The Tomato Salesman (Part 3)
How a deported Carlos Marcello returned home to Louisiana
Mike Maroun returned with a doctor before Carlos woke in his Tegucigalpa hotel room. He had slept two days.
The doctor found Carlos with severe dehydration and three cracked ribs. He recommended bed rest.
Since Mike Maroun had a travel visa, he volunteered to fly home for help while Carlos continued healing.
Friday, May 12, 1961.
Carlos Marcello had better places to be than the Capitol of Honduras.
Abandoned inside the Honduras border, Carlos and his attorney wandered lost in a jungle until two “banditos” approached them yelling in a language the Americans could not understand.
Carlos reminded Mike Maroun of the three-thousand dollars in their wallets and threw himself and Mike Maroun down a hillside to escape the highwaymen.
Later, they discovered the two “banditos” were local tour guides paid by the soldiers in El Salvador to help two lost “gringos” make the seventeen mile trek to the nearest Honduras airfield.
Their suitcases and clothes sat somewhere back in Guatemala or El Salvador. Bobby Kennedy, the boyish-faced, hard-driving attorney general, knew how to plan a vacation.
One month earlier, Kennedy told a press conference he felt “very happy Carlos Marcello is no longer with us,” and insisted his expulsion to Guatemala had been done “in strict accordance with the law.”
His own prosecutors knew better.
Within forty-eight hours, Edwyn Silberling, chief of Kennedy’s Organized Crime Section, warned his superiors in writing that the government had legitimized a birth record it knew to be fake.
Immigration Attorney Jack Wasserman called Kennedy’s deportation order “the darkest and foulest chapter in deportation history” and asked a federal judge to issue contempt citations against both the attorney general and Immigration Commissioner Joseph M. Swing.
The Justice Department’s solution to that problem: distract the public with a bigger one.
Unable to find Carlos in Central America, the Justice Department turned north to New Orleans.
Jacqueline Marcello, curvy but thin, stood a full foot taller than her husband and kept a stern face in public places.
She had married a man the papers called a crime boss.
For three decades she kept the household and raised the children, asking few questions. She signed no ledgers and buried no bodies, but on Kennedy’s order, the IRS filed tax liens of nearly a million dollars against her.
The lien servers didn’t care that she had done nothing wrong. With her bank accounts frozen, Attorney G. Wray Gill said the family could not buy “the necessities of life.”
Gill then sent word to Carlos in his Tegucigalpa hotel room.
He stands at the window with the telegram from the attorney, and for a long moment he does not move. The ribs make breathing painful and every breath cost him something.
For forty years, he never stepped back from a blow.
This one would be for Jacqueline.
He sets the telegram down and begins, quietly, to curse Bobby Kennedy and the brother who empowered him.
The Kennedys had set out to break Carlos by breaking his family.
Carlos decided to answer in kind.
He knew exactly who to call.
Isaac Irving Davidson was a Capitol Hill lobbyist, and his client list explained the country better than a civics book.
The same man carried water for Coca-Cola, the Teamsters, the Central Intelligence Agency, an assortment of Latin American dictators, and America’s top mobsters, and he saw no contradictions in any of it.
To Carlos Marcello’s face, Davidson called him “the boss.” Behind his back he called him “Uncle Shnookums.” A tender name for a man who ordered other men killed. Davidson did not use it carelessly.
“Uncle Shnookums,” he said, “controls things in Louisiana, but he’s the most-connected man in America.”
In 1961, those connections held.
Through Davidson, Carlos reached General Rafael Trujillo, a dictator who used mob contacts to extend his reach into the United States and other Caribbean states, funneling money and weapons to anti-Castro exiles.
Just over two weeks after Maroun left Honduras, Carlos paid General Trujillo to dispatch for him an air force jet from the Dominican Republic.
An FBI memorandum from June 1961 reported that a “high-ranking U.S. government official may have intervened with the Dominican Republic on Carlos Marcello’s behalf.”
Carlos saw no humility in the arrangement.
A man under a federal deportation order, forbidden to set foot in the United States, telephoned the right friend, and a sovereign government parked a military aircraft at his service.
The dictator’s plane carried Carlos to Miami, and from there, he caught a commercial flight home to Louisiana.
Within twenty-four hours, assassins in the Dominican Republic killed General Trujillo with weapons provided by the United States Central Intelligence Agency.
The Church Committee confirmed in 1975 the CIA shipped small arms to assassins in the Dominican Republic by concealing pieces of disassembled weapons inside routine grocery imports bound for an American-owned grocery store called “Wimpy’s Supermarket.”
Monday, May 29, 1961.
During the airline’s Memorial Day weekend rush.
Carlos Marcello returned home to New Orleans nursing three healing ribs and a vendetta. He gathered lawyers to fight the deportation that had nearly killed him.
When Washington learned Carlos was home, the newly-appointed attorney general had something to worry about.
Kennedy had seized a man without a warrant and denied him a lawyer. He had handed a foreign government birth documents that his own prosecutors knew to be forgeries.
If Carlos stood trial, this information would air in open court. Still, Bobby Kennedy doubled down, ordering two dozen federal agents into Louisiana to find Carlos and arrest him for illegal re-entry.
The raids widened.
Agents swept up mob associates at gambling houses across the state, and they charged Carlos Marcello’s brother, Joseph, with hiring the forger who secured the fake birth certificate.
Monday morning, June 5, 1961.
Carlos faced a federal charge and a live deportation order. He had a brother bound for prison, a wife buried under tax liens, and ribs that still made him wince in the Louisiana humidity.
To spare his other family members, Carlos surrendered.
Escorted by attorneys Mike Maroun and Jack Wasserman, he met immigration agent Bruce Hemstad and made arrangements to fly with INS Agent Arthur Bero to a Federal detention cell in McAllen, Texas until he could post bond and return home.
Friday, November 22, 1963.
The Federal Courthouse in New Orleans.
After three years, Carlos got his day in court. Beside him sat his brother Joseph, a co-defendant in the birth certificate fraud case and Attorneys G. Wray Gill, Jack Wasserman, and Mike Maroun.
Behind them, sat members of the Marcello family, along with Attorney Philip Smith and Private Investigator David Ferrie representing Guy Banister and Associates, Inc.
As their star witness, Kennedy’s team subpoenaed Carl Noll, the Dixie Mafia conman who forged the Guatemalan birth certificate.
A panel of Louisiana citizens deliberated the fraud charges against Carlos and returned their “not guilty” verdict sixty minutes after the bailiff shared reports of gunshots near the presidential motorcade in Dallas.