# Carlos Marcello: The New Orleans Mafia Boss, the Courts and the JFK Allegations

- Link: https://thedarksideofhumanity.com/carlos-marcello/
- Published: 2026-10-29T09:30:53-04:00
- Author: Mandi Martyr

Content warning: this dossier describes organized crime, bribery of public officials and a federal judge, an assault on an FBI agent, a criminal charge alleging that a witness’s murder was requested, and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. It contains no body, scene or victim images.TDSH Case File · New Orleans · Never charged over JFKCarlos Marcello: The New Orleans Mafia Boss, the Courts and the JFK AllegationsNever charged over JFKLA bribery conviction stoodDeported 1961Never charged over JFKNew Orleans, Louisiana1930 to 1989Federal investigators called him the boss of the New Orleans Mafia for thirty years. He was deported once, acquitted several times, had two convictions wiped out and served time on two others. A congressional committee said he had a motive to kill Kennedy and no direct evidence linked him. This is what the record shows.Legal status: Carlos Marcello was convicted of crimes several times, acquitted several times, and had two convictions wiped out on appeal. In order, the court and official records show the following. On May 13, 1930, he was convicted in Louisiana of assault and robbery and sentenced to 9 to 14 years; he received a pardon from the governor of Louisiana in 1935. In 1938 he pleaded guilty to a federal Marihuana Tax Act charge and was sentenced to one year; federal courts later refused to set that conviction aside. After he refused to answer the Kefauver committee’s questions in New Orleans in January 1951, a federal judge, sitting without a jury, found him guilty on six counts of contempt of the Senate and not guilty on 43; in 1952 the Fifth Circuit reversed and entered a judgment of acquittal. On November 22, 1963, a federal jury in New Orleans acquitted him of conspiracy charges over a falsified Guatemalan birth certificate. In October 1964 he was indicted for bribing a juror in that trial and for requesting the murder of a government witness; the murder-request charge was dropped and a jury acquitted him of the rest. On August 8, 1968, a federal jury in Houston convicted him of assaulting an FBI agent, and he was fined $5,000 and sentenced to two years; the Fifth Circuit affirmed in 1970. On August 3, 1981, a federal jury in New Orleans convicted him in the BRILAB case of one count of conspiracy to violate the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), and acquitted him on all the substantive counts; he was sentenced to seven years, the conviction was affirmed in 1983, and on June 23, 1989, the Fifth Circuit vacated it. In December 1981 a federal jury in Los Angeles convicted him on all three counts of conspiring to bribe a federal judge, corruptly endeavoring to influence an officer of the court, and interstate travel in aid of racketeering; the Ninth Circuit affirmed in 1984, and that conviction was never overturned. He was released from prison in 1989 and died at his home in Metairie, Louisiana, on March 2, 1993. He was never charged with any crime connected to the assassination of President Kennedy. Every claim in this dossier linking him to that crime is an allegation, and each one is attributed to whoever made it.For thirty years Carlos Marcello was the man federal investigators named as the boss of the New Orleans Mafia, the oldest crime family in the United States. He called himself a tomato salesman. He fought deportation for more than a quarter of a century, was flown out of the country in handcuffs in 1961, and was back in Louisiana within two months.Marcello is also one of the names that come up most often in theories about the killing of President Kennedy in Dallas on November 22, 1963. A congressional committee found in 1979 that he had the motive, means and opportunity, that it could not establish direct evidence of his complicity, and that it was unlikely he was involved, while saying it could not rule him out. This dossier quotes what that committee wrote and keeps it separate from what the courts decided.Where the court records, the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) and the newspapers of the time disagree on a date, a trial length or a sentence, the disagreement is stated here.01Who was Carlos Marcello?Carlos Marcello was the man the FBI, the Justice Department and two Senate committees identified as the head of organized crime in Louisiana from about 1950 until the 1980s. The HSCA described his territory as “an area that is based in New Orleans but extends throughout Louisiana and Texas.” He denied it, telling the House Select Committee on Crime he earned “a salary of about $1,600 a month” as a tomato salesman.He was not an American citizen, which left the government a weapon no ordinary case offered: deportation.02Birth, Tunis and a disputed birthplaceThe Supreme Court described him in 1955 as “a native of Tunis, Africa.” An immigration press release quoted in Justice Hugo Black’s dissent in the same case gave the details the government relied on: “born February 6, 1910, in Tunis, Africa, entered the United States for permanent residence October 7, 1910, at New Orleans.” Black wrote that Marcello had been “brought to this country forty-four years ago when he was eight months old.”Even so, the HSCA noted that “The exact place of Marcello’s birth on February 6, 1910, has long been in doubt, and at one point was a central question in a lengthy deportation proceeding.” Its own conclusion was cautious: “it is generally believed that Marcello was born in Tunis, North Africa, with the name Calogero Minacore.” UPI’s 1993 obituary said he was taken to New Orleans at eight months by his Sicilian parents. The Los Angeles Times obituary that week said he was born in Italy; that is not what the Supreme Court record says, and it is noted here as a source error.The birthplace mattered because a deportation needs a country willing to take the person, and a falsified Guatemalan birth certificate would later put him on trial.03The first conviction: assault and robbery, 1930According to the HSCA, “Marcello’s first contact with the law came on November 29, 1929, when he was arrested at the age of 19 by New Orleans police as accessory before and after the robbery of a local bank.” Those charges were dismissed. The committee went on: “Less than 6 months later, on May 13, 1930, he was convicted of assault and robbery and was sentenced to the State penitentiary for 9 to 14 years. He served less than 5.”The crime was a grocery store robbery. The HSCA summarized 1959 Senate testimony by Aaron M. Kohn, managing director of the Metropolitan Crime Commission of New Orleans and a former FBI agent, that Marcello had shielded himself by having two juveniles carry it out. Kohn said Marcello “was referred to as a Fagin” in the newspapers of the time. UPI’s obituary gave the boys’ ages as 13 and 16 and said Marcello was released after four years. The two juveniles are not named.In 1935 Marcello received a pardon from the governor of Louisiana. The same year, the HSCA says, charges were filed against him for a second assault and robbery, for violating federal revenue laws, for assault with intent to kill a New Orleans police officer and for another assault and robbery. “Marcello was not prosecuted on the various charges.” Those accusations never reached a verdict.04The conviction that followed him for life: marijuana, 1938In 1938 Marcello was arrested in what federal agents called “the biggest marihuana ring in New Orleans history,” charged, in the HSCA’s words, “with the sale of more than 23 pounds of illegal substance.” The Supreme Court’s 1955 opinion states the legal result plainly: “he had been convicted in 1938 of violation of the Marihuana Tax Act” and “sentenced to imprisonment for one year.” According to the HSCA, he pleaded guilty on October 29, 1938.The HSCA says he served less than 10 months and “arranged to settle his fine for $400,” against a fine of $76,830.That 1938 conviction became the legal foundation of every later attempt to deport him. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 made a marijuana conviction “at any time” a ground for deportation, even if it predated the law. Marcello’s lawyers tried for years to undo it. On October 31, 1962, the HSCA records, a federal court ruled against him, finding false his claim that he had no lawyer when he pleaded guilty. On July 22, 1964, “the Supreme Court rejected another appeal by Marcello to have his 1938 narcotics conviction set aside.” The conviction stood.05Slot machines, casinos and Frank CostelloExhibitA chart headed “La Cosa Nostra, 1963” and credited to FBI intelligence. Marcello appears in the bottom row, labeled New Orleans.Chart: Federal Bureau of Investigation, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain (work of the United States government).The HSCA’s staff report traced Marcello’s rise through the gambling business of the 1940s. “During the 1940’s, Marcello became associated with New York Mafia leader Frank Costello in the operation of a slot machine network,” it says, after a reported agreement between Costello and Senator Huey Long allowed slot machines into New Orleans. His family-owned Jefferson Music Company, the report continues, “came to dominate the slot machine, pinball and juke box trade in the New Orleans area.” He and associates also controlled the Beverly Club and the New Southport Club casinos; the Beverly Club, the report says, “brought Marcello into partnership with the syndicate financier, Meyer Lansky.”Much of this rests on the work of Aaron Kohn and the Metropolitan Crime Commission, a private watchdog group. In a 1970 statement to the House Judiciary Committee, quoted by the HSCA, Kohn said the organization’s criminal enterprise “required, and had, corrupt collusion of public officials at every critical level including police, sheriffs, justices of the peace, prosecutors, mayors, governors, judges, councilmen, licensing authorities, State legislators, and at least one Member of Congress.” That is Kohn’s assessment, not a court finding, and none of the officials he had in mind is named in it.06The Kefauver committee and six counts of contemptOn May 3, 1950, the Senate adopted a resolution creating a special committee on organized crime in interstate commerce, which became known as the Kefauver committee after Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee. A subcommittee of one senator sat in New Orleans on January 25 and 26, 1951. Marcello was subpoenaed, sworn in, and answered two questions: his name and his address. After that, according to the Fifth Circuit, he “was nevertheless asked some 166 specific questions, each of which he refused to answer on the ground that his answer might tend to incriminate him.”He was indicted for contempt of Congress on 49 counts, one for each of 49 refused questions. The court’s account of the trial is short: “Trial by jury was waived, and the court adjudged the appellant not guilty under 43 counts, and guilty under the six counts” that charged him with refusing to answer particular questions. Among them were “Now, sir, is there an indictment pending against you?” and “Have you ever been outside the State of Louisiana?” Others asked whether he knew a man the opinion calls Salvatore Vittali and whether he had an interest in the Beverly Club.The appeal court went through each of the six. It agreed that the Senate’s questions were pertinent to its inquiry, but held that each answer could have tended to incriminate him, and that he had not waived the privilege against self-incrimination. Its judgment, decided April 22, 1952, ended: “The judgment appealed from is reversed, and a judgment of acquittal here rendered.” The HSCA’s summary of this episode says Marcello was “Subsequently convicted of contempt of Congress” and “was later successful in having his conviction overturned.” In court terms, the conviction on six counts was reversed and he stands acquitted on all 49.07Fifth Amendment again: the McClellan committee, 1959On March 24, 1959, Marcello appeared before the Senate committee then investigating labor racketeering and organized crime, known as the McClellan committee. Its chief counsel was Robert F. Kennedy, and Senator John F. Kennedy sat on the committee. Marcello again took the Fifth Amendment on his background and associates. At the end, Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina asked one more question: “I would like to know how you managed to stay in the United States for 5 years, 9 months, and 24 days after you were found ordered deported as an undesirable person.” The answer, by the HSCA’s account, was “I wouldn’t know.”The HSCA notes that two years earlier, in November 1957, Marcello had not gone to the Mafia gathering broken up by New York State Police at Apalachin, New York. He sent his brother Joseph, whom the committee described as the family’s underboss. Joseph appears in the record repeatedly after this, as a co-defendant and at the airport in 1966, and is named for that reason.08The deportation fight, 1953 to 1961In early 1953, partly because of the national attention the Kefauver committee had brought him, the HSCA says, Marcello “finally became the subject of deportation proceedings.” The government’s case rested on the 1938 marijuana conviction. At his hearing before a special inquiry officer of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), the Supreme Court later noted, Marcello “did not dispute the fact of his conviction.” He challenged the fairness of the procedure instead.He lost. In Marcello v. Bonds, decided May 31, 1955, the Supreme Court held that the hearing had been lawful and affirmed the deportation order. Justice Black, joined by Justice Frankfurter, dissented, and Justice Douglas dissented separately on the ground that the law was ex post facto. Black pointed out that Marcello had arrived as a baby and had lived in the United States ever since, that he was married with four children, and that his wife and children were American citizens. They are not named here.Winning the case did not mean removing him. No country agreed to accept him, and the appeals went on. By the time of his 1959 Senate appearance, Senator Ervin was counting the days since the deportation order. The HSCA records that on March 3, 1961, General Joseph Swing of the INS told the FBI that “the Attorney General had been emphasizing” the importance of “taking prompt action to deport notorious hoodlums,” and that “the Marcello case is of particular interest.” The Attorney General by then was Robert Kennedy.09April 4, 1961: handcuffed and flown to GuatemalaThe HSCA’s account of the next month is precise. “On the afternoon of April 4, 1961, 8 years after he was ordered deported, Carlos Marcello was finally ejected from the United States.” He had gone to the INS office in New Orleans for his regular appointment to report as an alien. He was arrested and handcuffed there, taken to the airport and flown to Guatemala. His lawyers called the deportation “cruel and uncivilized.” The next day, Robert Kennedy said that “Marcello’s deportation was in strict accordance with the law.”Marcello never accepted that. Testifying to the HSCA on January 11, 1978, he said “two marshals put the handcuffs on me and they told me that I was being kidnaped and being brought to Guatemala, which they did, and in 30 minutes time I was in the plane.” He added: “They just snatched me and that is it, actually kidnaped me.” He also said Kennedy had told him he “would see that I be deported just as soon as he got in office.” Those are Marcello’s words; a court found the deportation valid.Guatemala did not keep him. According to the HSCA, on May 4, Guatemalan President Miguel Fuentes ordered him expelled, and he was driven to the border with El Salvador and released that night.On May 19, 1961, the HSCA says, a federal court in Washington “ruled that Marcello’s deportation was fully valid.” On June 2, his lawyers announced that he had returned and was in hiding. “Federal investigators have never been able to establish in detail his means of entry.” On June 5, after Robert Kennedy sent 20 federal agents to Shreveport to look for him, he surrendered in New Orleans. On June 8 a federal grand jury indicted him for illegal reentry, and on July 11 the INS again ruled him an undesirable alien and ordered him deported.The fight never ended. The Board of Immigration Appeals upheld the order on December 20, 1961, and on May 27, 1963, the Supreme Court declined to review it. The HSCA’s 1979 staff report says efforts to deport him “were still underway in 1979” and that “As of 1979, no country was willing to do so.” He was never deported again.10November 22, 1963: the birth certificate trialThe Guatemala episode produced a new criminal case. On October 30, 1961, the HSCA records, Robert Kennedy “announced the indictment of Marcello by a Federal grand jury in New Orleans on charges of conspiracy in falsifying a Guatemalan birth certificate and committing perjury.” His brother Joseph was charged too. The case was United States v. Carlos Marcello and Joseph Marcello, Criminal No. 28,365 in the Eastern District of Louisiana; the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library holds part of its trial transcript, dated November 21, 1963, among Justice Department Criminal Division files.The trial opened on November 4, 1963. The HSCA’s account of its end is two sentences long: “Eighteen days later, on November 22, 1963, he was acquitted. The news of President Kennedy’s murder in Dallas reached the New Orleans courtroom shortly before the verdict was announced.” That acquittal stands. The HSCA records that David Ferrie, who had worked as an investigator for Marcello’s lawyer G. Wray Gill on cases that included the Marcello deportation proceedings, said that on the morning of the assassination he was with Marcello at a courthouse in New Orleans. Ferrie’s place in the assassination allegations is covered below.11The juror and the witness: indicted in 1964, acquittedExhibitThe Hale Boggs Federal Building and United States Courthouse in New Orleans, photographed in 2016. It is shown as the federal courthouse in the city today; it is not claimed as the building where any Marcello trial took place.Photo: Yair Haklai, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.Less than a year later the government charged that the verdict itself had been bought. “On October 6, 1964,” the HSCA says, “Marcello and an associate were indicted in Federal court on charges of having bribed a member of the jury that had acquitted Marcello on November 22, 1963.” The indictment said Marcello and his lieutenants made two secret payments to a juror with “the intent to influence his action, vote, opinion and decision” in the case. It also charged that in November 1963 Marcello had tried “to influence, obstruct, and impede” the prosecution “by requesting the murder of” a principal government witness, Carl Noll. Those were charges, and he was presumed innocent of them.Marcello surrendered and was released on a $100,000 bond on October 8, 1964. According to the HSCA, “The charge of having requested the murder of the chief prosecution witness in the 1963 case was later dropped, following the reported unwillingness of that person to testify to the incident. Marcello was acquitted by a jury of the other charges.” He was therefore never convicted of bribing the 1963 juror and never tried on the charge that he asked for a witness to be killed.The HSCA does not give the date of that acquittal, and no court record of it was found for this dossier, so no date is given here. The HSCA does not name the juror or the co-defendant, and they are not named here.12The “Little Apalachin” and the punch at the airport, 1966ExhibitThe main entrance of the New Orleans International Airport passenger terminal on a 1960s postcard; the facade was completed in 1960. The confrontation with an FBI agent took place outside this terminal on September 30, 1966.Photo: Grant L. Robertson postcard, scanned by Infrogmation, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.On September 22, 1966, New York police raided a lunch at the La Stella restaurant on Long Island and arrested Marcello along with Carlo Gambino, Santos Trafficante, Joe Colombo and others. The press, the HSCA says, quickly dubbed it “the Little Apalachin” conference. The committee concluded that “the assemblage has never been fully explained.” Marcello’s own explanation, to the committee in 1978, was: “We just walked in. When we walked in we got arrested. We didn’t have time to eat or talk.” The HSCA records the outcome: “None of those arrested were convicted of a crime.”Eight days later he flew home. The Fifth Circuit’s opinion describes what happened next. “On September 30, 1966 Carlos Marcello arrived at the New Orleans airport where, because of his reputation as a Mafia boss, he was immediately surrounded by newspapermen and photographers.” Among them was FBI agent Patrick Collins, “posing as a deplaning passenger,” with a second agent taking photographs. Outside on the upper ramp, Marcello asked, with some profanity, whether the photographers had taken enough pictures. Collins, arms folded, said no.Marcello said: “Are you looking for trouble?” Collins answered: “I can handle trouble.” According to the court, Marcello then “took a couple of short jabs at Collins and attempted to mow him down with a hay-maker, which never really got off the ground because of his brother Joseph’s restraint.” The HSCA’s version has Marcello shouting “I’m the boss here!” before he swung. Collins is named in both records; the court called him “the complaining and key government witness.”13A mistrial in Laredo, a conviction in HoustonHe was indicted on October 7, 1966, for “forcibly assaulting and intimidating an officer of the FBI in violation of 18 U.S.C.A. § 111.” A judge granted a change of venue “because of extensive prejudicial publicity in the New Orleans area,” and on March 1, 1968, the case was transferred to the Southern District of Texas. The court’s own summary of what followed: “The case came on for trial before Judge Connally in Laredo, Texas in May of 1968 and resulted in a hung jury and mistrial on May 29.” The Metropolitan Crime Commission later said “There were substantial reasons to suspect jury tampering had occurred.” That was the commission’s suspicion. No one was charged with tampering in the Laredo trial in any source used here.The case was retried in Houston before Judge Singleton, and “on August 8, 1968 a verdict of guilty was returned. On September 12, 1968 Appellant was fined $5000 and sentenced to two years imprisonment.” The HSCA gives the verdict date as August 9, 1968; this dossier follows the appeal court.Marcello raised fifteen grounds of appeal. The Fifth Circuit, in an opinion by Chief Judge John R. Brown decided February 18, 1970, found each of them “wanting” and affirmed. In 1979 the HSCA described the assault as “the only Federal offense for which he has been tried and convicted in recent times.”He did not serve the two years. “Originally sentenced to 2 years in Federal prison, Marcello served less than 6 months, he was released on March 12, 1971,” the HSCA says. UPI’s 1993 obituary put it as a sentence “sliced to six months.”14BRILAB: one sting, two casesMarcello’s last two convictions both came out of a single FBI undercover operation known as BRILAB, which UPI explained stood for “bribery-labor.” They were separate cases, tried in different courts, and they ended differently. The New Orleans case was vacated in 1989. The Los Angeles case was affirmed and never overturned.The Fifth Circuit set out the background. “In 1979, the Federal Bureau of Investigation structured an undercover sting operation designed to investigate the bribing of public officials in connection with the placement of public employee insurance contracts. The Bureau staffed a fictitious insurance agency with two undercover agents and Joseph Hauser, a convicted insurance salesman.” According to the court, Hauser asked Marcello for help winning Louisiana state insurance business, and Marcello agreed to a plan involving bribes to officials.Marcello introduced them to Charles E. Roemer II, then Louisiana’s Commissioner of Administration, a post the court called “second only to the Governor of Louisiana in power, influence, and prestige.” Roemer, the court said, agreed to use his influence to place some of the state employee insurance business through Hauser, in return for $25,000 in advance and a share of future commissions. UPI reported that the defense argued the FBI had entrapped the men.15The New Orleans case: convicted in 1981, vacated in 1989In June 1980 a federal grand jury in New Orleans indicted Marcello, Roemer and three others on one count of conspiracy to violate the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) and one substantive RICO count, with mail fraud and wire fraud counts against Marcello and Roemer and an interstate travel count against Marcello. The court record states the verdict: “After an 18-week trial the jury returned a general verdict convicting Roemer and Marcello on the RICO conspiracy count, but acquitting them on all substantive counts.” UPI reported the verdict date as August 3, 1981, described the trial as 19 weeks long, and said the two were “acquitted on 11 other counts.”UPI reported that co-defendants I. Irving Davidson and Vincent Marinello were acquitted and that a fifth, Aubrey Young, was freed when the judge ruled the government had failed to make a case.On January 13, 1982, U.S. District Judge Morey L. Sear sentenced Marcello to seven years in prison and Roemer to three, later reduced to two. The Fifth Circuit affirmed in 1983, and the Supreme Court declined to hear the case.Then the law changed. In McNally v. United States in 1987, the Supreme Court held, in the Fifth Circuit’s summary, “that a scheme to defraud citizens of their intangible right to honest and impartial government did not constitute a violation of the mail fraud statute,” which it said was “limited in scope to the protection of property rights.” On June 23, 1989, a Fifth Circuit panel of Judges Politz, Garwood and Smith reversed.The court found that “the intangible rights theory was the sole basis on which the jury could have convicted the defendants,” that the facts were “essentially identical” to McNally, and that the indictment “contains no property interest allegation whatever.” It held that the conduct charged did “not constitute a violation of either the mail fraud or the wire fraud statute,” and ended: “the decision of the district court is REVERSED and the convictions of Roemer and Marcello are VACATED.” The New Orleans BRILAB conviction no longer stands. The Los Angeles Times obituary later said the Supreme Court “invalidated the mail fraud statute”; that is inaccurate. McNally narrowed the statute; it did not strike it down.16The Los Angeles case: bribing a federal judge, never overturnedTwo days after the New Orleans verdict, on August 5, 1981, a federal grand jury in Los Angeles indicted Marcello, Samuel Orlando Sciortino and Phillip Rizzuto. UPI reported that they were charged with trying to bribe U.S. District Judge Harry Pregerson, who was due to preside over a racketeering trial in which Sciortino was a defendant, and that the FBI had learned of the plan through the BRILAB investigation. The prosecutor said Judge Pregerson “was never contacted by any of the defendants or by any undercover witness or undercover FBI agents involved in the plot.”The three were tried together in the Central District of California before Judge Edward J. Devitt, Senior Judge of the United States District Court for the District of Minnesota. In the Ninth Circuit’s words, “the jury found Marcello guilty on all three counts”: conspiracy to bribe a public official, corruptly endeavoring to influence an officer of a court, and interstate travel in aid of racketeering. Sciortino was convicted only of the second count, with the jury unable to agree on the other two. Rizzuto was convicted on the first two and acquitted on the third. UPI dated the verdict to the Friday before December 13, 1981, which was December 11.The Ninth Circuit rejected entrapment and outrageous government conduct arguments and affirmed all three defendants’ convictions on April 18, 1984. Unlike the New Orleans conviction, this one was never vacated. Reports of the Los Angeles sentence differ: the Los Angeles Times obituary said he was “sentenced to serve seven years,” while a 1989 Los Angeles Times report said he was “facing a 10-year term in another case.” No court document used here settles the figure.17Prison, release and deathIn June 1989, when the Fifth Circuit vacated the New Orleans conviction, Marcello was still in federal custody. The court noted that Roemer “served his sentence and was released; Marcello remains in prison.” The Los Angeles Times reported that week that Roemer had served 15 months, and that Marcello, then 79, “remains in prison.”The Los Angeles conviction stood, but he did not serve all of either sentence. The Los Angeles Times obituary said he had “lived in Metairie since his 1989 release from prison” and that he had suffered a series of minor strokes while inside. UPI said he spent time in the federal prison hospital at Springfield, Missouri, and was “released after serving less than five years.” The exact date of his release in 1989, and the legal basis for it, are not stated in any official source used for this dossier.Carlos Marcello died on March 2, 1993, at his home in Metairie, a suburb of New Orleans. UPI reported the time as 7:30 a.m. and his age as 83, and said the coroner did not immediately release a cause of death. He had, the Los Angeles Times said, “been in failing health for years.” He was never deported.UPI’s obituary quoted Aaron Kohn, who had testified about Marcello to a Senate committee as early as 1959. “No other syndicate leader in the country can match the power and immunity that Carlos Marcello has won through outright corruption,” Kohn said, as retired director of the commission. Kohn described Marcello’s businesses as “legitimate interests illegitimately operated.” Those are an investigator’s characterizations, not court findings.18The JFK allegations, and what the HSCA actually foundCarlos Marcello was never charged with any crime connected to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Everything in this section is allegation, and each claim is attributed to the person or body that made it. The most important of those bodies is the House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA), whose final report and supporting volumes were published in 1979. Marcello’s own position is stated first, because he was the accused: before the committee in executive session, the HSCA records, “Marcello categorically denied any involvement in organized crime or the assassination of President Kennedy. Marcello also denied ever making any kind of threat against the President’s life.”The committee’s general findingsThe HSCA’s overall conclusion was that “President John F. Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy. The Committee is unable to identify the other gunman or the extent of the conspiracy.” One of the four factors behind that conclusion was the committee’s view that “There was a high probability that a second gunman, in fact, fired at the President.”On organized crime, its formal finding was carefully limited: “The committee believes, on the basis of the evidence available to it, that the national syndicate of organized crime, as a group, was not involved in the assassination of President Kennedy, but that the available evidence does not preclude the possibility that individual members may have been involved.” It concluded that “the most likely family bosses of organized crime to have participated in such a unilateral assassination plan were Carlos Marcello and Santos Trafficante.” Neither was ever charged in connection with the assassination.What it said about MarcelloThe central sentence of the committee’s section on Marcello reads: “The committee found that Marcello had the motive, means and opportunity to have President John F. Kennedy assassinated, though it was unable to establish direct evidence of Marcello’s complicity.” The motive it described was the Kennedy administration’s campaign against him, including the 1961 deportation.What set Marcello apart, the committee said, was “credible associations relating both Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby to figures having a relationship, albeit tenuous, with Marcello’s crime family or organization.” In the same passage it warned: “association is the first step in conspiracy; it is not identical to it, and while associations may legitimately give rise to suspicions, a careful distinction must always be drawn between suspicions suspected and facts found.”The associations it listed were these, each as the committee described them: Oswald’s uncle. Charles “Dutz” Murret, whom the committee called “a minor underworld gambling figure,” and who it said had been an associate of figures in the Marcello organization. David Ferrie. The committee found “several areas of credible evidence and testimony indicating a possible association” between Oswald and Ferrie, but said “the nature of the Oswald-Ferrie association remained largely a mystery.” Ferrie had done investigative work for Marcello’s lawyer. Jack Ruby. The committee said Ruby knew Joseph Civello, “the Marcello associate, who allegedly headed organized crime activities in Dallas,” and that a Dallas restaurant owner who visited Ruby in jail had acknowledged a long relationship with Marcello. The committee then weighed the case against him. It noted that Marcello’s career had been built on “a policy of prudence; he is not reckless,” and that a risk analysis suggested he “would be unlikely to undertake so dangerous a course of action as a Presidential assassination.” Its conclusion was double-edged, and both halves need to be read together. First: “Considering that record of prudence, and in the absence of direct evidence of involvement, it may be said that it is unlikely that Marcello was in fact involved in the assassination of the President.” Second: the evidence of motive and of links to Oswald and Ruby, “coupled with the failure of the 1963-64 investigation to explore adequately possible conspiratorial activity in the assassination, precluded a judgment by the committee that Marcello and his associates were not involved.”In plain terms, the HSCA said Marcello was probably not involved and that it could not rule him out. It did not find that he took part.The Churchill Farms threat: one informant’s accountThe best known allegation comes from a 1969 book, “The Grim Reapers,” by Ed Reid. Reid’s informant, identified by the committee as Edward Becker, said that in September 1962 he had been at a meeting with Marcello at Churchill Farms, “the 3,000-acre swampland plantation owned by Marcello outside of New Orleans.” According to the final report, it was alleged that Marcello shouted an old Sicilian threat, “Livarsi na petra di la scarpa!” (“Take the stone out of my shoe!”), against the Kennedy brothers, and that he spoke of using a “nut” to carry out the killing.The committee’s findings on that account cut both ways. It criticized the FBI: the Bureau knew of the allegation more than a year and a half before the book came out, never conducted “a substantive investigation,” and senior officials, including Director Hoover, were aware of agents’ action to “discredit” the informant. An FBI memorandum also said Becker had “a reputation of being unreliable and known to misrepresent facts.” The committee concluded that Becker was “in fact associated with various underworld figures,” but that “as a consequence of his underworld involvement, the informant had a questionable reputation for honesty and may not be a credible source of information.” Marcello denied making any threat.Later claimsThe committee noted that “Marcello was never the subject of electronic surveillance coverage by the FBI.” Claims have continued since. When he died, the Los Angeles Times reported that the PBS program “Frontline” had that year interviewed an associate of Santos Trafficante, who quoted Trafficante as saying Marcello had “messed up” when he had Kennedy killed. That is a secondhand account of a remark attributed to Trafficante; it has never been tested in court. The same newspaper’s summary of the record remains accurate: “no official link was ever made.”19Timeline February 6, 1910: Born, generally believed in Tunis; arrives in New Orleans October 7, 1910. May 13, 1930: Convicted of assault and robbery; pardoned 1935. 1938: Pleads guilty under the Marihuana Tax Act; one year. January 1951: Refuses Kefauver committee questions; contempt conviction on six counts reversed April 22, 1952, with acquittal rendered. May 31, 1955: Supreme Court upholds deportation order. April 4, 1961: Deported to Guatemala; back by June. November 22, 1963: Acquitted in the birth certificate case. October 1964: Indicted for jury bribery and requesting a witness’s murder; murder-request charge dropped, acquitted on the rest. August 8, 1968: Convicted of assaulting an FBI agent; affirmed February 18, 1970; released March 12, 1971. 1979: HSCA finds motive, means and opportunity but no direct evidence of complicity. August 3, 1981: BRILAB New Orleans RICO conspiracy conviction; vacated June 23, 1989. December 1981: Los Angeles judicial bribery conviction; affirmed April 18, 1984; never overturned. 1989: Released from prison. March 2, 1993: Dies in Metairie, aged 83. 20Frequently asked questionsWas Carlos Marcello convicted of killing JFK?No. He was never charged in connection with the assassination. The HSCA found he had “the motive, means and opportunity” but “was unable to establish direct evidence of Marcello’s complicity,” and said it was “unlikely” he was involved while declining to rule him out.Was his BRILAB conviction overturned?One of them was. The 1981 New Orleans RICO conspiracy conviction was vacated in 1989 after McNally. The 1981 Los Angeles conviction for conspiring to bribe a federal judge was affirmed and never overturned.Was he ever deported?Once, to Guatemala in 1961. He returned within two months and was never removed again.21Related case files The Nightmarish Reign of the Axeman in New Orleans Citations & SourcesSources22 Cornell Legal Information Institute: Marcello v. Bonds, 349 U.S. 302 (1955) OpenJurist: Marcello v. United States, 196 F.2d 437 (5th Cir. 1952) OpenJurist: United States v. Marcello, 423 F.2d 993 (5th Cir. 1970) OpenJurist: United States v. Roemer, 703 F.2d 805 (5th Cir. 1983) Public.Resource.Org: United States v. Marcello, 876 F.2d 1147 (5th Cir. 1989) OpenJurist: United States v. Marcello, 731 F.2d 1354 (9th Cir. 1984) National Archives: Report of the Select Committee on Assassinations, Part I C AARC Public Library: HSCA Volume IX: III. Carlos Marcello JFK Assassination Information: Carlos Marcello (HSCA Volume IX transcription) John F. Kennedy Presidential Library: United States v. Carlos Marcello and Joseph Marcello: Trial transcript (pages 844-879), 21 November 1963 UPI: Reputed Mafia kingpin Carlos Marcello, convicted this week in… UPI: Marcello fights conviction UPI: Sentencing set for Brilab pair UPI: Carlos Marcello, Louisiana Mafia boss dies Los Angeles Times: The Nation: News from June 25, 1989 Los Angeles Times: Carlos Marcello; Gulf Coast Crime Figure Image creditsPhoto: Yair Haklai, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.Photo: Grant L. Robertson postcard, scanned by Infrogmation, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.