The Tomato Salesman (Part 5)
The Death of Carlos Marcello
October 6, 1989. Federal marshals complete the paperwork and Carlos Marcello walks out of the federal correctional system for the last time.
He is seventy-nine years old.
The strokes that began the previous January have hollowed something behind his eyes. He stands wide-shouldered and five feet three, the silver mane gone to white.
He is going home to Louisiana.
He returned to an empire that had not waited for him.
It had started on April 15, 1983, the day a federal judge dismissed the appeal and ordered him to begin serving immediately.
Two juries had convicted him in the BRILAB insurance fraud: Louisiana on August 4, 1981, then Los Angeles four months later. At seventy-three, Carlos Marcello faced seventeen years.
The Bureau of Prisons placed him at the US Medical Center f…
