“The Godfather” has two scenes where after a mobster kills someone he leaves the gun behind on purpose. When Micheal is planning his assassination of the police captain and the other mobster, he is advised to drop his gun in an unobtrusive way and just walk away. The other is the famous line quoted above.
Now, the guns used for the murders are supposedly “ice cold”, and untraceable back to anyone connected to the mob. But what exactly is the purpose behind leaving the murder weapon at the crime scene? It would seem that if you just put the gun in a paper bag and toss it in the nearest public trashcan or into the river you’d be depriving the cops of a lot of forensic information. Once the gun gets into the waste stream it’s pretty much gone forever, barring some incredible fluke of luck. Obviously, if you’re walking away from the crime scene and get stopped by a cop and you’ve got the murder weapon in your pocket, then you’re done. But if you get stopped that quickly after the crime, you’re probably in big trouble anyway.
I have to imagine that these scenes were included in “The Godfather” because that’s the way real life gangsters behaved. But why? What’s the advantage of not disposing of the gun? Does it still happen that killers sometimes leave the murder weapon behind on purpose, if they ever really did?
I do like the search warrant angle. If the cops already have the murder weapon, they don’t have an excuse to come into you and your associate’s homes looking for it.
I know they want to solve the murder of a police captain, but come on, 1945? I wasn’t in New York then. I have a birth certificate from 1964 that can prove it!
Pretty sure Michael wasn’t wearing gloves at any point during that murder…would have looked suspicious if he’d worn them to the restaurant or if he’d come out from the bathroom wearing them, no?
Right, which is why I thought to wrap the gun in a bag and ditch it in the nearest trashcan. The gun is gone, and even if through some unlikely circumstance it turns up again, it’s guaranteed to show up if I just drop it at the crime scene.
And BMax is correct that the gun Michael used had tape over the handle and trigger so it wouldn’t take fingerprints. But I’d be worried about leaving a print somewhere. Even if you clean the gun thoroughly, how can you be sure that you didn’t accidentally touch it somewhere and leave an incriminating print? Too risky, especially when it seems that there are so many easy ways to get rid of the gun.
Since the movie is set in the late 40s, maybe this was SOP back when forensics wasn’t so advanced?
Even if you’re going to ditch the thing very quickly, you’re running that much more of a risk of a witness seeing you with the gun. If you don’t have the gun, even if a witness positively id’s you leaving the scene, all that it proves is that you were there and split when the shooting started.
Besides, you can never count on finding a trash can when you need one. You’d look pretty silly wandering around outside the murder scene with a gun in your hand, looking for a place to dump it.
Incidentally, one of our favorite Italian restaurants locally is a smallish place with layout and decor eerily reminiscent of the joint where Michael Corleone shot McCluskey and Sollozzo. When I eat there, I always try to get a seat facing the front.
Nowadays, even if you were stopped without the gun, the police conceivably could test your hands for powder residue, couldn’t they? That’s what CSI suggests, anyhow.
The police always search the nearby trashcans, sewer grates, and riverbeds until they find the murder weapon, which will always contain recoverable prints, if not actual DNA. On Law and Order they do, anyway.
Here’s the thing about fingerprints: they’re only a problem if the police (or other law enforcement agency) already has 'em. If you’ve never been fingerprinted before for any reason, you’re not “in the system”. So they find a gun with fingerprints on it, so what? Since Michael was “clean” (hadn’t been arrested for anything before), there weren’t any prints on file for the cops to match the gun to. Sure, they’ll keep the prints they lift off the gun on file, but back in the days before computers, once things grow cold they’ll just sit in a basement drawer somewhere. And since the whole plan was to ship Michael off to Sicily immediately after the hit, the cops wouldn’t even be able to bring him in, fingerprint him, and make a comparison right away.
I’ve always thought that the main reason for this is to avoid being caught with the gun. Gunshots tend to attract attention. If you’re fleeing the scene of a crime and encounter the police, having the murder weapon with you is very incriminating. On the other hand, if you’ve left the gun behind, you can claim to be an innocent bystander. (There might be other evidence against you, of course, but at least you’re not carrying the gun.)
Or if you become a suspect after the crime, at which point the police can take your fingerprints and see if they match the ones on the gun.
