The Mob Collector
Nofio Pecora, Carlos Marcello, and the unsolved murder of Thomas Gagliano
Detective Walter Holmes loaded his car in Amite on a January morning in 1959, ready to drive home without an arrest. He had covered three states in two weeks. He drove to Kentucky first, then to North Carolina, and finally to the Tangipahoa Parish Jail. In each place, he pressed a police sketch against a living face and found no match.
The sketch showed a hold-up man wanted for the murder of Thomas Gagliano, shot dead in his own New Orleans bar in 1958. None of the men were right.
Then a Tickfaw police officer named Louis Pigno walked over to his car. Pigno said he recognized the face in the sketch. A man called “Nofi” played poker every Wednesday night in the back room of Angelo Nicotre’s bar, right there in Independence. Holmes put down his keys and stayed another week.
The following Wednesday night, Holmes and Pigno sit in an unmarked car outside a bar called The Greek. It is cold. The door swings open and men move through the light. Holmes watches each one.
When the man they have been waiting for finally steps into the doorway, Pigno leans forward.
“Angelo says this guy’s got relatives all over Independence. You want to question some of them?”
Holmes studies the face. Five feet ten, olive-complexioned, straight dark hair, good teeth. The face is familiar. A booking photograph, years earlier, outside a warehouse.
Holmes shakes his head.
“That won’t be necessary. I recognize him. His name was Onofio Pecoraro. He changed it when we busted him for robbing a warehouse. Today, he’s called Nofio Pecora. He works as a collector for the mob.”
Neither man in that car could have known, on that January night, how far the name Nofio Pecora would eventually travel.
The original Gagliano homicide report described the killer as “a white man with an olive complexion, 5 feet 10 inches tall, 160 to 175 pounds, straight dark hair, who could speak Italian and had good teeth.”
Pecora matched on every count. He favored Panama hats in summer. He was no truck driver.
An anonymous telephone tip had directed Holmes toward highway men from the start, sending him across three states. Pecora could have placed that call himself.
There was one complication. Nofio Pecora was 48 years old in 1958. The witnesses who described the shooter had placed him considerably younger. If Pecora pulled the trigger on Thomas Gagliano, three people had lied to the New Orleans Police Department.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation had assembled more than 200 documents on the man born Onofio Pecoraro. By 1935, he was running narcotics from Honduras up the Mississippi River. His first arrest came on December 21, 1937.
Federal agents had rounded up 88 people in what they described as a “gigantic interstate narcotics ring.” Five held New Orleans addresses: James Campo, Thomas Siracusa, Philip and Nicholas Bonura, and Onofio Pecoraro. All five faced charges of “conspiracy to violate narcotics laws.”
In 1942, Louisiana State Police found him with $20,000 in furs stolen from a state conservation warehouse. A night watchman had discovered two co-workers inside, bound and gagged with adhesive tape. Pecoraro was traveling with Philip Bonura and a man the record calls “Dutch August” Terilleaux.
All three said they were poultry dealers. They had found a stranded truck driver on the highway, they said. The grateful man gave them the furs.
The story made national news. Onofio Pecoraro became Nofio Pecora and opened a used car lot.
In time, the lot gave way to bars on Bourbon Street, a restaurant, and a mobile home park. The financing came through loans from his wife’s employer.
Frances Pecora worked for a man named Carlos Marcello. Marcello had built his fortune in the produce business. He was New Orleans’ celebrated tomato salesman. He was also the acknowledged head of organized crime in Louisiana.
Thomas Gagliano had run a bar with a gambling operation in the back room. Barmaid Linda Pertuit, 38, told Holmes that Pecora “collected dividends” every week from Gagliano and from other bar owners who hosted card games. She believed most bars in the city had opened with mob loans. She never asked questions.
Holmes must have thought of the poker game in the back of Nicotre’s bar. He must have thought of the unmarked car on a cold January night, and how long Pecora had been hiding in plain sight.
He went looking for the witnesses. Margie Simmons, 28, Gagliano’s common-law wife, had left New Orleans with no forwarding address. Holmes had planned to show her Pecora’s photograph and ask directly why she had described the shooter as a younger man. She was already gone.
Witness Louis Gallo, 41, refused to answer questions without a lawyer. Pertuit had not seen the shooter’s face. She recognized Pecora’s photograph and described what she knew, and she could offer nothing more.
We have only what Linda Pertuit was willing to say, and what Margie Simmons did not stay to answer.
Pecora’s name surfaced again eleven years later, in a different city. Among Jack Ruby’s last telephone calls, placed before he shot Lee Harvey Oswald, was a call to Pecora’s office at the mobile home court.
His wife, Frances, eventually found work in Louisiana state government. She later went to prison for attempting to bribe Tangipahoa Parish Sheriff Eddie Layrisson. This came after deputies found her son in a Loranger warehouse stocked with narcotics.
Nofio Pecora died in 1986.
The murder of Thomas Gagliano officially remains unsolved.