Ron Rawson on Carlos Marcello

Ron Rawson is our resident expert on all things Mafia in New Orleans. He has researched the Marcello crime family for many years. We discuss the origins of the Italian mafia and the famous murder of the former New Orleans Chief of Police, David Hennessy. Even though the suspects were unknown, police arrested and charged nineteen members of the Sicilian community. After these men had been acquitted for lack of evidence, a large mob gathered at the Parish prison. They stormed the prison and seized all remaining defendants. Some accounts report that three were lynched from a lamp post or a tree and the others were clubbed to death. The New York Times reported this to be the largest mass lynching in the United States with all eleven men murdered by hanging.

Was the New Orleans mob boss really deported to Guatemala?

By 1950, Carlos Marcello was known as the crime boss of New Orleans. He had forged a partnership with the New York crime boss Frank Costello and was becoming a national figure. During this time, the INS tried to deport him based on a 1938 narcotics conviction. Marcello’s attorneys fought this off with a dispute over the policies and procedures of the INS. By 1961 Robert Kennedy became the Attorney General of the United States. He remembered how Marcello had refused to testify in a recent Senate Committee of Labor Racketeering and he ordered his deportation to Guatemala. Kennedy based his decision to deport on a fraudulent Guatemalan passport Marcello had obtained some years before.  There are many stories told about this supposed deportation but Ron Rawson cuts through all the myths and tells the real story.

Ron Rawson and Facebook

Ron Rawson posts under the name Sam Marcello and is the administrator of several New Orleans interest Facebook groups. Look for Cresent City Mafia, Murder and Mysteries or  New Orleans: Whistles in the Night 

Show notes by Gary Jenkins

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