"It had nothing to do with business". --Roth

Been binging on YouTube godfather clips.

So when Roth tells Michael ( about the murder of Moe Green)
" I didn't ask who gave the order as it had nothing to do with business"

So the only way that makes sense is if Roth had no financial dealings with Green.

Yes? No?

**** 1st time I've wandered over to this part of the site. It looks good. I bet I can learn tons about the trilogy***

I think that's most likely, although I guess it could just be that his percentages weren't affected. Roth, dealing with governments and corporations, may have outgrown Moe.

Agree. Plus, Moe was losing money in what should have been a goldmine. He refused an offer of a reasonable buyout. The "business" was to make money--he was losing, so his murder had nothing to do with "business" as Roth defined it.

In reality, Roth was responding, very sharply, to Michael's accusation that Roth gave the order to have Pentangeli whacked, by reminding Michael that he looked the other way when Michael whacked his best friend .

Thanks guys

So obviously Moe Green is based on Ben Siegel.

So, in the clip mentioned, Roth is on about Moe opened the first casino, he was a visionary blah blah.
Just like they say about Siegel. But in real life wasn't there already casinos in Nevada ?.

Yes.
Ben Siegel came to the West Coast in 1933 to muscle in on Jack Dragna's LA rackets. He visited Nevada many times. In 1941, he was charged in the murder of a NY mobster who was trying to hide out in California. A jury acquitted Siegel, but he though it best to lie low in Vegas for a while.

Vegas had been a boom town since 1931, when gambling was legalized statewide. Siegel found seven hotel/casinos there, including several that were air conditioned, all of them built int he Western "ranch corral" style. He tried unsuccessfully to buy into the El Rancho Vegas. He did succeed in buying the El Cortez with money from his NY mob partners (probably Meyer Lansky, Joe Adonis and Frank Costello). They sold less than a year later and nearly doubled their money.

Siegel next set his sights on a partially built hotel on the edge of today's Strip. It was already called the Flamingo by its owner, Billy Wilkerson, a degenerate gambler whose losses left him without money to finish the hotel. Siegel bought him out and convinced his Cortez partners to reinvest in the Flamingo, which opened on December 26, 1946 and lost money (as I said earlier). He was murdered on June 20, 1947. Within an hour of his death, two big-time, mob-connected gambling hotshots, Little Moe Sedway and Gus Greenbaum claimed the Flamingo and started to make big money.

Siegel didn't "invent" Las Vegas. His contribution was to build the first hotel/casino in the modern, Miami Beach-style that was very different from the Western corral style of the other hotels. The Flamingo set the pace for Las Vegas's growth with other modern style hotels in the Fifties because people from other parts of the US preferred it to the Western frontier theme. The guy who really built Vegas in that period was Moe Dalitz, a big-time Prohibition-era gangster from Cleveland.

@Turnball
Maybe this question should be in another thread but You pointed out that Bugsy was in LA to muscle in on Jack Dragna's rackets. Dragna had been connected to the Old Gagliano-Luchesse Family, Does anyone know of this causing any problems in NY? Or why no one intervened for Dragna?

Peppino, there's a great deal of BS about Siegel and Dragna, most of it perpetuated by Mickey Cohen, a small timer and a publicity hound. Dragna's main racket was shaking down bookies. Siegel went West to expand gambling, which he saw as underdeveloped by Dragna and Tony "The Admiral" Cornero, who ran gambling ships out of LA harbor. Siegel and Dragna were in conflict, but they found a way to cooperate by building the Trans Continental Racing Wire, with NY's help, which the bookies needed and which brought in an enormous amount of revenue.

No one was ever arrested, much less tried and convicted, in Siegel's murder. Some writers think Dragna was responsible, out of resentment of Siegel. I think Siegel was murdered on NY's orders because of the Flamingo fiasco.