The Purpose of Paranoia: The Influence of Conspiracy on American Cinema

WARNING: SPOILERS!

There are few historical events that would capture the influence of American cinema more than the Watergate scandal that plagued America during the early 70s. The revelations that were uncovered during the Watergate investigation, and the investigations that it spawned, created a public distrust in the federal government. The growing claims of conspiracy and cover up over the assassination of President John. F. Kennedy, and his brother, Senator Robert F. Kennedy would also lead people to think twice about taking what the government said at face value.

            

One out of the three movies in Alan J. Pakula’s “Paranoia Trilogy” (Klute, All The President’s Men and The Parallax View) The Parallax View (1974) would completely sum up the feelings of distrust and paranoia that existed during the 1970s. The Parallax View, starring Warren Beatty as a news reporter whose ex-girlfriend witnesses a Bobby Kennedy-esque assassination, acts as a time capsule of the 1970s.

Right when The Parallax View was released, the point of political paranoia in the United States was at its highest. The Watergate Committee, which led to the resignation of President Richard M. Nixon, had spawned more investigations into the federal government. The Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities was formed after the Watergate Committee. The Committee to Study Governmental Operations was organized to investigate the crimes of the CIA and other intelligence agencies, such as the FBI, since their complicity in Watergate proved that they were capable of breaking charter. When disturbing information started to be uncovered when the investigation of the CIA started, the Church Committee was formed to just investigate the crimes of the CIA.  During the Church Committee various domestic crimes of the CIA were uncovered, including OPERATION MOCKINGBIRD, which proved that the CIA had influence in both domestic and foreign media. When CIA involvement in the JFK assassination was deemed a possibility, the House Select Committee on Assassinations was formed. The HSCA would re-investigate the assassinations of both President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King. The Kennedy assassination would once again be thrust it into the mindset of the public.

Even though The Parallax View would debut before most of these committees would be formed, it would be an eerie omen. Similar to the omens that would haunt Frank Sinatra during the early 50s and 60s. In 1954, Sinatra would star in a movie called Suddenly. He would play the leader of three gangsters that would capture the town’s sheriff (Sterling Hayden) and would hatch a plan to assassinate the President of the United States when his train stopped in town. The plan is strangely similar to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Sinatra would create a sniper’s nest on the top story of a house looking over the railroad where the President would stop. When asked why he was using a sniper rifle instead of a tommy gun by one of his cohorts, Sinatra would reply that the rifle would pack more of a punch. Of course, the film is not exactly like the Kennedy assassination, Sinatra and his men are stopped before they could assassinate the President. President Kennedy would not be so lucky. After the Kennedy assassination, Sinatra would sell all the rights he had to the film, casting it into the realm of the public domain. Sinatra would suffer another ill-fated omen with his film, The Manchurian Candidate (1962). The film again stars Sinatra as a Korean vet who eventually uncovers that he and his fellow squad members were captured and brainwashed by communist during combat. The group’s former Staff Sergeant, Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey), would be hypnotized to assassinate the Vice-Presidential rival of his stepfather. Again, the end turns out differently, where Shaw assassinates his MaCarthyish stepfather and his mother (Angela Lansbury), who was revealed to be working with the communist. Shaw then kills himself, realizing that he posed a continuous threat. During the Church Committee, it was revealed in OPERATION ARTICHOKE that the CIA had been trying to hypnotize assassins since the early 50s, similar to the methods used in The Manchurian Candidate. The research to make a sleeper assassin would continue through the 60s and 70s in the infamous MKULTRA programs. A popular conspiracy theory for both of the assassinations of President and Senator Kennedy is that Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan were sleeper assassins, who were triggered to kill by the CIA.

The plot of The Parallax View would also contain elements of both Kennedy assassinations. As stated earlier, reporter Joseph Frady (Warren Beatty) has an ex-girlfriend who witnesses an assassination of a state senator that greatly compares to the assassination conspiracy theories of Senator Robert F. Kennedy. One assassin shoots the senator at close range, serving as a distraction, while another assassin is able to finish him off. Three years after the assassination, Frady’s ex comes to visit him, saying she is fearful for her safety. She reveals that several people who witnessed the assassination of the senator have suffered strange and unexplained deaths. This is an obviously nod to the list of people who suffered equally strange deaths that witnessed the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Daley Plaza on November 22, 1963. Frady eventually uncovers that a company named Parallax has been hiring angry, anti-social outcasts (similar to Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan), who unknowingly, are going to take the fall for political assassinations. Frady goes undercover and applies to be one of these patsies and watches a film that shows a montage of pictures. Within this montage are pictures of stereotypical American images: apple pie, the American flag, and the nuclear family. But as the montage speeds up images of racial violence, graves, Nazis, and the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald are embedded into the montage.

Frady continues to stalk the man who believes will be his handler for Parallax. Believing that Parallax is not aware of his deception, Frady tries to prevent the assassination of another U.S. Senator. Not only does Frady fail, but Parallax has caught on to Frady and ends up framing him for the assassination. Frady is quickly killed by a Parallax assassin (dressed as a security guard) and the film ends with a governmental committee stating that Frady was a crazed, lone assassin, similar to the explanations given by the U.S. government over Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan.

            

The Parallax View wouldn't be the only film that uniquely captured the rampant paranoia of the 70s. Sydney Pollock’s Three Days of the Condor (1975) would also be an early post-Watergate film. Directed by Sydney Pollock and starring Robert Redford, Faye Dunaway, and Max von Sydow, Three Days of the Condor is about bookish CIA analyst Joe Turner (Redford) who comes back from a lunch run to discover that all of his coworkers have been murdered by assassins. Turner starts to play a cat and mouse game with his CIA handlers and the mysterious operative Joubert (von Sydow), who continues to hunt him down. It is eventually uncovered that CIA Deputy Director of Operations, Leonard Atwood, ordered the massacre of Turner’s co-workers because Turner was about to uncover a secret operation that would allow the CIA to take over Middle East oilfields. The movie is filled with paranoia and intrigue, but it is the ending of the movie that really portrays the cloak and dagger nature of the CIA. Turner eventually uncovers the plot, and confronts Atwood at his house at gunpoint. Joubert disrupts them and then unexpectedly kills Atwood. Though initially Joubert had been hired by Atwood to assassinate Turner, his superiors, discovering the secret plot, hired Joubert to take out Atwood. Joubert is courteous towards Turner, and even warns him to leave the country because the CIA may still try to have him killed. Turner leaks the story to The New York Times, and the film ends with a freeze frame of Turner looking over his shoulder; making sure that nobody is following him.

            

Three Days of the Condor would be one of the first in a slew of films that portrayed the shadowy world of intrigue that CIA agents traverse. A few years after Three Days of the Condor, Brian De Palma’s Blow Out (1981) would bring the shadowy world of assassination back to the screen. The film stars John Travolta as Jack Terry, a sound mixer for films who records the assassination of a governor. Dismissed as a Chappaquiddick-esque auto accident by the authorities, Terry holds the only piece of evidence that proves that it was an assassination plot. He is soon stalked by a mysterious government operative (John Lithgow), who is revealed to be an agent gone rouge. Lithgow’s character slightly compares to E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy, the leaders of Nixon’s infamous “plumbers”, who organized the never carried out assassination of reporter Jack Anderson without the approval of the White House. 

Also, Terry having electronic evidence to prove that there was a conspiracy behind the murder is a reference to the infamous Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination.

By the end of the 20^th Century, mainstream political conspiracy thrillers were in full swing with Enemy of the State (1998) and Arlington Road (1999). Enemy of the State starts Will Smith, Gene Hackman, John Voight, Gabriel Byrne, Jason Robards, and Tom Sizemore. The film is about Robert Clayton Dean (Smith), a lawyer who is given a videotape that shows a Congressman (Robards) being murdered in broad daylight by assassins working for NSA official Thomas Reynolds (Voight). Reynolds soon find outs that Dean has the evidence and starts systematically running his life, by getting him fired from his job and freezing his assets. Dean eventually stumbles across retired NSA operative Edward Lyle (Hackman, in a role that is a direct throwback to his character in Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation (1974)), who helps Smith avoid the government agents after him. The climax of the film happens in the backroom of a restaurant owned by D.C. mob boss Joey Pintero (Sizemore), who ends up in a Mexican standoff with Reynolds and his agents. The climax is important, not just because Sizemore has the privilege of being the only actor to portray the leader of a Mafia organization in Washington D.C., but because the ending could be a reference to the relationship that existed between organized crime and the intelligence community. During the Church Committee and the House Select Committee on Assassinations, it was revealed that the CIA worked with New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello, Tampa Mafia boss Santo Trafficante, Chicago Mafia boss Sam Giancana, and Chicago lieutenant Johnny Roselli in an effort to assassinate Cuban Dictator Fidel Castro. (It is important to note that both Roselli and Giancana were both brutally murdered after their testimony before the House Select Committee on Assassinations. Teamsters Union Boss Jimmy Hoffa would also disappear around the same time of these murders.)

Right after Enemy of the State debuted at the box office, Arlington Road, another political thriller, was released. Instead of focusing on the government being the antagonist, Arlington Road is about widowed university professor Michael Faraday (Jeff Bridges), who suspects that his new neighbors (Tim Robbins and Joan Cusack) are terrorists. Professor Faraday, who specializes in American terrorism, becomes obsessed with investigating his neighbors and foiling their terrorist plot. Arlington Road would be the first in several films that depicted the paranoia of terrorism, especially after the 9/11 attacks. Civic Duty (2006) and the television show 24(2001-2010), for example, both deal with the paranoia and mass hysteria concerning terrorism in a post 9/11 world.

As the first decade of the new century came to a close, there would be several films made about CIA corruption, conspiracy, and its relationship with Islamic fundamentalism: Munich (2005), Syriana (2005), The Bourne Trilogy, Rendition (2007), Charlie Wilson’s War (2007), Body of Lies (2008) and The Ghost Writer (2010). But it would be two films (technically one is a miniseries) that focused on the early years of the CIA that would be the best. Robert De Niro’s The Good Shepherd (2006) and TNT’s highly fictionalized miniseries The Company(2007) are both based on the early years of the CIA and both have CIA counter-intelligence chief James Jesus Angleton as a central character in the story. It would be the haunting last words of The Good Shepherd that would sum up the attitude of the CIA since its founding: I remember a senator once asked me. When we talk about "CIA" why we never use the word "the" in front of it. And I asked him, do you put the word "the" in front of "God"?

DASVIDANIYA!: A Brief History of Russian Organized Crime

Note: This was a paper for a history class and in no way covers the entire history of Russian organized crime. For further reading, see the bibliography section at the bottom of the page.


Fate had it that when I found myself at the head of the state it was already clear that all was not well in the country. Those are the words spoken by Russian President Mikhael S. Gorbachev as he announced his resignation from the USSR. It would be the advent of the free market which would give rise to organized crime in not only Russia, but in all of the republics which formerly comprised the Soviet Union.

Of course, organized crime existed in Russia before the fall of the Soviet Union. Unlike the various organized crime groups in the United States, ethnicity did not play a major factor in membership. Serving time in Russian prisons, Stalin’s brutal gulags, replaced the binding role of ethnicity. A professional criminal class began to develop within the gulags. This criminal elite adopted certain rules, behaviors, values, and sanctions that bounded them to the “vory v zakone” or “thieves law”. While the vory were considered by their peers to be the top criminals, the true people that sat on top of the hierarchy of organized crime in Soviet Russia were either Communist Party members or state officials that abused their power and authority. These corrupt Soviet officials developed a symbiotic relationship with the criminal class. The bribes that funneled up from the criminals to officials caused the state not only to allow organized crime to exist, but encouraged and protected it because the state itself benefited from organized crime.  A clear criminal organization, composed of three levels, really only began to take shape at the end of the 1960s, during the corrupt Brezhnev era. The top level of the structure was occupied by Soviet leaders and corrupt officials. The second level was composed of normal people that worked for the state, but produced goods outside state mandated quotas and sold them on the black market for profit. The third level was made up of the professional criminals who ran various criminal enterprises. All of these levels existed before the 1960s, but it was only when gangsters became more involved in white collar crimes did they absorb into one organization.

            
During the 1970s, after the Dymshits–Kuznetsov hijacking, the Soviet Union temporarily loosened immigration restrictions for Jewish immigrants, allowing hundreds of thousands of people to immigrate to America. It is widely believed that the KGB used this opportunity to rid the gulags of its most vicious criminals, who continued their life of crime in the United States.  One of the earliest identified Russian gangs in the United States was the Potato Bag Gang.  Operating out of Brighton Beach, the gang members would pose as sailors who would offer to sell people a bag full of gold rubles for a thousand dollars. The victim would be shown a sample coin, which was real, and was given a large bag that ended up being filled with potatoes instead of coins. Russian gangs would become more and more involved in more serious criminal enterprises like prostitution, extortion, and theft. As Russian gangs became deeper involved in the criminal underworld, they would develop business relationships with the American Mafia. Russian organized groups would eventually spread across the country into California. 

            
It was a certain set of circumstances at the end of the Soviet Union that lead to the criminal underworld thriving upon the introduction of the free market. President Gorbachev was the first Soviet leader that reintroduced the notion of private business ownership back into Russia after sixty years of strict state control. Gorbachev’s Law of Commons allowed private Russian entrepreneurs to open up businesses, but with the ability for anyone to open up a business came competition. Business rivals would employ hired thugs to muscle in on the competition. The Russian police didn’t have the financial backing to compete with the onslaught of violence that was unleashed by the introduction of private ownership. This caused the street gangs to become privatized law enforcement agencies. According to McMafia, by Misha Glenny, “Instead of paying taxes to the state (which had no idea how to tax new small-scale private enterprise, businessmen willingly handed over between 10 and 30 percent to local thugs that would ensure in exchange that they could continue trading, free from the violence of the gruppirovki, or street gang, working on behalf of the competitors.”

           
Law enforcement agencies, both in America and Russia, began to notice that many Russian criminals connected to organized crime had scores of tattoos decorating their bodies. Same with the Japanese Yakuza, tattoos are an important part of Russian crime. “The tattoos present a picture of the inmate's criminal history. Tattoos are like a passport, a biography, a uniform with medals. They reflect the convict's interests, his outlook on life, his world view. A prisoner with an incorrect or unauthorized tattoo could be punished or killed by fellow inmates.” The importance of the relationship between tattoos and the Russian criminal culture can be seen in the movie Eastern Promises. Directed by David Cronenberg, the film stars Viggo Mortensen as a Russian gangster who works for a powerful vor in contemporary London. There is a scene where Mortensen’s character is being accepted into the criminal organization he is working for, but must go through a rigorous interview with the vor leadership. Mortensen is completely nude during this ceremony, so that the vor may see the tattoos housed on his body. 

Though it looked as if criminal gangs were taking over Russia, “...it was indeed tamed stuff. The mob was largely a collection of inchoate street gangs who still had to watch their backs for the cops or the KGB.”  It wasn’t until Boris Yeltsin came into power, after a failed coup against Gorbachev, that organized criminals would be able to evolve into the global power that it is today. Yeltsin announced in 1992 that the Russian government would free all prices. Price liberalization would be to Russian criminals what prohibition was to criminals in America. While the prices of goods on which the everyday Russian were concerned about, like food, was liberalized; the prices on goods such as: oils, gas, diamonds, and metals stayed at their Soviet-subsidized prices. Prices on theses natural resources can be as much as forty times cheaper than the world market price. Conveniently, at the same time the government decided to privatize the monopoly that the Soviet Union had imposed on the import/export of all goods and commodities.  It was this set of circumstances that lead to a super wealthy upper class of Russians, referred to as the oligarchs. But while a few private citizens were reaping the riches of the introduction of capitalism into Russia, most of the population fell further into poverty, with only a weak middle class that stood in between. Another problem with the emergence of the free market was that “the police and even the KGB were clueless as to how one might enforce contract law. The protection rackets and Mafiosi were not; their central role in the new Russian economy was to ensure that contracts entered into were honored.” This meant that the oligarchs of Russia and organized criminals again entered into a seemingly beneficial relationship. Even though the new capitalist society in Russia was built on blood, organized criminal gangs enforced a degree of stability during this economic transition.

With this new influx of money and power into the hands of criminals, the title of vor was able to be purchased. The ability to simply purchase the title, instead of earning it by serving several years in prison, led to the debasement of the authority and respect that came with the title, and eventually to the destruction of the highly organized hierarchy of thieves that existed in the Soviet prisons. The destruction of the “thief’s law” crumbled into street gangs and other simple criminal networks.  A factor that set apart Russian organized crime from organized crime in other countries is that “there were about twenty major gangs in Moscow, and dozens of minor gangs, some of them Slav and some Caucasian. Although there were tensions between the so-called ethnic groups, both sides were wary of each other’s influence and power.” This meant that organized crime was so prevalent after the introduction of capitalism that dozens of groups co-existed (or tried) in one city. If that many gangs existed in Moscow at one time, that would only mean that thousands of criminal organizations existed across Russia during this time. It was during this Darwin-esque period in the Russian underworld that some of these organized gangs evolved from the private enforcement arm of the oligarchs into highly organized criminal organizations. One of the best examples of this was Chechen organized crime. Chechen gangsters were notorious for their violence and ruthlessness. But according to Mark Galeotti, a fifteen year veteran of studying organized crime in Russia, “The Chechen mafia became a brand name, a franchise, a McMafia if you like. They would sell the moniker “Chechen” to protection rackets in other towns provided they paid, of course, and provided they always carried out their word. If a group claimed a Chechen connection but didn’t carry out its threats to the letter, it was devaluing the brand. The original Chechens would come after them.” This meant that as Russian organized crime developed, it was not guided by strict “family loyalties”, like the American Mafia, but rather by transactions.

Another example of the blurred line between the state and organized crime can be seen under the presidency of Slobodan Milošević. Milošević, while he served as President of Serbia, developed a profitable relationship with Serbian gangsters. Serbian organized crime groups were allowed to reap the profits of smuggling oil and cigarettes during the sanctions that were enforced during the Yugoslav Wars. In return, Milošević would get part of the cut and the gangsters would carry out assassinations at his request. The war in former Yugoslavia wasn’t the only war being fought. The bloody “cigarette wars” broke out in Serbia. The scramble for the monopoly over the cigarette trade even involved Milošević’s own son, Marko Milošević. The violence would only crescendo when Milošević’s lost power in the Bulldozer Revolution of October 2000. This power vacuum resulted in several daylight assassinations of high ranking Serbian gangsters.

The organized crime bosses who survived the turmoil of the 90s in Russia welcomed the election of President Vladimir Putin. President Putin, an ex-KGB agent, restored the former power of the KGB under the name of the FSB. Putin also became the scorn of the oligarchs, who claimed that he was the reincarnation of Stalin. Putin was able to fashion a new system of government that brought the aspects of capitalism and market authoritarianism together. This caused the easy money days of the oligarchs to come to an end. The threat of money becoming scarce caused the oligarchs to continue their investment in the protection rackets of organized crime. But the gangsters employed by the oligarchs seemed to be facing a new competition, ex-KGB agents. Since the fall of the Soviet Union hundreds of ex-KGB agents found themselves without a job. Instead of joining Russia’s newly formed police service, several went into the business of organized crime. Almost all of the major oligarchs had at least one former KGB man on their payroll to advise them on security. Former Director of the CIA, John M. Deutch, said “I do agree that in Russian organized crime there is a presence of ex-security service members, KGB members, and ex-military members. That is certainly the case.” But, according to Dr. Walter Zarycky, professor of political science at New York University, “The Russian mafia and the KGB are allies, not enemies, and in many cases they are one and the same." Dr. Zarycky’s claim that Russian organized crime and ex-intelligence officers are working together makes sense. Ever since the turn of the century, Russian criminals have become involved in crimes over the internet. Several ex-KGB agents organized the Russian Business Network (RBN), which has become a notorious cybercrime organization. Using their technical skills for crime, rather than for the state, the internet service provided by the RBN creates a safe place for the sharing of child pornography, phishing/spamming scams, credit card fraud, corporate espionage, and the ability for criminals to target a victim individually. “The Russians have everyone nailed cold in terms of technical ability," said Greg Hoglund, CEO of cyber security company HBGary. "The Russian crime guys have a ridiculous toolkit. They're targeting end users in many cases, so they have to be sophisticated."

Cyberspace was not the only place where Russian organized criminals were spreading to. “Law enforcement personnel in many countries — including Spain, Greece, Hungary, Italy, France, Israel, Britain, and even the United States — have been surprised by how “confidently” criminal groups consisting of people from the former Soviet Union now dominate their national criminal worlds.”  Part of the reason that criminals are able to spread abroad so successfully is because Interpol, the international police agency, does not maintain the kind of files that allow for an even approximate assessment of the number of Russian criminals operating abroad. Though Interpol hasn’t taken an interest in the spread of Russian organized crime, the National Prosecutor of Italy has claimed that here are “up to 300,000” Russian criminals operating in foreign countries. .” Europe and the United States are not the only areas that Russian gangsters have their eyes on. The longstanding institutional weaknesses of several countries in the Caribbean and Latin America have given Russian criminals the chance they need to establish themselves. The absence of transparency and effective state monitoring of the banking systems in Latin America have left them vulnerable to penetration by Russian money launderers. But just because Russian organized crime has spread across the world, doesn’t mean their hierarchy structure has. “Russian organized crime is neither monolithic nor necessarily hierarchical, especially abroad. Indeed, much of the heavy lifting in international illegal commerce, from heroin trafficking to the smuggling of radioactive material and counterfeit money, is done by ad hoc criminal coalitions with few apparent resources, little formal structure, and uncertain connections with the political or official upperworld. Such groups commonly coalesce for one or two deals, divide up the proceeds and then disband.” This could be the reason that the spread of Russian organized crime has been so difficult to stop by authorities. The ability to host small criminal groups overseas rather than expanding an entire criminal organization may be hard to catch. To quote the film The Usual Suspects, “One cannot be betrayed if one has no people.”

Despite being involved in: human smuggling, the international drug trade, murder for hire, extortion, money laundering, prostitution, and various types of cybercrime, the most alarming crime committed by Russian gangsters, both overseas and at home, are their alleged links with terrorist. In the mid-1970s, the company Inslaw, INC. developed a program called PROMIS (Prosecutor's Management Information System) to be used by the Justice Department. The program was a database designed to handle papers and documents generated by law enforcement agencies and courts. PROMIS was also a tool used by law enforcement to track people through credit card purchases, entry and exits visas, and telephone usage. Robert Hanasen, the former FBI agent who was convicted of spying, secured a copy of the PROMIS software and then sold it to Russian gangsters. Allegedly it was from there that Russian organized crime figures sold a copy of PROMIS to Osama Bin Laden for $2 million dollars. Using this program, Bin Laden would be able to penetrate U.S. databases and banking systems without being detected. He would also be able to counter the ability of various intelligence agencies to track him. On June 15, 2001, a story by Washington Times reporter Jerry Serper said “The software delivered to the Russian handlers and later sent to Bin Laden, according to sources, is believed to be an upgraded version of a program known as PROMIS.” Though the United States government continued to deny that Bin Laden had any type of program, the United States announced that they discontinued using PROMIS a year after 9/11. Britain and Germany discontinued their use of the PROMIS program shortly after the United States made their announcement.  Besides stolen government programs, there is also fear that Russian criminal syndicates may smuggle a nuclear weapon or the material to build a nuclear weapon into the hands of terrorist. A study of a number of Russia’s “closed cities”, named that because of the because of the increased security and limited access that apply to them because of its housing of nuclear weapons and material, found that Russian administrators haven’t focused enough on the possible linkage of criminals and terrorist activity. The study claims that a large number of convicts return to these “closed cities” after they serve their prison sentences. The study also claims that there is a large drug trade in the closed city of Ozersk, suggesting the presence of criminals within the closed city. This criminal presence leads to the smuggling of people into the closed city, a crime for which the penalty is not severe. Also, there is a large population of reported Islamic propagandists that in live in the towns that surround Ozersk.  It is important to note that Russian organized crime syndicates have never stolen a nuclear bomb and have put it on the black market, but according to this study the motive, means, and opportunity are there. Another link that could possibly exists between Russian gangsters and terrorist could be the drug trade. Thanks to an almost a worldwide prohibition on narcotics, terrorist organizations like the Taliban or al Qaeda fund their activities through the drug trade. The cultivation of the opium poppy has gone up more than 1000 percent since the first year of the United States invading Afghanistan. More than likely, the Taliban was rearming itself by taking control of this opium harvest and enforcing high taxes on its distribution. While profitable, most of the cash that the terrorist receive from the narcotics trade goes to paying off the network that smuggles it. It is somewhere along this distribution line that it is believed that Russian gangsters help push the drugs that help fund terrorism, either knowingly or unknowingly. 

Though its origins come from the repressive gulags that Stalin ruled over, Russian organized crime syndicates became a global power only years after the Soviet Union fell. Though at first these gangs acted as the safeguards of capitalism in Russia, they would eventually evolve not only to pose a threat to Russia, but to most of the world.

Bibliography

-Bagley, Bruce. GLOBALIZATION AND TRANSNATIONAL ORGANIZED CRIME: THE RUSSIAN MAFIA IN LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN.Globalization, Weak States and Transnational Organized Crime. School of International Studies, 15 Nov. 2001. Web. 15 Apr. 2012.

Glenny, Misha. McMafia: A Journey through the Global Criminal Underworld. New York: Knopf, 2008. Print.

-Globe, Paul. Russian Mafia' Abroad Now 300,000 Strong, Journal Says Read More: Http://www.themoscowtimes.com/columns/article/russian-mafia-abroad-now-300000-strong-journal-says/400786.html#ixzz1sUpHCnp3 The Moscow Times." The Moscow Times. 02 Mar. 2010. Web. 19 Apr. 2012. http://www.themoscowtimes.com/columns/article/russian-mafia-abroad-now-300000-strong-journal-says/400786.html

-Goldman, David. "The Cyber Mafia Has Already Hacked You." CNNMoney. Cable News Network, 27 July 2011. Web. 19 Apr. 2012. .

H.R. Rep. No. Congress-Y 4. IN 8/16: C 86/3 (1996). Print.

-Orttung, Robert, and Louise Shelley. Linkages Between Terrorist and Organized Crime Groups in Nuclear Smuggling. PONARS Policy Memo No. 392. Dec. 2005. Print.

-Rep. No. The Threat of Russian Organized Crime NCJ 187085 at 1-6 (2001). Print.

-Ruppert, Michael C. Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil. New York: New Society Publishers, 2004. Print.

Why Valentine's Day is the BEST day of the year.

I know what most of you are thinking at this exact moment: “100% of women would rather be operated on by an abortionist with Parkinson’s disease before spending a minute in the same room with Dexter, why would he enjoy celebrating Valentines Day?”

Well, it’s not to increase abortion rates (well OK, maybe it is).

Besides being a day where most of us take on our roles as pawns in an ongoing corporate conspiracy aimed at profiting off human emotion, St. Valentines Day is also a red(heh) letter day in the calendar of the Chicago Underworld.

To appreciate the whole situation, a brief history of the Chicago underworld is necessary.

In the early 1900’s a man by the name of James "Big Jim" Colosimo, former Precinct Captain of Chicago's First Ward, established himself as “boss” of Chicago. Colosimo and his wife ran a chain of brothels that earned more than $600,000 a year. This made Colosimo the perfect target for the infamous Black Hand extortionist that plagued Italians during the early 1900’s.

You also must keep in mind that this was a time when the Mafia wasn’t like the Mafia we are familiar with today. It wasn’t until 1931 that the Mafia was reorganized and took the shape of the national crime syndicate that we all recognize. Before prohibition, the Mafia wasn’t even the dominate criminal force in the American Underworld. Several other Italian gangs (like the ‘Ndrangheta from Calabria, and the Comorra from Naples) rivaled the Sicilian Mafia for underworld dominance in America. Not to mention the hordes of native and Irish gangs that also stood in their way.

Anyway, by 1909, the threats of the Black Hand extortionist had become so dire, Colosimo’s wife asked her cousin Johnny “The Fox” Torrio to travel from New York to Chicago to help them solve their extortionist problem. Johnny Torrio had been a member of the Five Points Gang and the James Street Gang, alongside with future Mafia bigwig Charlie “Lucky” Lucaino.

The solution to Torrio was simple. Torrio just hired two New York thugs to murder the extortionist when they showed up to collect their money. Colosimo was so grateful he made Torrio number two in his criminal empire, which mainly consisted of prostitution and gambling.

Things had been going so well for Torrio that by 1919 he brought over a young, violent hoodlum by the name of Al Capone to help him in his business ventures.

The 18th Amendment was passed on January 16, 1919. This made the production and consumption of alcohol in the United States illegal, causing organized crime groups like the Mafia to profit greatly from both political and religious fanaticism.

As many other leaders of various organized crime groups, Torrio saw this as a perfect business venture to save his organization from extinction. Colosimo didn’t agree. Colosimo forbade Torrio to bootleg any illicit liquor to the various speakeasies that were sprouting up all over Chicago.

Torrio knew that if he wasn’t going to dominate the new bootlegging business in Chicago, somebody else would. That’s why Torrio had Colosimo assassinated on May 11, 1920. The betrayal would be a prelude to the violence generated by organized crime for dominance over the bootlegging racket in Chicago.

With Colosimo out of the way, Torrio took control of his new empire with Capone second in command. With Torrio at the helm, and Capone making sure that speakeasy operators were purchasing their beer, the Torrio/Capone organization took control of most of the South Side of Chicago.

But trying to avoid the bloody turf battles that were about to be unleashed on Chicago, Torrio met with various leaders of bootlegging organizations and carved out territories for them to operate in. Torrio would take the South Side. Dion O’ Banion, leader of the predominantly Irish North Side Gang, took the North Side, and the Sicilian Genna Brothers would take Chicago’s downtown region.

Clashes soon started happening between the Genna’s and O’ Banion. The Genna brothers wanted to have O’ Bannion assassinated, but since they were Sicilians, they would have to get the permission of the governing Mafia body in Chicago before they could make the hit.

The governing Sicilian Mafia body at the time was known as the Unione Siciliana, an organization originally set up to help Sicilian immigrants get settled, but had become corrupted by Sicilian gangsters and now was a front for what was then the American Mafia. Again, at this time, before reorganization in 1931, you must have been a full blooded Sicilian in order to be a member of the Mafia; other Italians could not be a part of the organization. Capone was denied membership because his background was Neapolitan, not Sicilian.

The man in charge of the Unione Siciliana at the time was Mike Merlo. Merlo abhorred violence and denied the fearsome Genna brothers permission to have O’ Banion assassinated. While being alive and in control of the governing Mafia body in Chicago, Merlo was able to keep the peace between the various criminal organizations.

Mike Merlo died of cancer on November 8, 1924. Two days later the gangs of Chicago broke into open warfare.

The assassination of Dion O’ Banion on November 10, 1924, by the Genna brothers and Torrio’s South Side gang, triggered a series of events that would eventually crescendo into the St. Valentines Day Massacre.

The death of Mike Merlo meant that someone else would have to take leadership of the governing body of the Mafia in Chicago.

Angelo Genna, the youngest and most volatile of the six Genna brothers would take Merlo's position as president of the Unione Siciliana. Capone, desperate to dominate the organization himself had a close ally, Antonio Lombardo, that he would have liked to have seen as head of the organization.

This plan of the Neapolitan Capone didn't sit well with the Sicilian Gennas, who, as members of the hierarchy of the Unione, saw the position of president as one of prestige and honor among their Sicilian brethren. The brothers quickly rallied and pressed hard to put Angelo in as the next president. Capone, unhappy at the turn of events, bided his time under the patient leadership of Torrio.

O’Bannon’s death would soon be avenged. In January 1925, a retaliation from the North Side gang ended up with the attempted assassination of Johnny Torrio. While Torrio survived the ambush right outside of his apartment, he retired from the soon to be bloody streets of Chicago, and left his underworld empire to Capone and moved to Italy. Torrio would later return to the United States and would later be a key player in the reorganization of the American Mafia in 1931.

His rule lasting a little over five months, in May, 1925, Hymie Weiss , now leader of the Irish North Side Gang, dispatched assassins that chased down Angelo Genna in a high speed car chase and then shot him to death. Angelo's death and the loss of leadership of the Unione Siciliana were the least of the remaining brothers' worries. Soon after Angelo’s murder, two of the six brothers: Mike and Antonio Genna were also both murdered. In a period of 44 days three of the Genna brothers were killed. The remaining Genna brothers: Peter, Sam, and Vincenzo fled to Sicily, leaving Capone in control of his new empire to take over their rackets.

With Angelo Genna being dispatched so quickly, Unione Siciliana needed yet another leader. Capone still pushed for his faithful ally, Antonio Lombardo, to become president of the Unione, but lost again to a man by the name of Samuel Samuzzo Amatuna. Unfortunately for Amatuna, his reign would just last a week shorter than Genna’s, thanks to assassins quickly dispatched by Capone.

With the death of Amatuna in November, 1925, Al Capone was finally able to place his own man, Lombardo, into the leadership of the Unione Siciliana. It was not an easy task. Opposing the Capone interests was Giuseppe Aiello, one of nine members active in the Unione. Aiello also desired the seat of power for himself.

While trying to dominate the local Mafia, Capone’s relationship with the North Side Gang continued to sour. On September 20, 1926, Capone was having lunch with bodyguard Frank Rio at the Hawthorne Hotel when a caravan of cars cruised past the building and riddled it with hundreds of submachine gun bullets. Hymie Weiss, then leader of the North Side Gang, and a bodyguard were later assassinated on October 11, 1926 in a hail of gunfire while crossing the street, leaving George “Bugs” Moran to take control of the North Side Gang.

Desperate to defeat both Capone and Lombardo, and secure his influence over the Unione Siciliana, Giuseppe Aiello turned to Bugs Moran and the North Side Gang for assistance. After several months of “peace”: assassins of Moran, members of the North Side Gang, and brothers, Frank and Peter Gusenberg, gunned down Lombardo in a busy Chicago street on September 7th , 1928.

With the assassination of Lombardo, the Unione needed yet ANOTHER leader. Aiello was yet again denied leadership, and another Capone ally, Pasqualino "Patsy" Lolordo took the position. Shortly after, on January 8, 1929, "Patsy" Lolordo was shot to death in his house by an unknown gunman…..but you could probably guess who he worked for by now. And guess who still didn’t get to be President of the Unione? That’s right! Joseph ''Hop Toad'' Guinta took over leadership of the Unione Siciliana.

It didn't take long for Capone to figure out that the demise of Lolordo and Lomardo were both carefully orchestrated by Giuseppe Aiello. Capone was planning, along with one of his top triggerman, "Machine Gun" Jack McGurn, a damaging retaliatory response that would be remembered throughout history as the St. Valentines Day Massacre.

The plan was fairly simple. While Capone was away on vacation at his Florida estate(in order to have a solid alibi), assassins disguised as cops would be waiting outside one of Moran’s garages, one that he visited every day, and when Moran would enter the garage the “police” would barge in on them and stage a raid and then assassinate Moran and his men.

At around 10:30 a.m. on February, 14, 1929, the Moran gang had already arrived at the warehouse. However, Moran himself was not inside. One account states that Moran was supposedly approaching the warehouse, spotted the police car, and fled the scene to a nearby coffee shop. Another account was that Moran was simply late getting there.

The lookouts that Capone had placed across the street to insure that Moran himself was inside the garage mistook one of Moran’s men for Moran himself. Thinking that Moran himself was inside the garage, Capone’s lookouts signaled for the assassins to enter the warehouse.

Witnesses outside the garage saw a Cadillac sedan pull to a stop in front of the garage. Four men, two dressed in police uniform, emerged and walked inside. The two phony police, carrying shotguns, entered the rear portion of the garage and found members of Moran's gang. The killers told the seven men to line up facing the back wall. There was apparently not any resistance, as the Moran men thought their captors were real authorities. Then the two "police officers" signaled the pair in civilian clothes. Two of the killers started shooting with Thompson sub-machine guns. All seven men were killed in a volley of seventy machine-gun bullets and two shotgun blasts according to the coroner's report. To show bystanders that everything was under control, the men in street clothes came out with their hands up, prodded by the two uniformed cops.

The seven men that were killed that day were: James Clark, Frank and Pete Gusenberg(brothers), Adam Heyer, Johnny May, Dr. Reinhardt Schwimmer, and Al Weinshank. All of these men had a position in Moran's criminal operations, from button men to front men.

When Moran heard about the massacre, he checked himself into a hospital claiming to have some exotic sickness. The press eventually found him and when asked who could have done such a thing, Moran responded with: “Only Capone kills like that.”

While Moran himself wasn’t killed in the incident, his gang was decimated.

The North Side Gang eventually lost control over its rackets to the Capone organization, leaving Al Capone completely in control over Chicago. The rest of Moran’s criminal career amounted to nothing more than petty thievery. Moran was arrested in 1946 for robbing $10,000 from a bank messenger; he was convicted and sentenced to prison. He later died of cancer on February 25, 1957. He was given a pauper's burial outside of prison.

With virtually every other obstacle out of his way, Capone was in complete control of Chicago. He owned the police, the politicians, and the judges. Capone was the law. But his plan eventually backfired. The public had grown tired of the gruesome violence in Chicago generated by prohibition. While the St. Valentines Day Massacre was successful in removing any business opposition from the Capone interest, it had also made national headlines. Finally answering the cries of an outraged public, the Federal Government planed to put Capone behind bars.

Even though Capone was successful in defeating Bugs Moran and the North Side Gang, he still had the treacherous Giuseppe Aiello organizing assassination attempts against him. Capone’s uncanny ability not to get shot, even though several dozen assassination attempts were put in motion against the mob boss, forced Aiello to turn to two of Capone’s own assassins to help murder him. Albert Anselmi, John Scalise, as well as the new head of the Unione, Joseph "Hop Toad" Giunta, met with Aiello, who proposed that if Capone was assassinated they could take control of his empire for themselves.

But in April 1929, after getting wind of the plot, Capone beat them to the punch and had the three men killed, dispatched with a beating with a baseball bat, followed by a gunshot to the face to finish the job (the scene famed by a number of movies in which Capone murders associates with a baseball bat at a banquet is based on these killings). All three of their bodies were found in an abandoned automobile several days later.

With the death of Joseph "Hop Toad" Giunta, Giuseppe Aiello was finally able to take control of the Unione Siciliana. While Aiello was coming into power, Capone was going to jail. Capone served a one year sentence in prison for carrying a concealed weapon.

While in jail, Capone learned of plans that Aiello again was trying to assassinate him. Capone, finally deciding to assassinate Aiello, bided his time in prison.

On October 23, 1930, with several of his lieutenants being murdered in the previous year, Aiello was making plans to permanently leave Chicago, allegedly to move to Mexico. Upon leaving a local building, a gunman in a second-floor window across the street started firing at him with a submachine gun. Aiello toppled off the building steps and moved around the corner, out of the line of fire. Unfortunately for him, he stumbled into the range of a second submachine gun nest on the third floor of another apartment block. Aiello was taken to Garfield Park Hospital, but was pronounced dead on arrival. The coroner eventually removed 59 bullets from his body.

While Capone was yet again victorious in getting rid of another underworld nemesis, it would be law enforcement that would be his downfall. Elliot Ness(who gets far too much credit for putting away Capone) and his team of “Untouchables” impacted Capone's operations, but it was income tax evasion that was the key weapon. In a number of federal grand jury cases in 1931, Capone was charged with 22 counts of tax evasion and also 5,000 violations of the Volstead Act. On October 17, 1931, Capone was sentenced to eleven years, and following a failed appeal, he began his sentence in 1932.

With prohibition ending, along with a major Mafia revolution and reorganization underway, Capone found himself behind bars.

He would be eventually transferred to Alcatraz prison, where the isolation from the outside world didn’t help the syphilis that was slowly eating away at his brain.

After his release, Capone’s mental health had greatly diminished. He often raved on about communists, foreigners, and George Moran, who he was convinced was still plotting to kill him from his Ohio prison cell. On January 21, 1947, Capone suffered a stroke. He regained consciousness and started to improve but contracted pneumonia two days later. Capone then suffered a fatal cardiac arrest the next day at his Florida estate.

So instead of being cogs in a massive corporate conspiracy, liberate yourselves and celebrate what Valentines Day is truly about: historic underworld violence!

Sources:

-The Gangs of Chicago-Herbert Asbury

-The Outfit-Gus Russo

-Capone: The Man and the Era-Laurence Bergreen

-The History of Organized Crime : The True story and Secrets of Global Gangland-David Southwell.

-Organized Crime : An Inside Guide to the World's Most Successful Industry-Paul Lunde.

Top Ten Movies of 2011

My Top Ten Movies of 2011:


10.) "The Trip"

9.) "The Devil's Double"

8.) "Midnight In Paris"

7.) "The Lincoln Lawyer"

6.) "Carnage"

5.) "Hanna"

4.)"The Ides of March"

3.)"J. Edgar"

2.) "Drive"

1.) "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy"

King of the Crescent City: A brief paper on the life of Carlos Marcello

FOREWARD: This being a paper for my history class, it is very brief and does not cover every aspect of Marcello's life. Notably brief in this paper is Marcello's alleged involvment in the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Senator Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr. For a more detailed reading about Carlos Marcello, check out any of the books located at the bottom of the paper that I used as sources.

Also, this paper serves as an excellent companion piece to my earlier paper: Who Killa De Chief?: The Mafia, the Assassination of David Hennessy, and the Crescent City Lynchings. Combined, these two papers briefly document the rise and fall of the Mafia in New Orleans.



Born on February 6, 1910, Calogero Minacore would live in Tunis, Tunisia until he and his mother would travel later that year to the United States. It was there where Calogero’s father, Guiseppe Minacore, was able to work as a field hand and had saved enough money to not only bring his wife and newborn son to the United States, but also to purchase a small farm near Algiers, Louisiana. It was while Guiseppe was working on a sugar plantation that he was forced to change his name. The owner of the plantation was also named “Minacore”, so to avoid confusion Guiseppe changed his name to Joseph Marcello. His wife would choose the name Louise Marcello. The name they chose for their son would not only be remembered and associated with organized crime, but also with the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy, and civil rights leader, Martin Luther King, Jr. It was barley into the first year of his life when little Calogero Minacore would then on be known as Carlos Marcello.

Both John and Louise would eventually become naturalized citizens, and the rest of the Marcello children (Carlos would have six brothers, and two sisters) would automatically become citizens due to being born on U.S. soil. But for some reason they never bothered to have Carlos naturalized, an oversight that would haunt him for the rest of his life. Marcello grew up working with his father on their farm. He would bring the vegetables they would grow by cart to the various produce markets, most of which were dominated by the local Mafia, located in the French Quarter.

Just about the same time Marcello would be exposed to the Mafia, its longtime leader, Charles Matranga, would retire. Matranga survived a bloody war with the rival Provenzano Mafia faction and a mass lynching over the assassination of Police Chief David Hennessy to become the undisputed leader of the Mafia in New Orleans. In 1925, Matranga retired and Sylvestro Carolla would become leader of the New Orleans Mafia. Nicknamed “Silver Dollar Sam” the scarred, sleepy eyed Carolla continued the tradition that the New Orleans Mafia seemed to have on assassinating public officials by murdering a narcotics agent by the name of Cecil Moore. Unlike his predecessors, Carolla wasn’t subjected to a lynching, but rather a light two year prison sentence. By the time Carolla was boss the 18th Amendment had passed, making the manufacture, sale, and transportation of alcohol illegal. While the American public was distracted by the violence generated by prohibition in New York and Chicago, the violence generated by Carolla and his organization to dominate bootlegging in New Orleans gained little attention.

In 1928, at the age of 18, Marcello left his family’s farm and moved into the French Quarter. Marcello would commit petty crimes until 1929 when he organized a $7,000 bank robbery with three young accomplices. The bank was not far from his family’s farm. His father agreed to hide the stash of money. Fearing the consequences, one of Marcello’s younger brothers, Pete, called the cops and told them where the money was hidden. Marcello, his three accomplices, and even his father were arrested. But the bank, just happy to get all of the money back, dropped all charges.

It wasn’t long before Marcello would be planning his next robbery. In order to get money for guns to hold up the same bank he held up months earlier, Marcello and two other teenage accomplices robbed a grocery store. The score being a success, the gang started to plan their bigger robbery. All was going well until Marcello’s youngest accomplice (13 years old) was recognized by the grocer they had robbed three weeks before and was arrested. The boy spilled the whole plot and Marcello was arrested and turned out to be the only one of the three to be convicted for assault, robbery, and grand larceny. On May 28, 1930, at the age of 20, Marcello entered Angola prison. Marcello was eventually pardoned by puppet Governor O.K. Allen after serving only four years of his nine to twelve sentence.

After Marcello left prison he went back to work for his father. He only did this until he could afford to put a down payment on a rundown bar in Gretna. Marcello named it “The Brown Bomber”, and brought his brother Peter in with him to help run the place. Marcello would soon use his bar as a front for selling marijuana. Through regular payoffs to the Mafia, Marcello was able to keep his bar protected from raids by the local police. Marcello would eventually meet Frank Todaro, an underboss in Carolla’s organization. Marcello started working for Todaro and married his daughter, Jacqueline. It was after his marriage that Marcello and his brother Vincent set up the Jefferson Music Company, where the Marcello brothers would strong arm bars and restaurants in New Orleans to supply their establishments with pool tables, pinball machines, and jukeboxes from Marcello’s company.

It was a chance meeting between New York mob boss Frank Costello and Governor Huey Long that helped drive Marcello’s successes. Costello wanted to expand his slot machine empire into New Orleans and Long, being the virtual dictator of the state, wouldn’t mind the payoff. A meeting between Long, Costello, and Carolla took place to bring Costello’s slot machines into Louisiana. Marcello’s Jefferson Music Company was recommended as a primary vehicle to help install Costello’s slot machines. While this was good news for Marcello, it was soon shattered by trouble with the authorities. Marcello was still selling marijuana out of his bar, where an undercover federal agent had purchased 23 pounds of it. Marcello was sentenced to a year and a day at Atlanta State Penitentiary. But through the political connections of Carolla, Marcello ended up only serving nine months.

After serving a brief stint in Atlanta, Marcello returned to enforce the use of Costello’s slot machines in New Orleans. Marcello, now 30 and a father, reaped the benefits of this highly profitable business. Marcello would also gain interest in the casino business as it gained popularity.

On May 5, 1947, the upper echelons of the New Orleans Mafia gathered at the Black Diamond nightclub to anoint Marcello as boss of the New Orleans Mafia. After Carolla beat the rap for murdering a federal narcotics agent, the Justice Department would use any means necessary to rid New Orleans of him. Much like Marcello, Carolla was not a U.S. citizen. The Justice Department would use this against Carolla and ordered deportation proceedings against him in the mid 30s. But the already slow process was delayed by World War II. But now that the war was over, the government wasted no time in deporting the New Orleans mob boss. Carolla, along with New York Mafia bigwig Charlie “Lucky” Lucaino, faced exile in Italy. At thirty seven years old, Carlos Marcello became Mafia boss of New Orleans.

From 1950-1951 the United States Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce, easier remembered as the Kefauver Committee, had investigated the Mafia throughout the United States. The Committee brought Carlos Marcello before it on January 25, 1951. The expansion of Marcello’s empire into: Mississippi, Texas, Missouri, Arkansas, California, Alabama, and even the Caribbean and Central America made him an essential target for the committee. While sitting in a New Orleans courtroom Marcello would invoke his right of the Fifth Amendment 152 times. While he was well within his rights to plead the fifth, the corruption that had been established in Louisiana outraged Senator Estes Kefauver, the chairmen of the committee. Not being able to establish his citizenship, the United States issued its first deportation order against Carlos Marcello in 1953.

Marcello had another problem besides his approaching deportation order. His old headquarters, the Willswood Tavern, had been exposed by the Kefauver Committee as his base of operations. Marcello would relocate from the Willswood Tavern, where Al Capone’s old chef Provino Mosca worked, and moved to the Town and Country Motel on Airline Highway. A one story building behind the motel and restaurant would serve as Marcello’s new fortress.

Not long after the Kefauver Committee, a group of concerned New Orleans citizens invited ex-FBI agent Aaron Kohn down to investigate the NOPD. Kohn had plenty of experience of brining rural bank robbers like John Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson to justice, but this is the first time that Kohn would go head to head with an urban mobster. While investigating the NOPD, Kohn discovered that all of the vice and corruption in the city led back to Carlos Marcello. Kohn received ridicule from the NOPD, former FBI colleagues, and even from New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison. Kohn was quoted saying: We have been in repeated public conflicts with Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, who denies the existence in our city of probable organized crime. He and his staff have blocked out efforts to have grand juries probe the influence of the Cosa Nostra and other syndicate operations. The corrupt Garrison would later achieved fame as the only man who ever tried a person in the Kennedy assassination. Kohn eventually was able to get two grand juries to indict high level NOPD officers on corruption charges. He was also able to get Marcello in the crosshairs of the McClellan Committee, which was investigating corruption in labor and management. This is where Marcello’s infamous feud with the Kennedy brothers would begin.

The McClellan Committee was formed on January 30, 1957, with Robert F. Kennedy appointed as Chief Counsel, and his brother, Senator John F. Kennedy, a member of the committee. At first the committee was only concerned with corruption in organized labor. It was here where Teamsters President Jimmy Hoffa was brought before and grilled by the Kennedy brothers. It was after the discovery of the secret Apalachin meeting in New York on November 14, 1957, which exposed the existence of the Mafia to the country, that shifted the committee’s focus to organized crime. (Marcello wasn’t at the Apalachin meeting that was uncovered by police, but sent Dallas Mafia boss Joe Civello to the meeting in his place) Marcello was brought before the committee and again reprised his role of pleading the fifth amendment. While Marcello was able to walk out of the courtroom with his head high, knowing that he beat another government committee, Robert F. Kennedy would not forget the brash Marcello.

On the early morning of January 1, 1959, Fidel Castro would overthrow U.S. supported “President” Fulgencio Batista, and took control of Cuba. In the months after the revolution, Castro would disassemble the empire that the Mafia had built in Havana. Castro closed all of their casinos and racetracks, and chased all elements of the Mafia out of his country. He even placed Florida Mafia boss Santo Trfficante, Jr. under arrest and held him in an abandoned casino for months. This is when the “pact with the devil” was formed. The CIA and the Mafia worked together on several occasions to have Castro assassinated. Chicago Mafia boss Sam Giancana, his subordinate Johnny Roselli, Tampa Mafia boss Santo Trafficante, Jr., and New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello were the major players in the alliance that the Mafia had with the CIA. Not only did these Mafia bosses work with the CIA, but they also funded several anti-Castro exile groups as well. It is believed by some that it was this alliance between these three groups that was the driving force responsible for the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

A year after Castro took power; President John F. Kennedy defeated former Vice President Richard Nixon in the race for the presidency. Robert Kennedy was made Attorney General, and was eager to prosecute the mobsters who escaped them years earlier. To help stall his deportation case Marcello acquired a fake birth certificate that stated he was from Guatemala. While the government was aware that this birth certificate was a forgery, Attorney General Robert Kennedy decided to use this against Marcello. On the morning of April 4, 1961 Marcello, along with his lawyer, paid his tri-monthly visit to the INS office in New Orleans. Marcello was arrested and then kidnapped by INS agents. Marcello was told that he was being immediately deported to where his birth certificate said he was from, Guatemala. Not only was this illegal because the government knew that Marcello’s birth certificate was a forgery, but as part of his deportation order Marcello was supposed to have been given a seventy two hour notice before he was deported. Marcello was not allowed to call his family, or get anything from his home. He was immediately put on a plane and was left for dead in the jungles of Guatemala. Marcello stayed in exile for two months before sneaking back into the United States. In his book, The Enemy Within, Robert Kennedy wrote: If we do not attack organized criminals with weapons and techniques as effective as their own, they will destroy us.

After sneaking back into the country, Marcello eventually turned himself in to the authorities on June 2, 1963. He was released the same day and was allowed to return to his home and go about his daily activities. Even though the “kidnap deportation” was illegal, Kennedy had Marcello called to testify before the reconstituted McClellan committee, but he avoided this on the basis of illness caused by his ordeal in Guatemala. His brother Joe and Joe Poretto, one of Marcello’s top men, were however summonsed to the hearing. They both, like Marcello did in the past, plead the Fifth Amendment. On October 30, 1963, Attorney General Kennedy publicly announced the indictment of Marcello on charges of falsifying his Guatemalan birth certificate, and perjury. From this moment on, several witnesses would claim that whenever the Kennedy name was brought up around Marcello, he would burst into violent outbursts, where he would swear revenge against the Kennedy brothers.

This paper being long and out of control enough, and realizing that this is a paper on the life of Carlos Marcello rather than trying to implicate him in the Kennedy assassination, I’m only going to briefly mention Marcello and the Kennedy assassination.

In the summer of 1963, Lee Harvey Oswald returned to his native city of New Orleans. His mother, a former prostitute, and his uncle were the few members of his family that would still talk to him after his defection to Russia. Oswald’s uncle was Charles “Dutz” Murret, a bookmaker closely connected to Marcello. People have claimed to have seen Oswald in the presence of David Ferrie. Ferrie was a pilot, a scientist, and a paralegal. Ferrie was connected to Marcello because he was helping Marcello with his upcoming deportation case. Ferrie also trained the Cubans that stormed the Bay of Pigs, and hated Kennedy after the failed invasion. After his summer stay in New Orleans, Oswald moved to Dallas, which was controlled by Marcello.

On November 22, 1963, right at the precise moment President Kennedy was assassinated, Marcello was in a New Orleans courtroom facing yet another trial related to his deportation. It was in the middle of The United States vs. Carlos Marcello when a bailiff approached judge Herbert W. Christenberry and whispered something into his ear. The judge then told the court that President Kennedy had been shot. Soon after, Marcello and his brother Joe would be found not guilty on the counts of “conspiracy to defraud the United States government by obtaining a false Guatemalan birth certificate" and "conspiracy to obstruct the United States government in the exercise of its right to deport Carlos Marcello." But the courts were not finished with him yet. On October 16, 1964, Marcello was indicted in connection with jury tampering at his trial for the forged birth certificate. He eventually came to trial on this charge on August 17, 1965, but once again the jury found in his favor.

After beating two major court cases, and with the Kennedy brothers out of office, Marcello’s organization would continue to prosper. Not having to fear deportation at the moment, Marcello no longer had to tip toe around the government. His next run in with the law would be on October 1, 1966. Marcello, after returning to New Orleans from a brief Mafia summit in New York that was raided by the police, punched FBI agent Patrick Collins. Marcello was brought to trial for this and was sentenced to two years in federal prison. But keeping with tradition, he only served six months in a medical facility in Springfield, Missouri.

Again, while this paper is about the life of Carlos Marcello, and not the implication of his involvement in assassinations, it should be noted that Marcello had connections to James Earl Ray and Sirhan Sirhan, the assassins of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy. Marcello was known for his stance against civil rights, and was known to fund the KKK. According to witnesses Ray was seen at the Town and Country Motel on December 17, 1967. Also, when the FBI raided Ray‘s apartment, agents found a map with the address of LA gangster Johnny Roselli circled on it. Only after a few months after King’s assassination, Robert Kennedy was assassinated as well. In 1968, Robert Kennedy was gearing up to run as the Democratic candidate for the presidency. The Mafia feared that Kennedy would reopen the investigation into his brother’s death, and that he might further pursue organized crime if he were elected. Kennedy was later shot by Sirhan Sirhan, who worked as a groom at the Santa Anita race track controlled by LA gangster Mickey Cohen, who was a close friend of Marcello.

While Marcello was never officially connected to any of these assassinations, he was called before The House Select Committee on Assassinations on January 11, 1978. After the Watergate scandal broke in 1972, the Watergate Committee was formed to investigate. After finding out about CIA and FBI involvement in the scandal, the Church Committee and the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence were both formed to investigate the various intelligence agencies of the United States. When suspicions arouse that these very agencies could be involved with the Kennedy assassination the House Select Committee on Assassinations was formed in 1976 to reinvestigate the JFK/MLK assassinations, and the attempt on presidential candidate George Wallace. Marcello was called as a witness and not a suspect, so his testimony was given under a grant of immunity, so he didn‘t have to hide behind the Fifth Amendment. It was at this time when a number of Marcello’s associates started to turn up dead. Chicago Mafia boss Sam Giancana was shot in the back of the head in his basement on June 19, 1975. Johnny Roselli’s decomposing body was found in a 55-gallon steel fuel drum floating in a bay near Miami on August 9, 1976. Roselli had been strangled, shot, and his legs were sawn off. Chicago Mafia hitman Charles Nicoletti was found dead in his car with three gunshot wounds to the back of his head on March 29, 1977. Finally, Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa disappeared on July 30, 1975. What all of these men had in common (besides being involved with the Mafia and allegedly in the Kennedy assassination) was that they either testified before the House Select Committee on Assassinations, or they were due to testify. Marcello and his associate in Tampa, Santo Trafficante, Jr., would be the only two major Mafia figures to survive the committee hearings. The Committee would later conclude that Marcello had the motive, means, and opportunity to assassinate President Kennedy.

Joseph Hauser was an insurance swindler who was introduced to Marcello in 1976. It was Marcello who helped him dupe insurance companies in New Orleans. But Hauser was eventually caught and pleaded guilty to federal racketeering charges. Seeing their opportunity the FBI, who longed to convict Marcello, approached Hauser and told him that if he would cooperate with the authorities, all of his charges would be dropped. Hauser would have to participate in Project BRILAB (short for bribery and labor), a nationwide sting set up to get Marcello. The operation began on April 2, 1979. Hauser, aided by two undercover FBI agents, set themselves up as representatives of a fictitious West Coast insurance company and set out to induce Marcello to use his influence to get key officials in the labor movement and the state and municipal governments to award major insurance contracts to the company, in return for a share of the huge commissions payable on these agreements. Hauser and the FBI agents would wear wires and Marcello's office at the Town and Country Motel complex would be bugged. The FBI recorded fourteen hundred reels of recorded tape of conversations with Marcello. The sting eventually ended and Marcello would be charged with racketeering, conspiracy, mail and wire fraud, and interstate travel to engage in racketeering. The main witnesses for the government were Hauser and the two undercover FBI agents, Larry Montague and Michael Wacks. On August 4, 1981, Marcello was found guilty of violating the RICO statute, the next day he was also found guilty of trying to bribe a federal judge. Between the BRILAB sting, and the bribing of a federal judge, Marcello faced seventeen years in prison. Marcello was moved from prison to prison, never staying in the same place for more than two years.

In 1989, Marcello suffered a series of strokes. He had become severely disabled and had been showing the early stages of Alzheimer's disease. A 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals threw out Carlos’s BRILAB conviction. After serving six and a half years, Marcello was freed to the care of his family. He would eventually lose the power of speech and he regressed to his infancy. He was rarely in public and died on March 3, 1993.

After Marcello’s arrest and death there was a power vacuum in the New Orleans underworld. None of Marcello’s brothers wanted to take control of his organization, and most of them officially retired from crime. Remnants of Marcello’s organization allied themselves with men connected to the Gambino Crime Family in New York and the Bruno-Scarfo Crime Family in Philadelphia. The east coast mobsters worked with former Marcello members Anthony Corolla, Nick Karno, and Frank Caracci to take control of New Orleans. Silver Dollar Sam’s son, Anthony Carolla, told the eastern mobsters: Sure, go ahead. Come on in. You won’t get any heat from the Marcellos. They’re finished. They don’t mean nothin around here anymore.

According to Marcello-era criminal Frenchy Brouillette, Anthony Corolla leading a Mafia family in New Orleans was as effective as George W. Bush leading the United States.

The New Orleans Mafia lost a major source of illegal revenue when 4th term Governor Edwin Edwards legalized casino gambling in the early 90's.

Marcello was initially buried in Westlawn Memorial Park and Mausoleum, but was moved two years later to Metairie Cemetery.


Sources
-Mafia Kingfish-John H. Davis
-Legacy of Secrecy-Lamar Waldron
-Mr. New Orleans-Michael Randazzo V
-Deep Water: Joseph Macheca and the Birth of the American Mafia-Thomas Hunt
-The Enemy Within-Robert F. Kennedy