The Hidden History of the JFK Assassination (10 page)

To help document Marcello’s words and actions, Kirk told Van Laningham “he was going to report to his boss and try for a wiretap of the prison” cell that Marcello shared with Jack. “Two weeks later, Kirk came to see me. He said, ‘Well, a judge is going to give us a wiretap [based] on the evidence [Jack had provided].’” Van Laningham was told that “the Unit phone in the hall would be bugged” and more importantly “that I would have a bug in the room that I shared with Marcello. I was told to buy a Panasonic radio in the [prison] store. I bought the radio and [the Unit Manager] said that he would have to take the radio away to see if it was legal for me to have. I called Kirk and he told me that the bug was being installed in the radio and it would be returned when they were finished. On the 17th of September [1985, the Unit Manager] brought the radio back and told me that I could have it. . . . [I] thought to myself, here I am in this little room with the head of the Mafia from New Orleans, with a radio with a bug inside. I was really scared. If I was found out, I was dead.”

The bugging operation described by Van Laningham was confirmed by Kimmel and the FBI files, which include a “Priority” memo sent to the Director of the FBI, William Sessions, confirming that Van Laningham “was roommate of New Orleans organized crime
boss Carlos Marcello at Federal Correctional Institution, Texarkana, Texas,” and “was instrumental in furnishing probable cause to initiate Title III coverage of Marcello and prison telephone.” The same memo also confirms that Van Laningham “successfully introduced FBI undercover agent to Marcello.” Van Laningham wrote at the time—and told NBC News for the Discovery Channel—that the Marcello bugging operation yielded “hundreds of hours” of tapes, which Kimmel confirmed. Kimmel told me that while the FBI listened to every tape, they would transcribe a tape only if Marcello mentioned something of interest. Another CAMTEX FBI agent I interviewed said he was the one who actually listened to every secretly recorded tape.

Even as their private conversations were being recorded, Marcello continued to grow closer to Van Laningham. Marcello “would talk for hours about his early life in New Orleans [and] how he had got started running the Mafia in Louisiana.” Marcello shared with Jack intimate aspects of his personal life, from his many girlfriends and mistresses to details about his family. The godfather also saw that Van Laningham got well-fitting clothes, avoided bad work assignments, and gained protection from the other inmates, including those jealous of Jack’s close friendship with the godfather. Marcello even dispensed fatherly advice to Van Laningham about his future outside of prison.

For all those reasons, Van Laningham grew to like some aspects of Marcello’s personality. Yet all that changed once Jack heard Carlos Marcello’s chilling confession to JFK’s assassination. It brought home to Jack just how much Marcello had come to trust him—and how deadly the godfather could be. If Marcello could find a way to kill a president and get away with it, what chance did Jack have if Marcello learned that he had betrayed him to the FBI?

*
According to former Justice Department prosecutor John Diuguid, the only exception was a single visit to Marcello in the 1960s by a very frightened, wired informant for the Bureau of Narcotics.

*
Thomas Kimmel’s grandfather was Admiral H. E. Kimmel, Commander of the US Naval Base at Pearl Harbor when it was attacked on December 7, 1941. Admiral Kimmel was scapegoated for the disaster, which was the subject of excessive government secrecy at the time and for many decades afterward.

CHAPTER 4

Carlos Marcello’s Rise to Power

I
N MANY WAYS, Carlos Marcello was unique among Mafia godfathers. He ruled his empire without challenge from the late 1940s to the early 1980s, a remarkable tenure for such a deadly profession. A close look at Marcello’s early life shows how he developed the incredible confidence needed to order JFK’s assassination and how he gained the experience to get away with it.

Marcello wasn’t like Mafia chiefs in other cities, because the history of his mob “family” was very different. The New Orleans Mafia is the oldest Mafia family in the United States, having begun in the 1860s. As a result, the New Orleans mob could conduct some critical business, such as carrying out major hits, without approval of the national Mafia “commission.” The New Orleans Mafia was also monolithic and under Marcello’s sole control once he became a godfather, in stark contrast to the Mafia in New York City, whose several mob families often competed—and sometimes fought—among themselves.

In addition, the New Orleans Mafia was one of the few mob families to conduct hits on government officials; the only others who dared to take such measures even occasionally were Trafficante’s Tampa mob and the Chicago Mafia, both allies of Marcello in drug trafficking and the JFK hit.

In the 1800s, soon after the Civil War, New Orleans became a favored American destination for immigrants from Sicily, the birthplace of the Mafia, because the climates of the two regions were so similar. Marcello biographer John H. Davis found that “between 1869 and 1889, the New Orleans police attributed over a hundred murders to the [local] Sicilian Mafia.”

One hundred was also the number of members in the New Orleans Mafia by October 15, 1890, when mob hit men shot the city’s Police Chief, David Hennessey, using a shotgun and a revolver. He died the following day, and though nineteen mobsters were indicted for the hit, all were acquitted thanks to witness intimidation and bribed jurors. In response to Hennessey’s assassination and the resulting acquittals, the public rioted and killed eleven of the Mafia men. But within two years, the New Orleans Mafia had fully recovered and was stronger than ever.

By 1922 the new head of the New Orleans Mafia was Sam Carolla, a narcotics trafficker born in Sicily who, as Davis noted, had shot and killed “a federal narcotics agent by the name of Cecil Moore.” Carolla served only two years in federal prison for the crime and emerged to continue heading the organization into the 1930s and mid-1940s.

Carlos Marcello was born Calogero Minacore on February 6, 1910, in Tunisia, the son of a Sicilian mother who soon joined her husband in New Orleans. After dropping out of school at age fourteen, Carlos helped his large family of six brothers and two sisters by delivering vegetables from the family’s farm to the New Orleans market, which was controlled by the Mafia. Carlos soon saw crime as a greater opportunity than farming, and at age nineteen he and three friends robbed a bank of $7,000. However, after they were caught and forced to return the money, all the charges were dropped.

Marcello quickly learned that it was better to have others commit his crimes, so he had two teenagers rob a grocery store. While Marcello was planning a follow-up crime with the two—another bank robbery—the teens were arrested. One of them told the authorities everything, and the police also arrested Marcello. In the future, Marcello would come to rely on only close family members and associates who could be trusted not to talk. He had a lot of time to think about such things after “he was sentenced to nine to twelve years in prison,” a term he began serving in May 1930 when he was just twenty. Thanks to a corrupt governor, Marcello was pardoned after only four years.

After leaving prison, Marcello bought his first bar, beginning a pattern that would eventually see him owning or controlling dozens of bars, clubs, and restaurants in cities ranging from New Orleans to Dallas, where he would secretly control even gay bars and Jack Ruby’s Carousel Club. The following year, in 1936, the twenty-six-year-old Marcello officially joined the New Orleans Mafia and married the daughter of one of Sam Carolla’s underbosses. Less than two years later, Marcello was arrested again, this time for selling twenty-three pounds of marijuana from his bar. He was sentenced to a year and a day and ordered to pay a fine of $76,830, but thanks to the mob’s influence, he paid only $400 and was released after just nine months. In the future, Marcello would leave the actual trafficking of drugs to others to insulate himself from risk of arrest.

After his release, Marcello focused on a music company he owned with one of his brothers. It was just a front for putting their jukeboxes and pinball machines in bars, restaurants, and clubs in the cities of Gretna and Algiers, just outside New Orleans. Any owners who didn’t want Marcello’s machines were dealt with brutally.

Those machines—and Marcello’s ruthless powers of persuasion—proved to be his ticket to the big time because Sam Carolla had just closed a deal with New York mob boss Frank Costello to put a thousand of Costello’s slot machines in and around New Orleans. Carolla ordered Marcello to get a fourth of the machines into New Orleans’s west side. In return, Marcello would keep two-thirds of the money while Costello got one-third. The deal was incredibly profitable for both thanks to Marcello’s fearsome reputation among bar and club owners. At this time Marcello made his first steps at large-scale bribery of public officials. He later boasted that he gave the Gretna Police Chief “$50,000 in cash every few months,” as well as distributing much smaller bribes to lower-level police.

Marcello was so ruthlessly efficient and the slots so profitable that when Costello and Meyer Lansky decided to build a plush gambling casino called the Beverly Country Club near New Orleans, they made Marcello a 12.5 percent partner. The club opened in 1945 and soon featured top nightclub acts of the day, including such Hollywood stars as Jimmy Durante. Marcello was soon managing not only the club but all of Costello’s gambling operations in the New Orleans area. All of that was in addition to his other highly profitable activities, which ranged from having “the largest racing wire service in New Orleans” to “reaping huge profits from the narcotics trade for Sam Carolla.”

When it came to keeping his men in line, as well as the many other business owners he dealt with, Carlos Marcello could rely on his violent reputation. John H. Davis pointed out that “Carlos had been the prime suspect in several murders for which he had never been charged.” One victim was a hoodlum who used the names Constantine Masotto and (according to FBI files) Thomas Siracusa. In 1943 Marcello sent
a clear message to mobsters, business owners, and law enforcement when he personally helped torture and murder Siracusa in semi-public fashion at the Willswood Tavern, a rustic restaurant just outside New Orleans owned by Marcello’s family.

Davis briefly mentioned the torture/murder in his landmark 1989 biography of Marcello, a key source for information about Marcello’s history in this chapter. But here, quoted from FBI files for the first time, is an eyewitness account from a woman who had been dining at the restaurant that evening. Twenty-four years later, when she finally told the FBI what she had seen, she was still so afraid that she refused to testify in court and requested that the FBI not identify her.

The woman said that Marcello was part of a large dinner party at the restaurant and that when Siracusa “arrived [he] appeared surprised and then afraid.” When “Siracusa walked . . . back into the kitchen,” Marcello and three other men “immediately” followed him. After hearing shouting and fighting, a customer “opened the kitchen door,” and the witness “observed Siracusa sitting in a metal chair.” One of Marcello’s men “was holding a snub-nose revolver which was pressed against Siracusa’s temple. Carlos Marcello was slapping Siracusa [who] appeared afraid for his life and was shouting in Italian.”

The “terrified” witness and her companions fled. A day or two later, the witness noticed “all the newspapers were carrying front-page stories about the disappearance of Siracusa,” so she notified “the New Orleans Police Department.” She was sent “to see Sheriff Clancy . . . and told him what she had seen and that she was scared. Sheriff Clancy told her that if she kept her mouth shut, she would not get hurt. She later went to see [a police] Captain at his home [who] told her to keep her mouth shut about what she had told him, as they would kill her. Several weeks later [a] Deputy [for Clancy] also told her to keep her
mouth shut,” adding that he already knew “Carlos Marcello worked [Siracusa] over [and] that Siracusa was killed.”

The willingness of public officials to intimidate the witness and aid Marcello is remarkable, especially considering that the witness told the FBI that the man she had seen holding the gun on Siracusa for Marcello was the “Chief Investigator” for the local “District Attorney.” John H. Davis cited a different FBI report stating that “a year after [Siracusa went] missing . . . his lime-encrusted skeleton was discovered in the swamp behind [Willswood] Tavern.” That report said that Siracusa “had been beaten to death with rubber hoses by Carlos Marcello and an accomplice. The body was then thrown into a tub of lye and after decomposition, the partially liquefied remains were poured into the swamp.” That type of murder (usually by “one of his guards”) and body dumping became standard retaliation for anyone in Marcello’s organization who displeased, disobeyed, or withheld money from the crime boss.

Word of Marcello’s murder of Siracusa spread throughout the criminal underworld and beyond, to those who did business with Marcello and to all levels of law enforcement, helping to keep all of them in line. That use of fear and corruption was a template for many of Marcello’s future crimes, though the mob boss later kept his hands technically clean by relying on his men and professionals to take care of the actual murders.

At the same time, Carlos Marcello could also be extremely personable with family, friends, and business associates. Given the many murders for which he was responsible, it’s tempting to say that Marcello combined the traits of both a sociopath and a psychopath. However, a better analogy might be that Marcello was simply like a great white shark, which must keep swimming forward or die. Jack
Van Laningham later characterized Marcello by saying, “[A] more cruel and vicious egomaniac I have never met. If he liked you, he would take care of you. But if he did not—well, I’m sure that you know what happens to you.” He added that Marcello “seemed to want to win all the time, even if he had to cheat,” and this impulse applied even to the friendly games of gin rummy they played in prison. So for Marcello, killing may simply have been part of winning, of always moving ahead. After all, he hadn’t achieved his position in the Mafia by inheriting it from his father, as had his friend Santo Trafficante. Instead, Marcello had to earn his own power and then keep earning it to fend off potential local rivals and mob bosses from other areas.