Preface | Abrahamic Flaws

In Mangham, a small village in northeast Louisiana where Dr. Ralph Lee Abraham, Jr. built his career,1 everyone has a story to tell about their most notable and celebrated native son. For years, Abraham served as one of Richland Parish’s only physicians, operating his medical practice out of a small brick building near the intersection of US Highway 425 and Louisiana Highway 132.

In America’s patriarchal popular imagination, the “country doctor” is almost always an honorable, humble, and deeply respected man. He may not have attended the fanciest medical school or felt comfortable in a big city, but somehow, he was a specialist in everything and a friend to everyone.

Before he became known as “Doc,” Ralph Abraham was a farmer. Like nearly everyone in Richland Parish, Abraham grew up on the family farm. After high school, he…

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In early July 2023, nearly two years after his death, the FBI quietly released a declassified but heavily redacted 328-page volume about four-term Louisiana Gov. Edwin Washington Edwards through its online “vault.” Edwards, a charismatic and enduringly popular Democrat and the only person in Louisiana history to serve in all three branches and all three levels of government, was hounded by allegations of corruption throughout his career.

In May 2000, five years after his final term as governor and following a controversial trial overseen by an erratic and hostile judge, Frank Polozola, Edwards was convicted on 17 charges related to a purported shakedown scheme involving the issuance of casino licenses. Judge Polozola, whose imperial self-regard and dictatorial courtroom management style earned him the nickname “Ayatollah Polozola,” handed Edwards a ten-year sentence, a punishment many believed was equivalent to the death penalty considering Edwards’s age.

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My mission on Imagine Louisiana is simple and stubborn: correct the record, widen the context, and tell this state’s story with rigor and heart. To that end, I want to highlight a set of reports from the Bayou Brief archives that continue to do work in the world.

Why this list of twenty? Because each one changed a conversation, sharpened public understanding, or restored history that had been buried under myth. Together, they map the throughline of my journalism: documents over spin, memory over myth, people over power.

To receive new posts, support my work, and collect your gift basket, become a paid subscriber for just $50 a year.

What to Expect

• History that isn’t homework. The three-part Carlos Marcello series reads like narrative nonfiction while sticking to the paper trail.

• A truthful reckoning with the Kingfish. These Huey Long pieces resist both hagiography and hit job, focusing on evidence.

• Pow…

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Nearly seven months ago, on Friday, April 4, 2025, I cranked up the engine of my Substack account and quietly published a piece celebrating the 64th anniversary of Carlos Marcello’s wild ride from New Orleans to Guatemala. Even though my Substack account had been essentially dormant since its inception in late December 2021, I somehow managed to collect nearly 50 free subscribers, and I wasn’t in any particular hurry to expand.

This would be a slow launch, I decided, a way of reestablishing my digital presence as an investigative writer. I named the site “CenLamar 2.0” both because “cenlamar” was the name I’d registered under at Substack (and therefore, already in the site’s address, cenlamar.substack.com) and because I thought the call-back to my first website, CenLamar, was appropriate.

Two months later, having tripled the number of subscribers (184!), I rebranded and relaunched the site, upcycling an old name: Imagine Louisiana.

There was one other major change on the reimagined Imagine Louisiana platform: It would operate largely behind a paywall—an imminently affordable paywall!—and actively encourage readers to become paid subscribers. I’d already switched on the “paid subscriber” feature, though the status didn’t confer any real benefits. On the relaunched site, the vast majority of new content would be free to read in full for a week. After a week, it would hop over the paywall and remain eternally in the archives, accessible only to paid subscribers.

As of yesterday, 47 of the site’s 305 total subscribers are paid subscribers. Not bad.

It’d be nice to finish the year strong. During the next few weeks, I will be expanding the paid archives with exclusive content.

To that end, as a way of thanking our —yes, I know the site is just me—paid annual subscribers and welcoming new paid annual subscribers, here’s a little gift:

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Audio

Recorded phone call between President Lyndon B. Johnson and Attorney General Ramsey Clark, 02/22/1967. Clark provides Johnson with a full briefing1 on the death and the life of David Ferrie, who died early that morning.

Recording starts after the conversation has begun.

Photographs

Documents

DWF: FBI File Part 1 of 2

52MB ∙ PDF file

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Part Two of a two-part series. Read Part One here.

I.

“People today are too concerned with trivial matters, things that could be dismissed if viewed in the light of the bearing on the eternal,” Dave Ferrie, a pilot with Eastern Airlines and self-described psychologist, told an audience of 75 Alabama businesswomen at Birmingham’s Episcopal Church of the Advent on December 1, 1954.1 “What has worry over everyday things have to do with eternity?”

The Birmingham News published a brief item about Ferrie’s lecture at the historic downtown church the following day. “Capt. Ferrie reported a tremendous increase in mental illness cases in the United States,” the paper noted. “He attributed the increase to two things: ‘The lack of parental and teacher discipline, and underdeveloped willpower.’ He said most mental illnesses can be cured through the patient’s will to be cured.”

David William Ferrie’s life serves as a vivid reflection of how mid-century America dealt with those who deviated from the n…

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On Friday, August 26, 2005, the front page of the Times-Picayune carried huuuge news for New Orleans: The day before, from the cheaply-gilded offices atop his epoynmous tower in Midtown Manhattan, Donald Trump, star of NBC’s newest hit reality television show, “The Apprentice,” announced he was stamping his name on a massive new skyscraper in the heart of the city’s Central Business District, located on the site of a parking lot at 501 Poydras Street.

“It’s a sexy, great city in so many different ways, and our customers have requested New Orleans as a location they’d like to buy in,” Trump claimed. “We’ve got buyers who follow us wherever we go.” According to the Times-Picayune, Trump’s plan was “expected to bring glitz” (whatever that meant) to a city already internationally known for its spectacular architecture. “[Trump Tower New Orleans] is going to be absolutely the most incredible building New Orleans has ever seen,” he boasted. “It will be the best building in New Orleans. Nothing else even comes close to it.”

News of Trump’s involvement effectively relaunched the same proposed development that had been publicly announced three months earlier. Initially marketed as a $120 million, 50-story, 500-unit condominium building, with Trump aboard, the development was now being described, confusingly, as a $400 million, 70-story building, which would carry the name and the flag of “Trump International Hotel and Tower,” even though it was still “a condominum project.”

Construction was expected to begin in eight months, and the entire development would be privately financed.

Mayor Ray Nagin was ecstatic, arguing that Trump’s imprimatur was proof that the city’s real estate market was on the upswing. “This is international news,” he declared.

That day, buried on page ten, the Times-Picayune ran a brief report about a tropical storm that had strengthened into a hurricane two hours before reaching Florida’s Atlantic Coast.

Three days later, at approximately 6:10 a.m., Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Buras, Louisiana, a tiny fishing village 60 miles south of New Orleans on the frontier of the Mississippi River’s byzantium bird’s foot delta. By the day’s end, after the storm had passed and just as New Orleans began to breathe a sigh of relief that it had been largely spared, the city’s worst fears were realized when the catastrophic failure of the federal levee system put 80% of New Orleans underwater.

Although Hurricane Katrina would later be blamed for destroying the dream of Trump Tower New Orleans, the proposed development endured after the storm for nearly five years. In early 2006, Trump claimed to have taken reservations or deposits for roughly 175 units, accounting for more than 40% of the entire development. A year later, on March 15, 2007, the New Orleans City Council unanimously approved the Trump Tower plans, clearing the final regulatory hurdle.

The finalized plan called for an 842-foot tower (716-feet without the spire)—not only the tallest in Louisiana, but also taller than anything outside of Houston on the entire Gulf Coast—comprised of 734 units, 290 traditional condominiums and 435 “condotel” rooms, which would be sold individually but allowed to operate collectively as hotel rooms. Once constructed, the building would dominate the skyline of a city left fallow by the storm.

There were other tangible signs of progress: At the site of the proposed tower, a giant sign advertising the project; a slickly designed website, TrumpTowerNewOrleans.com, featuring a video testimonial from the Donald himself, and the opening of a small sales office in New Orleans.

In many ways, the story of the planned skyscraper isn’t about the collateral damage left in the wake of a devastating hurricane; it’s about a remarkably durable, wildly ambitious, and stupidly gigantic project that, at its core, was defined by deceiving the public and buyers. It’s about a fake news story that was manufactured 20 years ago with the hope of making a quick fortune by selling a few hundred overpriced condos. It’s about a starstruck and overstretched local media, a corrupt and incompetent local government, and the misplaced priorities that some placed in a city struggling to recover and rebuild.

In March of 2008, WDSU’s Ken Jones came closer than anyone else in reporting the truth by inserting an unconfirmed rumor into a story that otherwise would have just been disinformation from the Trump team about their plans to break ground in the summer and how they have been “exceeding condo presale estimates by 300%, so far,” whatever that meant.

“There’s been talk that the only connection Donald Trump will have with this project is his name,” Jones dished. He then asked Christian Moises of New Orleans City Business Magazine, ostensibly an expert in the city’s business news, if he could clarify Trump’s role in the project, and Moises started responding before realizing that his answer was also vague and confusing.

Donald Trump wasn’t the developer, or even a co-developer, of the proposed tower in New Orleans that carried his name. He wasn’t attracted to the project as an investor. His interest in the project wasn’t the result of methodical scrutiny or anything resembling due diligence. Despite the headline of the Times-Picayune, “Trump buys into N.O. condo project,” Donald Trump wasn’t buying anything in New Orleans. Trump didn’t spend a dime of his own money on the project. He’d entered into a licensing agreement with the project’s real developers, wherein he was paid upfront for use of the Trump brand and for his involvement in publicizing and marketing the project, which hinged entirely on substantial pre-construction sales.

With Trump as their hypeman, the developers reintroduced their plan to the public with the hope of generating the enthusiasm and interest necessary to lure in enough early buyers—and cash—to secure a construction loan. If the project succeeded, Trump also stood to gain on the backend in hotel management and brand licensing fees. If it failed, his only risk was reputational, a risk in every transaction. Although the plan never materialized, Trump nonetheless earned significant goodwill for the decision to continue pursuing the deal in the years following Hurricane Katrina. Indeed, according to a recent report by Rolling Stone, Trump may have been the only person who made money from the arrested development. Aside from the purchase of prime real estate on Poydras, Trump’s $2 million licensing fee was easily the largest single expense associated with the proposal. In hindsight, it also may have doomed the project from the very beginning.

Four days before Hurricane Katrina, Trump’s first act as the development’s paid spokesperson was to add 20 stories to what had been conceived as a 50-story building. Days later, however, in the immediate aftermath of Katrina, the worst natural disaster in American history and an unprecedented humanitarian crisis, he was working behind the scenes on a plan to evacuate New Orleans and rescue the Trump brand from catastrophe. In a 2010 deposition, Trump revealed that he offered to return his licensing fee to the developers shortly after Katrina, with the intention of walking away from a project that had been announced just days earlier. His offer, however, was rebuffed. Henceforth, his son Don, Jr. would be the point person on the project.

In early September, 27-year-old Donald Trump, Jr., reaffirmed his family’s commitment to the colossal development in New Orleans. “We're in this with you guys,” he said. “But our sentiment right now is that it's inappropriate to talk business (at a time) with such a great loss of life.”1

In late November 2005, the Trump Organization finally issued a formal statement expressing confidence in the city’s recovery, which the local media would pathetically attempt to attribute as a direct quote from the Donald himself:

The Trump organization stands behind the people of New Orleans as they rebuild their great city. We have no doubt that the city of New Orleans will come back stronger than ever, and the Trump organization is proud to be a part of this redevelopment process as New Orleans gets back on its feet. Our decision to enter the New Orleans market has only been reinforced by the dynamic nature and resilient strength of the people of New Orleans.

“Tower could power N.O. revival,” the Times-Picayune asserted in a front-page report on November 21. The press essentially treated Trump’s proposed skyscraper as if the future of New Orleans depended on its swift completion, a sentiment that seemed to be shared by the city’s director of economic development, Don Hutchinson, and Michael Olivier, secretary of Louisiana Economic Development. Both men supported providing lucrative tax incentives to entice people to buy Trump-branded luxury condominiums, an obscene example of the worst kind of disaster capitalism. Specifically, they hoped to persuade Congress to allow condominium buyers the ability to deduct half of the unit’s purchase price from their federal income taxes.

“The message to the world is that a major project reflects confidence and security for investment,” Olivier stated. Hutchinson compared the incentives for Trump to the issuance of $8 billion in so-called Liberty bonds in the wake of the September 11th attacks. “The way I see it, what Congress did for New York is good enough for New Orleans. For [Trump tower in New Orleans] to start within six months would send a critical message,” said Hutchinson. “It will tell other investors to take a second look.”

Donald Trump tried and failed to cheat his way into a previous deal in Louisiana more than a decade earlier. In the summer of 1993, Trump flew his oversized private jet to Baton Rouge and stomped over to the Governor’s Mansion to ask Edwin Edwards to rig the rules and extend the deadline for applications from casino operators. Trump learned too late of Louisiana’s plans to grant 15 casino licenses, 14 operating on riverboats and one on land, at the foot of Canal Street in New Orleans, and he hoped his charm offensive would persuade the governor to grant him mercy. He really wanted one of those riverboats, and he was certain that his application, once submitted, would easily win on its own merits. Edwards was amused but unmoved. Trump would fly back home to New York, soured and slighted.2

New Orleans never sought out Donald Trump,3 and even before Katrina, it wasn’t clear if there was really a market for the kind of development he was proposing: Small but tall luxury condominiums in a newly constructed building that looked like it belonged in Dubai or Singapore or, well, anywhere in Florida. The architectural firm responsible for its design were, unsurprisingly, based in Fort Lauderdale and, if their website portfolio is to be trusted, apparently responsible for designing a significant number of the monstrous high-rise condominium buildings that are cluttered along Florida’s Atlantic Coast and sold to wealthy Yankees whose idea of a luxury beach vacation involves looking down at a crowded beach whenever they aren’t on a crowded beach. Wealthy Louisianians built Destin, and when it became too crowded, they moved down to the New Urbanist utopia that wealthy families from Alabama and Arkansas built along 30-A.

It would take more than a decade before anyone could fully appreciate the details of Trump’s licensing agreements or the scale of his public deception. While the planned development in New Orleans languished, Trump licensed his brand for similar proposed projects in Philadelphia, Phoenix, Charlotte, and Tampa, all attempting to sell condominiums under the guise of Trump’s name, and all failed to make it to construction. In 2009, Trump’s name was removed from a proposed “condotel” in Fort Lauderdale that defaulted; it would eventually materialize as a Conrad hotel, a flag of the Hilton chain, in 2017. Domestically, projects that paid to license the Trump brand were more likely to fail than succeed; the brand would find more success overseas.

In 1999, Trump signed his first licensing agreement with the South Korean conglomerate Daewoo for a high-rise condo development in Seoul named Trump World. Two years later, in December 2001, Michael Dezer, an Israeli immigrant who arrived in New York as a teenager and made a fortune in real estate, paid Donald Trump to license his name for a massive, 11-acre development on Sunny Isles Beach in Miami. “I saw that Trump was a better name than Dezer,” Dezer told the Miami Herald in a notably candid interview in 2002. “The Trump name is magic.” Dezer never attempted to conceal the fact that he paid for the Trump brand. Today, Donald Trump’s first licensing agreement development in the United States, Trump Grande on Sunny Isles Beach, is a complex of three enormous high-rises: Trump International Beach Hotel, a “condotel” managed by Sonesta, and a pair of 55-story condo buildings, Trump Palace and Trump Royale. But despite its success, Trump Grande would also prove to be a magic trick difficult to perform outside of Miami.

Why would anyone pay Donald Trump millions of dollars to pretend he liked the condos they were selling in New Orleans? Why didn’t the press warn the public of a fraud that now looks so obvious?

Twenty years ago, when the tabloid billionaire in command of his family’s real estate empire decided to stamp his name on a building, there was an implicit understanding that the building belonged to him. Even though his career was beset by a series of spectacular, vainglorious failures and his wealth was inherited and nearly squandered, by 2005, Donald Trump had been “resurrected as an icon of American success,” reinvented completely by the same television producer who gifted the world with Survivor, a show that recently wrapped up filming its 50th season, and turned into the megawatt lucky star of The Apprentice. Two years earlier, Donald Trump was a blubbering, washed-up, 1980s D-list celebrity, instantly recognizable but rendered obsolete by societal advancements, an artifact of a different era. His transformation on the silver screen had been so swift, so convincing, so complete, it was possible to forget the person who existed before he was replaced on television; even the term “real Donald Trump” had been reappropriated.

“I was seriously in trouble,” Trump confessed during the opening credits of The Apprentice on January 8, 2004. “I was billions of dollars in debt. But I fought back, and I won, big league.”

“What was he saying?” America asked. “Big league? Or bigly? Is bigly even a word? Either way, Trump, what a character!”

To be sure, there were plenty of people who called bullshit on the version of Trump that Mark Burnett curated for television, and in New Orleans, there was ample skepticism about the legitimacy of his plans and little evidence of the value that his name was supposedly adding. But 2005 was a lifetime ago, and given the timing of Trump’s announcement, there were plenty of other things that deserved priority over a billionaire’s plans to sell condos to dumb, rich people.

Unbeknownst to the public, the real developers of the building proposed at 501 Poydras Street were a consortium out of Pensacola, Florida, the same small group of investors—namely, Robert Rinke and brothers Allen and Fred Levin—who had courted controversy and invited conspiracy by transforming an unspoiled, 28-acre stretch of gorgeous beachfront property on Santa Rosa Island at the eastern end of Pensacola Beach into a gargantuan luxury resort community of high-rise condominium buildings they named Portofino. In New Orleans, the brothers Levin and Rinke added another, less notorious Pensacolan, Cliff Mowe, to their roster. Before recruiting Trump, Mowe was primarily responsible for handling the press. Notably, when the project was first announced, Jim Haslett, the head coach of the New Orleans Saints and the owner of a condo at Portofino, was named as a minority investor, with a 4% equity stake. Haslett was fired from the Saints at the end of 2005, following an abysmal 3-13 season, and his name subsequently disappeared from the project’s promotions.

Portofino’s story provides the backstory for the New Orleans venture, as success in Pensacola emboldened the same team to try a Trump-branded tower later.

Announced in 1997, the original plan called for five condominium towers, each roughly 21 stories tall with 150 units, totaling about 750 luxury condos. At the time, such height and scale were unprecedented on the Florida Panhandle coast. The Portofino towers would become the tallest buildings on the Gulf Coast between New Orleans and Tampa. The Levins, who grew up in Pensacola Beach, were not sentimental about the sleepy, low-rise beach town of their youth. They watched jealously as a parade of beachfront high-rises began marching down the Atlantic Coast and made landowners into developers and developers into billionaires. They wanted to do that on the land they controlled along Florida’s Forgotten Coast.

Portofino’s site, though beautiful, was environmentally sensitive. Of the 28 acres slated for development on Santa Rosa Island, about 11 acres were wetlands and marshes teeming with saltwater grasses vital to the Pensacola Bay ecosystem. These wetlands filtered water flowing into Santa Rosa Sound and provided habitat for fish and wildlife. The developers’ plan, however, treated these marshes as expendable “unsightly” swamps in the way of their vision. In 1998, the developers applied to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers for a permit under Section 404 of the Clean Water Act to fill in over half of the wetlands on the site. Specifically, they sought permission to dump fill into 6.5 acres of marsh (out of 11) to create solid ground for the towers and infrastructure. This request immediately triggered opposition from multiple fronts: The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Environmental Protection Agency, and NOAA’s National Marine Fisheries Service all filed strong objections. Residents and environmental advocates were outraged. But the Levin group pressed forward, countering the objections with promises of mitigation and using their political influence where possible. Ultimately, in August 2000, the Army Corps of Engineers approved the Portofino permit, mainly on the developer’s terms. Two small wetland areas would be untouched as a token preservation, and the developers were responsible for creating 6.5 acres of artificial marshes off-site to offset those destroyed by the project’s construction. (In 2004, Hurricane Ivan destroyed some of the mitigation areas, which the Corps deemed as an “Act of God” rather than holding the developers responsible.) Notably, the Corps approval occurred without a public hearing, and even more strikingly, the Corps’ Florida commander, Col. Joe Miller, signed the permit and simultaneously issued letters to the objecting residents stating that no hearing would be held; the next day, Miller retired.

Portofino’s construction proceeded soon after permit approval. The project broke ground in 2001, and by 2004, the first towers were completed and units sold. Ultimately, five towers were built in the initial phase (each about 20 stories, with a total of roughly 700+ condos). The resort opened its spa, restaurants, and beach club, attracting vacationers and second-home owners. Portofino became a success financially, selling out units during the mid-2000s real estate boom. But plans to build two more buildings, the final phase of the development, stalled after the market crashed. And by the time the market recovered, the pandemic happened. At least that was the excuse. Eight years after announcing the final phase, although Levin-Rinke Realty still operates the website promoting the pre-construction sales of units at Building 6, Allen and Fred Levin have both passed away, and the project is still on hold.

But in 2005, the dream was still very much alive. Flush with cash from Portofino’s success, buoyed by confidence after the construction of its first buildings, and buttressed by Fred Levin’s personal fortune, the Pensacola developers looked three hours west for their next project. After Katrina, they could afford to wait and to pay for Trump’s patience.

But why this project? Why was Fred Levin spending his fortune to arrange a marriage between Donald Trump and New Orleans? Who exactly was Fred Levin, and how did he make his fortune?

One of the most consequential and financially successful trial lawyers in American history, until his death at the age of 83 in 2021, Fredric Gerson Levin had been the wealthiest, most influential, and most recognizable person in the Florida panhandle for nearly 30 years. During the 1990s, he was also considered by many as the most bombastic, divisive, and offensive figure in the entire state, which, in Florida, is a distinction that requires more personality and chutzpah than anywhere else.

Levin is best known for engineering Florida’s landmark $13 billion settlement from Big Tobacco in 1993 by convincing his friend, state Senate President W.D. Childers, and Gov. Lawton Chiles to pass and enact the Third Party Medicaid Liability Recovery Act. “I was at Whistler, in British Columbia, sitting in the bar smoking a cigarette, having a drink, and [prominent Charleston, South Carolina trial lawyer] Ron Motley comes up to me and says, ‘How would you like to handle a tobacco case in Florida?’” he recalled to the Florida Super Lawyers Magazine in 2006. “I reached for a statute book, and it opened up to this thing on Medicaid. I started reading it and thought, ‘You know, I could change a few words in this statute and it would be perfect for a tobacco case.’”

Because of the change, in 1998, Levin personally earned $51 million from the Florida settlement, and because of his involvement in similar lawsuits in other states, he eventually took home an additional $129 million. Levin’s entire haul from Big Tobacco was the equivalent of $358 million in today’s dollars. Although his net worth was never disclosed, considering his share of the tobacco earnings and the scale of his philanthropy (totaling at least $75 million, including $40 million bequeathed by his estate to the University of Florida’s Levin College of Law in 2021), he was likely worth hundreds of millions of dollars when the proposed development in New Orleans was announced in 2005.4

But why did a liberal, Jewish trial lawyer and Democratic Party megadonor seek out Donald Trump? Curiously, Young’s 2014 biography doesn’t include anything about Fred Levin’s work with his brother Allen on Portofino or on Trump Tower New Orleans, but it does reveal that the two men already knew each other. They first met in the mid-90s, when Trump was still in the casino business and Levin worked as a boxing promoter for Pensacola native Roy Jones, Jr. One year, Trump invited Levin to his birthday party and told him to bring as many people as he wanted. (Edwin Edwards also earned invitations to Trump’s parties.) They were friendly with one another. That helped. It’s also worth reiterating that the Donald Trump of today wasn’t the Donald Trump that Levin knew, a man who could have also been characterized as a Democratic Party megadonor.

The two men were both wealthy, iconoclastic, controversial, flamboyant, vulgar, and combative. They both trafficked in tabloid gossip—Levin claimed the National Enquirer as his favorite paper—and, as evidenced by the five high-rises of Portofino and the planned skyscraper in New Orleans, they shared a similar aesthetic.

Levin sought Trump’s help with his proposed development in New Orleans, a move that was arguably misguided from the outset, as he genuinely believed Trump had the expertise and cachet needed to sell a project of this scale. And in 2005, very few people would have disagreed.

Fred Levin passed away from COVID-19 on January 12, 2021, six days after the January 6th attacks at the Capitol, eight days before Joe Biden moved into the White House and Trump moved to Florida. A year later, Pensacola named a street in his honor. On a Sunday morning, hundreds of people showed up to celebrate the inaugural Fred Levin Way Festival and to express appreciation for all of the ways Fred Levin contributed to the city. His final remarks, printed in his obituary, were an urgent warning that would have been politically controversial in the Florida panhandle, a place that had just reelected Matt Gaetz to another term in Congress. “PLEASE EVERYONE, JUST WEAR A MASK! It’s not too much to ask. It makes the difference of saving a life or taking a life.” Levin made only a few public comments about his involvement in the Trump Tower proposal in New Orleans and even fewer about his opinion of Trump. That would have been bad for business. But there’s no doubt he loathed Donald Trump as president and would have never associated himself with the Trump brand in 2005 had he known how toxic it would become in 2015.

Levin and his team of Pensacola boys signed a contract with Donald Trump, paying him to serve as their dealmaker and promising to give him all the glory. Hurricane Katrina disrupted their timeline and created uncertainty, but it also provided an enormous infusion of resources and goodwill that could have been utilized creatively. In late 2007, for example, Poydras Properties Hotel Holdings, a group of investors from Los Angeles, purchased the shuttered 1,193-room Hyatt hotel next to the Superdome from Chicago-based Strategic Hotels & Resorts for $32 million. The hotel had been heavily damaged and needed upwards of $250 million in renovations. A year and a half later, in February 2009, the Louisiana State Bond Commission approved the sale of $225 million in special low-cost Gulf Opportunity Zone (GO-Zone) bonds for the project. The renovated hotel reopened to the public in October 2011, and in 2019, Poydras Properties sold the hotel to a local partnership including Saints owner Gayle Benson, developer Darryl Berger, and Dr. Eric George, a hand surgeon and investor, for $400 million. Even though the residential real estate market had changed dramatically after Katrina and despite the overwhelming evidence of a lack of demand for a 70-story, 734-unit building, Trump never altered from the plans that were already too grandiose before the storm.

If there was a silver lining to the decision to reject Donald Trump’s offer to return the $2 million he was paid to license his name for the proposed development in New Orleans, it was that Fred Levin had forced Trump to remain accountable to the terms of their agreement and, unwittingly, helped to expose his licensing agreement scam.

Fred Levin lost at least a couple of million dollars on the project, but Donald Trump was responsible for its failure.

Epilogue

When folk singer Arlo Guthrie, the son of legendary musician Woodie Guthrie, arrived in New Orleans via Amtrak in early December 2005, he warned against the possibility of rebuilding a “Disney-fied” destination.

“Nothing wrong with Disney,” Guthrie said, “I work with them all the time. But there's a place for everybody, and they don't need to be in New Orleans. It doesn't need to be time shares or owned by Donald Trump. That's probably what will happen unless people can get back to their apartments and houses as soon as possible. The best way to defend against an oncoming cultural disaster is to get the music going and the food cooking and the people walking around. Get the people back into the city who were living there all along. The uniqueness of New Orleans depends on the people themselves. And it's not good enough just having some other people; it has to be those people."

On July 27, 2011, the Poydras Street land was foreclosed upon and sold at a sheriff’s auction. Its new owner was a local who knew precisely what to do with the property. Today, 501 Poydras Street is restored to its former glory, as a forgettable parking lot next to a busy intersection.

Sources:

• The Times-Picayune archived reports (2005-2011) on Trump Tower N.O. announcement, approval, delays, and cancellation.

• Curbed New Orleans 2015 retrospective on the project’s demise.

• Associated Press via NOLA.com on the 2009 “on hold” status and project details.

• Rolling Stone “Trump Vowed to 'Stand Behind' New Orleans After Katrina” (Lorena O’Neil, August 2025) on Trump’s post-Katrina promise and project failure.

• IBEW investigation (2016) noting Trump Tower N.O.’s deposits and foreclosure.

• Houston Architecture Forum archives (quoting Times Picayune 2005) on the Florida developers (Levin, Rinke, Mowe) and Portofino tie-in.

• Planetizen News (March 2005) on City Council approval and project specs.

• Florida Trend “Paving Over Paradise” (March 2009) on Portofino’s environmental battles.

• Tampa Bay Times (May 2005) reporting on wetlands mitigation for Portofino.

• Levin Rinke Realty Press Information on Portofino Final Phase (2016).

1

Four years earlier, at 6:15 a.m. on the Sunday before Mardi Gras, Donald Trump, Jr. was picked up by the New Orleans police outside of a home on, of all places, Hillary Street, and charged with public intoxication.

The records related to his arrest, which only became public in 2020, indicate that he spent the night behind bars before posting a $300 bond at 8:00 a.m. on Lundi Gras. Charges were eventually dropped after Trump, Jr. returned to town for a court hearing on July 25, 2001, and entered a plea of not guilty.

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In this audio recording, Ferrie reads from a portion of a lengthy, single-spaced, 10-page document he typed in late 1961. The document is an emotionally fraught and occasionally vindictive personal narrative in which Ferrie details his multiple arrests for indecency with underage teen boys and accuses a litany of individuals involved in his legal case, including two of his lawyers, of criminality.

Ferrie presumably elected not to send the document. It was discovered among his possessions after his death and taken into evidence by Orleans Parish District Attorney Jim Garrison.

The recording first surfaced in Baton Rouge in March 1967. On March 17, 1967, the Baton Rouge State Times reported that East Baton Rouge Parish District Attorney Sargent Pitcher personally delivered the tape to Orleans Parish District Attorney Jim Garrison.

In the late evening of November 22, 1963, as Captain David W. Ferrie’s brand-new light blue 1961 Comet streaked westward through the blinding rain, escaping the vortex of New Orleans and into “the whirlpool of despair,”12 a massive flotilla of federal agents dropped anchor in the Crescent City, the first invasion of investigators dispatched to Louisiana in order to gather information about Lee Harvey Oswald, the 24-year-old ex-Marine and New Orleans native suspected of assassinating President John F. Kennedy earlier that day in Dallas. Dave Ferrie couldn’t have picked a worse possible time to skip town.

“All I wanted to do was relax,” Ferrie explained to 31-year-old Andrew “Moo Moo” Sciambra, a baby lawyer working for Orleans Parish District Attorney Jim Garrison. “As it turned out, it was the worst trip I’ve ever made in my life.”

Ferrie didn’t make the midnight drive from his apartment in New Orleans to Houston during a terrible storm so he could “relax” once he checked into Room 19 of the Alamotel on 8700 South Main Street. He wanted to continue partying. The rest of the country may have been in mourning, but the disgraced former airline pilot finally had something worth celebrating. He brought along two friends, 18-year-old Alvin Beauboeuf and 24-year-old Melvin Coffey. They were always ready for an adventure.

Mel Coffey, who worked for Boeing on building the S-1C, the first stage of NASA’s Saturn V rockets, at the Michaud Assembly Factory in New Orleans, suggested Cape Canaveral and nearby Merritt Island, Florida, home of the brand-new NASA Launch Operations Center, which, in one week, would be given a new name by President Lyndon B. Johnson: The Kennedy Space Center. But the drive was 700 miles from New Orleans, and Al Beaubouef had his heart set on something else. He wanted to go ice skating, and he’d heard there was a new rink in Houston. Beaubouef made Ferrie promise to take him, and so Houston it was.

“I was a former roller skating champion with dozens of medals. I wanted to see how good I’d do on ice,” Beauboeuf recalled to researcher Gus Russo. “I had convinced Dave that ice skating was going to be the next big thing—like disco became in the seventies.”3

Layton Martens, a regular presence and occasional roommate at Ferrie’s apartment, remembered asking why he was even considering driving all the way to Houston just so Beaubouef could go ice skating. Ferrie told him that he “might be interested in purchasing a skating rink,” Martens said.

For his part, Dave Ferrie readily acknowledged that ice skating was at the top of their agenda, but he also said they planned on goose hunting as well. Plus, he had business to do in Vinton, Louisiana, he said, and Beauboeuf had family to visit in Alexandria. However, Ferrie didn’t ice skate at Winterland, and although they saw geese, no one went hunting. They left Houston on Saturday night and headed to the beaches down in Galveston. But it was freezing and miserable, and they packed up early the next morning and made their way to Alexandria.

Stopping at a service station outside of Orange, Texas, to replace the car’s sparkplugs, Ferrie watched Jack Ruby shoot and kill Lee Harvey Oswald on live television. Asked about the specifics of their itinerary, Ferrie wasn’t sure when or why he was in Vinton, but he recalled they had intended to stay in Alexandria for two or three days. Instead, they left only an hour after arriving. Ferrie had called Martens, who was staying at his apartment, to check on things back home.

“You need to get back home,” Martens told him. “Someone from WWL just called asking about you and Oswald, and your lawyer stopped by this afternoon looking for you. He said something about Oswald having your library card with him.”

Ferrie, Beaubouef, and Coffey piled back into the Comet station wagon and bolted back to New Orleans. Ferrie had been attempting to reach his attorney and part-time employer, Wray Gill, to no avail, and along the way, he stopped several times at pay phones to try Gill before finally reaching him.

“I think they want to arrest you,” Gill warned him.

“Who?”

“Garrison.”

Ferrie was dumbfounded, terrified, and fuming with anger. “What should I do?”

“Get back home, and we can go to their office tomorrow.”

Ferrie later said that he pulled into New Orleans around 7:30 p.m., but given the timeline of events that followed his return, he likely didn’t make it to his apartment until 11:30 p.m. He wouldn’t step foot inside, however, until late the next day. He knew Layton Martens was there, but he had no idea what awaited him. He asked Al Beaubouef to be a decoy, which was fine by Beaubouef, who wanted to call a few girls and invite them over. In the meantime, Ferrie needed to drive Coffey home anyway.

On his return shortly after midnight, he spotted a group of people standing out front and several unmarked cars parked along the side of the street. He wasn’t taking any chances, and fortunately, he knew he was too far away and it was too dark outside for anyone to have noticed him. He turned the car around and headed to a nearby grocery store, where he used the payphone outside to call his home line. After a few rings, a stranger picked up—“some dumb ox,” Ferrie remembered—and he knew immediately that his apartment was being raided.

With Dave Ferrie nowhere in sight, police decided to haul Al Beaubouef and Layton Martens into the Second District Police Station and book them for vagrancy and for being “under investigation of subversive activities.”

Ferrie knew he couldn’t return home, and it was probably better if he left New Orleans for the night. The police were actively looking for him. He phoned Wray Gill and briefed him on the nighttime raid.

He steered his Comet to Baton Rouge, more than an hour away, but once there, he became paranoid about getting a hotel room for the night.

Thomas Compton, one of his former CAP cadets, he realized, was now a college student in Hammond, fifty miles east. Ferrie would claim later that he called Compton once he made it to Hammond, but according to Compton, Ferrie surprised him by showing up at his dormitory at 5:30 a.m. in hysterics. “The police are at my home and have taken some of my things,” he cried. Compton had no clue what he meant, and Ferrie never mentioned his trip to Texas. He phoned Wray Gill and left Compton’s dorm around 8:30 a.m.

That afternoon, Wray Gill accompanied his client to the Orleans Parish District Attorney’s Office, and Captain David William Ferrie, accused of flying to Dallas to smuggle a suspected murderer out of jail and into hiding, turned himself in, becoming the first person arrested for conspiring with Lee Harvey Oswald in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

For Dave Ferrie, the joy was always in the journey, driving through an expanse of darkness for hours, flying into empty skies, ensconced in the power behind the steering wheel, a captain in control of his craft. He spent most of his life moving through liminal spaces, concrete highways and blue skies, college classrooms and cheap hotels, airport terminals and doctor’s offices. Whenever he wasn’t in transit, he found himself a stranger in a strange land, no matter where he was. Captain Ferrie was most comfortable in a uniform. He preferred wearing his rank subtly and without worrying about the frivolities of fashion. He struggled with people who failed to recognize his importance or respect his intellect.

Ferrie was high-octane, loud, and obnoxious and full of profanities, someone who brimmed with nervous energy and who had an opinion about practically everything. There was at least one thing he never claimed, at least publicly: He was gay. His sexual orientation made him automatically suspicious in the New Orleans of the 1950s and 60s, a time when the City That Care Forgot cared far too much about gay men.

Dave Ferrie was a pilot first, and by all accounts, a damn good one. He’d also been a priest, psychologist, private eye, pianist, patriot, and polemicist. At least, he tried to be. Seminary took a toll on his mental health. He dropped out twice from two different schools.

In the New Orleans city directory, he listed himself as “Dr. David W. Ferrie, psychologist,” but his doctorate in psychology was a bogus degree from an unaccredited mail-order mill in Bari, Italy. Neighbors would tell reporters and investigators that they assumed he ran a practice out of his apartment. He was a gifted private investigator, but his notoriety made it difficult to find stable work and impossible to “blend in.”

A pianist? He hadn’t played in years. A patriot? That’s a matter of opinion. He was proud of his longtime involvement in the Civil Air Patrol, a congressionally chartered nonprofit organization that served as the civilian auxiliary of the United States Air Force, but his relationship with CAP was tumultuous and controversial. He was kicked out multiple times and even attempted to launch his own “independent,” unsanctioned squadron, which, one could argue, made him a defector.

As a polemicist, he could be persuasive, but too often, he undermined his credibility with crude language, ad hominem attacks, and appeals to his own authority. He also didn’t know how to read the room.

In July 1961, for example, he was invited by the local chapter of the Military Order of the World Wars to deliver the keynote for its regular meeting. “The speaker of the evening, Captain D. W. Ferrie, Senior Pilot, Eastern Airlines, spoke on Cuba—April 1961, Present, Future,” Frank Speiss recorded in the minutes. “At the opening of his presentation, he indicated his talk would be controversial. When partly through the presentation, the Commander rose, apologized for interrupting the speaker, and told him the tenor of his remarks, up to that point, were contrary to the preamble and objectives for which the Military Order of the World Wars stands and that if he wished he could speak, not as our guest speaker, but as a private citizen and to the members present as private citizens after adjournment of the meeting. Captain Ferrie determined he would stop his presentation.”

Ferrie was undeniably intelligent. An autodidact who owned more than 3,000 books, he taught himself to become a hypnotist, an engineer, a forensic scientist, and a medical researcher.

But the most memorable thing about Dave Ferrie wasn’t his job, skills, or talents. It was his appearance: Weathered but smooth skin, dark brown, owl-like eyes, thin lips that disappeared under a protruding nose. Alopecia had taken all of his hair when he was in his mid-thirties. Whenever asked about his hair loss, he would tell fantastical stories about chemical weapons, medical experiments, and battery acid. One of his former colleagues at Eastern Airlines had a different theory.

“When Ferrie first joined the line, he was ‘handsome and friendly,’” the person, who asked to remain anonymous, told Ramparts magazine, “but in the end became ‘moody and paranoiac.’ The personality change coincided with a gradual loss of hair.”

But his alopecia was permanent, suggesting the causes were likely either genetic or the result of an autoimmune disorder. It couldn’t have been stress-induced. He typically wore a hat and sunglasses when he went out, which were effective at concealing his condition. For a man whose grooming habits and hygiene had always been wanting, Ferrie struggled with toupees. He usually wore a dark red wig that he never bothered to comb or wash. The only thing he knew to do with his eyebrows was to paint them on with thick layers of mascara.

The press was ruthless about his condition. “Besides the facts surrounding his life, Ferrie himself was a singularly repelling figure physically,” Haynes Johnson of the Washington Star wrote. “He was sickly, and his hair and eyebrows had been burned off. Instead of buying an adequate wig, Ferrie affected a different, more striking device. He glued down his red toupee and false eyebrows with glucose cement.”

In the days and years that followed the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, David Ferrie, whom Garrison called “one of history's most important individuals,” would emerge at the nexus of an entire universe of conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination of the 35th President of the United States: Cuba, the CIA, the Mafia, and most notoriously, Garrison’s theory of a “homosexual thrill-killing.”

Dave Ferrie started to regret his decision to leave New Orleans before he even arrived in Houston. He wasn’t paranoid. If anything, he was worried that the investigation wouldn’t include him. He spent most of his time at the Alamotel and the Winterland Ice Skating Rink on the phone, mining his sources back home for information about Oswald.

Unbeknownst to Ferrie, shortly before midnight on Saturday, November 23, his former colleague turned arch nemesis, Jack S. Martin (aka Edward Stuart Suggs), a slender man who sported a pencil-thin moustache, was also busy making calls. Hearing reports that Oswald, as a teenager, had once been enrolled in a local Civil Air Patrol squadron, Martin, a notorious drunk, began spreading a series of increasingly alarming rumors about his old pal, Dave Ferrie, whom he knew was a former CAP commander. Ferrie, he claimed, was friends with Oswald, and, recalling the weapons he’d seen at Ferrie’s apartment, Martin asserted that Ferrie had taught the suspected assassin how to use a rifle equipped with a telescopic sight, the kind Oswald used from the sixth floor of the Texas School Book Depository Building.

When one of Ferrie’s friends, Hardy Davis, a Black, gay bail bondsman, mentioned that Ferrie skipped town for Texas for the weekend, Martin cooked up a story about Ferrie flying to Dallas with plans of extracting Oswald from the scene of the crime. He added a minor embellishment that would become a significant detail for conspiracists: Oswald, he said, had Dave Ferrie’s New Orleans library card in his wallet when he was arrested.

Martin’s story was entirely fabricated: Ferrie and Oswald weren’t friends. Ferrie owned firearms, including a rifle, but he was never especially interested in guns or marksmanship and had no idea how to use a telescopic sight. He didn’t fly to Dallas; he drove to Houston. And Oswald, who lived in his hometown of New Orleans for five months in 1963, had his own well-worn New Orleans library card, which was issued to him on May 21 by an assistant librarian at the Napoleon Avenue branch, about a half a mile from his house on 4907 Magazine Street, in the wallet he’d left at Ruth Paine’s home in Irving, where his wife Marina and two daughters, June and Audrey, lived full-time and where Oswald spent most weekends.

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In an internal FBI memorandum dated November 25, 1963, New Orleans Bureau Special Agent in Charge Regis S. Kennedy pulls no punches: “Jack Martin is a well-known self-styled New Orleans private eye, personally known to SA Kennedy as a psychopathic personality, an individual who is not above furnishing false information. He is a ‘hang out’ at the New Orleans District Attorney's Office and closely with Guy Banister, a former Bureau SAC who is now operating a private investigation agency in New Orleans. Martin has an extremely poor reputation for the truth and veracity and [is] regarded by most people who know him as a ‘nut.’”

Martin was drunk and delusional, but as a professional con artist, he was an expert at spreading vicious rumors and launching smear campaigns. He knew who to call, when to call them, and what to say to attract attention, appear credible, and maintain plausible deniability. He called his contacts in the New Orleans Police Department and then the television stations WWL and WDSU. Eventually, he reached out to Orleans Parish assistant DA Herman Kohlman at home, repeated the stunning allegations against Ferrie, and implied that he’d heard the rumors from the press. Kohlman phoned a contact at WDSU to ask what he’d been hearing about Ferrie. Neither man revealed their sources. If they had, they would have realized Jack Martin was playing them. Before calling it a night, Kohlman reached out to another assistant District Attorney, Frank Klein, to brief him about the tips he’d received. Frank Klein decided to call an emergency meeting.

“At about midnight on [Sunday] November 24, 1963, Officers R. Comstock, L. Ivon, C. Jonau, C. Neidermier and F. Williams met Assistant District Attorney Frank Klein, in the office of the District Attorney,” Sgt. Fenner Sedgebeer memorialized in a letter to New Orleans Superintendent of Police Joe Giarrusso a few months later. “At that time, Mr. Klein began an investigation as to the possibility of David Ferrie being involved in the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, which had occurred in Dallas on November 22, 1963 by the hands of Lee Harvey Oswald. Information had been brought to the attention of Mr. Klein that David Ferrie and Lee Harvey Oswald had been friends and associates in the past.” The NOPD and the DA were planning a late-night raid of Ferrie’s apartment, intending to take him into custody. Since they were operating under the assumption that Ferrie had conspired with Oswald, they considered him a “fugitive from the State of Texas,” even though Texas had not declared him one.

Like the rest of the world, Dave Ferrie learned of Oswald shortly after his apprehension in Dallas on November 22. He didn’t recognize the name, Lee Harvey Oswald, and had no memory whatsoever of an Oswald in the Civil Air Patrol. Like the rest of the world, Dave Ferrie was curious to know more about the alleged assassin, particularly about his ties to New Orleans.

At the time, New Orleans, it’s important to note, had two CAP squadrons, one that met at Lakefront Airport in Orleans Parish, and another that met at Moisant Airport in Jefferson Parish (now known as Louis Armstrong New Orleans International Airport). From 1952 until April 1955, Ferrie was an instructor and eventually the commander of the squadron at Lakefront, which was larger and more prominent than the upstart Moisant. In December 1954, Squad Commander Ferrie had submitted the requisite paperwork for reappointment, but the following April, Wing Commander Joe Ehrlicher rejected his application, presumably in response to the death of a teenage pilot who crashed during flight training, effectively firing him from Lakefront. Ferrie was not deterred. From June through August 1955, he served, unofficially, as an instructor with the Moisant squadron.

Ferrie called several of his former CAP cadets to ask if they recalled Oswald. Everyone said the same thing he said: Never knew him, don’t remember him, didn’t even recognize his name. Everyone, that is, except for a local florist and former cadet named Eddie Voebel. Eddie Voebel remembered Lee Oswald well, he told Ferrie. They were friends in the eighth grade at Beauregard Junior High School. Voebel, in fact, was Oswald’s only friend.

By the time Ferrie phoned, Voebel had already spoken with the FBI twice. Bill Slatter of WDSU had also called Voebel to “advise” him that Dave Ferrie was “a homosexual.” Voebel hadn’t seen or spoken with the erstwhile CAP instructor in years, but now that he thought about it, he told Special Agents Nathan O. Brown and Kevin Harrigan, “Ferrie seemed to be an ‘oddball’ who rode a motorcycle and appeared very emotional.” He recalled how, on one occasion, Ferrie began to cry while listening to music. Ferrie had left a lasting impression on Voebel, but the claim that Ferrie was the “commander” of his CAP squadron didn’t ring true; he seemed to recall a different commander. Regardless, he did not doubt that Oswald and Ferrie had met one another, however briefly.

During the summer of 1955, Voebel had convinced a 15-year-old Lee Harvey Oswald to enroll as a cadet in the Moisant Squadron of the Civil Air Patrol. They rode the bus together out to Jefferson Parish for one of the meetings. Oswald, he said, attended two or three drills, four at the most. “It’s funny,” Voebel said. “I remember Oswald joining, but I don’t remember him as ever being there. He had a knack for being there and not being noticed.” Oswald, he said, claimed he was going to transfer into the Lakefront CAP squadron because the commute out to Moisant Airport took too long. Voebel was reasonably sure that Oswald never actually joined the other squadron, but he thought it was entirely possible that Oswald may have gone with him to a party for CAP recruits at Ferrie’s house.

Ferrie knew what he had to do, and he knew it would be enormously risky: He called Regis Kennedy at the FBI New Orleans Bureau and said he needed to amend his previous answer. He may not have remembered Oswald, but he trusted Voebel at his word. He also needed to amend his answer about whether he had ever met Oswald.

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A note: As a way of kicking off the launch of a reborn ImagineLouisiana.com, paid subscribers will be able to access my entire database of Huey P. Long research right here (just scroll all the way down). Make sure to check this space, because I will continue to organize and add material over time.

He was outrageous and disruptive, impatient and immature, charismatic and magnetic. Sui generis. In seven short years, he skyrocketed out of the piney wilderness and onto the world stage, entertainining and inspiring millions of working class Americans to believe in a future of shared prosperity and equal opportunities, alchemizing outrage against the privileged and the powerful. He was ruthless and capricious in his pursuit, uncompromising to a fault and blind to his own hypocricies. An iconoclast and autocrat. A principled populist and an imperial tyrant.

On Capitol Hill, he was full of sound and fury that signified nothing, but back home in Louisiana, he bulldozed anything in the way of his ambitions.

Huey Pierce Long, Jr. met life in a hury, taking every shortcut he encountered, clutching every unattended microphone for as long as he could, inserting himself into every important story and in front of every news camera. His unrestrained attacks against his opponents and critics earned him an audience, often attracting more enemies than allies.

Huey knew that he would never be admitted by the gatekeepers of high society. He would have to blaze his own trail. After installing a subservient Oscar K. Allen as his successor and stand-in and satisfied that he had control of nearly every aspect of state government in Louisiana, Long relinquished only the title of governor so that he could belatedly take his seat in the U.S. Senate. He immediately made his presence known, but while he relished in the performance of political theater, he struggled to find support for his proposals. To most of his colleagues, Long was too reactionary, and his ideas were too radical. For a moment, particularly after he drunkenly stumbled out of the men’s room of an exclusive Long Island country club with embarrasssing black eye and an incoherent story about gangsters, it looked as if his political career was doomed to stall out.

But, surprisingly, after a little introspection, Huey Long decided to make some changes. He retreated from the press, sobered up, and started quietly professionalizing his political operation. He also hit the road, traveling across the country to campaign for like-minded Democrats, and nearly everywhere he went, he was met with a crowd of enthusiastic supporters. Once he reemereged in the press, it was clear that if he decided to run as a third-party candidate the following year, he would seriously jeopardize Franklin D. Roosevelt’s chances of winning a second term.

But just as his message began to resonate and his movement began to mobilize, Huey P. Long was gone in a flash. In Louisiana, he left behind a state entirely transformed by his service, a place that jolted into the 20th century, 35 tumultous years late, because of his tenacity. For the rest of the nation, he became a cautionary tale about unbridled ambition, a story of unrealized dreams and open questions: What would have happened if he had lived beyond the age of 42?

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Taken on June 27, 1930, after reporting to the Louisiana State Penitentiary, better known as Angola, Carlos Marcello, 20, faced a sentence of 9 to 14 years of hard labor for a crime he indisputably did not commit. After two younger teens robbed a local grocery store at gunpoint and fled in a stolen car, they were quickly apprehended, failing to account for the fact that the store’s owner easily recognized the boys and knew their families. To avoid prosecution, the boys alleged that Marcello, who was nowhere near the scene, had “masterminded” the botched heist, testifying against him at trial and courting the support of the local press, who presented the boys as victims of a manipulative, sophisticated, and brutal Sicilian criminal. Marcello knew the two teens, but there was no evidence corroborating the story they told authorities. Had Marcello, who was convicted of armed robbery and assault hired better legal counsel, he likely would have prevailed, a lesson he had to learn again, ne…

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“I don’t even know who I am.”
—Carlos Marcello

The night before 17-year-old Luigia carried her infant son off of the steamship Liguria and into the embrace of a mad, accidental, improbable, and enchanting city; the night before her husband, 27-year-old Giuseppe, met his first child for the first time; before they began building a new life in a new world; before Luigia became Louise and Giuseppe became Joe and before Minacori became Marcello, the ship’s captain, Salvatore Anfosso, invited her and all of the other mothers of small children from steerage up to the recently-vacated cabins in first class. It was an unusually grand gesture, giving the cabins away for free that night, even for Captain Anfosso, who was somewhat of a minor celebrity in New Orleans thanks to the years he spent shepherding Sicilian immigrants and seasonal workers, the so-called “birds of passage,” between the lemon groves of their ancestral home and the sugarcane fields of their adopted one.

Under Anfosso’s command, the Liguria was a 5,000-ton money-making machine, a fast and reliable transatlantic workhorse capable of shuttling as many as 2,000 passengers from Palermo to New Orleans in only three weeks, and she was even quicker on the way back. “The Liguria has been specially built for service between Mediterranean ports and the United States, and it is provided with steam heaters for winter and a system of electric fans,” the Daily Picayune reported in August 1904 in a story announcing the newest addition to the local Italian fleet. “It has large, smoking rooms, a well-filled library, and magnificent drawing rooms. There are two dining rooms on the promenade deck, with two rows of large windows, ensuring ample light and ventilation. In the construction of interior accommodations, careful attention has been given to the arrangement of cabins, to secure every comfort to the travelers.”

Luigia was already familiar with the Liguria. For their honeymoon, Giuseppe wanted to take his bride on a tour of New Orleans, so he paid the $76 fare (approximately $2500 in today's dollars) for a pair of tickets departing Palermo aboard the Liguria. It was to be Luigia’s first time in America, but for reasons likely lost forever to the passage of time, she never disembarked from the ship in New Orleans. Both of their names were listed and then crossed out of the ship’s passenger manifest, though only Luigia’s entry contained the notation “no entry,” suggesting that while her husband, who had already taken three previous trips to America, was admitted, she stayed on board and headed back home.

Luigia and Giuseppe had tied the knot on February 8, 1908, two days after her 15th birthday, exchanging their vows inside the sanctuary of the Sainte-Croix Church in Tunisia, the first and only Catholic chapel located within the Medina of Tunis.

Their families, the Minacoris and the Farruggias, shared a bond and a history stretching back generations and across multiple continents. Both were rooted in Ravanusa, a tiny, cliffside village on the foothills of Mount Saraceno in southern Sicily, and both found work on the other side of the Mediterranean in North Africa in Tunisia. Like many Sicilian couples, the union of Giuseppe and Luigia began with a proposal negotiated and drafted by their parents. It wasn’t an arrangement either of them was forced to accept, but a match they were encouraged to cultivate.

The Minacoris left Sicily when Giuseppe was seven; the Farruggias arrived when Luigia was just seven months old. They settled only a few blocks from one another on the outskirts of Tunis, the besieged capital city of a fallen royal kingdom. Despite their time away, Sicily would continue to claim both families as its own. A year after Luigia and Giuseppe married, word finally reached Ravanusa, and a fastidious town clerk recorded the union, affixing a note on the margin of Giuseppe’s birth certificate.

At the turn of the 20th century, Tunisia, a battlefield and graveyard of ancient civilizations and powerful empires since the beginning of recorded history, was a protectorate of France, which took the country by force in 1881 after 300 years of Ottoman rule. Although Tunisia became part of France’s vast colonial empire, the French were not interested in becoming part of Tunisia, a predominantly Arab country. France’s presence in North Africa had less to do with cultural or historical ties or trade advantages than it did with containing Italy. In French Tunisia, Sicilians comprised nearly 10% of the entire population, representing the largest non-Arab community in North Africa, well over 100,000 people.

Giuseppe Minacori was one of those birds of passage, part of the flock that migrated to Louisiana for the autumnal sugarcane harvest, or la zuccherata, as it was known in Italian. He first arrived in America in 1903, aboard Captain Anfosso’s previous ship, the Manilla. His sister, Crocifissa, and her husband, Ciro, were already living in New Orleans on St. Joseph Street. He spent a few sleepless nights with them before Luigi dell’Orto, the New Orleans agent for the Italian Line, found him a job downriver in Plaquemines Parish. For three months, Giuseppe cut sugarcane at a place that still called itself a plantation even though the opulent mansion that had once dominated its grounds, left fallow and forgotten after the war, was now nothing but a pile of rubble.

The work was backbreaking, but Giuseppe, who stood 5’3” tall, was all muscle and might, granite and bronze and volcanic ash. He would push himself beyond the point of exhaustion, as evidenced by the missing middle finger on his left hand. It helped, though, that the sugarcane season wasn’t long, from October to January, and the pay, $1.50 a day, was as much as anything he could have made back home. He’d returned for the harvest in 1904 and again in 1906. And he would’ve gone in 1905, but that summer, one of United Fruit Company’s steamships carried yellow fever to the Thalia Street Wharf in New Orleans, along with a smuggled shipment of contraband bananas from Belize. A Sicilian dockworker was infected. Within a couple of months, a yellow fever epidemic swept across New Orleans, claiming nearly 500 lives and placing the entire city under mandatory quarantine.

Giuseppe always made sure there was a job lined up for him in Louisiana before making the long voyage to the other side of the Atlantic, knowing how in recent years, hundreds of Italians took the three-week journey to New Orleans only to be turned right back around, either because the seasonal positions were all filled or because the harvest was too paltry.

On his first trip in 1903, New Orleans had looked nothing like Giuseppe imagined of America, nothing like anywhere he’d ever seen. After disembarking, he pressed and shimmied through the orchestrated chaos of the Northeastern Fruit Wharf and finally spilled out onto the oyster-shelled streets of the lower French Quarter, an enclave called Little Palermo. In Little Palermo, he felt a rush of recognition.

Many of the names adorning the city’s storefronts were already familiar to him: Baratina, Catanzaro, Clesi, Manale, Radosta, Mancuso, Paretti, and Montelbano. Antonio Monteleone owned and operated a handsome 64-room hotel on the corner of Royal and Iberville. Angelo Brocato had moved to town and planned to open an ice cream parlor on Decatur Street. Further down Canal Street, outside of the Vieux Carré, as the French Quarter was more commonly known at the time, Sebastian Mandina built a grocery store and ran a popular restaurant. Before any of them came to town, Pietro Carmada’s son Emile cemented New Orleans’s reputation as one of the world’s top destinations for fine dining when he opened his restaurant on the corner of Washington and Coliseum in Uptown, which carried the surname his father adopted after immigrating from the tiny island of Ustica in 1852: Commander’s Palace.

He may not have known all of their stories, but all of these men, Giuseppe realized, were Sicilian.

Little Palermo served as a gateway for those traveling by steamship, a neighborhood that had risen in tandem with the development of the harbor along the Mississippi River and served as “a sort of home port, base camp, and central marketplace around which satellite communities of Italians (field laborers, fruit and vegetable farmers, seaman, dockworkers, market vendors) orbited for over half-a-century.” Primarily a collection of two and three-story brick structures that were originally the homes of affluent Spanish and French families, the neighborhood’s composition began changing in the 1840s as families moved out of the Quarter and property values plummeted. Gradually, its buildings were modified into tenement housing or subdivided into mixed-use rentals, with little concern for ventilation, sanitation, or overcrowding. To some locals, especially upper-class uptowners, the enclave of Sicilian immigrants was a crime-infested hotbed of disease, illness, and squalor, beyond any redemption other than demolition. But for people like Luigia and Giuseppe, Little Palermo was both a front door and a living room for their entire community or, as sociologists Anthony Margavio and Lambert Molyneaux put it, “(a place that) served to soften the transition from the old country to the new, insulating and sheltering Italian immigrants from a sometimes harsh and often indifferent world.”

At the turn of the 20th century, Little Palermo may have been the most difficult place to live in a town known as the Big Easy, but its proximity to the riverfront harbor wasn’t its only appeal. The neighborhood had also catalyzed around the French Market, a crown jewel of New Orleans and the pride of the Sicilian-Italian community. For Giuseppe, the French Market was always the highlight of his trips to New Orleans: Six blocks and 550 stalls of dry goods and fresh produce from all over the world. The French Market was sometimes called the Sicilian Market because, like the commercial docks and wharves lining the riverfront, Sicilians ran the whole show. More than 1,000 Sicilian vendors worked in the market’s grocery stalls and pushcarts, monopolizing the market’s leases. Indeed, by 1910, Sicilians effectively controlled and operated the city’s entire food supply chain.

Giuseppe wouldn’t work at a sugarcane plantation for long, he assured Luigia. He’d been inspired by New Orleans, and he dreamt of starting his own produce business, with fruit and vegetables grown in his own garden, next to his own house, which he’d sell all right there in the French Market. Luigia knew how ambitious and tenacious he was, and she believed him without any hesitation, even if she also understood the odds were stacked against them. Giuseppe’s dream was no different than the one shared by hundreds- if not thousands- of other Sicilian emigrants already in New Orleans.

From 1876 to 1914, a mass exodus of 14 million Italians fled their home country in one of the largest voluntary mass emigrations in world history. Of those, approximately 56% moved across the Atlantic, while the remaining 44% moved to another European country, with France, Switzerland, and Germany taking in exponentially more Italians than anywhere else. Many intended the move to be temporary, and while some eventually returned to Italy, most were gone for good. All told, four million people permanently relocated to the United States during the Italian diaspora, primarily to New York, Boston, and Philadelphia, major East Coast ports of entry in cities with burgeoning Italian immigrant communities.

New Orleans, Queen City of the South, was also a popular port of entry, and in 1910, it boasted the eighth-largest population of Italian immigrants in the nation. However, the Italian immigrant community of New Orleans was built differently from anywhere else. Unlike other U.S. destinations, where the vast majority of Italians came from continental Italy, with only about a quarter coming from Sicily, in New Orleans, Italian immigrants were almost exclusively Sicilian. According to congressional reports, “more than 99%” of the Italian emigrants who arrived in New Orleans in both 1891 and 1892 were Sicilian. A decade before, the split between continental Italians and Sicilian-Italians who came to New Orleans was roughly the same as other U.S. ports of entry. Today, the Crescent City remains “the only American city whose Italian population is almost exclusively of Sicilian origin.”

What happened? Why did Sicilians start moving to Louisiana? Why did people like Giuseppe Minacori and Luigia Farruggia leave?

To some extent, our ability to understand the phenomenon of Sicilian immigration in Louisiana is hampered both by the conflicting and ambiguous accounts of the number of Sicilians who came through but not to New Orleans and by the fact that Louisiana deliberately attracted temporary, seasonal workers, not permanent residents, from Sicily. Unfortunately, much of the early scholarship on Sicilian immigration in New Orleans failed to consider those factors, resulting in reporting that grossly inflated both the population of Sicilian-Italian immigrants permanently living in New Orleans and the total number of Sicilian-Italian seasonal workers who came through the Port of New Orleans.

“There is no way to tell accurately how many immigrants responded to the efforts to attract workers to the sugar plantations. Estimates range from a low of 16,000 to an improbable high of 80,000,” Anthony Margavio and Jerome Salomone explained in Bread and Respect: The Italians of Louisiana. “It was, however, the impetus of the sugar industry that opened the ‘immigration gates’ to Louisiana from Italy. Before those gates were largely closed by the Immigration Act of 1924, over 100,000 Italians had come through the Port of New Orleans as immigrants to the United States of America.”

Despite the contradictory and confusing methods used to measure the full scale of the so-called “Sicilian surge” in New Orleans, census reports and immigration records from the Port of New Orleans offer a rough approximation of the total population of Italian immigrants living in Louisiana when Luigia and her infant boy arrived on the Liguria. “The largest contingent of Italian, predominantly Sicilian, immigrants settled in Louisiana,” Jessica Barbata Jackson wrote in Dixie’s Italian. “In 1910, 43,000 Italians (foreign-born and native-born) resided in Louisiana; by 1930, nearly half of all foreign-born families in Louisiana were Italian.” According to the 1910 Census, 8,065 of the 19,634 (or 41%) foreign-born Italians were in Orleans Parish.

The most common explanation for Louisiana’s unique appeal to Sicilians, at least at the time, was that Sicilian immigrants, fleeing economic instability and political turmoil back home, were drawn to the Gulf South because its climate was similar to Sicily’s, and so were the jobs. If you could pick lemons, the argument went, you could raise cane. (Incidentally, Sicilians learned how to make sugar from the Portuguese, a century before Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne de Bienville founded New Orleans). But it strains credulity to believe that Sicilians just spontaneously began showing up in Louisiana simply because of the culture or the climate.

In his book Geographies of New Orleans, Richard Campanella, a geographer extraordinaire at Tulane University’s School of Architecture, argued the attraction was mutual. “It was both a case of Sicilians selecting Louisiana and Louisianians selecting Sicilians, from the 1840s to the 1910s,” he wrote. Indeed, one of the main reasons Sicilians came to New Orleans was because the trading routes and commercial exchanges between Sicily and New Orleans had been established decades before the diaspora. “Shipping lines had been in place between Palermo and New Orleans since the early nineteenth century. Cotton and other Southern exports were shipped to the Mediterranean region, and citrus fruits and other dry-land agricultural products came in return, often accompanied by Sicilian merchants and some families,” Campanella wrote. “The American tropical fruit industry can be traced to New Orleans, which in turn can be traced to Sicilian and Italian merchants in the antebellum era.” In other words, Sicilians came to New Orleans because Sicilian ships were already coming to New Orleans.

Equally compelling was the fact that Louisiana actively and specifically sought out Sicilians. In 1866, in the aftermath of the Civil War, state lawmakers approved the creation of a new agency, the Bureau of Immigration, which was tasked with recruiting foreign workers. Before the war, the state’s agricultural productivity had depended on slave labor, but since that was no longer an option, planter elites and their allies in government began searching for the cheapest available alternatives.

Unlike other Southern states, Louisiana had two unique and sometimes competing plantation economies in two distinct geographical regions. The culture and conditions were different in the piney hills and prairies of northern Louisiana than in the salt marshes and swamplands of southern Louisiana, and so were the crops. For several reasons, including the transformation of the state’s cotton industry from a plantation-based model to a sharecropping and crop-lien model and the sugar industry’s comparatively early adoption of a wage labor system, the work was in sugar, not cotton. “A legacy of French and Spanish imperial ambitions engulfed by the Anglo-American world, and a bastion of Roman Catholicism encircled by evangelical Protestantism, southern Louisiana was—as it is to this day—a place unto itself,” wrote John Rodriguez in Reconstruction in the Cane Fields. “Its ante- and postbellum uniqueness, however, also owed to Queen Sugar’s reign in the land where cotton was king. Southern Louisiana was a slave society, but that was only half the truth: it was also a sugar society.”

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Initially, the political vacuum left in the war’s wake and the dysfunction of Reconstruction stymied recruitment efforts, and the campaign for foreign labor remained idle until 1881, when the Louisiana Sugar Planters Association launched the Louisiana Immigration Association, an affiliated spin-off organization that served as a conduit between its member businesses, state and federal immigration agencies, foreign governments, the Louisiana Department of Agriculture, and the owners and agents of steamship lines. After initiatives to recruit foreign workers from China and Spain proved futile, the state narrowed its focus and worked in tandem with sugar planters to lure in Sicilians for the work.

In 1906, Charles Schuler, Louisiana State Commissioner of Agriculture and Immigration, explained how he believed the state could learn from its campaign for seasonal workers to attract “quality” foreign immigrants as well:

The only answer that I can give is to advertise. Advertise in every possible way. Furnish your immigration office with sufficient means, so that agents familiar with the resources and possibilities can come in personal contact with the prospective home seeker…. Distribute Louisiana’s literature, translated in the immigrants’ native language. Show the people of the old world in every possible way that Louisiana is an ideal state for a new settler. Show them the magnificent opportunities in agricultural pursuits, the thrifty and progressive towns and cities, the health and hospitality of Louisiana, the schools and religious advantages, [and] the splendid transportation facilities. Talk up Louisiana by telling the truth about her.

Giuseppe Minacori didn’t dream of working at a rundown sugarcane plantation in the sweltering heat of the Deep South for the rest of his life. He first came to Louisiana for the same reason nearly every other worker from Sicily came: Louisiana needed him, temporarily at least. No one asked him or Luigia to stay. They decided to return, permanently, largely because New Orleans already had a thriving, hard-working, and increasingly influential community of Sicilian immigrants, a community that had already reshaped the city’s built environment, its culture, and, perhaps most significantly, its cuisine, a community to which their membership was a birthright.

As eager as they were to start their new life, Giuseppe wanted to ensure he had a stable job and that they had a home before Luigia left her family in Tunisia, tasks that became even more urgent when Luigia told him the good news. He was about to become a father. So, for the second consecutive year, Giuseppe was back on the Liguria in September. This time, though, his ticket was one-way.

The momentary joy he felt after learning he’d soon be a father was quickly washed away by a combination of overwhelming guilt and regret. Since he couldn’t be there, he asked his older brother to check on her occasionally. Luigia lived with her mother Maria, and Giuseppe knew she would not be alone. He was the one alone. Nonetheless, it reassured him when his brother promised to make daily visits and to guarantee Luigia’s safe passage to America.

Giuseppe knew he could no longer make ends meet as a seasonal worker. He needed something full-time and year-round. So instead of writing the dell’Orto Agency, he contacted his brother-in-law, Ciro, and asked if he had any ideas or advice. Ciro and Crocifissa were no longer living on St. Joseph Street. They were now 30 miles northwest, on the shores of Lake Ponchartrain, outside of Frenier, Louisiana, a German settlement originally named Schlösser that had been built around its railroad station and was primarily known for its cabbage, sauerkraut, and ample supply of cypress timber. If he made it up to Frenier, Ciro had a job waiting for him. Giuseppe readily accepted. The sugar industry had been struggling after a series of unlucky breaks, and the money wasn’t what it used to be. As it turned out, he wasn’t the only passenger on the Liguria that season who decided to look elsewhere for work.

“For the first time since the inauguration of the immigration movement in Louisiana, a big ship has arrived here with more than 400 aliens and not a single one of them has been secured for the plantations and factories of the State through the Immigration Department,” The Daily Picayune reported, surmising that Italians, “unlike the Greeks and Austrians,” don’t “come across the ocean without knowing what they are going to do.”

The baby arrived on Luigia’s 17th birthday, February 6, 1910. (The day is significant among Sicilian Catholics. Three hundred and five years earlier, on February 6, 1605, a boy named Filippo Latini, who would later become a Capuchin friar and take the name Bernardo, was born in Corleone. When he was finally canonized in 2001 by Pope John Paul II, Bernard of Corleone became the patron saint of Mafia victims.) According to the court testimony of a U.S. immigration official in 1963, a birth certificate was filed with the French Tunisian government, a copy of which had been obtained by the Department of Justice, though both the original document and any copies of it were subsequently either lost or discarded. However, a copy of his certificate of baptism, corroborating both the date and the location of the child’s birth, was translated from French to Italian and recorded in the municipal register of Ravanusa, Sicily, in 1912. He was baptized in Carthage on March 28, 1910, at the parish of Saint Croce, alongside his godfather, Salvatore Broccolieri, and godmother, Grazia Insulla.

The Liguria left Palermo on Sunday, September 18, 1910, on a journey that stretched out of the Tyrrhenian Sea, past the Straits of Gibraltar, across the Atlantic Ocean, through the Gulf of Mexico, and up the mouth of the Mississippi River. She carried 625 souls, including Luigia and her baby boy, and 571 other Italian emigrants. The Daily Picayune found it “interesting” that there were so many passengers since “it has been several months since a number arrived at this port.” Actually, it’d been well over a year, and the city wasn’t exactly prepared to roll out the welcome mat.

Late that summer, there were reports of a cholera outbreak in parts of Italy, news that slowly trickled across the Atlantic and sent New Orleans officials into a panic. For years, they’d been lobbying the federal government for a new customs and immigration facility, and they worried the city could not efficiently process so many new arrivals all at once, especially if they had to be quarantined. Their fears were not unfounded.

When the Liguria made her maiden voyage in 1904, she carried a record-setting 1,391 Italian emigrants. Newly enacted laws required immigration inspectors to perform more rigorous screenings of foreign nationals, and because the Port of New Orleans didn’t have its own intake center, screenings for all 1,391 passengers had to be conducted on board. It was a nightmare.

“Captain Stretton, in charge of the Immigration Bureau at New Orleans, and his assistants worked nearly fourteen hours a day for five days before they could conclude the examination, which was held on board the Liguria, in the middle of the river, and under peculiar hardship for them and for the immigrants. No other way out of the difficulty could be had because, as long as the examination is going on, it is necessary to exercise the utmost caution lest some of the immigrants escape,” The Daily Picayune explained. “New Orleans has no place to receive the immigrants as they arrive, so that they may be permitted to leave the ship and be safely and comfortably housed on shore, pending their release after having passed the immigration officers’ inspection. So the examinations on board were held under the most uncomfortable conditions of crowd, noise, and hampered space.”

After five days, authorities denied entry to nearly 100 passengers on that maiden voyage and ordered them to return to Italy. Appeals were filed with the Department of the Treasury on behalf of some of the emigrants who were turned away, which meant the Liguria had to stay put in New Orleans while those passengers, now considered legally detained, awaited a decision. Late one night, two of the detainees “clambered over the ship’s side, jumped to the wharf, and fled ashore.” Both men escaped and were nowhere to be found. Federal agents, exasperated, arrested the ship’s commander for violating immigration laws by “permitting the landing of these two alien citizens of Italy without the permission [of the United States].” The Italian Line threatened to pull up anchor and never return to New Orleans, and the Italian government threatened to turn off its spigot of seasonal workers by tightening travel restrictions.

Eventually, the Americans blinked. Federal officials made assurances about prioritizing the construction of a permanent, stand-alone immigration facility, and in the meantime, New Orleans port commissioners agreed to install temporary metal sheds. An international diplomatic disaster was avoided. A few months later, when the Italian Line delivered 676 Italian emigrants to New Orleans on the steamship Vincenzo Florio, the ship’s captain, Giovanni Orango, had been so impressed by the “great improvement” at the port and the “splendid work” of the immigration service he promised that if conditions continued to improve, he’d urge the Italian Line to begin offering monthly service to New Orleans, instead of once every three months. “Captain Orango believes there is not enough encouragement to immigrants in this port. In his opinion, a landing station should be established…. The officials in charge have done, and are doing, their best, but the physical facilities for taking care of the immigrants are woefully deficient.”

Nearly six years later, there were few signs of improvement. The Italian Line’s shuttle from Palermo to New Orleans was still running on a quarterly schedule, never again carrying more than 1,000 passengers at a time, and immigration screenings and customs inspections were still being conducted in temporary metal sheds. The system worked as long as the line kept moving, but if a large number of passengers had to be detained or quarantined, a solution would need to be improvised, quickly. Otherwise, there was a real risk of threatening public health or creating a humanitarian disaster.

“Passengers will be detained until representatives of the United States Marine Hospital and Quarantine Service can determine whether any of the Italians came from the cholera-infected districts or if there is any source of infection,” the New Orleans Item assured its readers in September of 1910, two weeks in advance of the Liguria’s scheduled arrival in New Orleans, neglecting to mention the lack of a contingency plan. Italy enacted similar restrictions and ramped-up inspections in August, at “first alarm” of cholera spreading within its borders, blaming the outbreak on a roving band of “gypsies” whom they claimed brought cholera with them from Russia. Italy’s aggressive measures worked; fortunately, they managed to stop the spread of the deadly waterborne disease in its tracks.

Exactly three weeks after departing Palermo, on the morning of Saturday, October 8, 1910, the Liguria delicately glided into her familiar spot at the Northeastern Fruit Wharf. The press would report this as the moment of the ship’s arrival, but the Liguria had been in town for a full day already, anchoring midstream at Algiers Point on the West Bank in the early morning of Friday the seventh. First-class passengers had been permitted to disembark immediately—no detention necessary—and were shuttled in tug boats to the foot of Canal Street. Meanwhile, medical examiners from the Marine Hospital climbed aboard and spent the entire day shadowing the ship’s physician as he screened the passengers in steerage for cholera and other illnesses. That night, they gave the ship the all-clear.

“Very little sleep was indulged by anyone on board, as the immigrants, now that they were at last with the confines of ‘that great America’, could not rest, but sat up discussing the life before them,” the Item reported.

For Luigia, alone with her eight-month-old son in their private cabin on the deck above, that night— for the first time in nearly three weeks—there was quietude and calm and, at long last, sleep.

In just two years, Italy would be at war in Tripoli against the Ottoman Empire, and the Italian Line would be forced to suspend all business and be ordered back home. Nearly all of the line’s steamships were commandeered and retrofitted for combat. But not the Liguria. She was sold to the Russian Steam Navigation and Trade Company, rechristened the Apho, and delivered to Odesa in Imperial Russia. After the regicide of Czar Nicholas II and the ghastly murders of his entire family, the old steamship spent her twilight years chauffeuring Bolsheviks around the Black Sea, an ocean liner that retired to become a sea ferry.

Decades later, whenever Louise Marcello recalled the story of her arrival in America, she rarely mentioned the ironies or the indignities of that morning, how, for example, a New Orleans police detective, John D’Antonio, interrogated passengers, the way she’d been patronized by some of the men on board and made to feel stupid by a smug immigration officer for speaking broken English. He didn’t know that she was a polyglot or that English, which Louise soon mastered, would be the seventh language she spoke fluently. “The questions asked by the officials are astonishing,” one of the ship’s passengers, identified only as an Italian girl, told The Daily Picayune. “They not only want to know whether you can support yourself, but whether you can support your ma and your grandma. The questions are something else.”

Louise would never forget the scene at the wharf that morning, October 9, 1910. It was as if half of Sicily had shown up to welcome them, thousands of people, the women dressed in reds and blues and pinks and yellows and the men in corduroys and velveteens, a parade of euphoric joy and, above all, profound relief.

“The examination over, the immigrants were free to join friends outside the (inspection) shed, and were compelled to force their way through a solid mass of humanity that packed the doors. Policemen were obliged to clear a passage, and as one, two, or a dozen of the immigrants reached the door, they were hailed by someone who grabbed the baggage, hustled it to one side where it was put on the ground for the moment, and then followed by several minutes of audible kissing. Embraces were around and around, to all of the family and then some. All talked at once, yet all seemed satisfied to have it so,” the New Orleans Item reported.

Louise also never forgot the moment she locked eyes with her husband Joe, the then-27-year-old Giuseppe Minacori, whom she hadn’t seen since he departed Tunisia more than a year ago, his eyes welling with tears and her belly, unbeknownst to either of them, already swollen with their child. He left Tunis on a ferry back to Sicily, the first leg of his voyage from North Africa to New Orleans, aboard Captain Anfosso’s ship. Nor would she ever forget the moment Joe first met their son and how in that instant they were the happiest they ever had been before or ever would be again.

“While there was nothing intensely exciting about the landing of the steamship Liguria at the Northeastern Fruit Wharf yesterday,” the Daily Picayune reported:

“[T]here was enough room to make the occasion interesting and rub off the cold routine of the business conducted by the United States officials…. The waves of the immigrants were in bundles, trunks, bags, chests, and hand satchels. Huddled around the baggage were men, women, and children. The children romped up and down the wharf and gave their fathers and mothers no end to worry, absolutely oblivious to the fact their parents had landed in a strange land…. It was stated by all that the class of immigrants was also above the average. Some of the women and many of the children were marked types of Italian beauties. From Southern Italy were the olive-complexioned women and from the northern points were many handsome blondes. So beautiful and fine-mannered were many of the children whose parents had quarters in the steerage that they were taken charge by first-class passengers during daylight hours on the voyage and given the gala time of their lives.”

More than anything else, Louise Marcello—the matriarch of a sprawling and powerful American family—remembered that the night before she stepped foot on American soil, with her baby cradled in her arms, they slept peacefully in their very own cabin.

Joe’s older brother had kept his word, guaranteeing that mother and child were delivered to him in New Orleans. Louise’s brother came as well, which was only fitting. Both brothers shared the same name, the name Giuseppe and Luigia gave their son: Calogero.

The ship’s passenger manifest, along with an affidavit sworn before Immigration Officer Daniel Trazinuki from the Italian physician responsible for conducting personal examinations of all of those on board, provided descriptions of all four family members:

149. Calogero Minacori, 35 years old, male, 5’4”, dark complexion, chestnut eyes and hair, not able to read and write, not a polygamist or anarchist, married to Angela Gallo in Tunisia, born in Ravanusa, Girgenti, a citizen of Italy, last residence in Tunis, Africa, carrying $25 in cash, joining brother Giuseppe, no ticket but passage paid;

150. Calogero Farruggia, 29 years old, male, 5’2”, rosy complexion, chestnut eyes and hair, not able to read and write, not a polygamist or anarchist, married to Lucia Zera in Tunisia, born in Ravanusa, Girgenti, a citizen of Italy, last residence in Tunis, Africa, visiting his brother-in-law Giuseppe, carrying $25 in cash, no ticket but passage paid;

151. Luigia Farruggia, 17 years old, female, 5’3”, rosy complexion, chestnut eyes and hair, a married housewife, able to read and write, not a polygamist or anarchist, born in Ravanusa, Girgenti, a citizen of Italy, last residence in Tunis, Africa, nearest relative is her mother Maria Cervini, joining her husband Giuseppe Minacori, carrying $10 in cash, passage paid by her husband; and

152. Calogero Minacori, six months old, male…(other details duplicate his mother’s information).

Notably, baby Calogero was eight months old, not six, a discrepancy that would become relevant much later, manipulated to discredit and obscure the inconvenient fact that he was born in a country that no longer existed.

So, how do you explain the mistake? Well, considering the remainder of the infant’s entry was obviously copied from the one written directly above describing Luigia (resulting in the dubious claim that the newborn is able to read and write), we can infer the ship’s physician, likely after examining the boy’s mother and finding her to be healthy, was satisfied the infant posed no risk of spreading disease or infection and, perhaps in the interest of time, simply moved to the next passenger in line. It’s also worth noting that the manifest provided only passengers’ ages, not their dates of birth. The boy’s birthday, however, does appear on the only other contemporaneous record specifically identifying him during his first year of life, his baptismal record, and there is no reason whatsoever to question that document’s authenticity or its provenance.

The manifest does contain one mystery at least, though. The handwritten entries for baby Calogero and his family are all legibly written, but for some reason, there’s a deep line scrawled across the name of his paternal uncle, the 35-year-old Calogero Minacori. The line is prominent enough that when the manifest was finally transcribed in 2003 by members of the Immigrant Ships Transcribers Guild, it earned a mention in the transcriber’s notes. Unfortunately, the Liguria’s passenger manifest is the only record documenting the presence of Giuseppe Minacori’s older brother in the United States. What happened? Why was his name crossed out?

The city’s newspapers had exhaustively reported the ship’s arrival in October 1910. There were, for example, multiple stories about how New Orleans Detective John D’Antonio and Officer T.P. Simone boarded the Liguria, spent several hours grilling passengers about the Black Hand and the Mafia, and “did not find a person with a suspicious record.” So, if Uncle Calogero Minacori was forced to return home, it wasn’t because he was a convicted criminal or suspected of being in the Black Hand. We also know that at least a couple of passengers were denied entry.

Reporters were especially taken with the plight of a charismatic 15-year-old runaway named Maggio Ignacio, who, despite not knowing a word of English, managed to charm immigration officials and crew members. “Maggio is admitted by the inspectors to be one of the brightest lads (who) ever entered this port as an immigrant,” the Item claimed. In the end, though, the rules were the rules, and poor Maggio was deported back to his parents in Sicily.

At some point, Uncle Calogero went back as well, and while the circumstances of his return trip remain unclear, there’s compelling evidence that suggests he never even stepped foot on American soil at all. According to an Italian writer who spent time in Ravanusa in 2012 interviewing members of the Minacori family, the family folklore holds that Guiseppe’s brother had contracted an eye infection and was ordered to return. There is at least some circumstantial evidence that seems to support the story.

Five days after the Liguria’s physician finished examining all of the passengers in steerage, including 35-year-old Calogero, whose name the doctor, presumably, then crossed out, the Daily Picayune reported the “work of discharging passengers… was practically completed yesterday, when the United States Immigration Bureau, in most instances, took bonds for the release of passengers who had been held pending investigations.” The paper failed to mention the number of people being detained, but the report noted that at least “one of two cases of trachoma, a serious affliction of the eyes, were discovered” among the ship’s passengers.

It would take nearly 42 more years before Giuseppe, now an American citizen named Joseph, and his older brother Calogero were reunited. The steamships shuttling people between New Orleans and Palermo had stopped running decades ago—the boats were either garrisoned into two world wars or sold to the Soviets—so he’d sailed from New York instead, accompanied by his wife, who, a lifetime before, had been a teenager named Luigia, and their first-born granddaughter, a teenager gifted with the name that she made for herself in America, Louise.

The Marcellos weren’t in Sicily more than a week before Joe contracted bronchopneumonia and was rushed to the Hospital Feliciussa in Palermo. There, on the island of his birth and the soil of his ancestors, on June 17, 1952 at 3:10 p.m., with his two Louises and his big brother Calogero by his bedside, Joseph Marcello died. He was 69.

The saga of Carlos Marcello, the legendary Mafia boss who ruled the New Orleans underworld for more than 40 years, began on a mild, cloudy day in October of 1910 at the Northeastern Fruit Wharf in a city he would one day conquer and in a country he would always claim, even if it never claimed him.

As his 35-year-old uncle, Calogero Minacori, prohibited from entering the United States, languished aboard the steamship and awaited the inevitable order for his deportation, the other Calogero Minacori, an eight-month-old baby, was being carried from a first-class cabin and into the capital city of his future empire.

In the upcoming weeks, CenLamar (2.0) will be featuring a selection of excerpts from The Original Gangster: The American Saga of Carlos Marcello, the working title of a book I have been researching and writing for the past five years.

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