I believe all those guys are fluent in Spanish but Nacho was born in Quebec, Tuco in Los Angeles and the Cousins in Honduras. So none of them are going to have native Mexican accents.
Raymond Cruz (Tuco) is American of Mexican descent raised (Los Angeles). Michael Mando (Nacho) is a native French speaking Canadian - Spanish is his third language. Juan Carlos Cantu (Manuel Varga) is the real deal.
Do the cousins have enough dialogue in the entire BB/BCS universe (maybe a total of three sentences) to be able to evaluate their Spanish?
ETA: Damned ninjas…
What I am saying is that it is inconsistent. Last episode we were told they would be working at night. Now they are working by day. They are being secretive about letting the Germans be seen outside the warehouse or laundry but don’t care at all who sees them inside the laundry.
So what’s the “decent cover story” if they are discovered? A plausible cover story would be if they were openly doing renovations to the laundry, and were able to surreptitiously do the excavation with that as a screen. It would be plausible if they were paying off anyone who might check the Germans’ work permits or the construction permits. There’s no plausible cover story for a bunch of Germans secretly excavating a huge pit below the laundry when there’s no other construction going on.
I’m just not seeing this as a very clever plan.
It doesn’t have to be that clever. The laundry people aren’t going to be regaling one and all about extensive renovations at the laundromat and if they did, no one would care.
I think that it’s as simple as Mike has picked up some German over the last few months.
You want to bet your multi-million dollar project on that?
I would expect the strategy to be either an apparently legit, open operation with a plausible cover story (or payoffs), or an operation that is clandestine as possible. This one seems to mix two different strategies.
All the laundry people know is that a crew comes in at close of day and they’re working on a renovation project massively hid behind plastic over in one corner. Not their problem, no big deal, the respective work crews have zero language in common and I’ll bet Gus pays those laundry people really, really well. Knowing you have a job that pays better than anything you could possibly get means you put your head down, do your work and anyone asking questions is going to get a shrug and nothing else.
For that matter, all the Germans know is that for whatever reason Mr Fring wants a big underground room fitted out that he wants to keep confidential. They have no idea where it is or what Mr Fring wants it for–could be an elaborate safe room or a bomb shelter, they have no idea it’s intended to be a massive drug lab. Again, they’re being paid really well for what they’re doing and afterward they’ll go back home and probably just shut up about it or it will be one of those weird work stories we all have, “Yeah, once I spent a year building this huge underground room under a laundry for some rich dude, no idea what that was all about but I got paid enough that I bought this house” sort of thing. No reason they’d think anything of it, and they’re probably signing an NDA re any identifiable info on this room. Just a quirky thing that happened once–I worked for a hazardous waste disposal company that flew in crews of good ol’ boys from Louisiana and Mississippi, paid them way more than they could ever make back home and put them up in residence hotels–think any one of those guys was ever subpoenaed to testify to a federal court about irregularities regarding overexposure to asbestos on the sites and improper handling of the toxic shit? No, they were not, because they knew nothing–me, now, as the office manager, I had to go talk to investigators because I saw and handled invoices. I never saw one of the jobsites, but the actual sites are not the important part.
After the room is built, the Germans go home and Gale, who is fully aware of what he’s doing, outfits and equips the lab for its eventual end use. He’s fully in Fring’s pocket and owes loyalty to Gus, even if he’d lived he’d have kept his mouth shut.
All things considered, Mike and Gus are being really slick about getting the lab built, it’s all hide in plain sight with just enough secrecy to make sure the stuff in plain sight never really gets noticed.
One thing we can be sure of: no matter how clever or stupid the plan is, something is going to go seriously wrong with it in the next episode.
Keep in mind, the original estimate was they were supposed to be finished in 8 months, now at 8 months they aren’t even half way finished. Because of this the following may have happened:
- Hours of operation may have changed. Maybe they work 14 hour days instead of 12 hour days? Maybe they found they work harder during the day then a graveyard shift
- Maybe Gus thought all of the “heavy work” would have been done by X-date and the cover of a fully operational laundry factory could be operational. Unfortunately because the digging went long there was overlap
Also re: Mike and speaking German. My guess is Mike couldn’t speak a lick of German at the beginning, but because he’s dealing with German’s day-in and day-out for months he wants to know what they’re saying (because he’s pretty confident he’s not getting the “true” translation from the head German). So he probably bought a copy of “Rosetta Stone” and taught himself how to speak German.
Finally, my $0.02 on the sourcing of the German engineers. Like someone mentioned above, my guess is the parent company (Madergill or what ever it’s called) probably used one of it’s shadier shell companies to source European (ie Non-American) engineers that could pull this off. These engineers probably do this kind of work all over the world (making secret lairs for evil megalomaniacs) and they know not to open their mouths. Plus with the team being based in Europe there’s probably no possibility of conflicts of interest or knowledge of where they are (they probably don’t even know what state their in let alone which town).
MtM
I think they are preventing the Germans from seeing outside the warehouse or the laundry - trying to keep the Albuquerque location secret from them. I assume they are taking different routes between the sites as well.
If I had Gus’s stature and connections in the community and the criminal world, sure I would. It just has to be secret enough that it’s not raising huge red flags everywhere. Most of the secrecy is just to keep the Germans from being able to talk about it as they are less expendable and controllable than undocumented Guatemalan laundry workers.
It will be interesting to see how they cover up the blasting (something speculated on in this thread before the episode aired). From Mike’s reaction when told that one more round of blasting would be needed for the elevator shaft I assume the cover up is pretty complicated. mike probably realizes that blasting is the most likely way to give away the operation.
“We need to arrange another AC/DC benefit concert?”
Them cousins do their talkin’ with Hot Lead!
If I recall from Breaking Bad there is no elevator so I wonder if that additional blasting gets scrapped.
No, there’s an elevator in BB. In Face Off, Walt kills Jesse’s guards in the elevator or as he comes out of it.
Yes, I seem to recall Tyrus in a freight elevator at some point in BB.
I love that they’re actually showing us the creation of the lab area in detail, as I can remember watching Breaking Bad and thinking, “how convenient that the laundry happened to have a gigantic basement!” and wondering if it was common for any industrial buildings to have such vast spaces underneath.
It’s on a short corridor off a back corner and so not directly visible from the lab itself. And people like Gus tend to use the stairs since it’s more dramatic.
But it would be a pain to haul all the chemical drums and the meth up and down the stairs all the time.
One would think they’d have built the elevator first. Humping all of that dirt out of there can’t have been fun. I would think that the engines would have been put into the bare shaft along with a construction cage until the rest of the work was complete.
But if there’s an elevator, why on Earth would they lift that huge laundry machine every day?