Another answer

I asked another forum if Fredos men could have killed the shooters and one of the guys gave a detailed explanation.

"That is exactly who killed the assassins zaf. I was gonna post about this a few days back, but completely forgot because I was very busy.

In the screenplay for The Godfather: Part II it says the assassins (three of them; in the movie only two) had their throats cut when they were found in the ditch. That is why there were no further shots fired after the initial attempt on Michael. Before reading the screenplay I thought maybe Fredo used a silencer and shot them dead, but if their throats were cut it means it was not Fredo. Two things now. First, whoever did it had to be very handy with the knife, and Fredo certainly wasn't. The second thing is whoever did it probably got blood on themselves, and on their clothes, and needed to get out of the scene quick and go clean up. He wouldn't have time to change and therefore couldn't be outside pretending to be looking for the assassins.

That also means it wasn't Rocco or Neri or any of their men because they were at the scene immediately and they also would need time to go clean up. A missing capo would be way too suspicious. That rules out Rocco or Neri (who was dealing with Klingman at that moment.) Now, their men are well chosen and well paid and would have no reason to turn on the family. On top of that their own capos would notice their absence. So that rules them out too. Therefore, logic suggests that since it wasn't the capos or Fredo it could only have been one (or more) of Fredo's men. When Fredo was with his hysterical wife he would have no time to oversee his own men. It would be easy for any or some of them to dispose of the knife and clothes while Fredo was busy dealing with his wife.

When Fredo was approached by Johnny Ola it was very probable some of Fredo's men were approached as well. It would make sense on the part of Johnny Ola to do that. He was very shrewd and knew Fredo did not command the respect of the Corleone soldiers. It would be easy to buy off some of his men who were greedy enough or felt they stood no chance at being promoted or were not close enough to Michael to care about turning on him. Whatever the reasons, this is someone whose identity the movie never tells us and we're likely never to find out." - Hammerstrike



THIS ISNT MY WORK BUT SOMEBODY ELSES WHO POSTED IT ANOTHER FORUM.

LINK: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0071562/board/thread/81264474?

This is the most likely answer to who killed the shooters IMO.

Fredo's men probably DID kill the assassins. Therefore, Fredo lied to Mike when he said.. 'I didn't know it was gonna be a hit.'


END OF STORY IMO

Who are Fredo's men?

How did this guy from the other forum get his hands on the screenplay?

Wouldn't Johnny Ola's men been the obvious suspects? Since it was Roth that wanted Mike killed, and Ola was his Sicilian messenger boy, doesn't it make sense that Ola's men did it?

Fredo and Deanna showed up at the communion party alone. He had no men. I believe it was deleted, but I know that I have watched the scene of Fredo's arrival. If I'm not mistaken, they pull up in a sports car (perhaps a convertible?) and Fredo warns Deanna to behave herself because she's going to be around some of "Kay's classy friends". Fredo had no men with him.

So you're saying it was OJ?

Certainly two men armed with machine guns could only be overcome with a knife under one set of circumstances: they had not to suspect that the men they were approached by would kill them. So they had to have met on a prior occasion. And we know also that if a knife was the murder weapon, there had to be at least two men who managed to strike the assassins at exactly the same moment. "Difficult, not impossible."

Just because they turn up in a ditch with their throats cut (you can see this in the film, you don't need the screenplay for that) doesn't mean that that they were not shot. It is not out of the realm of plausibility that they were shot first and then had their throats cut for insurance -- stranger things have happened than people surviving serious gun shot wounds, but a deep slice from ear to ear, no way (Fanucci's attackers are said in the novel to have deliberately given him a shallow cut just to scare him). Sure, we don't hear further shots, and I'm not sure if the silencer had been invented at that time (a towel or a big potato on a gun barrel would have given the assassins' murderers away), but this does not necessarily disprove the notion that the assassins were shot.

I'm not saying it was Fredo's men -- not convinced yet -- but just because Fredo is not accompanied by them when he arrives doesn't mean they weren't already there as part of the compound security detail for that day.

Michael is such a control freak, I can't imagine him allowing anyone outside of "his" men on the grounds. Fredo's "men" would have consisted of casino security guards and bouncers from brothels.

History

Early suppressors were created around the beginning of the 20th century by a number of inventors. American inventor Hiram Percy Maxim is credited with inventing and selling the first commercially successful models circa 1902. Maxim called his device the trademarked name Maxim Silencer. Later this style of device would be widely adapted to internal combustion engines to generate the muffler, still called a silencer in the UK. The term silencer has since fallen out of favor among the firearms industry, being replaced with the more accurate term sound suppressor or just suppressor. Common usage, in newsprint and in non-technical usage favors the technically inaccurate, but historically earlier term that was used, silencer.

The suppressor was first introduced into the United States Army Air Forces before World War II. Office of Strategic Services agents during World War II favored the newly-designed High Standard HDM .22 caliber pistol. The addition of a sound suppressor baffle to the barrel absorbed 90% of the noise. "Wild Bill" Donovan, Director of the OSS, demonstrated the pistol for President Roosevelt at the White House. According to OSS research chief Stanley Lovell[3], Donovan (an old and trusted friend of the President) was waved into the Oval Office, where Roosevelt was dictating a letter. While Roosevelt finished his letter, Donovan turned his back and fired ten shots into a sandbag. Donovan then announced what he'd done and handed the smoking gun to the astonished President.

Great info -- thanks!

I really don't think we'll ever know, or are supposed to know, I think it's just a huge missing plot point in the movie FFC was too lazy to clean up.

That car has recently been identified by Turnbull, the resident car expert and aficionado as a Mercedes 300 SL, which is not a convertible.

I agree with you. These were probably Johnny's men and Fredo probably helped them make their way onto the compound w/o being accounted for by security. They could have been stashed up in Fredo's place - the same place that the dead assassins are discovered - thus making Fredo's role very valuable to Roth's plot.

We know that Johnny and Roth "lied" to Fredo about something. Perhaps Fredo DIDN'T know it was going to be a hit and Ola told him that the men were just there to "snoop" around a bit. Or..Fredo DID know it was going to be a hit, and Roth/Ola didn't "lie" to Fredo per se, but they DID give him strict assurances that Mike would be DEAD. When Mike lived, Fredo crapped his pants b/c he knew that his kid brother would eventually find the traitor.

(Again, I don't necessarily think that any of this proves that Fredo knew it was going to be a hit. But..he obviously wanted to screw his brother over or he wouldn't have withheld the information about Pentangeli and Questadt. )

On this point I think it is justifiable to refer to the second draft of the GFII screenplay, where we see that Fredo thought it was going to be a kidnapping, not a murder, and that this is what Ola lied about.

I don't think they were "snuck" into the compound. If you remember they accompanied Johnny Ola into see Mike (I always liked his entrance, the door opened, and he announced Johnnnny Olaaaa sort of like how Ed McMahon would have announced him ). Mike and everyone else knew they were there. Remember Mike offered to feed Johnny's men.

Did Mike see ALL of Johnny's men? When Mike sees the dead assassins lying in the gutter, he is obviously NOT seeing the same men that were in his office that afternoon. Otherwise, he would know Johnny is behind the plot.

Thus, someone within the family must have provided cover for the assassins, etc. Fredo's role could have been to provide these men w/ stealth cover. The assassins lie dead outside Fredo's window; therefore I think that his house is the "command center." I.e-Where the entire operation was being run from.

Much as I appreciate the original author's analysis, he's trying to shoehorn logic into an illogicial situation. Put another way, "Fredo's men" wins by default, a process of elimination--but default or process of elimination doesn't resolve the illogic of the situation:

We know that Roth was behind the Tahoe attack. If Roth wanted the shooters to survive so they wouldn't be captured and be forced to squeal (an idea that the shooters would have warmly endorsed and insisted on, since it involved their survival), why wouldn't he--and they--have worked out an escape plan for them? Relying on other, unknown killers (Fredo's men?) to kill the shooters would have perpetuated the problem: how would the throat-cutters have escaped detection? And, if they were "Fredo's men," having them as the last link in the chain leading to the shooting would have brought suspicion that much closer--a lot closer--to Fredo.

FFC and Puzo were engaging in dramatic license. They left us with the mystery of who killed the Tahoe shooters to underscore the dramatic precariousness of Michael's situation at that moment ("...killed by someone very close to us...very scary..."), and to justify his immediate departure from the compound so he could meet with Roth, Pentangeli, go to Cuba, etc.--all in aid of discovering that Fredo was the traitor. The important thing was that Fredo was ultimately exposed as the traitor--not who killed the Tahoe shooters, which was just a filmic device to set the next (absolutely brilliant) sequences in motion.

I don't know exactly how many men Johnny Ola bought with him, I suspect just two and they were both with Johnny came into the house, and Mike probably didn't pay too much attention to them.

What leads you to believe that Mike didn't recognize the men in the ditch? I don't remember it being shown that he even looked at the men, and even if he did, would he have told anyone that they were Ola's men.

The fact that he knew Roth was the one that tried to kill him, tells me that he knew Ola was in on the plot.

Well, I don't think Mike was 100% certain that Roth was behind the plot, until his visit w/ Frankie. He judges Frankie's reaction and concludes on the spot that Frankie was not involved.

If he had recognized one of the assassins then he would have had 100% certainty that it was Roth/Ola.

Brilliantly worded, TB. I never really thought about it like that. The identity of the "mystery-men" who killed the assassins is not meant to be uncovered by the viewers OR Michael. A "very scary" and non-luminous situation indeed.

However, the assassins ending up dead outside of Fredo's window has to be taken into account. FFC is telling us with this that Fredo is involved in the assassin's deaths in some form or another. There's no way to know "how" Fredo's involved in their deaths, only that he is.

True, looks like this questions gonna stay unanswerd.

Well, I think Johnny Ola was the kingpin in the shooting and it was done by his men, thats my story and I am sticking with it. Lets not forget the orange that Ola gave Mike, that was a DEAD give away that he was in on the plot. Anytime gifts were given, such as the C-note to Frankie, a subsquent murder attempt was made

It definitely is a dead giveaway, but let's also not forget that it was the orange-jacket-wearing Rocco Lampone who handed the orange from Miami to Michael, "on behalf" of Ola.

Uh oh, now Rocco's the one in on it..

I always find it hard to believe that Rocco would be a traitor.

Same here, especially since Rocco took on the "difficult, but not impossible" task of taking out Hyman Roth personally-- a thing that ended with him being shot to death immediately afterward...

I think Ola left someone behind to hit the hitters. Watching GFII yesterday on Bravo I noticed a scene where one of the watchdogs had gone to the edge of the lake. Could the guy who hit the hitters have escaped by boat?

Doesn't Deanna claim that someone was sneaking into her window? Maybe Fredo killed the shooters because they tried to kill Mike and he didn't know it was a hit and also to keep Mike from finding out about he and Roth/Ola. Just a thought.