Because of Vito's preferences and the disdain he had for Tattaglia I doubt the Corleones were directly involved in prostitution but as we see by the time of Michael's ascent that probably was no longer the case.
Yea that would make sense when Michael took over that he would go against some of his fathers ways for money.
I don't get that impression at all. Even though Michael's attempts were doomed, his quest was for legitimacy. The Corleone *crime* family made up only a portion of the Corleone Family's operations by the time they made the move to Nevada. I think it is very strongly suggested in the Part 1 (it's been years since I read the book) that all the plans to move into casinos and hotels had been planned by Michael *and* Vito. As I said in my post on another thread, I think Vito was plotting the move away from organized crime even before Michael returned from Sicily. In the second to last scene of Vito's, when he is warning Michael of how to identify the traitor, Vito makes it clear that he had wanted something different for Michael, and the way it is said suggests that Vito must have been planning for years to legitimize the Corleone family.
In Parts 2 and 3, it's clear that the Corleone Family has already split into two pieces; with Clemenza, and later Frank Pentangeli and much later Joey Zasa running the Corleone crime family in New York, certainly with a nod to Michael, maybe even a cut of the action, but largely independent of Michael.
My theory was that Michael's intent, once he was certain that Vincent Mancini had the brains to run the criminal half of the family, was to permanently divide the family into two pieces. Vincent would succeed Zasa as head of the Corleone crime family, and Michael would hand his children a vast and completely legitimate real estate empire, that the Corleone family would, as it stated in Part 3, be washed clean. Handing of control to Vincent at the time he did was Michael giving his approval for the murders, without ever having to give the orders, so that he would never again be placed in a position like he was during the Senate hearings.
That being the case, I don't think Michael ever had any interest in profiting from crime. He wanted to fulfill his and his father's dream of legitimizing the Corleone family. And that is, to some extent, what I think made both Vito and Michael different from their peers, and even from Sonny and Tom. For Vito and Michael, organized crime was a means to an end, and not the end itself. The end itself was a legitimate business empire, a sort of Italian-American version of the Kennedy, Rockefeller and Carnegie families, shady or controversial pasts to one extent or another, but now fully legitimized, with even wealthy foundations like the Corleone Foundation, to dole out money to further legitimize the families and wash away their darker pasts.
I'm sure if Michael's plan had come to fruition, there would be have been a Governor Corleone, a Senator Corleone, who knows, maybe even a President Corleone. This was obviously Vito's dreams from his earliest days. For him, being a crime boss was a only a few rungs on the ladder to the very pinnacle of the American Dream.
