Marcello

Marcello appears in the book as a powerful New Orleans crime boss and one of Russell Bufalino’s closest friends. His story is told through episodes of political pressure, lost Cuban assets, and alleged covert action: the government tried to deport him, Castro’s revolution cost him and other mob figures their casinos, and a Senate investigation later identified Bufalino as part of a plot against Castro in which Marcello’s associate is connected to the same wider criminal world.

Identity and Position

Marcello is identified as the crime boss of New Orleans and as a close friend and ally of Russell Bufalino. The account does not detail the organization or precise scope of Marcello’s own territory; instead, it establishes his standing through his friendship with Bufalino and through the federal government’s pursuit of him. Their association places Marcello among the figures whose business and personal ties crossed regional boundaries.

Deportation and Return

In the years after the Apalachin meeting and the McClellan Committee hearings brought greater public attention to organized crime, the Justice Department nearly succeeded in deporting Bufalino and Marcello. The two cases, however, took different paths. According to the book, the FBI avoided testing its case against Marcello in court: agents picked him up in New Orleans and put him on a plane to Guatemala. The FBI’s position was that Marcello had no rights as an American citizen because he had a Guatemalan birth certificate.

Marcello was furious. He flew back to the United States and, like Bufalino, ultimately beat the deportation charges in court. The episode shows both the intensity of federal pressure and its limits: the government could force a sudden removal, but Marcello returned and defeated the deportation effort through legal proceedings.

Cuba and the Castro Conflict

The book connects Marcello’s fortunes to the expulsion of mob figures from Cuba after Fidel Castro took power and seized their casinos. In Frank Sheeran’s account, Bufalino, Marcello, and Santo Trafficante were especially angry at Castro. Trafficante’s imprisonment in Cuba gave the conflict a personal as well as financial edge. Sheeran recounts having heard that Sam Giancana sent Jack Ruby to Cuba to distribute trading stamps in order to secure Trafficante’s release and departure.

A later account gives this hostility a covert political dimension. Time reported in June 1975, amid Senate Church Committee hearings on CIA ties to organized crime, that Bufalino’s help had been recruited for a mysterious CIA-gangland plot to kill Castro. The committee concluded that Bufalino was part of a conspiracy to use poison pills against Castro shortly before the Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961. This evidence concerns Bufalino’s alleged role, not a specific action by Marcello; Marcello’s place in the episode is as Bufalino’s close ally within the broader network shaped by the loss of Cuban property and opposition to Castro.

Narrative Significance

Marcello’s appearances are brief but connect several strands of the book: organized crime’s international reach, the consequences of Castro’s seizure of mob assets, and the uneasy overlap between government operations and criminal networks. The deportation episode presents him as a target who could be forcibly removed yet return to contest the government in court. The Cuba material, in turn, situates his alliance with Bufalino within a larger conflict over lost property and political revenge, while stopping short of attributing Bufalino’s reported CIA role directly to Marcello.