When Michael and Vito are doing their "playing dead" trick, they disband Sonny's regime and refuse to allow Tessio or Clemenza to rebuild their own crews. Presumably Tessio's and Clemenza's crews are full of slightly older men and may be suffering morale or even desertion problems.

As discussed this is all to make their enemies underestimate them.
Behind the scenes they have Rocco building a secret regime.

Also (as mentioned more in the novel) Vito has transferred his political power to Michael, who may even have expanded it beyond what his father had. Vito thought that "political connections and power are worth ten regimes".

My questions (and I don't know if there is a "right" or "wrong" answer) are:

1) How in the world did the Corleone enemies not notice a new group of "qualified" men coalescing around Rocco? Maybe this would have gotten past Tattaglia but shouldn't Barzini have been paying closer attention? Where did all of these people come from? Trained killers have to get started somewhere. Also how was the Corleone hierarchy paying these men?

2) How did the political power translate into the crushing of the Corleone enemies? Could it be that Corleone judges or police revoked licenses to operate or ignored murder investigations?

Thoughts?

He wasn't paying attention--he was too busy underestimating Michael.

"Regime" implies substantial numbers, but Rocco's secret regime needn't have been very big. Michael may have had him recruit a small number of reliable men to be kept in reserve "just in case" both caporegimes defected, or to do specialized jobs. As we saw, Rocco and someone else we hadn't seen before did the job on Tat and his hooker.


Puzo and FFC were never specific about why Michael needed all of Vito's political contacts "wired into him" when he was planning to move the family westward. My guess is that Michael needed political protection to avoid being arrested or prosecuted in the aftermath of the Great Massacre, as well as to have them in place for his successor, Clemenza.

The novel answers several of your questions.

IIRC, the novel doesn't go into details about what Rocco's men were doing or how they were making their money. All that was said about it was a discussion with Tom, Vito and Mike in which Tom pointed out that everyone that Rocco recruited had to be reported to Tom and that Tom noticed that Rocco's people were getting more money than their supposed jobs called for.

It's just a curiosity of mine. Barzini may have been smarter than Sonny and even Tom but he wasn't more cunning than Vito and Mike. I still think he should have noticed something unusual, unless as suggested Rocco's new "regime" was very small.

Well, it probably was small since there were only two other Corleone capos and those two capos could muster as many as 1,000 soldiers. As it turned out in the novel and the film, Rocco's regime wasn't used for much.

Why would Barzini notice anything? Again, as the novel points out, and as a deleted scene in the Saga illustrates, only Tom found out about Rocco's regime. How would anyone else find out? There's noting to indicate that anyone was "coalescing" around Rocco. I'll bet Rocco didn't place an ad in the newspaper.

Per the novel Rocco's regime (along with Clemenza's) was "turned loose" on all of the infiltrators of the Corleone domains. More than a few people were dealt with. Also Michael had reduced the size of the Tessio and Clemenza regimes without rebuilding the Sonny crew. Neither the novel nor the movie describes the new size of the Corleone Family before the revealing of the Rocco regime, but it's much less than 1000 members. Tessio and Clemenza are concerned about losing everything, which strongly suggests they are in dire need of manpower.



It's a point worth considering IMO that the people who get ahead and stay ahead in such a business make a point out of noticing things like that. Barzini had at least Carlo and later Tessio on his side. He could have picked something up. But he just wasn't smart or suspicious enough. He should have listed all the "players" in the Corleone family and had some idea of their capacity. We know that in real life the Families watch each other quite closely for recruitment and ensure that relative sizes remain roughly the same.

As I mentioned earlier, Rocco's crew was being trusted to plan and flawlessly execute a surprise attack that would in part re-establish Corleone hegemony in NY. The people who can do things like that either have done them before or are well known within the underworld to have the capacity to do things like that.

There is not a "right" or "wrong" answer or even one answer to this IMO. The book and novel do not address it.
But however many men Rocco had around him, whether it was ten or one hundred an intelligent opposition should have investigated it.

He was slippin'.

Indeed!!!

Sonny's regime was disbanded and its soldiers were distributed among Tessio's and Clemenza's regimes. Since each one of them started out with about 500 soldiers each, do the math. Mike's subsequent reduction of the strength of their regimes is indeterminant.

Apparently, Rocco's regime was used to carry out the assassination of the five families heads and to recover Corleone hegemony over certain NY territories previously lost to other families: to wit, a limited purpose for that regime for which not many soldiers were necessary.

If Barzini was prescient enough to discover that Rocco was building a regime, then he was prescient enough to discover Mike's intended use of that regime. If prescient at all, apparently it did not rise to the required threshhold.

Heads-up for Rocco ringside seat at the fish tank scene

Wonder he tipped Clemenza off they are planning something big that are gonna solve all our problems and answer all our questions
Be patient That's all I can tell you now...

Rocco was always smarter Rocco knew it's not a smart move! to tip Clemenza off
Rocco well he -- he played this one beautifully

Rocco built a secret regime and kept it a secret as well