When Don Corleone’s personal enforcer Luca Brasi is introduced in the opening wedding sequence of The Godfather, he immediately strikes fear into the person who spots him. Both Kay and Michael are quick to regard him as a fearsome presence in the film. It’s clear just from looking at him that Brasi is someone capable of doing serious harm under the right (or wrong) circumstances.
There’s a reason he looks that way. Lenny Montana, the person playing Brasi, was a real-life enforcer for New York’s Colombo crime family. To get around Montana’s potential lack of acting ability, Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola filmed him rehearsing his lines and made it appear as though he was in character as Brasi, practicing a speech the enforcer was about to give to his master. As threatening as he looks, Brasi seems innocent enough in this scene, until Michael tells Kay – and the film’s audience – about the character’s backstory.
Luca Brasi Killed Six Men In Two Weeks During The “Olive Oil War” Before The Godfather
Brasi Proved His Credentials As An Enforcer By Committing A Mᴀssacre
The Brasi story that Michael tells on-screen in The Godfather relates to a Frank Sinatra pastiche named Johnny Fontaine. In order to have Fontaine released from his music contract, Michael’s father, Vito Corleone, took Brasi to see the bandleader the singer was contracted to. “Luca Brasi held a gun to his head,” Michael says, “and my father ᴀssured him that either his brains or his signature would be on the contract.” As shocked as Kay is by this story, it has nothing on the parts of Luca Brasi’s backstory which were left out of the movie.
In a key difference between The Godfather book and its film adaptation, the equivalent scene in Mario Puzo’s novel sees Michael divulge an even more sinister story to his girlfriend. “Some people wanted to take over my father’s oil importing business,” he explains. “Luca Brasi went after them,” Michael continues. “The story is that he killed six men in two weeks and that ended the famous olive oil war.” This anecdote paints Brasi not only as an enforcer but a bloodthirsty killer, for whom a human life is just as cheap as Vito Corleone needs it to be.
What Else The Godfather’s Book Reveals About Luca Brasi
His Awful Past Indicates Psychopathic Tendencies
Puzo’s portrayal of Brasi in the Godfather novel reveals far more disturbing details about his past than simply his prolific kill count, however. After all, the ability to kill several men in quick succession would be advantageous for any mob enforcer in The Godfather. But flashback accounts later in the novel reveal that Brasi is a special kind of villain with outwardly psychopathic tendencies.
“Take it down to the basement and throw it into the furnace.” – Luca Brasi in The Godfather novel
First, there is the tale of him hacking two of Al Capone’s gunmen to death with an ax. Then there is a story so depraved that it’s no wonder Coppola cut it out of his movie adaptation of The Godfather. While in Sicily, Michael Corleone meets an old woman called Filomena, who describes an unspeakable act she committed at Brasi’s insistence. She used to work as a birthing specialist in New York, and Brasi hired her to deliver the babies of mobsters born out of wedlock in secret. On one occasion, though, he asked for more than just a delivery.
Stories like Brasi hacking pieces of flesh off adversaries and burning his own baby alive in a furnace would have given Coppola’s Godfather the complexion of a horror movie, distracting from Michael Corleone’s dramatic transformation into the тιтular character. Even the mᴀssacre Brasi carried out during the “Olive Oil War” was too much bloodshed to mention in the film’s opening act. Brasi is better kept as a “scary” onscreen heavy whose worst crimes are left to the imagination. Nevertheless, his backstory sheds a terrifying spotlight on how he qualified to become Don Corleone’s personal hitman.
