They wouldn’t have had to ask. Virtually all fingerprints in the United States are automatically sent to the FBI at the time they are taken to be centrally filed.
Was that system in place in late '40s?
Yeah, sometimes when someone goes to the men’s room and comes back you never know if everything’s gonna work out okay or if you’ll just ge
And of course, Michael didn’t follow the directions. He dramatically tossed the gun to the floor and raised his hand in the air, making it obvious to the standing, watching witnesses that he didn’t have it anymore.
I don’t want to hijack, but I doubt this is worth its own thread: what is Clemenza claiming to have done here? He “left it noisy”? Like there’s a volume adjustment on a .22?
“Leaving it noisy,” versus putting a silencer on it, perhaps?
Clemenza said he put “special tape” on the gun so that it wouldn’t register fingerprints. As far as leaving it noisy, I always assumed it meant he hadn’t used a silencer, which would have been impossible anyway as I recall, since I think it was a revolver, but made a good line about “scaring away pain in the ass innocent bystanders”. To me it meant they were taking reasonable care not to involve non-participants.
Perhaps a Pan Am flying boat?
Yeah, he might’ve bumped into Indiana Jones! Now there would’ve been a crossover!
“Boy, where you been all your life? That there’s one of them new car-boats.”
Well, here’s an article that confirms this: http://www.scafo.org/library/130303.html
I suppose we should look at it from the cop’s point of view. The murder weapon is always a big deal in crime fiction, but the reason it’s a big deal is if you can tie the murder weapon to a particular person. Link the weapon to a person and you’ve got your prime suspect. But if the weapon doesn’t have any prints, and doesn’t have a purchase record, the way the weapon gets linked to a person is when the cops find the weapon in the suspect’s possession.
So that seems to be the answer. You don’t want to be caught with the murder weapon in your possession, so you just drop it at the crime scene and walk away, and suddenly a big chunk of evidence tying you to the crime scene is left behind.
It’s good to know that whoever whacked Ludovic had the courtesy to click the “Submit Reply” button for him afterwards.
RR
And the decency not to rewrite his post to something about goat felching.
Murder is one thing, but editing another person’s post is something else. Organized crime may not fear The Man, but it fears The Moderators.
That’s the thing…Michael had been an officer in the army during WWII. As an oficer and not a grunt, I wouldn’t assume that he had personally shot anyone “from a mile away”, and blowing away The Turk & Cpt McCluskey had been very personal and the climax of a very emotionally draining week for him. He was rattled. He forgot what he was doing, and remembering Clemenza’s instructions, tossed the gun.
And Sterling Haden was great as McCluskey, BTW.
Got his precious bodily fluids spread every which way, he did.
I wonder if allowing the cops to recover the gun will cause them to focus on it and waste a lot of resources trying to trace it.
From what I understand, Sonny didn’t realize just what combat was like and what Michael had done to get his decorations. Michael was a hardcore combat veteran and could get the job done. But yeah, this was a personal and deliberate murder, so it’s understandable if he got the procedure a little wrong.
Nitpick: Michael was a captain in the Marines, and won the Navy Cross for heroism in the Pacific.
Yeah, saying: “Don’t mind those gloves, Micheal, I’ll hold it for you.”