Who is vito andolini

Shortly after that, the Don came for Vito, fearing the boy would surely swear revenge as well. Desperate to save their last surviving son, Antonio's widow held the Don at knifepoint, buying time for Vito to escape before she was also killed. Eventually, an adult Vito did return to Corleone and avenge his family by personally killing the Don and all who participated in their murders.

Antonio was known to be a stubborn, hot-headed, yet loving individual much like his grandson Santino. However it was these traits that got him killed, something that his son took note of and avoided during his own life. In the novel , Andolini does not refuse a tribute to Don Ciccio who isn't named , but actually kills him in a public struggle before being killed the following day by the chieftain's guards, wielding luparas.

The Godfather Wiki Explore. Films Books Games. Antonio Andolini, and this is for you Don Ciccio. In , his father, Antonio was murdered by a Sicilian Mafia boss named Don Ciccio because he refused to pay tribute to him. Desperate, Signora Andolini took her son to see the Mafia chieftain herself.

When she went to see Don Ciccio, she begged for forgiveness, but Don Ciccio refused, reasoning that the younger boy Vito would also seek revenge as an adult.

Later that night, he was smuggled away, fleeing Sicily to seek refuge in America on a cargo ship full of immigrants. Unable to speak English, he was renamed on Ellis Islandas Vito Corleone when the immigration clerks saw the tag pinned to his clothes labelled " Vito Andolini from Corleone ". Do me this favor. Ask your friends in the neighborhood about me. Vito was later adopted by the Abbandando family in New York, and he befriended Genco Abbandando, who became like a brother to him. When he was eighteen, Vito married and started a family.

Vito asked his friends to leave everything in his hands to convince Fanucci to accept less money, telling his friends "I'm going to make him an offer he can't refuse". Fanucci is impressed with Vito's courage, and offered him work. Vito interpreted his ability to low-ball Fanucci as a sign of the latter's weakness, thus confirming his suspicion of Fanucci's vulnerability.

Vito then allowed Fanucci to leave the building, so witnesses could confirm that he left alive. Vito had chosen the day of a major festival to spy on and follow Fanucci from the rooftops as Fanucci went home, and surprised him at the door to his apartment. He shot Fanucci three times with a muffled pistol, as the din from the festival and the towel Vito had wrapped the muzzle of his pistol in drowned out the noise from the gunshots.

After the hit, Vito retrieved the money Fanucci had taken earlier in the day and then destroyed the gun, dismantling it and dropping it down vent pipes of the apartment building. Despite all the precautions he had taken to ensure that he wouldn't be suspected, it turned out that the police thought Fanucci was scum and were in no hurry to find his killer, believing it was a routine gangland execution.

With Fanucci dead, Vito earned the respect of the neighborhood, becoming known as a "Man of Respect" in the neighborhood, and was soon asked to intercede in local disputes, gaining a reputation for never turning down someone who came to him for help and for being able to "reason" with "unreasonable" people.

Vito, Clemenza and Tessio eventually took over the neighborhood, treating it with a great deal more respect than Fanucci did. With the profits he was gaining, Vito started an olive oil importation business, Genco Pura , with his old friend Genco Abbandando.

The company eventually becomes the biggest olive oil importer in the nation, thanks to Vito's "reasoning" with store owners. While a excellent moneymaker in its own right, in the later years he used it as a legal front for his growing organized crime syndicate , while amassing a fortune with its illegal operations, which started during Prohibition , when he used his olive oil trucks to smuggle alcohol in from Canada.

Vito soon started to protect small neighborhood speakeasies, learning early the value of political protection. In , Vito returned to Sicily for the first time since leaving 21 years earlier, taking his wife and three children, Santino, Fredo and Michael , then an infant.

They toured the countryside, taking in the local culture, eating at family banquets and finally visiting the town of Corleone. Vito also quietly located and killed the thugs who Don Ciccio had sent to kill him as a child during his exodus from Sicily. He and his partner, Tommasino then set up a meeting with the aging Don Ciccio under the pretense of gaining his blessing for the olive oil business.

When the nearly-deaf Ciccio asked that Vito approach him, Vito reveals his father's name and his birth name right before stabbing and slashing the old don in the chest, avenging his murdered family. As they retreat, Ciccio's guards open fire, hitting Tommasino, paralyzing him for life. Vito manages to get Tommasino and himself into their car and they escape. Vito and his family soon after depart Sicily. By the early s , Vito Corleone had established the Corleone family along with old friends Peter Clemenza and Salvatore Tessio , who would become his caporegimes.

Genco Abbandando would become the first consigliere of the family. By this time, everyone, even his closest friends, were referring to him respectfully as "Don Corleone" or "The Godfather". He soon intervened in a problem involving a dangerous thug named Luca Brasi , making the man his personal enforcer.

During the Great Depression , when most people demeaned themselves to make mere pennies a day, Don Corleone offered good-paying, secure jobs to anyone willing to work for him. Anyone who came to him for help, Don Corleone helped with goodwill and encouraging words. He planned for the future by financing the education and careers of bright young neighborhood boys who would soon become lawyers, assistant DA's, even judges.

Large numbers of grateful Italians asked his advice on who to vote for in office elections, giving him a great deal of political power. He even hired a lawyer to organize a system of police payoffs, and insisted on paying as many officers as possible, whether they were needed at the moment or not. When Prohibition ended, a large source of the Mafia's revenue was gone.

Don Corleone decided to offer a partnership with Salvatore Maranzano , the big shot gang leader who controlled all the gambling in Manhattan. Vito offered a political umbrella which would help Maranzano expand his rackets into new areas, and Vito would get a share of the profits.

However, the short-sighted and short-tempered Maranzano, thinking that Vito was trying to forcibly buy him out, declared war on the "upstart" Corleone, touching off the Olive Oil War.

When the war started, it seemed that Maranzano had the upper hand, with business contacts, and alliances with the Tattaglia family and Al Capone in Chicago. However, the Corleones were far better organized, had far greater intelligence contacts, had greater political power and police protection, and had deceived Maranzano into believing that Tessio's operation in Brooklyn was a separate gang. The War turned into a stalemate until Maranzano called on Al Capone to send his two best gunmen after Vito.

Thanks to their contacts in the telegraph business the Corleones learned of this early on, and Don Corleone sent his enforcer Luca Brasi to intercept and eliminate the hitmen in a most horrifying fashion. Brasi and several men abducted the two hitmen, drove to a warehouse, tied them up, and Luca personally hacked one of the men to pieces with an axe, while the other swallowed his gag in terror and suffocated.

Vito sent a letter to Capone a few days later, the message being clear: you can either join me, or else stay out of my way. Not wanting to lose any more valuable men, Capone decided to remain neutral. The incident was a turning point in the War; Maranzano had severely underestimated just how powerful and crafty the Corleone family really was, and was soon losing soldiers who had lost faith in his ability to win.

While Clemenza's regime hacked away at Maranzano's power structure and in the process gaining loyalty of the unions who had been oppressed by Maranzano's thugs , Vito then sent in the held-back Tessio regime for the deathblow.

By New Year's Eve , the Corleones eliminated Maranzano and his empire, and established themselves as the most powerful of the families in New York. While he oversaw a business founded on gambling, bootlegging, and murder, he was known as a kind, generous man who lived by a strict moral code of loyalty to friends and, above all, family.

He tried to spread these values throughout the New York crime world; he disagreed with many of the vicious crimes carried out by gangs and so sought to control crime in New York by either consuming or eliminating rival gangs. Known as the Pacification of New York , the area of the city was left under the control of Five Families. He also disapproved of hard drugs, such as those peddled by his fellow Don, Philip Tattaglia , which led to a deep resentment between the two that would continue for years.

A straitlaced man concerning sexual matters, he also held himself above prostitution, another reason for his intense dislike of Tattaglia, whose primary business was prostitution. Don Corleone was also said to be able to find multiple profits and opportunities in everything.

An example of this occurred when his daughter Connie became engaged to a friend of her brother's, a hoodlum from Nevada named Carlo Rizzi. The Don sent several men on his payroll to Nevada to learn about Rizzi, and came back with information regarding legalized gambling there, which the Corleone family capitalized on in the years to come. By this time, he was married with four children, and had several godchildren as well, including big-time singer and actor Johnny Fontane , as well as Nino Valenti.

He also agreed, at the urging of his eldest son Santino, to take in the orphan Tom Hagen , and though he treated him like a son, he never officially adopted him out of respect for Tom's parents. While he loved all of them, he was most proud of Michael , an intelligent college graduate who's future the Don had "special plans" for. Unfortunately Michael and everyone else assumed these "plans" as involving the "family business", and often defied his father, enlisting in the Marine corps against his father's wishes and becoming a decorated World War II veteran.

In actuality, Don Corleone had wished for a life away from the "family business" for his son, for him to gain power publicly and legitimately, like a governor or senator.