Was it ever Vito’s dream to become “legitimate†like Michael?
No. Vito's hope for Michael's legitimacy ("Senator Corleone...Governor Corleone...") was based on Michael's prospects before the Sol-and-Mac shootings. He would have been a college grad, possibly a lawyer, with no criminal record or Mafia notoriety. Some here have compared Michael to JFK, in that JFK's father's notoriety didn't hinder his political career, while his father's money and influence were major assets in JFK's campaigns. But Vito was uneducated, probably not even officially a US citizen, and was identified as a major Mob boss. Didn't matter to Vito: he derived his legitimacy through his position as "justice dispenser" to his fellow Sicilian immigrants.
This is also an important question. Would it be possible at all for a mob boss like Michael to reach the level of wealth and pseudo legitimacy in America like he did in Godfather 3?
Yes. Moe Dalitz, a major Prohibition-era gangster who was head of Cleveland's Mayfield Road rum-running gang (the "Lakeville Road boys" in GFII), started going legit in the laundry business, won commendations as a laundry officer in the Army in WWII, then moved to Vegas in '47, where he built the Desert Inn, the Stardust and the Sundance hotel-casinos; financed and ran the re-election campaign of Sen. Pat McCarren (Senator Geary in GFII), Sunrise Hospital, the Las Vegas Country Club and the Las Vegas Convention Center. Dalitz, not Wayne Newton or Liberace, was known as "Mr. Las Vegas." Dalitz was named Humanitarian of the Year by the American Cancer Research Center and Hospital in 1976. In 1982 he received the Torch of Liberty Award by the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith.
