Tom Hagen: Sollozzo is known as the Turk. He's supposed to be very good with a knife. But only in matters of business, or of some sort of reasonable complaint. His business is narcotics. He has the fields in Turkey, where they grow the poppy. In Sicily he has the plant to process it into heroin. He needs cash and he needs protection from the police for which he gives a piece of the action, I couldn't find out how much. The Tattaglia Family is behind him here in New York so they have to be in it for something.

Don Corleone: What about his prison record?

Tom Hagen: Two terms, one in Italy, and one here. He's known as a top narcotics man.

Don Corleone: Santino, what do you think?

Sonny: There's a lot of money in that white powder.

Don Corleone: Tom?

Tom Hagen: Well, I say yes. There is more money potential in narcotics than anything else we're looking at now. If we don't get into it, somebody else will, maybe one of the Five Families, maybe all of them. And with the money they earn they'll be able to buy more police and political power. Then they come after us. Right now we have the unions and we have the gambling and those are the best things to have. But narcotics is a thing of the future. If we don't get a piece of that action we risk everything we have. Not now, but ten years from now.

Sonny: Well, what's your answer gonna be, Pop?”

Explore more quotes:


About the author

This page was created by our editorial team. Each page is manually curated, researched, collected, and issued by our staff writers. Quotes contained on this page have been double checked for their citations, their accuracy and the impact it will have on our readers.

Kelly Peacock is an accomplished poet and social media expert based in Brooklyn, New York. Kelly has a Bachelor's degree in creative writing from Farieligh Dickinson University and has contributed to many literary and cultural publications. Kelly assists on a wide variety of quote inputting and social media functions for Quote Catalog. Visit her personal website here.

Kendra Syrdal is a writer, editor, partner, and senior publisher for The Thought & Expression Company. Over the last few years she has been personally responsible for writing, editing, and producing over 30+ million pageviews on Thought Catalog.