A Novel You Can't Refuse
by John F. Baker -- Publishers Weekly, 5/21/2001
That's what senior editor George Lucas at Pocket Books thought when he got an advance look at an outline for a novel by Michael Gambino, grandson of the man on whom The Godfather was based. It was a novel called The Honored Society, in which Gambino, himself a "made man" in his Mafia family and now, at 36, out of jail and free to do as he likes, uses a fictional mafioso to tell, from deep inside the Family, just how it works. Lucas saw it early enough to take a "powerful position," sufficient to wrest world rights to the novel from agents Joel Gotler and the recently joined Noah Lukeman at AMG/Renaissance. There have been inside-the-Mafia books before, of course, but Gambino is said to be the highest-placed Mob member ever to write about it—certainly in fictional form.
