The Tomato Salesman (Part 4)
The Fall of Carlos Marcello
September 1966.
Thirteen men descended on La Stella, an expensive Italian restaurant in the Forest Hills section of Queens, and took their places at a long table in the basement dining room.
At the head sat Michele Miranda, 75, twice charged with murder and twice cleared, whom the FBI named consigliere to one of the New York Mafia families.
Beside him sat Joseph Colombo and, next to Colombo, the tall, gaunt Carlo Gambino. Born in Palermo in 1902, Gambino would one day claim the title capo di tutti capi, boss of all Mafia bosses in America.
Carlos Marcello had come from New Orleans with his brother, Joseph, along with Santo Trafficante, the gruff leader of the Tampa branch of the syndicate.
They had ordered their drinks when New York police burst into the basement room and arrested all thirteen.
Each walked out on $100,000 bond. The government granted Carlos immunity before a grand jury; he testified.
Several days later, the Marcellos, Trafficante, and three other New Orleanians returned to La Stella. Reporters had gathered outside. They ordered minestrone, linguine with white clam sauce, striped bass, and espresso.
“Why don’t they arrest us again for eating here,” one of them remarked.
Santo Trafficante raised his wine glass.
The Seating Arrangement in the above photograph (Left to Right):
Joseph Marcello Jr. (Far Left, foreground) – Seated with his back turned toward the camera, his profile partially visible on the left edge of the frame. He was the underboss of the New Orleans family and Carlos Marcello’s brother.
Jack Wasserman – Seated next to Joseph. He was a powerhouse Washington D.C. immigration attorney who famously fought the federal government’s attempts to deport Carlos Marcello.
Carlos Marcello – Seated prominently on the left-center side facing the camera. The legendary boss of the New Orleans crime family, looking entirely unfazed by the previous week’s arrests.
Santo Trafficante Jr. (Center / Head of the Table) – Seated right in the middle facing the camera dead-on. The powerful boss of the Tampa/Florida family is famously captured raising his wine glass in a mock toast directly at the photographer.
Frank Ragano – Seated to the right of Trafficante facing forward. A legendary mob lawyer from Tampa who represented Trafficante, Marcello, and Teamsters leader Jimmy Hoffa. (Ragano later sued Time magazine over the presentation of this specific photo).
Anthony Carollo – Seated to the right of Ragano. A high-ranking New Orleans mobster (and son of former boss “Silver Dollar Sam” Carolla) whose territorial demands in Louisiana were a primary reason the 13 bosses met in the first place.
Frank Gagliano (Far Right) – Seated at the right end of the table facing forward. A New Orleans family mobster who would later rise to become the family’s underboss.
The 13 major figures identified at that original meeting were a mix of New York heavyweights and powerful Southern bosses, including:
The New York Contingent
Carlo Gambino – Boss of the Gambino crime family
Joseph Colombo – Boss of the Colombo crime family
Aniello Dellacroce – Powerful Gambino family underboss
Tommy Eboli – Acting boss of the Genovese crime family
Michele “Mike” Miranda – Consigliere of the Genovese family
Dominick Alongi – Genovese driver and soldier (Eboli’s right-hand man)
Anthony “Tony” Cirillo – Genovese family soldier
Joseph “Joey N.” Gallo – Gambino family consigliere (not to be confused with “Crazy Joe” Gallo)
The New Orleans & Louisiana Delegation
Carlos Marcello – The formidable boss of the New Orleans crime family
Joseph Marcello Jr. – Carlos’s brother and trusted underboss
Anthony Carollo – High-ranking New Orleans member (son of former boss “Silver Dollar Sam” Carolla)
Frank Gagliano – New Orleans family mobster and future underboss
The Florida Delegation
Santo Trafficante Jr. – Boss of the Tampa crime family who controlled massive interests in Florida and pre-revolution Cuba
The grand jury ultimately cleared all thirteen.
The La Stella arrest accomplished what ten years of federal effort had not. It put Carlos Marcello in a courtroom record alongside Carlo Gambino and Michele Miranda. Louisiana public officials had long denied the Mafia existed in their state. That argument was harder to maintain after Forest Hills.
A year later, the government charged that Carlos had bribed one of the jurors at his 1963 trial. A jury acquitted him of that charge too.
Carlos flew home to New Orleans International Airport, where reporters and FBI agents had gathered. Among them was Patrick Collins, a federal agent assigned to the Organized Crime unit.
The crowd swarmed Carlos as he crossed the terminal.
“Don’t you have enough damn pictures?” he snapped.
Collins stepped toward him.
“Are you looking for some f------ trouble?” Carlos asked.
What followed became a matter of contested testimony. Collins told the trial jury that Carlos jabbed at him and tried to land a haymaker. Carlos said he only gestured for the man to move.
His attorney, Mike Maroun, testified that Collins had told him over drinks that the whole incident was an accident and Carlos should never have faced those charges.
The jury in Laredo, Texas, seated there because the New Orleans publicity made a local trial impossible, could not agree. Houston did.
In 1968, a Houston jury convicted Carlos Marcello of assaulting a federal agent, his first conviction since the 1938 marijuana charge. A federal judge sentenced him to six months at the Federal Medical Center in Springfield, Missouri.
Dozens of prominent Louisianians wrote to the court before sentencing. Former Jefferson Sheriff William Coci told the judge Carlos had been “greatly maligned by the news media.”
The Reverend Bob Harrington, who called himself the Chaplain of Bourbon Street, informed the court that Carlos had long ago accepted “Christ as his Savior.”
Carlos served his term. He said later he needed the rest.
Three years after the Houston verdict, Carlos sat before a federal immigration panel for what felt like the tenth time in twenty years. He was sixty-three. His answers were patient, even plaintive.
He told the panel he had grown too old to adjust to a new country and wanted the matter settled once and for all. The people of Louisiana respected him, he said.
“People say why don’t you go to Italy, man,” Carlos told the panel in 1973. “You could live like a king. I say I have all my friends here.”
One immigration official suggested Marcello, with his millions, could do exactly that.
“I’ll fight to the last,” Carlos replied. “To stay. I want to stay in this country. This is the only country I know of.”
The panel did not deport him.
By the late 1970s, Carlos was in his late sixties.
He stood painfully erect, as though his five-foot-three frame required the effort. His shoulders remained wide, and a thick silver mane crowned a head his associates called disproportionately large. The downturned crescent of his scowl could break, in private, into a roguish grin.
He drove a bronze Cadillac to his office on Airline Highway every morning by eight.
The office building faced a parking lot and looked like it might house a bail bondsman: cheap brick, one-way glass.
Inside, Carlos sits at a large mahogany desk, facing an aerial photograph of Churchill Farms, the six thousand West Bank acres he bought in the mid-1950s for roughly fifty dollars each. Family photographs cover the walls. In one corner, a television blares.
He does not know that FBI agents broke into this room one night and hid a recording device in the ceiling above his desk.
The man across from him is Joseph Hauser, a Beverly Hills insurance executive with a $750,000 mansion and a fleet of luxury cars, who has already cut a deal to serve as a federal informant in exchange for leniency on his own fraud conviction.
Two more FBI agents, posing as Hauser’s associates, sit nearby.
Carlos talks freely.
“I got, like, St. Charles Parish,” he told Hauser on the tapes. “I got, like, Raceland and Thibodaux. I got like Morgan City, Franklin, Lake Charles, and on down. I know all those people.”
By the fall of 1979, he was deep inside a scheme to win Louisiana state insurance contracts through bribes and kickbacks. His co-defendant was Charles E. Roemer II, the state’s former Commissioner of Administration.
The trial ran nineteen weeks in the spring of 1981. Jurors listened to hours of recorded conversations from the inner sanctum of the Airline Highway office. They convicted Carlos Marcello and Charles Roemer of conspiracy.
The sentence was seven years, the most severe since a twenty-year-old produce hauler named Calogero Minacore entered the gates of Angola State Prison in 1930.
To the end of the undercover operation, Carlos refused to believe that Hauser had been a government plant.
“No way, man,” he said, on one of the last recordings played at trial. “Cause I’d a heard it.”
He had not heard a thing.