“Behind every great fortune there is a crime.”

— Mario Puzo, The Godfather

Variant: Behind every successful fortune there is a crime.
Source: The Godfather

Last update June 3, 2021. History

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Mario Puzo53

American Novelist 1920–1999

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Part II
A variant, "Behind every great fortune there is a great crime," has appeared as a quotation of Balzac; but it may have originated in a paraphrase in The Oil Barons: Men of Greed and Grandeur (1971) by Richard O'Connor, p. 47: "Balzac maintained that behind every great fortune there is a great crime." It also appears at the beginning of the novel "The Godfather," published two years earlier.
Le Père Goriot (1835)