The Red River Brief (The Wrong Brother): Part VIII
Revenge is a Louisiana dessert best served hot by the Maroun brothers from Shreveport and Carlos Marcello from New Orleans.
The details of Carlos Marcello’s deportation to Central America in 1961 remain one of the most interesting facets of the JFK assassination plot, yet also one of the least studied. President Kennedy had been in office less than three months when his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy (RFK), facilitated the arrangements to have Marcello unceremoniously shipped from Moisant Airport in New Orleans (now Louis Armstrong International) to an air force base in Guatemala. The reasons for the deportation were multifaceted and confusing, but primarily indicative of the Kennedy administration’s focus to crush the corrupt connections of labor unions and organized crime entities.
In terms of legality, the attorney general used the power of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) to export the Mafia boss of New Orleans and beyond because it had been determined at the Kefauver hearings of 1950-51 that Marcello was not only not a citizen of the United States, but that he had established several layers of fraudulent immigration paperwork and passports. From journalist Ronald Rawson:
Before he was put on a plane to Guatemala the INS had attempted to get permission to deport him to Italy, Tunisia, and France. Italy would not take him because he was not born in Italy. Tunisia would not take him because, when he was born in the country, it was under French rule. France would not take him as they no longer controlled Tunisia and that’s where he was born.
Marcello, an Italian born in Tunisia, was a man without a country who held a fraudulent Guatemalan birth certificate. He had business interests there that included shrimp, tomatoes, and, according to legend, marijuana. The CIA-created United Fruit Company also operated in Guatemala and several other countries in Latin America; many historians have alluded to the possibility that Marcello’s deportation was much more than an immigration status issue. In fact, it is likely that the maneuver by the Kennedy brothers was explicitly a money grab. Remove the well-connected crime boss of New Orleans, take over his business interests in the United States and elsewhere, and certain elements of Kennedy’s cronies will reap huge profits. The tactics of organized crime families, in essence, were actually duplicated by those of the government.
In terms of piling on the charges to keep Marcello away from the United States, RFK enlisted the aid of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to hit him with liens totaling $130,895 for unpaid taxes from 1956-59 and additional liens of $835,396 for 1960-61. The JFK administration thought that deporting Marcello and tacking on nearly a million dollars in tax liens would prohibit his return, but it was making a grievous—and eventually fatal—error. For not only was Marcello deeply embedded with the intelligence services of the United States in relation to the 1954 coup in Guatemala that removed democratically-elected President Jacobo Árbenz and replaced him with the military dictatorship of Carlos Castillo Armas, but he was also a teammate of the CIA for the overthrow of Castro in Cuba.
A few months after Marcello’s deportation, in November 1961, JFK forced Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles and his entourage, including Deputy Director for Plans Richard M. Bissell, Jr. and Deputy Director (General) Charles Cabell, to resign. Within ten months of taking power, the new administration had alienated a Mafia boss and the most powerful figures in the nation’s intelligence community. And over the course of four days (April 17-20), concurrent to Marcello’s exile in Central America, it had abandoned CIA-trained operatives at the failed Bay of Pigs invasion on the southern coast of Cuba by failing to provide promised air and naval support. This operation had been formulated with the assistance of organized crime financing by Marcello, Sam Giancana in Chicago, and Santo Trafficante in Miami.
Mike Maroun (left) with his client, Carlos Marcello.
It was clear that JFK and RFK were attempting to clean house of their most powerful domestic adversaries, both within the government and outside of it; the argument can be made that the peril they faced from Mafia and CIA bedfellows was far greater than anything offered by the Soviet Union, including the placement of ballistic missiles in Cuba that led to the crisis of October 1962.
Of particular interest, this: Charles Cabell—the son of a Confederate general—had achieved the same rank as his father in the Air Force and became CIA Deputy Director under Dulles in 1953 while still on active duty. His brother, Earle Cabell, was the Mayor of Dallas on November 22, 1963. They are the fourth set of siblings with revenge motives to be directly connected to the assassination of President Kennedy. John Foster Dulles, the brother of Allen, passed away in 1959 after serving as Secretary of State for President Eisenhower or he would have most likely also been a part of the emerging cabal of kinsmen whose interests were threatened by JFK.
Like General Cabell (see above photo), the brothers Dulles were also close, personal friends with Richard Nixon, Eisenhower’s Vice President.
The mutually-beneficial ties that had been established between organized crime and the CIA since WWII were, aptly, further strengthened by the Kennedy Administration’s overt willingness to disable and disenfranchise the status quo of the mob's profiteering and power-mongering operations. Angry, powerful men with unlimited financial resources and paramilitary underlings are dangerous. In effect, Marcello’s deportation and the Bay of Pigs fiasco were the initial catalysts for the murder of President Kennedy. When JFK disabled the powers-that-be for CIA leadership, the origins of the assassination plot were cemented.
Marcello’s stay in Guatemala was as shockingly bizarre as his subsequent (forced) excursions into El Salvador and Honduras. RFK had deported him to Guatemala because the government there had been willing to accept him based on a falsified birth certificate Marcello held for the country: it showed that he was born in the mountain village of San Jose Pinula. After landing at the air force base, an entourage that included Guatemalan military officials, government representatives, and members of the press, took Marcello to the swanky Hotel Biltmore in Guatemala City.
Back in the states, his team of lawyers that included Jack Wasserman, Philip Smith (who had accompanied him to the INS meeting on the day Marcello was deported), G. Wray Gill, and Mike Maroun were filing motion after motion against the U.S. government. Humorously, one of Wasserman’s filings stated that his client was not, in fact, a citizen of Guatemala at almost the exact moment that Marcello was telling immigration officials in Guatemala that he was a citizen! As was to be expected of a Latin American nation, Marcello was actually arrested after his immigration meeting, shaken down for a $75,000 bribe, then returned to the Hotel Biltmore after officials were assured that a new school would be built in San Jose Pinula.
Within a week, Marcello was joined at the hotel by several members of his family and his Shreveport-based attorney Mike Maroun (see photo below). Brothers Sammy and Vincent, wife Jackie, Vincent’s wife Sadie, son Little Joe, daughter Florence and uncle Felice Golino all made the trek from Louisiana to the Hotel Biltmore on a pilgrimage of sorts to support the family’s patriarch. Back home in New Orleans, attorney G. Wray Gill hired David Ferrie and Guy Bannister to assist him with plans to have Marcello returned to the state. The Gill-Ferrie-Bannister connectivity is yet another statistical anomaly, perhaps better stated as a probability, that baffles the senses in any objective evaluation of the evidence relating to a conspiracy to kill JFK.
For example, in December 1961, Gill began representing Ferrie in his attempt to be reinstated with Eastern Air Lines after the latter’s suspension due to charges of moral infractions. Ferrie was later employed by Gill as an investigator and handyman from March 1962 to December 1963 (the month after the assassination). Joining Ferrie to help Gill on the Marcello matter was his close associate Guy Bannister; the two had been heavily involved in far-right, anti-Castro, CIA-backed endeavors that included Operation 40 and Operation Mongoose training bases near Lake Pontchartrain in Louisiana. There were at least six staging camps in South Louisiana preparing Cuban exiles and others for the invasion at the Bay of Pigs. Joining the luminaries there were Frank Sturgis and his Anti-Communist Brigade from Miami, the Alpha 66 group (also from Miami with links to Bannister and E. Howard Hunt), and members of the Cuban Revolutionary Council.
In yet another stunning, factual connection, Bannister’s private investigator office in New Orleans at 531 Lafayette Street had another entrance on its side at 544 Camp Street; the latter address appeared on the Fair Play for Cuba leaflets that Lee Harvey Oswald was distributing in the summer of 1963. It was also an office address used by the aforementioned anti-Castro exile, Carlos Bringuier, who had confronted Oswald in the streets of New Orleans and debated him on radio programs.
Taken independently, without any corresponding references to the assassination plotters for the murder of the President of the United States, these facts would not amount to much in terms of proving a conspiracy in a court of law. But look at them in terms of a common sense, statistical probability manner and the evidence trail is quite alarming.
Let us recap the connections:
1. Carlos Marcello, a powerful organized crime boss, is deported to Central America by RFK at the direction of JFK.
2. One of Marcello’s lawyers, G. Wray Gill, has in his employ both David Ferrie and Guy Bannister.
3. Ferrie and Bannister are involved with CIA-led Operation 40 and Operation Mongoose.
4. Ferrie is a known associate of Lee Harvey Oswald.
5. Bannister’s office address was connected to Lee Harvey Oswald.
There is, of course, the possibility that there are innocent explanations for Carlos Marcello’s link to the person accused of murdering JFK, the same person who would be silenced himself two days later in a tale straight from the pages of The Enigma of Admiral Darlan! But what is most/more probable for the logical mind to process?
As Marcello sweltered for a month in the Guatemalan heat that often surpassed the temperature and humidity in New Orleans, and his team of attorneys worked feverishly on his behalf in Washington against the Justice Department, the INS, and the IRS, another rather interesting character was to join his team. Amongst the innermost circles of power-brokers for the Washington, DC of that era, or for possibly any era, Isaac Irving Davidson (see photo below) is a legendary figure. To the general public, however, he is an invisible man. And for the purposes of this examination, Davidson could be one of the more dangerous and sinister conduits for the entire JFK operation.
During WWII, Davidson worked with the War Production Board. Afterwards, he began a career in public relations while dabbling as a licensed arms dealer on the side. Davidson’s roster of clients reads like a casting call for the usual suspects in Casablanca. There was the military dictator of Nicaragua, Anastasio Somoza, and the military dictator of Cuba, Fulgencio Batista, who was later deposed by Fidel Castro’s forces. Davidson represented Carlos Marcello, too, along with Teamsters boss Jimmy Hoffa. Dictator François “Papa Doc” Duvalier hired him in 1964 to represent the Haitian government; it has been claimed that Davidson met George de Mohrenschildt, Oswald’s handler in Dallas, on one of his visits to Haiti.
Later, in the 1970s, Davidson became involved with Santo Trafficante and the Teamsters Union. The FBI were closely watching these two men and they were eventually charged with pilfering large sums from the Teamsters Southeast States Health and Welfare Fund. Although indicted, the charges were eventually dropped. And, duplicitously, it has been determined that Davidson was also serving as an information asset for both the FBI and the CIA.
If these associations are not enough to implicate Davidson at least indirectly to the JFK assassination plot, consider another fascinating element: he was an associate of Shreveport native, friend of the Maroun brothers, Marine Corps officer, CIA agent, tactical instructor for Cuban exiles for Operation 40 and Operation Mongoose, and the person who established the Marine Corps Support Facility in New Orleans on land purchased from a Carlos Marcello dummy corporation…Carl Elmer Jenkins. As philosopher/poet George Santayana opined, “History is always written wrong, and so always needs to be rewritten.”
Carl Elmer Jenkins, Shreveport (LA) native.
General Maroun, Shreveport (LA) native.
The historical confluence of these villainous men meant little during the time that Marcello was being deported from a second country in a span of less than six weeks. In May 1961, just after his family members had returned to New Orleans from Guatemala City, a torturous journey was to begin for Marcello and his lawyer, Mike Maroun, who had remained behind to support him. After several delays and interrogations, Guatemalan secret service agents escorted the pair in a station wagon to a Salvadoran army base about twenty miles from the border. After being interrogated for a few days at that military camp, Marcello and Maroun were then transferred to another base that was close to San Salvador, the capitol of El Salvador.
If Marcello’s hatred for JFK had not been stoked enough by his deportation, or the tax liens from the IRS, or the failure at the Bay of Pigs that he and his mob associates had helped to bankroll, or even the pawn-like shuttling around by the governments of Guatemala and El Salvador, what was to occur next would be enough to make him—and Maroun—eternally livid.
A two-member Salvadoran guard detail drove Marcello and Maroun six hours in a school bus from the base near San Salvador to the top of a mountain road just across the border into Honduras. One of the most powerful Mafia figures in the world and one of the most powerful lawyers in the United States were deposited there, in suits, dress shirts, and loafers, with no food, water, or supplies. It was clearly a death sentence of sorts that had been handed down from the Kennedy brothers in Washington to officials in El Salvador. Maroun was in his mid-forties; Marcello was 51. Neither was in excellent shape or health. But here they were, deep in a Central American jungle, with the only recourse being of hiking on the road in the same direction from which they had come.
It took Marcello and Maroun more than eight hours to hike 17 miles. According to the latter’s version of the story, Marcello found it hard to breathe in the upper-mountain atmosphere and collapsed in the road at least three times while saying he couldn’t go on any further. They staggered into a mountaintop village and, after a brief rest and meal, hired a pair of boys to lead them to whatever nearby civilization in Honduras they could find. Eventually, after suspecting the boys might try to rob them and escaping down the mountains on their own, Marcello and Maroun came upon a small regional airport and were able to hire a plane to fly them to the Honduran capitol city of Tegucigalpa.
The two exhausted men checked into a hotel and slept for two straight days. Maroun, who had obviously not been deported, was able to secure a flight back to Louisiana soon thereafter. At least, with his return, he would be able to let Marcello’s family and associates that the crime boss was alive. Marcello spent two more weeks at the hotel in Tegucigalpa. How he returned to Louisiana, specifically Shreveport, directly from Honduras is anyone’s guess. Some believe David Ferrie was the charter pilot. Famed JFK researcher and attorney G. Robert Blakey, who served on the House Select Committee on Assassinations, stated in 1980 that it was picked up on a wiretap that Marcello was flown to Miami aboard a Dominican Republic Air Force jet on the orders of the country’s President, General Rafael Trujillo.
And the murderous, CIA-backed dictator Trujillo had two mutual friends in common with Carlos Marcello: Santo Trafficante and Irving Davidson.
Sources:
Rawson, Ronald. (2021) “Carlos Marcello: The Little Man’s Deportation to Guatemala” The Crescent City Corner.
Lynch, Grayston L. (1998). “Decision for Disaster: Betrayal at the Bay of Pigs.” Brassey's.
"Gen. Charles Cabell Dies, Former CIA Deputy Director." The Washington Post, May 27, 1971, p. B7.
Wilson, Eric. (2015) “The Spectacle of the False Flag: Parapolitics from JFK to Watergate” Punctum Books, Brooklyn NY.
Today in New Orleans History. “G. Wray Gill Dies” (October 4, 1972). neworleanspast.com
Pope, John. (November 15, 2013) “JFK assassination conspiracy: David Ferrie was linked to Lee Harvey Oswald, Clay Shaw in New Orleans” The Times-Picayune.
Shannon, Andrew J. FBI report on I. Irving Davidson (30th September, 1958).
Davis, John H. “Mafia Kingfish: Carlos Marcello and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy” (1988).
Spartacus Educational. “Isaac Irving Davidson” spartacus-educational.com
Santayana, George “Life of Reason: Reason in Science” Scribner’s, 1906, p. 45.