I’m going to copy and paste from my own book Suburban Xanadu to provide some context. One of Puzo’s sources for The Godfather (he had, after all, no personal knowledge of organized crime outside of his dealings with lower-level gambling operators and loansharks) was the material generated by the Kefauver Committee (1950-1).

As I summarized the impact of the Committee hearings:

These hearings allowed the Committee to make sweeping generalizations about the state of crime in interstate commerce. In its final report, the Committee declared the existence of a nationwide crime syndicate in the United States, “despite the protestations of a strangely assorted company of criminals, self-serving politicians, plain blind fools, and others who may be misguided, that there is no such combine.” This syndicate was paradoxically both “loosely organized” and “cohesive.” The chief focus of the syndicate’s operation was gambling in its several forms, including the race wire, slot machines, and illegal casinos. Behind this syndicate lurked a “shadowy, international criminal organization known as the Mafia.” The Mafia’s “origin and headquarters” were in Sicily, its major business was narcotics, and it was the final arbiter in disputes between rival criminals. This mafia sponsored a dramatic increase in political corruption. Such corruption stemmed from beat cops and detectives who took $10 to ignore small time operations to sheriffs, mayors, and governors. Finally, the Committee concluded that secure in their illegal profits, “known hoodlums” had begun the infiltration of legitimate businesses. Thus, by using “gangster methods,” criminals branched out into legal industries, particularly in alcoholic beverage retail.[i]

Former bootleggers, Kefauver alleged, had transitioned into “legitimate” liquor distributorships. But it goes beyond that, into real estate and banking. In Puzo’s Omerta, Don Raymonde Aprile retires from organized crime and owns a chain of banks.

Then of course there are lower-level operators who “went legit” and moved from illegal gambling to running Las Vegas casinos. Some, like Moe Dalitz, did this successfully. Others, like Lefty Rosenthal, did not.

It’s difficult to point to a specific modern business and say “this was founded by a mob boss,” but the idea was that organized crime was diversifying and getting into “serious” money. As with anything else dealing with the mob, this is open to interpretation, since the mobsters themselves were not known for keeping good records.

[i] Estes Kefauver. Crime in America. Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Company, 1951., 12-16.