The Hi-Ho mafia murder
New Orleans' mob visits Tangipahoa and Livingston parishes
THE FIRST DEAD MAN I ever saw had a cigarette between his fingers.
I was eight years old watching nine Livingston Parish sheriff’s deputies pulling the body of John George Trathen from a briar patch at the base of the Courtney Bridge in Holden.
Bright sun, but chilly cold.
My mom stood beside me on the sandbar, along with a few other nosy neighbors, all of us squinting in the August light.
The deputies lost their footing pushing through the brush. Trathen’s wool cap fell off the stretcher. Nobody picked it up.
I never forgot that cap. And I never forgot Trathen.
A swimmer found John George Trathen, 41, on Sunday, August 8, 1973, behind a clump of bushes next to LA 1036, near a bridge over the Tickfaw River in Livingston Parish. The Associated Press reported he was a party barge captain and professional sports angler out of Miami Beach, Florida — a Korean War veteran, a Coast Guard man. Shot four times: chest, side, leg, chin. His right hand, stiffened in rigor, still pinched a cigarette butt between two fingers when the deputies reached him.
Within days, five men were behind bars.
Two weeks later, the Livingston Parish Sheriff’s Office turned them all loose. Not enough evidence, Chief Deputy Odom Graves told reporters.
That was 1973. It is still not enough evidence today.
Ten years after I watched them pull Trathen from that briar patch, I was a journalism major at Southeastern Louisiana University in Hammond.
I ate lunch most days at the Hi-Ho Barbeque on West Thomas Street. Prices were lower than anywhere near campus. But the real draw was Miss Celeste.
Celeste Alexander worked the Hi-Ho counter for decades without a cash register of any kind. She kept it all in her head — orders, faces, names, conversations from years back. Until her death in 2002, she remembered everything.
She remembered Trathen.
“He sat right over there. With those two mafia types. He had pork with cheese. The other two had beef dressed, but the dead man had pork.”
She told me that in 1982. Described it like it happened that morning. Then she leaned on the counter and lowered her voice.
“Narcs coming through here say he was undercover. Some crazy drug thing. Watch. They won’t catch them. Not ever. Mark my word. Somebody big covered up the whole thing.”
Miss Celeste was not the kind of woman who wasted words.
Shortly after the murder, she identified one of those mafia types for the Livingston Parish Sheriff’s Office. Leonard L. “Curly” Shipley, 48, of Kenner. Deputies booked him as a material witness.
Sheriff Taft Faust charged Paul Wayne George, 27, of Shreveport with the murder itself, and added three New Orleans residents — Louis Matranga, Leonard B. Johnson, and Jessie A. Martin — as accessories after the fact.
The FBI helped piece together what these men shared. Every one of them had prior arrests for armed robbery or drug trafficking — and every one of them worked at nightclubs owned by Carlos Marcello, the man FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover put on record as New Orleans’ top hoodlum.
Jefferson Parish deputies found Louis Matranga the next day. He was eating lunch at Marcello’s Town and Country Motel on Airline Highway. They picked him up with $36,000 cash and a stolen safe in his back seat.
“Louie” Matranga was not a random name in New Orleans organized crime. His ancestor Tony Matranga is credited with bringing the mafia to Louisiana in 1857.
The family ran the organization through the early twentieth century before Sylvestro “Silver Dollar Sam” Carolla took the underboss role.
The government deported Carolla in 1944, which handed authority to his own underboss — Carlos Marcello.
The men eating beef at Hi-Ho Barbeque the day Trathen ordered his last pork sandwich ran in those circles. That is not speculation. That is their rap sheet.
The charges didn’t hold.
On October 10, 1973, the LPSO cleared all five men — George, Shipley, Matranga, Johnson, and Martin — of any involvement in Trathen’s death. Chief Deputy Graves said the evidence wasn’t there. The men walked.
Paul Wayne George didn’t stay lucky. On August 22, 1974, The Acadiana Advocate reported that an unidentified assailant shot him six times outside a nightspot he owned on US 167 southwest of Lafayette, around ten-thirty at night.
Lafayette Parish Sheriff Carlo Listi told reporters that everyone knew George was involved in organized crime.
But nobody was charged with that killing either.
As for Curly Shipley — the man Miss Celeste put at Trathen’s table — his name surfaced again in 1997.
Former Hattiesburg, Mississippi Sheriff Leroy Hobbs, then serving time for trying to bribe Governor Edwin Edwards into pardoning convicted hitman Kirksey Nix, Jr., identified Shipley as the “racketeering representative” who had paid him to make the approach.
Nix, for what it’s worth, was the man who killed New Orleans grocery magnate Frank Corso and the wife of Sheriff Buford “Walking Tall” Pusser. He also ran a sex-for-sale operation out of Angola State Penitentiary through the 1990s.
These are the men who had lunch with John George Trathen the afternoon before his body turned up in a briar patch off the Tickfaw River.
Trathen’s murder has never been solved. No one has ever been convicted. The LPSO cleared the file fifty years ago and has not reopened it since.
Miss Celeste went to her grave in 2002 knowing more about that last meal than any detective ever put in a report. She told me what she saw, named who she saw, and then told me, flat out, that somebody with pull had buried the whole thing.
She wasn’t wrong about much.
A Korean War veteran and Coast Guard man came to Hammond, ate pork with cheese at a counter on West Thomas Street, and ended up shot four times in a river bottom two miles down the road.
The men across the table from him went free. The man charged with his murder got shot six times a year later in Lafayette Parish. The witness who could put them all in the same room died without ever testifying in a courtroom.
There’s no crime in eating a Hi-Ho sandwich. But I’ve spent forty years wondering what those men talked about at that lunch — and whether John George Trathen knew, before he finished his pork with cheese, that he wasn’t going home alive.