Peter Clemenza is the perhaps the scariest member of the Corleone mafia family in The Godfather aside from Vito Corleone’s personal enforcer Luca Brasi. Clemenza is one of the Corleone family’s two caporegimes, the most senior members of the mob organization below the Don himself and his closest advisors.Clemenza plays a key role in the first Godfather movie, leading the hit job on all the leaders of the Five Families ordered by Michael Corleone. He also helped establish Vito Corleone’s crime business to begin with, as shown in the flashback sequences of The Godfather Part II.

It comes as a shock, then, that such an important character is said to have died before the main events of the second Godfather movie, without a proper explanation as to why. The truth of the matter is that Richard Castellano, the actor who played Clemenza in The Godfather, refused to appear in its sequel due to differences with Francis Ford Coppola over the size of his role and his acting fee. How Coppola and Mario Puzo explain Clemenza’s absence in the film itself, however, is a different story.

What Really Happened To Clemenza After The Godfather, According To The 2004 Sequel Novel

The Godfather Returns Describes His Death In Full

In a brief conversation during a party at the Corleone compound on Lake Tahoe, one of the main locations in The Godfather Part II, it’s mentioned briefly that Clemenza died of a heart attack in between the events of the two movies. “That was no heart attack,” Corleone enforcer Willi Cicci scoffs cryptically. We can infer from this remark that there were suspicious circumstances around Clemenza’s apparent fatal heart attack. Mark Winegardner’s sequel novel to the Godfather movie trilogy, The Godfather Returns, elaborates further on Cicci’s remark.

According to the story in Winegardner’s novel, Clemenza did have a fatal heart attack, having fallen onto a grill in the back room of a diner owned by an old friend. His death was no accident, though. As Winegardner puts it, “The prevailing rumor was that the men who said they pulled Clemenza from the grill had actually pushed him onto it, that they were trying to burn him up and along with it.” Clemenza was meant to die at the diner that night, just not in the exact manner he ended up going.

Winegardner claims that there’s no definitive evidence pointing to one particular suspect for Clemenza’s murder, but there were several high-profile gangsters in The Godfather trilogy who wanted him gone. Hyman Roth, the Jewish mobster who, according to a deleted scene in The Godfather Part II, had helped Clemenza start his criminal career, could have ordered his killing in an attempt to undermine the Corleone family as they negotiated with Roth for control of Cuba’s drugs and gambling trades.

It could also have been Louie Russo from Chicago’s mafia. But, most likely, the Rosato brothers, who infiltrated Clemenza’s branch of the Corleone mob on behalf of rival New York family the Tattaglia, killed him as retaliation for the caporegime’s hitjob on their previous don.

Clemenza’s Death Is More Sinister Because You Don’t See It In The Godfather Part II

The Mob Could Kill Off A Character That Important Without A Second Thought

Peter Clemenza’s death might have been an accidental plot point in The Godfather Part II, brought about by an actor’s refusal to sign his contract. Nevertheless, the way it’s handled in the movie underlines how truly terrifying the world of the mob could actually be. That such a significant character, and a scary mᴀss killer to boot, could be disposed of in two short lines of dialogue speculating on the nature of his death emphasizes what a morbid and precarious life these gangsters lead.

Clemenza was the Corleones’ ruthless henchman, capable of garroting Michael’s brother-in-law without a second thought upon his command in The Godfather. Yet he himself was ruthlessly removed from the story, with nothing left behind except a mystery swirling around his cause of death.