Claim: Vito Corleone is a creation.

The Corleone Family is a fictional Sicilian family , and the focus of the books and films of The Godfather series . The family was created by Mario Puzo and first appears in his 1969 novel The Godfather . It is said that the Corleone family is inspired by the real-life Borgia family from Renaissance Italy in the late 15th century .   Compared with the real-life Five Families of organized crime , the Corleone family draws comparisons with the Genovese and Bonanno crime families .