Married to the Mob

Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1.

Every time I hear about my dad, it's, oh, he's a killer. He's just straight evil.

I was becoming the bridge between Jeremy Scott and the son he'd never known.

At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer.

Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley Season 2 starting April 9th on the iHeart

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Raisin.com, where your money grows. For several weeks now, small groups of Italian-Americans have been picketing FBI headquarters in Manhattan

to protest the use of terms like mafia and gangster, which they regard as ethnic slurs. Today, the protest took on all the appearances of a full-fledged movement as thousands of demonstrators gathered near Central Park to celebrate Italian-American Unity Day.
In 1970, Joseph Colombo founded the Italian-American Civil Rights League.

You are organized! You are one! Nobody could take you apart anymore!

The group was formed to stamp out the stereotyping of Italian-Americans in motion pictures, television, and the government. Colombo had cast himself as an outspoken watchdog on behalf of his fellow Italian-Americans.
Italian-Americans face an insidious bias that comes from a mythical association with crime. The fact is that our more than 22 million Italian-Americans, only 5,000, a mere 1.50th of 1%, not a half, not a quarter, 1.50th of 1% are involved in organized crime.
Joe Colombo also happened to be allegedly the head of one of New York's most formidable mob families, and he had his sights set on shutting down the Godfather. I'm Mark Seal.
And I'm Nathan King. And this is Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli.
This episode takes us to the streets of New York City, where the powers of the mob come head-to-head with paramount movie makers. Mark, do you think anyone involved in the making of The Godfather expected the actual mafia to oppose the film? No, never.
You know, nobody thought that anybody would care about the movie, much less object to it. I mean, this was a fictional story about a fictional family, so who's going to care? But as it turns out, people really did object to it.
And when did that start, that pressure campaign?

It started almost from the beginning.

You know, Al Ruddy tells the story of he met with Mickey Cohen in the beginning,

who was the former associate of Bugsy Siegel, no less. And he invited Al Ruddy to lunch.

And according to Al, he said, the guys are watching you.

And Al Ruddy must have thought, what guys, you know?

And he said, Mickey, call off your dogs. This is a movie.
Who's going to care about it? But then strange things start happening. A mysterious man shows up in the office of Paramount, supposedly with a check for $1 million, which he would give them in exchange for dropping the picture.
Death threats became routine. Ruddy began keeping a .45 pistol in his desk.
He said he didn't know who the calls were from, but they were threatening him. And so people were getting paranoid.
But the most opposed group was the League. Can you tell us a bit about that? So in 1970, Joe Colombo founded the Italian American Civil Rights League.
It was a revival of the defunct Italian American Anti-Defamation League, but he wanted it to be bigger and more powerful. We got the opportunity to speak with Joe Colombo's grandson, Anthony Colombo Jr., who gave us some insights into what his grandfather's motivations may have been.
He says there are Italian-American organized criminals, but there are organized criminals in every ethnicity. And so the Justice Department has only labeled and stigmatized one ethnic community, an Italian-American community, and it's unfair.
And his goal was to largely help the Italian-American community by eliminating these stereotypes. It's interesting to hear from his grandson about the lasting legacy of the league, but I do think it was about more than combating stereotypes.
For Joe Colombo, this was personal. April of 1970, the FBI arrested his son and charged him with a scheme to melt down coins and sell the silver.
Colombo thought this was harassment, so he decided to get a group together and picket outside of FBI headquarters. And he accused the FBI of unfairly targeting not only his son, but all Italian-Americans.

And within a week, this new league was born.

Will you welcome, please, Mr. Joseph Colombo.
Thank you. In June of 1970, he hosted the first annual Unity Day,

which was a rally of 50,000 Italian-Americans stretched from Columbus Circle deep into Central Park. God, I was born of Italian birth.
It seems like a really unusual position for a mafia boss to take. What made him decide to put himself in the public eye in that way? It was very unusual, but Colombo was amassing political power while denying any affiliation to organized crime.
And it seemed like the sky was the limit. My grandfather met with Abe Rosenthal and told him, if you don't eliminate the word mafia, La Cosa Nostra, out of the New York Times, the papers aren't rolling.
Because they, remember, they had control of the unions. And so they had a stranglehold on New York.
And that was the power with which my grandfather influenced. Joe Colombo's league was suddenly rich with cash from donations and members across the city.
They decided to host this big benefit at Madison Square Garden, which was headlined by no less than Frank Sinatra. And what happened to Colombo's son who was arrested? He was acquitted after the chief witness suddenly recanted his statement.
How convenient. And now, emboldened by his success, he sets his sights on a more ambitious and far-reaching mission.
He's going to shape the way Italian-Americans are viewed in popular culture. Here's Anthony Colombo Jr.
again.

When Mario Puzo's book became a bestseller and was going to be made into a movie, there were efforts to combat that by my grandfather in the league. It's interesting that the very thing that ultimately made The Godfather a success, which is the interest of Italian-American audiences, is precisely what worked against it in the first place.
But, you know, nobody really understood what the movie was going to be except the people that were making the movie. So from the outside looking in, I'm sure that they felt it might be bad for the image of Italian-Americans.
It was a movie about a mafia family. And they didn't realize that ultimately it was going to glorify, you know, if anything.
So what efforts did the league take to put a stop to the movie? Well, it depends on who you ask. But Al Ruddy's assistant, Betty McCart, told me that the studio started getting threats.
How would the threats come in in the beginning? In the beginning, mostly by phone. And there was a man at Paramount who was the head of security, and he told Al that Al should be very careful because they were really after him.
And did it ever go beyond threats? Well, Al Ruddy became so paranoid that he and Betty would routinely swap cars to throw off any would-be trackers. And one night, while driving Ruddy's Vassal Vega convertible, Betty sees a car following her all the way home.
She runs inside to call the police, and later that night, shots ring out over the neighborhood. And my kids came in all hysterical.
They'd heard gunshots, and they went outside, and all the windows had been shot out of the Faso Vega, which was a warning, you know, to Al. Something unexpected happened after Jeremy Scott confessed to killing Michelle Schofield in Bone Valley Season 1.
I just knew him as a kid. Long, silent voices from his past came forward.
And he was just staring at me. And they had secrets of their own to share.
Um, Gilbert King, I'm the son of Jeremy Linscott. I was no longer just telling the story.
I was part of it. Every time I hear about my dad is, oh, he's a killer.
He's just straight evil. I was becoming the bridge between a killer and the son he'd never known.
If the cops and everything would have done their job properly, my dad would have been in jail. I would have never existed.
I never expected to find myself in this place. Now, I need to tell you how I got here.
At the end of the day, I'm literally a son of a killer. Bone Valley, Season 2.
Jeremy. Jeremy, I want to tell you something.
Listen to new episodes of Bone Valley Season 2 starting April 9th on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And to hear the entire new season ad-free with exclusive content starting April 9th, subscribe to Lava for Good Plus on Apple Podcasts.
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So these are a bit stronger than threats. They're actually taking action.
Well, yeah, but, you know, Ruddy apparently wasn't fazed by it. He and the rest of the crew moved to New York, where they started setting up production, and that's when the trouble really started.
Everywhere the production went, it seemed like Columbo had gotten there first. Here's Robert Evans.
We could go to Long Island for locations. The next day, it was closed down.
Went to Staten Island, closed down. The Bronx closed down.
The five families did not want us to shoot that picture in New York. And it got worse before it got better.
Far worse. One day, Robert Evans is in his hotel suite with his wife, Allie McGraw, and their newborn baby when a call comes in.
He threatened my life. Columbo did what he said.
My wife had just had a baby. And he said, you want your baby to be all right, get out of town.
I said, why don't you call Al Ruddy? He's a producer. He says, because when we kill the snake, we cut the fucking head off.

And how did Evans react to that? Well, as you can imagine, not well. I think he was really scared.
It's one thing to make a movie about mobsters. It's another to be confronted by them in real time.
Of course, there's a question as to whether or not this call ever happened. Joe Colombo's grandson, Anthony, insisted to me that his grandfather never said or sanctioned such threats, especially not over the telephone, which was probably bugged by the feds.
I do think that there was a call between Bob Evans and my grandfather, but my grandfather didn't have to make those threats like that. You know, he was a subtle man.
He wielded power in a way that few in New York could and did it through, you know, exercise power in other ways. The Teamsters threatened to freeze all transportation involving the Godfather.
Well, that's it. No Teamsters and you can't make a movie.
Ruddy and Evans had to do something fast. They realized that the only way to get the movie made was to arrange a sit-down with Joe Colombo.
And how did they plan to get this meeting? Well, in true Hollywood fashion, Ruddy and Evans called their own version of a fixer. They called an agent.
To arrange a meeting with a mob boss? Who did they get? Well, they got a pretty great agent, Eddie Goldstone from Creative Management Associates, which represented many of the actors on the film. He was a talent agent to the stars and tasked with brokering a meeting between Al Ruddy and Joe Colombo.
And how does he go about doing this? Well, apparently James Caan had all the right connections and set a meeting between Colombo and Goldstone. And on the day of the meeting, Goldstone took a cab to an address on Mott Street.
Do you think he was nervous? I believe he was nervous. He said he had a lump in his stomach, but he had a job to do.
So in his nice suit, he knocked with a big smile on his face. The address turned out to be an Italian-American social club.
He told me that the air was full of smoke and about a dozen men were speaking Italian with their leader clearly at the center. He was ushered in, and he shook hands with none other than Joe Colombo.
And what do these two men talk about? Well, Eddie goes into his spiel about the trouble they're having with the Teamsters, and how great the movie's going to be, and maybe they can come to some sort of arrangement, a deal. And what do they say? Well, according to Goldstone, apparently they wanted to talk about Marlon Brando.
20 minutes of pretending, he's good friends with Marlon, and Eddie Goldstone has the meeting set between Ruddy and Columbo. That's amazing.
Hollywood charm really works anywhere, huh? It sure does. So Ruddy got his meeting with Columbo.
Yes. So first he has to have a preliminary meeting with Colombo's son, Anthony, and the league's president, Nat Marconi.
They hammer out a tentative deal with three conditions. Number one, they have to delete the word mafia and cosa nostra from the script.
Number two, they have to allow the league to review the script and change anything they deem damaging to the Italian-American image. And finally, number three, they have to donate the proceeds from the film's New York premiere to the League's hospital fund.
And what does Ruddy say? He agrees to all of it, which is a pretty unprecedented deal for a Hollywood producer to make. He's essentially handing over the rights to script revisions.
And turning over a portion of the profits to a group allegedly founded by one of the country's most powerful mobsters. But he gets his meeting.
Yes. In February of 1971, Al Ruddy walks into the Park Sheridan Hotel and is in for a surprise.
600 Italian-American members of the league greet him with boos and cheers. Joe Colombo was testing him.
He wanted to see if Ruddy could win over the members. And Ruddy has to address this crowd.
I mean, you know, that's a pretty incredible thing. So what does he say to them? He said, this is not going to be a movie that's going to demean or stereotype anybody.
This is an equal opportunity thing. I mean, we have an Irish cop.
We have, you know, all these different ethnic groups, not just Italian Americans. He calmed down the crowd.
They asked him questions, and there was some back and forth. And Ruddy apparently did an admirable job talking to this crowd and making them understand that the Godfather movie was not out to upset or demean anyone, that it was going to be a story about an Italian-American family.
And I'd meet Joe after that. I said, look, Joe, I'll tell you what I'll do.
You can to my office tomorrow, and I'll let you look the script. You can see a mafia, whatever's in there, and you like to donate, and you read it, and we'll see if we can make a deal.
I said, okay, I'll be there at 3 o'clock. The next day, Colombo showed up at the Gulf and Western Building with two associates to read the script.
Joe's at the office of me, one guy's on the couch, and one guy's sitting in the window when the hot air comes out. I take a 155-page script.
Mark, you can imagine. I give this guy 155-page script where he puts out his little bit of Franklin glasses and looks at it for about two minutes.
What does this mean fade in? I realize there's no way Joe was going to turn the page to. They didn't read it? Well, they supposedly, according to Ruddy at least, only got past page one before getting bored and giving Al their blessing.
Finally, Joe takes a slammer on the table. It went, do we like this guy? Do we trust him? Yeah, we like this guy.
So what the fuck do we have to read the script for? Let's just make a deal. We're just going to take the word mafia out of the script.
Which only appeared once, by the way.

So Al Ruddy and Joe Colombo strike a deal.

Is it time to make a movie?

Well, not so fast.

Colombo thought it'd be a good idea to hold a press conference to announce the new partnership. Joe calls me two days later.
And he said, look, we should get the word out to our people that we're now behind the movie, which I thought was a grand idea because we were having trouble signing locations in Staten Island. He says, can you come to the league office tomorrow at 2 o'clock at the press conference?

Ruddy thinks, what the hell?

It'll just be a few Italian-American newspapers.

And he agrees.

I get in the elevator.

It was a park cabin.

It was in those days, like 58th Street.

I could hardly get in the elevator.

I didn't know everyone was going up to, like, the 20th floor.

It's sun guns and video cameras and lights.

What the fuck's going on? They all get out of the safe York Times with pictures of me with Nat Marcon, Joe Colombo. Now, where the league says, we're behind the movie.

And. There's articles on the front page of the New York Times with pictures of me with Nat Marcon, Joe Columbus.
Now, where the league says we're behind the movie and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Unfortunately, it wasn't interpreted that way by the press.
Ruddy definitely underestimated how big of a deal this was. What was the press coverage like? It was horrible.
The Times called the deal a hypocritical, craven act of voluntary self-censorship. And the Village Voice wrote, if you want to produce a film on the mafia, please ask their permission first.
How did Paramount react? Does anyone else know about the deal Ruddy made? apparently not Evans was in Europe Stanley Jaffe was in the Caribbean and Puzo was at a weight loss

clinic a spokesman for Paramount told Variety that the deal was completely unauthorized. The front page of the Wall Street Journal the next morning, as Marcy moves in on Gulf and Western, right, that we've compromised the book.
But worse than the bad press, Gulf and Western's stock had dropped two and a half points, and Charlie Bluedorn is pissed. What happens to Ruddy? Well, Ruddy goes into Bluedorn's office the next day, or he was called into Bluedorn's office the next day, and he was fired.
I walk in there, and I swear to God, Charlie Bluedorn is living. You're right by company all these years.
I try to go with shit one day. I got the mob moving in and my share.
I'm freaking the fuck out, right? But he had one saving grace. Apparently, Francis Coppola told Charlie Bluedorn that Al Ruddy is the only one who can get this picture made.
Charlie stops the shoot. And he calls Francis up and brings Francis down there and tells Francis he's fired Al Ruddy.
He's a fucking maniac. And Francis Coppola literally saved my job.
He said, Charlie, he's the only man who can keep this movie going. Do you understand? So now they call me back again.
He calls for the mob. I come back to see Charlie, and he's almost had a spin in his mouth, I swear.
He's like, I'm putting your back on the fucking mouth. He just might have started with the pants.
I would choke you. That's in my ass.
I mean, Mark, but never quite this hard. No, it definitely tested the production's mettle, you know.
But now the red carpet is rolled out. Deals are made left and right for locations.

Vendors start working with them. Homeowners open their homes.
Any problem the movie had, all they had to do is call Joe Colombo. Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli is a production of Airmail and iHeart Media.
The podcast is based on the book of the same name, written by our very own Mark Seal. Our producer is Tina Mullen.
Research assistance by Jack Sullivan. Jonathan Dressler was our development producer.
Our music supervisor is Randall Poster. Our executive producers are me, Nathan King, Mark Seal, Dylan Fagan, and Graydon Carter.
Special thanks to Bridget Arsenault and everyone at CDM Studios. A comprehensive list of sources and acknowledgments can be found in Mark Seal's book, Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli, published by Gallery Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.