The Tomato Salesman (Part 1)
Inside the Secret Empire of Carlos Marcello
New Orleans. A 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 one dead cypress tree in the 300 block of North Galvez Street.
The Creole waiters and musicians in the bar served sit-downs before, but this night felt different. Maybe the caliber of men slipping into the backroom had more to discuss than the usual imported prostitutes, narcotics, or rigged novelty 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.
Young Carlos is thirty-seven years old. By the time the men in this room finish 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 outside a Sicilian exile community in French Tunisia, he was the son of a Louisiana farm 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.
According to legend, 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 an unnamed “chain grocer” and sent him to Angola State Prison for “nine to fourteen years.”
He served four.
Two years after his 1933 release, police charged him again, this time with the kidnapping of a taxi-cab driver and the assault and robbery of an A&P grocery store manager.
Joseph (the former Giuseppe) Marcello, some believe, worked through State Legislator Peter Hand to bribe Governor Oscar Allen. However it happened, Carlos got a pardon and walked out of prison at age twenty-three.
In 1935, the New Orleans Police Department charged Carlos with beating Police Officer Robert P. Childress. The final disposition of the case read: “Released on order of Chief of Detectives John J. Grosch.”
Silvestro “Silver Dollar Sam” Carollo, 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.
Carollo’s underboss, Frank Todaro, liked Carlos enough to let him court his niece, Jacqueline. They married in September 1936, and Todaro welcomed him to the family with a liquor store and part of the mob’s pinball-machine distribution racket.
In 1938, police raided Carlos’ liquor store at 1039 Teche Street in Algiers after stopping his delivery truck delivered 462 grains of cocaine and 54 pounds of marijuana to an undercover officer on Canal Street.
In addition to Carlos, 28, police arrested the driver, 45-year-old Charles Wade, and Carlos’ 16-year-old brother, Vincent.
That time, Carlos served only a year and a day, but the sheriff’s office confiscated his store and everything inside, including Carollo’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, Carlos swore off robberies and narcotics, opening a bar he called the Brown Bomber Saloon in honor of boxer Joe Louis.
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.
In 1944, Carlos saw his brothers Peter, Pascal, Vincent, and Joseph join the service. He also saw charges for selling wartime gasoline coupons on the black market.
Later that year, Frank Todaro died of a heart attack. By then, Carlos had moved hundreds of slot machines, “race horse machines,” jukeboxes, and pay-off pinball machines statewide by forming silent partnerships with legitimate businesses.
This impressed Jimmy Moran, an associate of Frank Costello helping Carlos distribute slot machines from his Irish-Chinese restaurant, the Ming Toy.
In 1947, 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 Carollo.
With Boss Carollo and Underboss Todaro gone, Carlos seemed a natural for the throne. But he faced challenges from Frank “Three Fingers” Coppola, who owned one third of Frank Costello’s novelty company, and Silver Dollar Sam’s son, Anthony, 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 Carollo had a clean record, having never participated in the family business.
Coppola, he pointed out, had moved to Louisiana from Detroit to avoid a long-standing deportation order and could be expelled any day. This proved to be prophetic. The government deported Coppola in 1948.
The mob got Costello’s message without him mentioning Marcello.
As a result, 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 West Bank. Men of all ranks came in, paid their respects, and left.
This continued for decades.
Carlos’ nephew, Vincent Bruno, 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 Carollo faction. From his exile in Sicily, Sam Carollo 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 touted 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 decomposed in a tub of lye before getting dumped in an alligator-invested swamp.
According to Dorman, in the cinder-block office of the Town and Country Motel at 1225 Airline Highway, to the left of Carlos Marcello’s desk sat a bust of Julius Caesar in full Roman head gear.
Above the imperator’s statue, a sign quoted Benjamin Franklin:
THREE CAN KEEP A SECRET IF TWO ARE DEAD.