Carlos Marcello

Carlos Marcello (born Calogero Minacori, February 6, 1910, Tunis, Tunisia - died March 2, 1993, New Orleans, Louisiana) was the boss of the New Orleans crime family from the late 1940s until his 1981 conviction, exercising informal control over organized crime in Louisiana and portions of Texas. He was identified by the House Select Committee on Assassinations as having the motive, means and opportunity to have President Kennedy assassinated and was the subject of multiple FBI informant reports documenting specific threats against the president.¹

Criminal Career

Marcello was born to Sicilian parents who emigrated to Tunisia and then to the United States, settling in New Orleans. He was raised in the area and entered criminal enterprise through the gambling operations and political corruption infrastructure that characterized New Orleans organized crime. He gradually consolidated control over the New Orleans territory following World War II, building a criminal organization that controlled gambling across Louisiana and into Texas and that maintained long-standing relationships with New Orleans political machines.

Marcello was never a member of the national organized crime commission in the same formal sense as New York or Chicago families, but he operated as a peer of the major organized crime bosses, attended commission meetings, and had close relationships with Santos Trafficante, Jr. in Tampa and with figures in the Chicago and New York families. His territory included the Gulf Coast and extended into Central American gambling and political connections.¹

Deportation and the Kennedy Connection

In 1961, Attorney General Robert Kennedy's aggressive pursuit of organized crime - a personal priority that represented a sharp departure from J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, which had long declined to acknowledge the existence of a national organized crime structure - directly targeted Marcello. Kennedy's Justice Department secured Marcello's deportation on April 4, 1961, placing him on a government aircraft and depositing him in Guatemala without warning or due process. Marcello returned to the United States within weeks through undocumented means.

FBI informant Edward Becker reported to the FBI in September 1962 that Marcello had made an explicit threat against President Kennedy at a meeting at Churchill Farms, his estate outside New Orleans. According to Becker, Marcello invoked a Sicilian proverb - "Take the stone out of your shoe" - to describe his intention to deal with Robert Kennedy through the president, and stated that any hit man used for the assassination would be a "nut" without apparent organized crime connections.

The Becker report was not transmitted by the FBI to the Warren Commission. The House Select Committee on Assassinations examined the published account that Marcello threatened the President at a meeting at Churchill Farms in September 1962. It identified the informant who claimed to have been present, learned that the FBI knew of his allegations for a year and a half before they were published in 1969 and possessed information indicating he may have met Marcello in the fall of 1962, and found that no substantive investigation was ever conducted. Director J. Edgar Hoover and other senior FBI officials knew that agents were acting to "discredit" the informant without a significant investigation of his allegations. The committee also found that the informant had a questionable reputation for honesty.²

HSCA Investigation

The House Select Committee on Assassinations reported in January 1979 that Marcello had the "motive, means and opportunity to have President John F. Kennedy assassinated," and that it was "unable to establish direct evidence."³ The committee found:

• Marcello had a documented, intense personal motive arising from the Kennedy administration's deportation and continuing prosecution
• Marcello had the organizational resources to arrange an assassination using individuals without apparent organized crime connections
• Jack Ruby's connections to Marcello's New Orleans organization were documented
• Lee Harvey Oswald had connections to New Orleans - his uncle and surrogate father Dutz Murret was a Marcello associate and bookie

The committee named Marcello and Santos Trafficante, Jr. as the family bosses most likely to have been involved.⁴ Among the associations it found linking Oswald to Marcello's organization were Oswald's uncle Charles "Dutz" Murret, a minor underworld gambling figure who was an associate of organized crime figures affiliated with the Marcello organization; acquaintances of Oswald's mother, one of whom reportedly served at one time as a personal aide or driver to Marcello; and the person who arranged Oswald's bail in August 1963, an associate of two of Marcello's deputies, one of them Nofio Pecora, who received a telephone call from Ruby on October 30, 1963.³ It described the existence of credible associations linking Oswald and Ruby to Marcello's organization as the critical evidentiary element, and stated that the FBI never maintained electronic surveillance of Marcello despite two attempts.³

The report concludes that "it may be said that it is unlikely that Marcello was in fact, involved in the assassination of the President," and adds that his motive and links to Oswald and Ruby, coupled with the failure of the 1963-64 investigation, "precluded a judgment by the committee that Marcello and his associates were not involved."³ The report also says that Marcello's organized crime career "has been based to a large extent on a policy of prudence; he is not reckless."³

BRILAB Conviction

In 1981, Marcello was convicted in the FBI's BRILAB (bribery-labor) undercover operation, in which FBI agents posed as insurance company representatives offering kickbacks to Louisiana officials in exchange for state insurance contracts. Marcello was caught on tape approving bribery payments. He was convicted of racketeering and bribery charges and sentenced to seven years in federal prison.

In 1985, while incarcerated, FBI informant Joseph Hauser reported that Marcello had confessed to planning the Kennedy assassination. The confession, if genuine, was never corroborated by independent evidence, and Marcello's attorney denied it. Marcello was released from federal prison in 1989 following a series of strokes that had severely impaired his cognition. He died of complications related to Alzheimer's disease on March 2, 1993.¹