Answer:
Amerigo Bonasera, a Sicilian-American undertaker, sits in a New York City courtroom awaiting the sentence of two men who viciously attacked his daughter. The judge chastises the offenders, but suspends their sentence due to their fathers’ political connections and their clean records. A furious Bonasera watches the men leave the courtroom. He thinks about his daughter lying in her hospital bed “with her broken jaw wired together.” Bonasera has long trusted the law, but now he feels the law has failed him. He tells his grieving wife, “for justice we must go on our knees to Don Corleone.”
The novel opens by highlighting the major theme of crime and justice that runs throughout the story. Through the court’s failure to adequately punish the men who assaulted Bonasera’s daughter, Puzo presents Don Corleone, and, by extension, the Mafia, as an alternative system of justice that has the courage to do what the legitimate law cannot, or will not, do.