Cristina: Thank you for that terrific little nugget you game me about oranges equaling death in the GF movies!!!
By the way, Michael is sucking on an orange when he is giving Rocco the order to hit Roth...the scene where Rocco says, "Difficult, not impossible."

I tend to agree with Plaw about Rocco handing the job on down the line. To be honest with you, I never understood why Michael wanted Rocco himself to do it in the firstplace. I know he wasn't as important as Neri, therefore expendible, but that doesn't necessarily mean he automatically has to die. In fact, if I were Michael I would be more than a little worried if I found out that is was Rocco who performed the hit.

Michael had just dodged a major bullet at the Senate Hearings when Pentangelli changed his testimony, and in doing so eliminated the testimony of the "buffer" needed to convict Michael. From the chart at the hearings, the FBI knew that Rocco also received direct orders from Michael as a capo. Considering they knew all of this info, I think it is pretty safe to assume that they were aware of Michael's business relationship with Hyman Roth. It's been stated many times that Rocco's mission was a suicide mission, so they wouldn't have been able to get any testimony from Rocco, but how do you think it looked to the FBI when one of the top Corleone men ended up shooting one of his business partners in that Miami airport.

I'm no law professor so I could be wrong in my assumption, but I'm guessing that the circumstantial evidence would have been more than enough to expand any subpoenas or warrants and open the floodgates of the Senate Hearings all over again. Michael barely squeaked away clean the first time. I doubt we was real eager to try to do so again.

Having Rocco give one of his top subordinates the job would have kept the buffer system intact and he'd still have his no. 4 man. Michael obviously didn't have a whole lot of trust in Rocco anymore if he truly felt he was as expendible as some suggest, so why would Michael care if it was Rocco or one of his men that killed Roth? As Plaw stated above, the hit wasn't really all that difficult anyways. Any wiseguy could have posed as a reporter, pulled out a gun and shot Roth. If Michael really felt Rocco was expendible to the point that he needed to die, he could still have one of Neri's men do it or simply send him on a lower profile suicide mission.

Jimmy, everything you said in your post was logical. Logic is on your side. But consider:

If a button man below Rocco or Neri's level was considered good enough to do the hit, the guy would have been smart enough to figure out that he was certain either to be killed or captured. Given an order to do the job, with no option out, the guy would have had a powerful incentive to either rat out Rocco (or Neri, if he was one of Neri's men) to law enforcement--which would implicate Michael by extension--or to sell out to Roth.

But Michael, the supreme manipulator, would have sensed Rocco's desire to regain the stature that he lost to Neri. And Rocco might have convinced himself that he had a chance to escape. It's true that Rocco, dead or alive, would have been identified with Michael. But by that point in his life, Michael seemed not to care. Kay--who, more than anyone in his life needed to believe in his "legitimacy"--was out of his life, after revealing her abortion and her conviction that "this Sicilian thing...must end." And Fredo was about to be dead. Michael had achieved what he wanted in Nevada; and Castro's takeover in Cuba put the kaibosh on his plan to supplant Roth as the top gambling honcho in Havana. He had little to lose.