Originally posted by plawrence:
One thing that bothers me here, though, is this:
If it was Roth who ordered the hit on Pentangeli--and Roth admits as much in his "This is the business that we've chosen" speech--how could he have possiblty thought that Michael wouldn't figure this out? Michael knew that he didn't give the order, so there weren't too many possibilities left.
Remember that, when he visited Roth in Miami, Michael said: "Frank Pentangeli is a dead man. You don't object?" But when he dispatched Frankie to "settle the problems with the Rosato brothers," Michael was clearly signaling that he really didn't suspect Frankie in the Tahoe shooting after all--meaning that he might suspect Roth. My theory is that Roth ordered the hit on Pentangeli to prevent Michael and Frankie from working together to cook up mischief against Roth. In Havana, Roth was telling Michael, in effect, that he, Roth, simply did what Michael said he was going to do: kill Pentangeli. And that whole rap about Moe Green was intended to tell Michael that killing Frankie was tit for tat for Michael's killing of Moe.
