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…
