone Family, and Cicci had risen to the position of consigliere. The old man Pentangeli liked Willi – he reminded him of an old-timer from the good old days, and despite his outward appearance and demeanor, that of a brutish man possesssed of limited intelligence, Willi Cicci and Frankie Pentangeli had always shared the private joke that between the two of them, Willi was really the one with the brains.

It had always been assumed that it would be Willi Cicci who would take over the New York operations of the Corleone Family upon the death of Pentangeli, and Cicci was patient and happy in the knowledge that his future was assured, until the day of the shootout with the Rosatos outside Richie’s Bar. Taken into custody by New York City detectives, and with his Padrone Frankie Pentangeli murdered, or so he thought, on the orders of Michael Corleone, Cicci saw no way out of a life of imprisonment except by accepting the deal that was now offered to him by the United States Government:

Agree to testify against Michael Corleone at a Senate hearing investigating organized crime in America, and, in exchange, receive immunity from all prosecution along with a new identity and relocation in the government’s newly-formed Witness Protection Program.

Now in Washington, D.C., his testimony completed, Willi Cicci was packing his lone suitcase and preparing, under escort by the two F.B.I agents who had been his constant companions for the past several months, for a final meeting at The United States Justice Department at which he would learn his new name.

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