Andrew Cuomo addresses brother Chris’ ‘Fredo’ meltdown

Gov. Andrew Cuomo went all Sonny Corleone on a reporter Monday who dared criticize him and his brother over what the writer called their misconceptions of Italian stereotypes.

Cuomo — channeling the hot-headed character from the Mafia classic “The Godfather’’ — claimed that he had only seen “parts’’ of the legendary movie, sniped that “Italian Americans are not Mafia’’ and even questioned the Albany writer’s own cultural background.

“I can’t tell you how many times people have come up to me and said, ‘In “The Godfather,” who are you, which one are you, which character are you?’ ” Cuomo seethed on WAMC radio.

“I have seen parts of it,’’ the governor claimed, referring to the 1972 film starring Marlon Brando and Al Pacino that won three Oscars, including for Best Picture and Best Actor, and was nominated for seven more.

“My father wouldn’t watch the movie because it was anti-Italian,” he said of his late dad, former Gov. Mario Cuomo.

Cuomo was ranting in response to a column by Albany Times-Union Managing Editor Casey Seiler last week in which Seiler took both Andrew and his younger brother, Chris, a CNN anchor, to task for what he called their lacking interpretations of Italian-related slurs.

Chris Cuomo was caught on video earlier this month launching into a profanity-laced tirade against a heckler who called him “Fredo.’’ Chris said “The Godfather’’ character — another son of the flick’s Mafia chief, Vito Corleone, although a much more mild, ineffectual one — was as offensive to Italian-Americans as the N-word is to African-Americans.

“While Fredo Corleone is indeed of Italian descent, his name is commonly used as an insult against the member of some kind of family dynasty who’s viewed as the most useless. This jape cuts across ethnic groups,’’ Seiler wrote.

Seiler added that last year, Andrew incorrectly said the slur “wop’’ referred to Italian Immigrants entering the US through Ellis Island “without papers.’’

Seiler wrote, “Cuomo subsequently stopped offering this history lesson, perhaps because it isn’t true: As anyone with Google and five seconds can tell you, ‘wop’ derives from guappo, the Italian word for dude or dandy.”

Andrew retorted Monday, “I was told ‘wop’ stood for ‘without papers.’ I was told that by my father.

“Seiler says, ‘Well, if you Google “wop,” it says something else.’ First of all, you didn’t have a Google in the 1940s in South Jamaica,’’ Queens, where Mario was born.

The governor added, “Seiler, he’s from Kentucky, and maybe he doesn’t really know New York or he doesn’t really know the sensitivity of the ethnicity. He was an entertainment reporter, and he was enamored, uh, by the actors and the actresses or whatever the heck.”

When the show’s host, Alan Chartock, tried to get the governor to talk about something else — specifically, Israel barring two Muslim congresswomen from visiting the Mideast country — Cuomo wouldn’t let up.

“I just want to finish one point on this,’’ the governor said.

“ ‘The Godfather’ movie, don’t you dare, don’t you dare liken my family to the family you saw in ‘The Godfather or [HBO’s] ‘The Sopranos,’ ” he said of critics.

“Mario Cuomo lived with those rumors of the Mafia. They hurt him. They scarred him. Every Italian lives with it. Don’t you glorify it, and don’t you repeat it, and don’t you institutionalize it and say, ‘Well, if you google it its not that bad.’ ”

The governor recalled his father’s tussle once with a critic over the slur “Dago.”

“I remember there was another discussion of the term ‘Dago,’ which is another ugly miserable term, which was, I believe, and my father believed, a ‘Dago’ was an anti-Itlaian slur,’’ Andrew said.

“Somebody says to my father, ‘Well, you know, “Dago” is not really anti-Italian, it’s really anti-Latino, it came from “Diego,” ‘ and my father was like, ‘Don’t you tell me what they meant when they said to me “Dago, You’re a Dago.” They knew I wasn’t Spanish.’ This is all ugliness,’’ his son said.

The editor of the Times Union, Rex Smith, said in a statement, “The column was a genre known as humorous political commentary, a hallmark of Casey Seiler’s writing, and it certainly didn’t arise from any ethnic bias.

“The original verbal attack on Chris Cuomo was certainly a slur, but in no way was coverage of the incident in the Times Union an endorsement of that intent.”