Young Abe Vigoda: How a Thrill-Seeking Brooklyn Kid Became a New York Gangster—& Cop!

“Tell Mike it was only business. I always liked him.” So begins Salvatore Tessio, the now-condemned Corleone family capo played by the mostly good Brooklyn Jewish boy Abe Vigoda in his final scene in The Godfather.

Replies Tom Hagen (Robert Duvall), consigliere to the family’s boss, Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), “He knows that.”

“Tom, can you get me off the hook? For old time’s sake?”

“Can’t do it, Sally.”

When The Godfather opened in March 1972, Vigoda was 51 years old. With more than two decades as an actor behind him, it wasn’t the first time he’d faced judgment. His parents, Sam, a tailor, and Lena, were Russian immigrants. His older brother, William was an exceptional art student and later a professional cartoonist whose credits included work on the popular “Archie” comics. But Abe, an avid handball player who failed to complete high school, entered the printing trade instead.

But the printer in him didn’t last long. In November 1943, Abe joined the Army and afterward studied acting on the GI Bill. He made his television debut in 1949, including an episode of the acclaimed Studio One series, with other small TV appearances following. Mostly, however, Abe was a jobbing stage actor, with a range notably wider than his Godfather, and later Barney Miller, fame suggests.

In 1961, for example, he appeared in a Joseph Papp Central Park production of Richard II, as John of Gaunt (whose “famous dying tribute to England,” opined the New York Post, “Vigoda rather muffles”). He returned the next season in The Tempest, with James Earl Jones and Charles Durning in the cast. Chekhov, Shaw, and much more followed—even the 1967 Broadway production of Marat/Sade, with Vigoda cast as Mad Animal, and appearances on the TV horror series Dark Shadows. But it was an open casting call for The Godfather that changed everything.

Besides the now veteran actor’s skills, how might Vigoda have assumed the proper gravity of his role?

First, is the understanding that the Brooklyn of Vigoda’s youth was, quite literally, a gangster’s paradise, where Italian cosa nostra and Jewish mobsters alike were nearly untouchable, with much more to fear from one another than from the law.

Unlike in Manhattan, where US Attorney George Z. Medalie—a Lower East Side rabbi’s son and progressive Republican appointed by President Hoover in 1931—launched the gangbusting career of Thomas Dewey, the foes of racketeering in Brooklyn were largely powerless. In the county of Kings, neither the highly corrupt, Democratic-machine-controlled district attorney’s office, nor federal prosecutors made any serious efforts at curtailing organized crime.

Though this would change with the November 1939 election of Democrat William O’Dwyer—an Irish-born former Brooklyn cop, lawyer, and judge—as Kings County DA, and the subsequent “Murder Incorporated” trials of 1940-1941, their actual impact on organized crime was minimal.

Indeed, despite seven men—three Italian and four Jewish, including “Murder Incorporated” co-director, Louis “Lepke” Buchalter—receiving death sentences, as early as O’Dwyer’s failed 1941 effort to unseat incumbent Mayor La Gaurdia, suspicions were voiced that the DA was protecting certain gangsters—including Murder Incorporated’s other co-director, Brooklyn waterfront boss, Albert Anastasia—even as he prosecuted others.

This was the world around young Abe Vigoda of 1687 St. John’s Place in Crown Heights. And if he himself didn’t wish to be a gangster, there was a wildness there still, an impulse much in evidence on Aug. 17, 1939, when he pulled a fire alarm at the corner of Stone and Lott avenues in neighboring Brownsville—the home of Murder Incorporated. Somehow, Vigoda’s action became known and he surrendered himself to police the next day.

As reported in the Aug. 19 Brooklyn Eagle, in court Vigoda said he “was tired of a dull life” and wanted a “thrill.” Replied Magistrate Jospeh Flynn, “Fifty dollars or 10 days,” after which the penurious Russian Jew with an Italian-sounding name made for mobster roles, was sent to the Rikers Island workhouse.