I searched the archives, so I apologize if this has been covered before, but…
I just finished watching “Fargo” again. It’s a true classic, but my question is this: What did Jerry Lundegaard need the money for in the first place? I know the movie is based at least loosely on a true story, but I’ve never heard what the guy did to get himself in such a jam. And, is he still in jail?
IIRC, he needed the money for a business deal.
Also, ISTR that Fargo is completely fictional.
It’s a classic macguffin. Like “what’s in the briefcase in Pulp Fiction?” He’s clearly embezzled funds from the Ford Motor Company (the reason he’s giving the runaround to the guy from FM Credit). But what happened to the money, no one knows.
Though it was originally claimed to have been based on a true story, I believe that the Coens have since admitted that the story is entirely fictional.
It’s complicated but it does make sense. Hold onto your hats.
First off: it’s not a true story. The statement at the beginning of the movie is a gag. Nothing approximating the movie’s story ever happened.
Secondly, Jerry needed the money because he’d been stealing money from his dealership. If you will recall, Jerry is harassed at work by “Riley Deifenbach,” an unseen person on the phone who says he’s working on an audit and wants the vehicle identification numbers for some cars Jerry says he sold.
There’s some historical fact behind this concept. Back in the 1980’s, when the movie is set, many car dealerships had problems with employees, esp. management, embezzling funds by securing “loans” for imaginary customers and imaginary cars. They’d get dealer financing for a car that didn’t exist and was never sold, so the money didn’t have to feed back through to pay for a car, so they could keep the money. If this sounds like horrible accounting, it was, but the scam was found out enough times that the car companies cleaned it up and it doesn’t happen anymore, so far as I know.
That’s why Deifenbach was bugging Jerry for the vehicle identification numbers. He had an audit he had to conduct and he’s got bags of money going out the door with no car VINs attached to it; Deifenbach assumes at first that it’s just loosey-goosey accounting and the VINs just never got sent over (that’s why he starts out friendly) but then get pissed when it becomes obvious Jerry’s stalling. You’ll recall Jerry trying to scrawl long numbers on a notepad in such a way that the fax would make them illegible.
The money had already been financed by GM for the nonexistent cars, which is why he insisted on the phone “I already got the money,” meaning of course that the financing had already been secured. If Jerry had sent in phony numbers the jig would be up. According to his conversation with Deifenbach, the amount he needed to come up with to pop back into the system, at which point I guess he could have claimed it was a mixup and no harm done because the money was still around, was $350,000; he and Deifenbach both state that figure.
The parking lot deal he brings to Wade (his father-in-law) is a completely separate deal, something else he’s worked on because he wanted some other way of getting the money from his father-in-law. When he discussed it with Wade over dinner, it was pretty clear he’d brought it to him before, so we can assume he’d tried this method to get the money but was getting desperate he wouldn’t get the deal done before the auditors came calling, so he dreamed up the kidnapping scam as Plan B. The parking lot deal was for $750,000, which is only meaningful in that it’s more than $350,000, so it’s what he needs and then some.
Of course, his ransom demand is $1,000,000, not the $350,000 he really needs. Plus, he tells Carl Showalter and Gaear Grimsrud (the kidnappers) that it’s only $80,000. In other words, he was trying to rip off everyone. He’d already ripped his dealership off for $350,000; he was trying to get either $750,000 or $1 million (depending which panned out first) from his father-in-law to pay off the money he owed the dealer AND pocket some more dough, AND he shortchanged Carl and Gaear by telling them it was only $80,000. Basically, he was a colossal weasel.
So what did he do with the original $350,000? Like jrepka says, it’s just a macguffin; I guess he blew it. I can see a weasel like Jerry Lundegaard embezzling $350,000 over a number of years and blowing it all on a house that’s just a little bigger than he needs, a few too many trips to Disneyland, a new car every three years… you really can blow that much money on shit, and a snivelling, lying weasel like Jerry is just the person to do it.
Right, if you look at the beginning of the ending credits, there is the usual (for TV anyway) disclaimer that the story bears no relation to actual facts and people. I guess it’s a tall tale in the spirit of Paul Bunyan, whose statue comes up many times in the movie.
The part I didn’t understand was, how did Jerry so easily steal the Sierra he gave to the kidnappers? Nobody seemed to be catching on to this theft.
My understanding at the time the movie came out was that a true crime story of the feeding of a corpse into a woodchipper inspired the movie. Everything else may have been fiction but the woodchipper incident was based on a true story. Maybe a Google search of wood chipper or woodchipper might turn up the real crime story in some archive somewhere?
I’m addicted to National Public Radio. Some time before Fargo was released I heard a report on NPR about the guy who was convicted after he fed his wife through a wood chipper. I don’t remember the circumstances of the woman’s death, but IIRC the story was about how she was positively identified by the DNA in the slurry she became.
If anyone else remembers the story and has a link to it, I like to read it.
I did a Google search. I’m not all that interested so I didn’t spend a lot of time on this but a couple of morbid stories popped up…
There seems to be a recent story about some guy named Rodriguez who seems to have, with his wife or girlfriend, committed murder/suicide by lying on a conveyer belt and feeding himself and her into a wood chipper. I didn’t go to the sites so I’m not sure of the details.
There were also at least two sites that mentioned the guy who stabbed his wife dozens of times and then fed her into a wood chipper. It seems he’s serving fifty years and recently got turned down for parole.
There were also several sites mentioning terrible accidents with wood chippers…some guy up in a tree with a rope around his waist and the rope got caught in the chipper…several workers getting all or part of themselves wood chipped. With 300,000,000+ people on the continent anything that can happen, will.
I could have sworn there was a story a few years back about some low-life crooks who fed a corpse into a wood chipper during a crime caper but I didn’t spot any sites along those lines.
Maybe that’s it? Did it happen in a northern state? Like Minnesota?
Was that one in San Diego, just recently? IIRC, there was a Mexican immigrant who was killed when he fell into a wood chipper.
Johnny, ah tol’ ya, ah tol’ ya! I ain’t that interested and I didn’t go into the sites to check the details. If you don’t have Google go into your search engine and search up and bookmark Google. Make it your search engine of choice, apparently it’s the best. Anyway, search “wood chipper” and you’ll probably get the same sites I did. Enjoy.
I have to go help some friends move from one apartment building to another now. (sigh)
It was a GM dealer, not a Ford one. The guy on the phone was from GMAC (General Motors Acceptance Corp; a GM subsidiary in charge of making loans to customers, dealers, etc).
This is a rather morbid question, but what would the cops do with a corpse that has been ground into a pulp? Would they scoop it up and bury it like normal, or just (urp) wash it away, or what?
Yes, this happened in Phoenix over the summer. Guy who works at a landscaping company proposes to girlfriend. Girlfriend says yes. Guy says, okay, I’ve got a surprise for you. Blindfolds girlfriend, drives her down to the company. Flips on woodchipper, climbs on the belt, and tries to pull her in with him. He dies, she comes really close to dying as well, but breaks free at the very last moment. A little traumatizing, I suppose…
This was a couple months after another woodchipper suicide in town - some guy took “a nice swan dive”, in the words of witnesses, off the balcony of his apartment complex and into a woodchipper that the maintenance people were using.
I’ve not found anything on the net re: disposal of murder victims via woodchipper, but it seems like one of those things that SOMEONE must have done at some point or another…
I worked with a girl who used to work as a receptionist in a mortuary. She had a friend who worked in a hospital. The hospital friend related to her the story of the “Bucket Lady”. He said that a woman had been drinking (and possibly had taken a tranquilizer) and fell asleep in her hot tub, sometime in the late '70s/early '80s. She drowned, of course. They found her two weeks later and had to remove her in buckets.
Problem with the story: My dad had a hot tub in the late '80s, and it worked on a timer. It would stop bubbling after a while. (I don’t remember if the heat stayed on.)
I suppose parts of her may have been collected in buckets, but it seems unlikely to me that she was stew. I don’t know how they disposed of the remains, but I’d assume by cremation.
Which reminds me of another story! (I’m full of 'em!)
This happened in Nevada several years ago. A man used some sort of subterfuge to get a female reporter into a small plane with him. (The aircraft was flown by a hired pilot.) Once they were several thousand feet in the air, he proposed to her. She refused, of course; whereupon the man jumped out of the aircraft and plummetted (I love that word!) to his death. His body was found with a parachute of his own design attached to it. The whole thing was a publicity stunt to sell his new parachute. Unfortunately, it failed to deploy.
The only thing I can think of to add to RickJay’s excellent summary is that the parking lot deal seems genuine to me, since the father-in-law decides to invest in it himself. My thought is that Mr. Lundegaard hoped to jumpstart the parking lot venture with less capital than he asks for (after having removed the $350,000 he owes to GM), but not just embezzle the whole $750,000.
This is excerpted from http://www.newstimes.com/archive99/dec1999/lck.htm
There is some court testimony that I haven’t read through that mentions it as well http://www.ncku.edu.tw/~webfes/ojaug28.htm
Lake Zoar is in Connecticut
Wait, wait, the reason he’s giving the FM Credit guy the runaround is that he had to basically steal one of his own cars to give to Showalter and Grimsrud; he figured he could get one by them, but they got wise to it. He wanted the money to invest in a parking lot, if I recall, probably just to make some bucks.
There is some court testimony that I haven’t read through that mentions it as well http://www.ncku.edu.tw/~webfes/ojaug28.htm
Lake Zoar is in Connecticut
**
[/QUOTE]
I’d assumed this was the definitive incident, since it made national news and occurred roughly around the time when Fargo was supposed to have taken place.
No. Remember, he’s in dutch to his own company to the tune of $350,000. A Ciera does not cost $350,000.
He gave the Ciera to the two dimwits as part of the deal, which he arranged because he already needed the money. The kidnapping and the parking lot deal are separate deals he arranged for the same purpose; paying back the money he’s embezzled. He doesn’t need both to happen, just one.
That’s why when he thinks Wade is going to give him $750,000 for the parking lot, he goes to Shep Proudfoot (the Indian mechanic) and tries to call the kidnapping off; it was his backup plan to start with.
The Ciera is the clue that keys Marge Gunderson onto Jerry’s not being on the level; she connects that with Shep Proudfoot. But in the grand scheme of things, it’s only a minor part of Jerry’s colossal problems.
I like Fargo for a lot of reasons, but the thing I like most about it isn’t the funny accents or the bizarre story; it’s the character of Jerry Lundegaard. As bizarre as his predicament is, he’s an AMAZINGLY well-written character, a generally nice guy who’s just weaselly and dishonest and who starts with one lie, and then another, and then another, and doesn’t know how to get out of his problem except to keep lying. I found him completely, thoroughly believable, one of the best and most realistic characters in recent movie history.
The other characters in the film work, but they’re caricatures; The Housewife, The Mean Old Coot, The Loud Obnoxious Criminal, The Quiet Dangerous Criminal, The Bratty Kid, The Small Town Deputy, etc. Marge is hard to classify; she’s interesting but weird. Jerry, though, is real. I’ve known people like that.