Fred Hodges News Archives 2004
See also: Brittany Hodges  Anita Hodges

The Blame Game
January 27, 2004

If depositors of First Federal Savings & Loan had seen the stunt manager Fred Hodges pulled at the God Have Mercy Medical Center this week they'd be lining up at the teller windows withdrawing funds.

His daughter admitted to the hospital for a non-life-threatening injury, Hodges, like so many in Genoa City do whenever there's a crisis, paced the checkered floor and began looking for someone to blame. Forget that there was not an iota of evidence to prove Brittany Hodges was electrocuted due to faulty wiring or that a 19-year-old college student shouldn't have been emulating the sex act with a metal pole in the first place, Mr. Hodges blamed his daughter's employer, Bobby Marsino.

"He did this to her. He's the reason Brittany is lying there," Hodges oozed of Marsino, as his baby girl's sissified boyfriend Raul Guittierez paced at his side fully defending Marsino.

Only days earlier Guittierez and his girlfriend, J.T. Hellstrom had been spewing what a dangerous man Marsino is and had both been threatened by the man Guittierez now works as a bookkeeper for.

"It's no time to be thinking of blaming someone," Guittierez told Hodges and a split-second later was asked by Hodges, "Is it my fault Brittany is in there fighting for her life?"

What in hell is wrong with these people? Why must there always be someone to blame? Not one patient admitted to GHM in the past thirty years who is either a member of, or related to, the elite in this town has not had someone causing a scene in the hall or blaming themselves for something totally out of their control.

Even when Guittierez reminded Hodges that he may have brought on his daughter's "accident" by having the strip club where she works shut down and cut off its lines of credit, Hodges whined, "so you're saying I'm to blame?"

Then, because he's such a retched boil on the ass of society, Guittierez spewed, "A lot of people are to blame."

So which is it? Either there's nobody to blame or there's a lot of people to blame and who might those people be and what can be done about them? Should they have their legs cut off at the knees? Will that solve anything? Will it make the patient get better faster?

Just once it would be nice to walk into the GHM and not see some elitist trying to dissect relatively uncomplicated issues with deliriously inspiring rants. Just once it would be nice not to see these freaks throwing fits in the hall as Marsino and his goon, Angelo did on Tuesday so intense and noisy they had to be asked by a nurse to get a room.

Just once it would be nice not to see girlie-boys like Guittierez and his bunk-bud Hellstrom trying to act like tough guys as they did this week when wave a candy bar under his nose and he'll melt into a diabetic coma Guittierez actually lunged at Angelo while squealing "let me at him" as if this would have in any way scared Angelo.

Ditto for Hellstrom who sneered, "What is that guy doing here anyway?" as if he, with gnarled calluses on the palm of his right hand from working Guittierez's pud, gets to decide who may enter and leave the hospital.

And yes, this would be the same Hellstrom who only weeks ago was told by Ms. Hodges to move out of the apartment they share with Guittierez and who was supposedly on "stakeout" duty in his role as a private-eye in-training and even longer ago was hated by Guittierez.

Fred Hodges' little blame game and the boob-boy's little show of force accomplished nothing except to cause little children watching with their parents in the waiting room to cringe and cry.

In Focus
January 24, 2003

A stripper got the shock of her life while emulating the sex act with a pole at the Genoa City Gentlemen's Club last week. Not to be confused with the local Country Club where rich men and women rub elbows and drink heavily after nine holes of golf, the Gentlemen's Club is a dive where scantily-clad women strip nude, dance and in some cases, "sing" for customers.

Despite being run by gangsters the club is seen as a viable part of the business community because it isn't located near churches, schools and day-care centers. The children of some of this city's most prominent citizens work at and patronize the club and do not consider the smut it peddles as icky, bad, or blasphemous. The club attracts men from all walks of life right down to the aging impotent construction worker who - as an alternative to spending 14 hours a day glued to loveyourself.com as he maxes out the family MasterCard on rubber nipple clips - would rather pretend that the pole the girl is humping on stage is his. This much everyone knows.

But what a lot of people don't know is why a man so adamantly opposed to strip joints keeps coming back to watch his daughter strip? Case in point: Fred Hodges.

As manager of the local Savings & Loan, Hodges and his wife have long objected to their daughter's employment at the Gentlemen's Club. He went so far as to stage a situation in which his daughter's boyfriend, Raul Guittierez and Guittierez's girlfriend, Jeffery Todd Hellstrom, were able to slip into the club without being carded and subsequently served alcohol. The club was immediately shut down when tipped-off liquor control agents busted it for serving minors.

Thanks to political connections the club reopened a few days later and on New Year's Eve a drunken Hodges stopped by to warn the club's operator that he planned to "take you down." That very same night Hodges' wife was warned that her husband should be careful when crossing the street so as not to get hit by a bus.

Refusing to be intimidated, Hodges cancelled a loan the club had with his bank and went so far as to have all the club's lines of credit cut off. As if the gangsters wouldn't find out what he did, Hodges showed up the club last Friday to watch his daughter audition for what she thought would launch a singing career.

How, exactly, this came to be has caused some consternation. Did the gangsters send Hodges an invitation? Did it read:

"Dear Mr. Hodges, you are cordially invited to attend your daughter's singing audition at the Gentlemen's Club. We know you're trying to put us out of business, but we'd like your presence anyway on this momentous occasion." - Signed, Sal Staley, Mob Boss Local 666.

Did Hodges' daughter invite him? Did she not say, "Daddy dearest, I know how much you despise that I take off my clothes in front of strange men, had the place where I work shut down and want to see it shut permanently and have been warned by my employers that your legs could be broken, but would you please come watch me audition tonight?"

Did Sal Staley not know that when he called in two goons to keep Hodges planted firmly in his seat that night he'd catch on when an "accident" would shock his daughter into unconsciousness?

The bigger question is why Hodges would want to watch his daughter strip given that the first time he made it appear as if such skankiness made him physically sick. It was, of course, okay for the daughters of other men to prance around nearly naked, but not his little girl.

Is there more to daddy Hodges than meets the eye? Isn't he supposed to be one of the terrified, hyperzealous, evangelical, white, borderline fanatical religious people who apparently don't see a lot of sunlight and never read books and believe everything their homophobic intolerant Bible-spouting evangelical pastor say?

Hodges appearance at the Gentlemen's Club, not to mention Guittierez's employment there as a bookkeeper with no idea how to cook much less the books, should make Genoa City feel really, really good as it sits back all smug and blank-faced and picking its nose, as tired voices scream from deep within, saying oh my freaking God what have we done, and how stupid are we, and why is the world laughing at us, again.

Freddy's dead meat
by Vicki Johns 
January 22, 2004

Looks like there's trouble in Genoa City, trouble with a capital 'T' and that rhymes with 'B' and that stands for bludgeoning. Or more likely, a very, very bad take off-on a B-gangster movie from the 30's.

So Bobby Marsino has lost his "line of credit" because Frederick Hodges has pulled it, putting everything from the strip club's toilets to taxes at risk. The premise of this bank-provided line of credit is asinine beyond belief. What gangster in the world does business with a bank he doesn't own? And why is Bobby, clearly mob-connected, doing business with a bank at all? This is "the" mob we are talking about here. The mob, who makes the Vatican, Queen Elizabeth and even Bill Gates look like paupers. This is not a group of people who are sitting around wasting sweat over how they'll make it to the next pay period.

And how is it that Marsino's is even having cash flow problems? This is a place where the patrons are stupid enough to throw $20 bills at girl who's not revealing anything more than a pair of pink nipples and pay eight bucks for a shot of watered down whiskey, in addition to the cover charge. His biggest expenses have got to be light bulbs for those two blinking stage spotlights, firemen's poles, and disinfectant fortified with a spermicidal agent.

If there was any question whatsoever that Marsino's is a mob-backed joint, it was totally eliminated once Sal Staley got interested in taking out Fred Hodges. There'd be about zippo amount of bankers in America if every time one pulled a business loan, a member of the mob, simply out of the goodness of his heart, put a slug in the suit's chest.

And if there is one thing the federal government will attest to, the mob is not stupid. Except possibly in Genoa City, where the trait seems to be a pre-requisite for citizenship, including members of the mafia. Nor does the mafia have a reputation for sloppiness or implicating themselves. In other words, Fred buys the farm, and the first thing little wifey Anita does is sing to the cops about her run-in with Angelo, which was anything but smooth and discreet. The mafia tends to be a little more subtle about their messages – dead horse's heads in beds and the like.

Also contrary to popular belief, the mob doesn't necessarily "off" a guy for an offense as puny as removing a line of credit. The answer to Marsino's problems is simple – and is unquestionably the edict that would come down from "the Don": get rid of one singer named Brittany Hodges. Clearly, Marsino's survived long before Brittany ever decided to share her goods with it's customers. It had no line of credit issues; jerks like Sal stayed down in Chicago where they belonged, and Angelo stayed behind the bar rubbing fingerprints off of glasses. But then again, the pre-requisite for Genoa City citizenship is stupidity, mob-connected or not.