Olive Oil King: Joe Profaci, the Original Godfather, and the Birth of the Colombo Family

Summary

The epic true story of the first Godfather who built an olive oil industry and ruled the New York underworld with a cold-blooded drive that made him a legend …

Ruthless Giuseppe "Joe" Profaci was hardwired to run an empire. Within a few years after emigrating to America at the age of twenty-five, he was a charter Godfather of one of the Five Families of New York and transformed himself into the Olive Oil King, running a product pipeline from his birthplace of Villabate, Sicily, to kitchens across the country—a front so successful it inspired Vito Corleone's Genco Pura Olive Oil in The Godfather. But Joe's greed would erode a smooth machine into a corpse-strewn battlefield of escalating Mob wars and the eventual birth of the Colombo crime family.

This is the first-ever biography of a founder of the modern American Mafia, whom Robert F. Kennedy called "one of the most powerful underworld figures in the United States." And the least known. Until now. Here is Profaci's legendary three-decade reign that began with the post-Prohibition monopoly of rackets as well as authentic industry ventures and the profitable capitalization of illegitimate enterprises. The violent retaliation against Profaci by the betrayed Gallo brothers that devastated organized crime. And the eventual transition and takeover by the Profaci family's top enforcer, Joe Colombo.

With an introduction by Gianni Russo—aka Carlo Rizzi in The Godfather—who would parlay the fictional Corleone Genco line into a thriving real-life business of his own, this is the twisting, violent, and gripping story of Joe Profaci, the business, and the internecine wars that defined him and his blood-soaked legacy.