Moe Greene¶
At a glance¶
- Played by
- Alex Rocco
- Business
- Built the Corleones' Las Vegas casino
- Backed by
- Corleone money; allied with Barzini
- Died
- 1955, Las Vegas — shot through the eye on a massage table
- Modeled on
- Bugsy Siegel
I made my bones when you were going out with cheerleaders. Moe Greene to Michael
Three scenes, one of the most famous deaths in film, and the clearest statement in the trilogy of what Michael actually does to people who talk to him that way.
The character¶
Greene is the man who saw Las Vegas first. He built the hotel with Corleone financing when nobody else believed in the desert, and he is proud of it in a way that is entirely earned and entirely fatal.
His problem is Fredo. Fredo has been sent west to learn the business under Greene, and Greene — who does not think much of him — slapped him in public in front of hotel staff. Michael raises it directly. Greene's response is that Fredo was banging cocktail waitresses two at a time and the players couldn't get a drink, and that he runs a business, not a family charity.
He is right about all of it. It doesn't matter.
Michael offers to buy him out. Greene, drunk and insulted, blows up: do you know who I am? I'm Moe Greene! I made my bones when you were going out with cheerleaders. And then the line that finishes him — that he'll talk to Barzini, and that he can make a deal.
Michael has just been told, out loud, by a man he is trying to buy, that the man is talking to Barzini. He says almost nothing. He asks Fredo, quietly, never to take sides against the family again.
The death¶
During the baptism sequence, Greene is face-down on a massage table in Las Vegas, getting a rubdown, glasses off. He hears something, sits up, puts his glasses on — and a gunman shoots him through the right lens.
It's the most graphic image in the film and the one people remember. It also completes a pattern: the priest is asking Michael whether he renounces Satan, and the man who has just claimed the authority of "I'm Moe Greene" is killed reaching for the ability to see.
Alex Rocco (1936–2015) had an actual background in the Boston criminal underworld — he was associated with the Winter Hill area during the Irish Gang War before moving west and taking up acting. He later won an Emmy for The Famous Teddy Z and had a long career as a character actor. Moe Greene is his monument.
Bugsy Siegel¶
Greene is a fairly direct portrait of Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel (1906–1947): the Jewish mobster who, with Meyer Lansky's money and the Syndicate's, built the Flamingo in Las Vegas, ran it disastrously over budget, and was shot dead in a Beverly Hills living room in June 1947 through a window — one of the rounds took out his eye.
The eye is not a coincidence. See Real-World Mafia.
Puzo and Coppola pair Greene with Hyman Roth in Part II the way the real history pairs Siegel with Lansky, and Roth's most dangerous speech is about exactly this: I've been a Jew all my life… we were like brothers. Roth telling Michael that he never asked who ordered the death of Moe Greene is the moment the audience learns Roth has been the enemy all along.
Why he matters after he's dead¶
Moe Greene's murder is the debt Michael can never explain away.
In Part II, Roth uses it as the pretext for everything: Michael killed Greene without asking anybody's permission, so Roth is entitled to move against him. In Part III, the Commission's grievances against Michael still reach back to 1955.
He is also the first person Michael kills purely for insolence. Sollozzo and McCluskey were survival. Barzini and the Families were war. Carlo was vengeance. Moe Greene talked back.