Excerpt from The Godfather Returns by Mark Winegardner, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

With a final glance back at the corpse of his mentor, Geraci got into the back of a car with Al Neri. Geraci wasn't afraid or even angry. For now he was only a man, staring straight ahead and ready to confront whatever came next.

In the weeks that followed the killings, Geraci worked closely with Michael Corleone. As he saw and helped administer the details of the ongoing war, Geraci learned how badly he'd underestimated his new Don. The Corleones had safe houses in every borough and a dozen suburbs, a constantly rotating inventory. They had underground garages full of cars and trucks with phony licenses and registrations. Some were armored and/or souped up with engines that could compete at Le Mans. Others were deceptively sound junkers that could break down at the flick of a hidden switch, snarling traffic and blocking pursuers. Some were destined to be crashed or fished out of rivers and swamps. Several were exact replicas of cars driven by high-ranking members of the Family, poised to mislead witnesses, enemies, or the police. They had arsenals of weapons all over the city: behind a rack of clothes at a dry cleaner's on Belmont Avenue, underneath bags of sugar and flour in the back rooms of a bakery in Carroll Gardens, inside crates at a coffin warehouse in Lindenhurst. Michael Corleone was out to gain full political control of a state (Nevada) and a country (Cuba), and the more Geraci learned, the more plausible such things began to seem. The Corleones had more law enforcement agents on their payroll than the FBI, and they had pictures of the FBI director in a dress, sucking the penis of his top assistant.

Michael's grand, intricate plan was this: peace, coupled with massive expansion and relocation, then organization of the crime families throughout the country, better than before, while at the same time strengthening and expanding business ties with Sicily, all on the way to legitimacy, complete with utter control of Cuba and access to the White House and even the Vatican. Everything new would be built with other people's money: "loans," much of it from the pension funds of various unions. Those truck drivers, electricians, and jukebox stockers would receive a greater rate of return than they'd have ever gotten from a racket like the stock market. The Corleones would put more and more layers between themselves and anything like street crime. Before long they could stop using fronts and operate in the open, indistinguishable from any of the master criminals known collectively to suckers everywhere as the Fortune 500.

The plan wasn't unworkable, Geraci thought. Merely unnecessary. They were already in the only business in the history of the world that turned a profit every year. But he went along. In the short run, he had no choice. In the long run, he couldn't lose. If things worked out, he'd get what he really wanted, which was to run Tessio's old regime: a traditional operation with roots in the neighborhoods. If the Corleones spread themselves too thin and fell apart, Geraci could just grab what was rightly his and take it from there.

He forced himself not to think about Tessio. A boxer learns quickly to put things out of his mind. Otherwise he's a sitting duck. Geraci had hated boxing the whole time he was doing it, but ten years after his last fight, he had to admit that it had served him well.

Over the course of that summer, Nick Geraci and Michael Corleone became something like friends. Had a thing or two gone differently, they might have stayed that way.

For example: If only Michael hadn't decided in August to make his brother, Fredo, his underboss, a position the Corleones had never used and that Michael intended as symbolic, a way of bringing Fredo, a goodhearted bumbler, back into the fold. If only Michael had let the top people in his organization–rather than no one at all–know it was only symbolic.

Excerpted from The Godfather Returns by Mark Winegardner Copyright © 2004 by Mark Winegardner. Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.