The Senator

Another scene i never quite understood in Godfather part 2, was the scene in the hotel Fredo run, where the Senator wakes up with the dead girl(who im assuming is a hooker right) ?

Did i miss something here, or was there an explanation ? Was it a setup from Michael to get the senator in his pocket ?

How did the girl die ?

You guys are a wealth of interpretation, so i look forward to the posts once again.

cheers

Yes she was a call girl and it was a set up to get the Senator in their pocket by making it all go away. he was obviously drugged and she was killed.

It was in one of the number of brothels we have here in Nevada, mostly in the boonies (which is why the small plane was show taxiing just before the Geary scene).

Geary was drugged -- he couldn't remember anything -- and Neri cut up the hooker. He's cleaning up in another room when Hagen arrives and gets Geary into the Corleone fold.

And, for the record: Brothels are legal in NV in counties that have less than 500,000 population--10 of 13 counties today. That distinction was made so that Clark County, which includes Las Vegas, would have no legalized brothels--the better to keep the gamblers and their money at the tables.

The same goes for the Reno/Carson City area as well, presumably the same rationale as Clark County. To call some of these counties "rural" is an understatement - some are truly out in the middle of nowhere.

For those unfamiliar with the area, the closest brothels to Las Vegas are over the hill in Pahrump, which is about an hour west just over the Clark/Nye line. There wasn't even telephone service, much less a paved road to that area until the late 1960s. That would make the private plane landing at the brothel much more explainable.

Thanks for the info guys.

The Godfather movies just continue to blow me away.

That's why all of us are here.

Please continue to post interesting threads and comments.

To borrow a term from Senator Geary, I'm going to amplify a bit:

I think you can draw parallels between this killing and the Khartoum killing in GF1. In both instances, a brutal death was used to pull the target in line, but more importantly, the target had previously insulted the Corleones. And both targets had treated females as disposable sex objects -- Woltz with the young movie star, and Geary with the prostitutes.

Had Geary taken a reasonable bribe for helping the licenses along, I think there would have been no issue. After all, Vito probably had all those politicians in his pocket that same way. He was just a two bit hick politician on the hustle -- if he were smart, he wouldn't have named his price in such direct language, without a middleman, and especially in his intended target's office. Apparently this idiot never thought the room could have been bugged or the conversation recorded.

But then Geary got exceptionally greedy and demanded a ridiculous kickback. Then to double down, he personally insults the Corleone family -- both in his boat house diatribe, and his "Core-lee-ON" vs. "Core-lee-on-eeeee" pronunciation. That's what probably sparked such a bloody measure to get Geary's compliance.

Something else with Geary that bugs me -- aside from his pro-Italian monologue later in the film, he was really useless to the Corleones. Unless Questadt had a super secret witness list that wasn't shared with the rest of the Senat committee, you would have thought Geary would have tipped Michael off that Pentangeli flipped.

I've always believed that Geary helped spring the perjury trap on Michael:

As a member of that Senate subcommittee, and because Michael was one of his "constituents," Geary had to know that they were holding Pentangeli in secret. I believe that his questioning of Cicci about "buffers" was directly aimed at getting Cicci to admit that "I never talked to him [Michael]," making Michael think that since Cicci was the highest ranking witness against him, he could get away with perjury. That BS speech about Italians being "the salt of the earth," and his hasty departure from the hearing, were designed to cover his ass.

I've always thought that Geary's false step was asking for a piece of the casinos that Corleones already controlled.

Especially since $250,000 in 1958 was worth around $2 million in 2014.

Comparing hotel revenues between 1958 casinos and today's mega-properties doesn't quite translate, but some digging shows Geary's proposed 5% skim on all the properties is equal to about $3.25 million today. If I were facing a shakedown like that, I'd dummy up a hooker murder too.

Side note - I always liked the casting choice of GD Spradlin in this role. From his early crook roles on Dragnet to his later roles, he had an affinity for playing some real shady characters.

A part and parcel of organized crime is bribery and blackmail; certainly, Michael was used to it and expected it. However, Geary's insulting words were beyond expectation and earned Michael's eternal enmity.

The speech to the crowd was a slap to the Corleones, from "Anthony Vie-toe Car-lee-on" to botching Kay's name.

But compounding it later with the "...your whole fucking family" bit was really crossing the line. Michael's counteroffer of Geary personally putting up the license fee was a very subtle "go fuck yourself."

Absolutely. For some reason, Geary fails to appreciate the line between business and personal that the mob lives by. He just couldn't resist the temptation to insult Michael in front of his own men - even as his ostensible purpose was a simple extortion. In that sense, he shot himself in the foot.

Had he kept his demands to a reasonable, even customary amount and kept his personal contempt for the Corleones to himself, he stood a good chance of getting what he wanted. It just goes to show Geary's rank naivete and amateurism. The guy was a total rube, a simple country boy picking a fight with a highly-skilled and ruthless city slicker. He never stood a chance.

~ Q

There's a great British TV series called "Hustle," which is about a bunch of con men playing long cons. Among their little rules:

Find somebody who wants something for nothing, then give him nothing for something.

Old Geary was Exhibit A for that rule.

Great way to put it.

Everyone makes good points, and I must say I agree with TB that Geary saw the Senate hearings as a way he could get out from under Michael's thumb. Too bad this plotline did not get further developed because then Geary could have been included in that killing montage at the end of the movie, set up as follows:
Michael (to Neri)- And Geary?
Neri - He comes back to Vegas every other weekend to make a big show of playing family man with his wife and kids.
Michael - Then meet him in Washington. I don't want his family involved.
Tom - You want to gun down a U.S. Senator?
Michael - Tom, he never wanted to go along with us, you should know that. Rocco, before you go to Miami, make a stop in D.C.
Rocco - No that's an easier one.

Geary was forced into submission. He was a bigoted jerk, who was a crook and a hippocrite. And not a family man, which Michael would have hated. Contrast that to all the politicians who got invited to Connie's wedding, made lame excuses about how they couldn't make it, but all sent gifts to her just as well. Now thats how bribery works.