The Tomato Salesman (Part 1)
Inside the Secret Empire of Carlos Marcello
New Orleans.
Monday night—May 5, 1947.
Just after nightfall on the dark side of town.
Fancy cars with out-of-state plates roll pass the Black Diamond Lounge and park in the shadows of dilapidated buildings and a dead cypress tree in the 300 block of North Galvez Street.
The Creole waiters and musicians in the bar had seen sit-downs before, but this night felt different. Maybe the caliber of men slipping into the backroom had more to discuss than imported prostitutes, narcotics, or rigged pinball machines.
At the head of the table, a small man settles into his chair. Five feet two inches, with a broad Sicilian face and dark eyes that register everything but share nothing. When the man speaks, the words come in a rolling drawl part Sicilian, part Yat.
Most in the room know the man as Carlos Marcello.
He is thirty-seven years old. By the time the men in this room have finished their business, he will take his first steps to become the most powerful crime boss in the American South.
Carlos Marcello had not been born to this. He didn’t even use the Sicilian pronunciation of his adopted surname. No one around him called Carlos, “Mar-chello,” and he’d laugh at them if they had.
Born Calogero Minacore in 1910 in a Sicilian exile community in French Tunisia, he was the son of a Louisiana laborer named Giuseppe.
When immigration officers searched the steamship Liguria at the Port of New Orleans later that fall, they checked everyone aboard for signs of “black hand” affiliation.
Giuseppe had landed in the city months earlier, ensuring no one looked twice at the eight-month-old boy in Luigia’s arms.
Giuseppe Minacore renamed the family at the request of his plantation boss with a similar name, who worried other workers might claim nepotism.
That’s how little Calogero Minacore became Carlos Marcello.
The boy left school at fourteen to cart produce to the French Market for his father. By his late teens, he’d become acquainted with delinquents his age.
At nineteen, a New Orleans court convicted Carlos of robbing a chain grocer and sent him to Angola State Prison for “nine to fourteen years.”
He served four.
Released in 1933, police charged him with assault and robbery of an A&P grocer two years later.
Joseph (the former Giuseppe) Marcello, some believe, worked through a lawyer named Peter Hand to bribe Governor Oscar Allen. However it happened, Carlos got a pardon and walked out of prison at age twenty-three.
Silvestro “Silver Dollar Sam” Carolla, the broad-shouldered boss of the Louisiana mob, took notice. He had partnered with New York’s Frank Costello, who had slot machines needing placement.
Sam thought Carlos and his brothers might be perfect for the job.
Carolla’s underboss, Frank Todaro, liked Carlos enough to let him court his niece, Jacqueline. They married in September 1936, and Todaro rewarded his new son with a liquor store and part of the mob’s pinball-machine distribution racket.
In 1938, police raided Carlos’ Teche Liquor Store in Algiers after stopping his delivery truck on Canal Street with 462 grains of cocaine and 54 pounds of marijuana.
That time, Carlos served only a year and a day, but the sheriff’s office confiscated his store and everything inside, including Carolla’s pinball machines.
When he got out, Carlos filed a lawsuit against the Jefferson Parish sheriff for the return of the pinball machines. The suit said the machines were “games of skill” and had nothing to do with gambling or any other illegal activity.
After winning in court, he opened a bar he called the Brown Bomber in honor of Joe Louis. No more robberies or narcotics.
Black patrons who could not walk into a white bank on Main Street found Carlos a willing lender. And when they couldn’t pay, he’d collect in real estate.
By the time his father-in-law died of a heart attack in 1944, Carlos had moved thousands of slots, jukeboxes, and pinball machines by forming silent partnerships with legitimate businesses statewide.
This impressed Jimmy Moran, an associate of Frank Costello helping distribute slot machines from his Irish-Chinese restaurant, the Ming Toy.
In 1951, Costello approached Moran about managing a new Jefferson Parish casino with his partners Meyer Lansky and Dandy Phil Kastel. Instead, “Diamond Jim” recommended Carlos Marcello.
Carlos accepted, and added Costello’s race-wire bookmaking to his portfolio.
In April 1947, the government deported Sam Carolla.
With Boss Sam and Underboss Frank Todaro gone, Carlos seemed a natural for the throne. But Silver Dollar Sam’s son challenged him, forcing the capos to call an election.
Frank Costello, careful not to appear meddling in another family’s affairs, sent unofficial word pointing out the 22-year-old Anthony Carolla had a clean record, having never participated in the family business.
The mob got the message without Costello mentioning Marcello.
The vote at the Black Diamond was not close.
The next morning, Carlos Marcello’s neighbors saw a procession of expensive cars arrive at his Italianate mansion on the East Bank. Men of all ranks came in, paid their respects, and left.
This continued for decades. Carlos’ nephew told me his uncle launched more businesses and weddings than any bank in the United States, and for many such investments, he was never reimbursed.
But the recipients of his favors stood ready should he ever ask a favor in return.
Even the sheriff Carlos beat in court, Frank “King” Clancy, a man who once ruled the delta flats and neon jungles of Jefferson Parish, paid homage in person after that night at the Black Diamond.
Costello sent a congratulatory note, ending any lingering opposition from the Carolla faction. From his exile in Sicily, Sam Carolla also sent his blessing.
The empire that followed grossed over a billion dollars a year.
Carlos laundered money into real estate, restaurants, hotels, liquor stores, service stations, wholesale beverage distributorships, shrimp boats, and a tomato-canning factory that supplied the United States Navy.
He told anyone who asked that he was a tomato salesman. In time, no one ran a business in Louisiana without money trickling into his pocket.
And his political operation matched his criminal one.
Aaron Kohn, a lean, sharp-featured former FBI agent serving as managing director of the New Orleans Metropolitan Crime Commission, spent years investigating Carlos and never got close.
As Guy Banister had before him, Kohn presented a list of mob-connected gambling houses who regularly paid off the New Orleans Police Department.
The district attorney only asked where Kohn got the list. When Kohn refused to name the officer who passed it to him, the district attorney jailed Kohn for contempt.
Investigative journalist Michael Dorman eventually ran Carlos down for an interview. The mob boss denied being one, then talked openly about his political spending, without embarrassment.
“I’ve been helping put people in office for years,” Carlos told Dorman. “I’ve spent a whole lot of money on campaign contributions and I’ve spread the word to people to support my candidates. What’s wrong with that?”
Louisiana’s courts never quite answered his question.
As for his enemies: “confidential informants” told Kohn and the FBI that Carlos Marcello’s detractors were decomposed in a tub of lye, before getting dumped in an alligator-invested swamp.
In a cinder-block office at the Town and Country Motel, 1225 Airline Highway, behind Carlos Marcello’s desk stood a bust of Julius Caesar and above the statue a sign quoted Benjamin Franklin:
THREE CAN KEEP A SECRET IF TWO ARE DEAD.