The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (11 page)

As Marcello gained experience, he also became better at avoiding prosecution. John H. Davis points out that in the late 1930s and early 1940s, “Carlos had been charged with two more assaults and robberies, violation of the federal Internal Revenue laws, assault with intent to kill a New Orleans police officer, sale of narcotics, and armed assault of a New Orleans investigative reporter. None of these charges were ever prosecuted, and the records of several of the arrests mysteriously disappeared.” Not bad for a man described as “almost illiterate.”

Marcello’s rise was also aided by his mentor and partner from New York, Frank Costello. The top Mafia figure of the 1930s had been Charles “Lucky” Luciano, who eventually left Costello temporarily in charge while Luciano was in prison. In return for the aid Luciano offered Naval Intelligence during World War II (ostensibly to help protect New York docks from sabotage and to help restore order in Italy and Sicily after the Allied invasion), Luciano was released from prison. He went into permanent exile in Italy. This solidified Costello’s
New York and national mob power even more, a development that also helped Marcello.

Costello and the other high-ranking mob bosses clearly liked what they saw in Carlos Marcello because when local boss Sam Carolla was slated for deportation back to Sicily in May 1947, Marcello was chosen to take over the Mafia in Louisiana. Ostensibly, Marcello was to be Carolla’s “
de facto
successor,” since Carolla would still technically be the local godfather. But with the same merciless determination that had taken him that far, Marcello continued to expand his power and his contacts. Within a few years, he was indeed godfather of a rapidly expanding empire. Marcello became more prominent on the national Mafia scene when “Costello [and] mob financier and adviser Meyer Lansky agreed to establish a national underworld communications center in New Orleans, and later a national clearinghouse for underworld money laundering . . . in the Crescent City,” according to Davis. He said the thirty-seven-year-old Marcello “bought an eight-bedroom Italianate mansion . . . and moved his growing family—he now had a son and three daughters—into . . . surroundings worthy of some of the grand old families of New Orleans.”

Marcello became more powerful, wealthier, and more influential in the Mafia—and in Louisiana politics—with each passing year. At that time, officials ranging from US Attorney General Howard McGrath to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover publicly expressed skepticism that the Mafia even existed. However, Tennessee Democratic Senator Estes Kefauver knew the Mafia was a very real threat, so in 1950, as Chairman of the Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce, he began a well-publicized investigation. In addition to targeting national crime figures such as Frank Costello, Kefauver called Marcello “the evil genius of organized crime in New
Orleans” and held hearings there, on the mob boss’s own turf. Kefauver possibly singled out Marcello not only because of New Orleans’s long-standing reputation for vice but also because of an article by prominent muckraking newspaper columnist Drew Pearson, who described the low-public-profile Marcello as “the crime czar” of the city.

On January 25, 1951, Carlos Marcello was forced to appear before Senator Kefauver’s hearings in New Orleans. In response to 152 questions, Marcello claimed Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination, refusing to answer such basic queries as his age, marital status, and—most important to Marcello—where he was born. The only question he even briefly answered was “‘What laws have you violated?’ To which he replied: ‘Not being an attorney, I would not know.’” His New Orleans attorney, G. Wray Gill, was sitting right beside him, as he would continue to do for years to come, including when Marcello was in federal court the day JFK was shot.

Carlos Marcello was charged and convicted of contempt of Congress for taking the Fifth so many times, though that conviction was eventually overturned on appeal. But Davis points out that Kefauver had also “recommended to the Attorney General that deportation proceedings be initiated against Marcello as soon as possible.” It took two years, but “in 1953 the federal government issued its first deportation order against Marcello,” a matter that would reach a critical turning point soon after John F. Kennedy took office as president. However, that was still eight years away. In the meantime, Marcello grew even more powerful under the new Republican administration of President Dwight Eisenhower and especially his vice president, Richard Nixon.

The 1953 deportation order against Carlos Marcello didn’t produce results while Nixon and Eisenhower were in office, for reasons that remain unclear. Marcello did eventually hire a powerful
Washington attorney, Jack Wasserman, to help with his deportation case, and he also retained his own Washington lobbyist. But it’s possible that Marcello wasn’t deported because of one or more high-level bribes, since he was so experienced at funneling money to politicians in Louisiana and, as his territory expanded, Texas.

In general, as long as Nixon was vice president, Marcello and the Mafia flourished, not just in the United States but also in countries ranging from Cuba to Guatemala. Marcello—and his closest mob ally, Florida’s Santo Trafficante—was even associated with attempted hits on government officials in 1954 and 1955. Unable to take the Fifth as Marcello had done, New Orleans Sheriff Frank Clancy reluctantly testified to the Kefauver Committee about the “5,000 slot machines in his parish” and said that “New Orleans boss Carlos Marcello opened three gambling casinos.” By 1955 Sheriff Clancy was reportedly “talking to federal agents about Louisiana gambling,” according to one Mafia history.

In April 1955 Clancy was hospitalized for a medical condition, but the “guard outside his door” was removed on a pretext. Then the patient in the room next to Sheriff Clancy, a bank teller, had his skull smashed open “with a cleaver” while he lay in his hospital bed. It’s unclear whether the hit man simply mixed up the rooms and killed the wrong person or if the murder of the man in the next room was meant to send a message to Clancy. In any event, Clancy “ceased giving information to federal agents.” The same was true for “a nurses’ aide who had seen the killer and provided police with a detailed description.” But “three days later she suddenly recalled she had no idea what the man looked like.” No one was ever arrested in the hospital murder case, and the same type of witness intimidation would occur after JFK’s assassination.

Carlos Marcello became increasingly involved with Santo Trafficante and his operations as the 1950s progressed. Both men preferred to avoid publicity and to wield their growing power away from the limelight. Like Marcello, Trafficante was ruthless with his enemies; testimony given at the Kefauver Committee hearings tied Trafficante’s mob family to at least fourteen murders over two decades. Among those killed was a Kefauver Committee witness, who was murdered before he could testify. Tampa’s police chief did give testimony, which was later summarized thusly: Trafficante “had a standard operating procedure for murder, which included the importation of hired killers from out of town and setting up patsies to take the fall.”

Unlike Marcello, Santo Trafficante had long been groomed to take over for his father, Santos Trafficante Sr., whose accomplishments included creating the American side of the French Connection heroin network. According to one mob history, that network originally extended “from Marseilles, France, through Cuba to Florida,” and from its Tampa base, the Trafficante family helped supply heroin to cities ranging from New York to Chicago. In the 1950s Marcello’s organization was part of that network, bringing in heroin through ports in Louisiana and Texas, as well as across the border from Mexico.

Trafficante Sr. had sent his son to Cuba in 1946 both to help with the heroin trafficking that resumed after World War II and to gain a piece of the Havana casino action. Santo Trafficante managed casinos for his father until the elder Trafficante’s death in 1954, at which point Trafficante assumed control of the mob family.

Santo Trafficante spoke fluent Spanish and continued to spend time in Cuba as well as Tampa, with frequent visits to the “open” mob city of Miami. Because of his lack of a passport and US citizenship, Marcello could not easily or safely travel to Cuba, which by the
1950s was the Mafia’s gambling mecca for well-heeled travelers from the United States. Trafficante was one of the two main casino owners in Havana with the other being mob financial genius Meyer Lansky. Trafficante completely controlled one casino, the Sans Souci, and had shares in three more.

For years it was thought that Marcello’s inability to travel to Cuba prevented him from holding a share in the mob’s Havana gambling industry, but as revealed here for the first time, that wasn’t the case. Decades later, in prison, Marcello made an admission to Jack Van Laningham, who reported that “he was partners with a man that ran the Mafia in Florida, [Santo] Trafficante, [and] they were [also] partners in a casino in Cuba, and made millions before Castro took over and shut them down.”

Mafia casinos in Cuba had flourished under the brutal dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, whose regime was embraced by Vice President Richard Nixon and tolerated by President Eisenhower. Nixon reportedly had business interests on the island with his mob-connected best friend, Charles “Bebe” Rebozo. Nixon had visited the Mafia casinos and had been given honors by Batista. The repressive Cuban dictator had partnered with mob bosses like Meyer Lansky and Santo Trafficante, who gave him a lucrative piece of the growing Havana casino industry. Meanwhile, much of the Cuban populace suffered from bad nutrition, low wages, and Batista’s vicious police state.

By 1957 Cubans Fidel Castro, his brother Raul, and Juan Almeida—as well as Argentinean doctor Che Guevara—were leading a small but growing guerrilla movement in Cuba’s Sierra Maestra. While the charismatic Fidel got the lion’s share of favorable press attention, other rebel leaders and groups also fought against the regime, putting more and more pressure on Batista’s corrupt police
state. When Eisenhower established an arms embargo, it didn’t slow the fighting but only allowed the Mafia and the CIA to fill the void by providing weapons, and not just to Batista. Surprisingly, the CIA and Trafficante played both sides, providing small quantities of arms to Fidel Castro and his men.

However, all the fighting occurred far from the plush Havana casinos, which continued to flourish and expand in 1957. They generated so much revenue that New York mob boss Albert Anastasia wanted a big piece of the action. Frank Costello had been forced into retirement, meaning that Trafficante couldn’t turn to Marcello’s old mentor for help. On October 24, 1957, Trafficante met with Anastasia in the New York mob boss’s suite at the Park Sheraton Hotel, but apparently the two were at an impasse. The next day two men murdered Anastasia in the hotel’s barbershop. Trafficante checked out of the hotel an hour later and left New York. Even though the
Washington Post
described him as the “leading suspect” in arranging Anastasia’s murder, he was never charged.

The Administration’s tolerance of the Mafia was such that Trafficante felt safe to return to New York State for a meeting just two weeks later, along with almost a hundred other mob bosses from across the country. The ever-cautious Carlos Marcello didn’t attend and instead sent “his most trusted brother, Joe” and his top two Dallas lieutenants, Joseph Civello and Joe Campisi Sr. Their agenda ranged from replacing Anastasia to providing assistance for Batista and Fidel Castro. The mobsters met at a secluded country estate near the small town of Apalachin, New York.

Marcello’s caution proved to be justified when local officers raided the unusual meeting, arresting fifty-eight mob leaders, including Trafficante and Joe Marcello. They were detained only briefly, but
the huge meeting, combined with the recent sensational front-page news of Anastasia’s assassination, only served to fuel the frustration of many Americans—and some members of Congress—that the Mafia seemed to operate with near impunity under J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI and the rest of the Eisenhower–Nixon Administration.

IN THE 1950S, two successful assassinations of government officials were linked to close associates of Carlos Marcello; one took place the same year as Apalachin, 1957, and the other in 1954. Though Marcello was not the driving force in either, both are important for understanding how the godfather later murdered JFK, and they show how Marcello partnered with, and learned from, his fellow mob bosses.

Marcello’s partner Santo Trafficante was one of the vice lords behind the highly publicized assassination of Alabama’s Attorney General–elect in 1954. The hit occurred in Phenix City, Alabama, long known as the most corrupt town in America. Just across the river from much larger Columbus, Georgia, and its huge Fort Benning US Army base, Phenix City was a cesspool of all forms of vice that preyed on servicemen: drugs, gambling, and clip joints featuring armies of B-girls and prostitutes. Prior to World War II, Franklin Roosevelt had sent General George Patton to clean up the town, but to no avail. Santo Trafficante had a major influence in Phenix City through one of his longtime lieutenants, and Marcello had criminal interests in Alabama as well. State officials either looked the other way or—in the case of Alabama’s sitting Attorney General—were part of the criminal operation.

In 1954 Phenix City’s Albert Patterson ran for Attorney General of Alabama on a promise to clean up the town. He won the Democratic nomination, which in 1950s Alabama made him the Attorney
General–elect, but Patterson was quickly assassinated by gunfire. The confident crime lords hadn’t bothered to use any type of patsy to take the blame, so it was immediately clear that organized crime was responsible for the murder.

The assassination of Attorney General–elect Patterson generated huge headlines across the country. Though the Eisenhower–Nixon Administration, including FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, had basically taken a hands-off approach to organized crime, National Guard General Walter Hanna pressured the Alabama Governor, who finally got Eisenhower to take action. Phenix City was placed under “Martial Rule” by the National Guard, putting the city under US military occupation. That drastic step finally ran the rackets out of Phenix City, though after a time they simply reorganized on a smaller scale across the river in Columbus, Georgia.