Roger Stone tampered with a congressional witness by urging the person to ‘do a ‘Frank Pentangeli,’ special counsel Robert Mueller charges in an indictment of the longtime associate to President Trump, proving the old adage that there’s a “Godfather” reference for everything.
Early Friday morning, Mueller announced that a grand jury had indicted Stone on seven counts, including making false statements to Congress, obstruction of justice, and witness tampering related to his contacts with Wikileaks over potentially damaging information to the campaign of Hillary Clinton.
At one point, the indictment charges, “On multiple occasions, including on or about December 1, 2017, STONE told Person 2 that Person 2 should do a ‘Frank Pentangeli’ before [U.S. House of Representatives Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence] in order to avoid contradicting STONE’s testimony. Frank Pentangeli is a character in the film The Godfather: Part II, which both STONE and Person 2 had discussed, who testifies before a congressional committee and in that testimony claims not to know critical information that he does in fact know.”
For those unacquainted, in the film, Pentangeli (also known as “Fankie Five Angels”), is set to testify before Congress against crime boss Michael Corleone. Pentangeli is under tight guard by the FBI, and thus there’s no way to get to him directly. Instead, Michael has Pentangeli’s brother flown in from Italy to sit next to him in the audience, signaling that even though they can’t get to Frank Pentangeli directly, they can always reach his family.
Pentangeli then recants his previous sworn statements about criminal dealings of the Corleone crime family, insisting, “I never knew no godfather.”
