Dr. Anthony Fauci’s paternal grandparents, Antonino Fauci and Calogera Guardino, immigrated to the United States in the late 19th century from Sciacca, a port city on Sicily’s southwestern coast about an hour-and-a-half west of Ravanusa, an ancient town in the Sicilian hinterlands and the birthplace of Giuseppe Minacori and his wife Luigia Farrugio, who sailed across the Atlantic and then up the Mississippi River to New Orleans, where they started a new life in the new world under a new surname, Marcello.1

The coincidence has no legal significance. It is simply a remarkable historical rhyme.

Seventy-five years apart, two Americans with family roots in the same Sicilian province sat before hostile Senate committees whose members had already publicly associated them with serious crimes. Both men invoked the Fifth Amendment more than one hundred times. Both were threatened with contempt of Congress.

Marcello was actually indicted, convicted, and sentenced for contempt. Then the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit reversed every remaining count and entered a judgment of acquittal.

That decision does not mean Fauci automatically possesses a valid privilege against answering every question Paul’s committee asked. President Joe Biden’s broad pardon of Fauci gives Paul an argument that did not exist in Marcello’s case. Nor does hostility by a senator, standing alone, excuse a witness from testifying.

But the central holding of Marcello’s appeal remains devastating to Paul’s sweeping contention that Fauci’s silence itself constitutes contempt:

Congress cannot publicly place a witness in the position of a criminal defendant, seek answers that may help construct a prosecution, and then make the witness’s reliance on the Fifth Amendment a crime.

Marcello’s case is not binding precedent on a federal court in Washington. It is a 1952 Fifth Circuit decision. But it rests on a national constitutional rule announced by the Supreme Court—and modern law is, in one important respect, more protective of Fauci than the law Marcello confronted.

Congress had already decided what Fauci was

On July 29, 2026, Fauci appeared under subpoena before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs. He announced at the beginning that he would invoke his Fifth Amendment privilege and then did so repeatedly throughout the approximately three-hour hearing. Contemporary accounts placed the number of invocations above one hundred.2

Fauci was not appearing before legislators who had approached his conduct with detached curiosity.

Paul had previously referred Fauci to the Justice Department for possible criminal prosecution, alleging that Fauci lied under oath during earlier Senate testimony concerning National Institutes of Health support for research in Wuhan. In 2025, Paul renewed that referral and simultaneously questioned the validity of Biden’s pardon, arguing that the Justice Department should investigate whether it had been properly authorized.3

Paul later accused Fauci of directing federal employees to destroy official records, concealing information from congressional investigators, misleading Congress, and participating in what Paul called a pandemic “coverup.” These remain allegations. They have not been established by a criminal conviction or judicial finding. But for Fifth Amendment purposes, their importance lies in the fact that the committee chairman had already identified criminal theories and publicly advocated prosecution before compelling Fauci to testify.

Senator Josh Hawley added another set of accusations during the hearing. Hawley alleged that Fauci unlawfully used government employees and resources to pursue personal cash awards, repeatedly juxtaposing those allegations with the words “a million people dead.” Paul ended the hearing by asking whether Fauci’s actions had led to “the largest man-made plague in human history.”4

Neither senator literally presented Fauci with a murder indictment. Neither proved that Fauci created SARS-CoV-2, caused the pandemic, destroyed government records, illegally enriched himself, or lied under oath. The origins of the pandemic remain disputed, and the senators’ allegations must remain identified as allegations.

But their theory of culpability was unmistakable. Fauci was being placed within a narrative in which federally supported research may have produced or contributed to a man-made virus; Fauci allegedly concealed or minimized that possibility; he allegedly misled Congress and the public; and the resulting pandemic killed more than one million Americans and millions more throughout the world.

That is not a neutral legislative inquiry. It is at least potentially an evidence-gathering proceeding against a publicly designated criminal target.

Fauci explained his position in precisely those terms. He said Paul had repeatedly demanded his prosecution and imprisonment and that the apparent purpose of the hearing was to induce him to say “something, anything” that could vindicate Paul’s pledge that Fauci should end up “behind bars.” Paul responded that Fauci’s pardon eliminated any legitimate basis for silence, warned that there would be repercussions, and announced that the committee would consider contempt proceedings.5

The question is not whether Paul sincerely believes his accusations. Nor is it whether Fauci is innocent of every conceivable offense.

The constitutional question is whether truthful answers could provide evidence—or links to evidence—that might be used in a criminal prosecution.

Carlos Marcello’s case explains why that distinction matters.

Why Marcello was charged with contempt

On January 25, 1951, Marcello appeared before a subcommittee of Senator Estes Kefauver’s Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce in New Orleans.

Marcello supplied his name and address. When asked to produce tax returns, financial records, and other documents, he read a prepared declaration saying that he would refuse to answer further questions or produce records because they might incriminate him.

The committee proceeded anyway.

Later accounts frequently state that Marcello invoked the Fifth Amendment 155 times. The controlling appellate opinion gives a different number: the committee propounded “some 166 specific questions,” each of which Marcello refused to answer.

The number ultimately had no constitutional importance. Congress did not prosecute him merely because he had repeated the same invocation many times. It prosecuted him because the committee concluded that particular assertions of privilege were invalid, directed him to answer, and treated his continued refusal as a violation of the federal contempt statute.6

That statute, now codified at 2 U.S.C. § 192, makes it a misdemeanor for a properly summoned witness willfully to refuse to answer a question pertinent to a congressional inquiry. The statute does not erase the Fifth Amendment. If the answer is constitutionally privileged, the refusal is not criminal contempt.

Marcello was indicted on forty-nine separate counts. He waived a jury and stood trial before a federal judge. The judge acquitted him on forty-three counts but convicted him on six.

Those six questions asked whether Marcello had an indictment pending against him; whether he had ever traveled outside Louisiana; whether he knew Salvatore Vittali; whether he had an interest in the Beverly Club; whether he had previously said that his investment in that club amounted to between $40,000 and $50,000; and whether he had said he purchased the New Southport Club from Victor Trapani for between $160,000 and $165,000.7

Several of these sounded harmless in isolation.

Travel outside Louisiana is not necessarily criminal. Knowing another person is not necessarily criminal. Having an interest in a business is not necessarily criminal.

The trial judge concluded that Marcello had failed to demonstrate a reasonable danger from answering the first three questions. As to the business questions, the judge ruled that Marcello had waived the privilege by previously discussing the same businesses with an FBI agent in 1948.

The Fifth Circuit rejected both conclusions.

Marcello was functionally the accused

The appellate court first resolved an issue in the government’s favor: the committee possessed legitimate authority to investigate organized crime, and the six disputed questions were pertinent to that investigation.

Marcello did not prevail because Congress was powerless to investigate him.

He prevailed because the Fifth Circuit refused to pretend that the questions had been asked in a vacuum.

Before Marcello took the witness chair, newspapers had called him Louisiana’s Mafia leader, its leading racketeer, a “crime czar,” and the beneficiary of a regional criminal monopoly. New Orleans Mayor deLesseps Morrison testified about what he called the “Kastel-Marcello axis,” encompassing casinos, racing information, coin-operated machines, and related enterprises. Kefauver announced during the proceeding that investigative reports identified Marcello as one of the principal criminals in the United States.

The court examined that publicity, the official accusations, the committee’s declared purpose, the criminal subjects under investigation, and the relationships among the questions. It concluded that Marcello’s actual position was “markedly similar to that of an accused in a criminal trial.”8

That characterization was decisive.

Only months earlier, the Supreme Court had decided Hoffman v. United States. The Court held that the Fifth Amendment protects more than answers that directly confess a completed crime. It also protects answers that could furnish a link in the chain of evidence needed to prosecute the witness.

A judge may reject the privilege only when, after considering the question and all surrounding circumstances, it is perfectly clear that the answer cannot possibly tend to incriminate the witness. The witness cannot be required to explain the danger so fully that the explanation itself supplies the incriminating information.9

The Fifth Circuit applied that test question by question.

An answer concerning Marcello’s travel outside Louisiana could help establish interstate activity, meetings, transactions, or federal jurisdiction. Acknowledging that he knew Vittali could connect him with a person then associated with a murder investigation, flight from prosecution, or other potentially federal conduct. Statements about Marcello’s investments in the Beverly and New Southport clubs could connect him to gambling income, concealed ownership, tax liability, interstate racketeering, or other criminal activity under investigation.

None of those answers, standing alone, necessarily proved a crime.

That was not the standard.

It was enough that an answer might advance the investigation, identify another source, establish part of an element, authenticate an earlier statement, or provide a link that prosecutors could combine with other evidence.

The Fifth Circuit also rejected the government’s waiver theory. Whatever Marcello had voluntarily told an FBI agent in 1948 did not permanently surrender his privilege in every subsequent proceeding. By 1951, the setting had changed dramatically. Marcello was now the publicly identified target of a national organized-crime investigation. Repeating or expanding upon the earlier information could create new criminal consequences.

The court reversed all six convictions and entered a judgment of acquittal. It did not order another trial. It determined that the Constitution protected the refusals on which the convictions rested.10

Hostility alone is not the rule

Marcello did not win merely because Kefauver disliked him.

The Fifth Amendment does not give every witness a right to refuse questions posed by a sarcastic, angry, partisan, unfair, or grandstanding senator. Congressional hearings are often adversarial. Legislators may confront witnesses with damaging documents, challenge implausible answers, and announce that they believe misconduct occurred.

The committee’s hostility mattered in Marcello’s case because it demonstrated something more legally consequential: the proceeding had placed Marcello in the functional position of an accused person.

Kefauver’s committee had publicly identified the crimes it associated with Marcello. It had described the organization it believed he controlled. It was seeking the names, businesses, movements, financial interests, and relationships needed to complete that criminal picture.

The setting converted otherwise neutral facts into potentially incriminating evidence.

The same distinction applies to Fauci.

Paul’s criminal referrals, demands for prosecution, allegations of false testimony, claims of destroyed records, attacks on the pardon, and rhetoric about a man-made plague do not automatically validate every invocation Fauci made. They do, however, make it exceedingly difficult to argue that Fauci’s fear of prosecution is imaginary.

Hawley’s questions concerning federal employees, government resources, personal awards, and financial benefits were likewise framed as accusations of unlawful self-dealing. A truthful answer concerning who directed an employee, how an award application was prepared, what government resources were used, whether an ethics office was contacted, or what Fauci understood the governing rules to be could help establish knowledge, intent, authorization, benefit, or concealment.

Paul’s substantive questions concerning Wuhan research, federal funding, official communications, records retention, and previous congressional testimony carry the same potential. If prosecutors were later to pursue false-statement, records, obstruction, fraud, or conspiracy charges, the answers Paul demanded might become evidence or reveal where other evidence could be found.

The more explicitly senators insist that the witness committed serious crimes, the harder it becomes for them to maintain that his answers could not possibly incriminate him.

The problem with Fauci’s blanket invocation

This does not necessarily mean Fauci was entitled to refuse every question.

Hawley asked him what day of the week it was, what color tie he was wearing, and what color the carpet was. Those answers, by themselves, would ordinarily present no plausible danger of incrimination.

But that maneuver creates a different problem for a contempt prosecution. Section 192 applies only to a refusal to answer a question pertinent to the subject under congressional inquiry. The color of Fauci’s tie and the color of the carpet were presumably tests or political theater, not evidence concerning the origins of COVID-19, federal research grants, records preservation, or pandemic policy.

Paul therefore faces a difficult divide:

Questions that are genuinely pertinent to his announced investigation frequently concern the very conduct he has called criminal and may therefore be protected.

Questions that are manifestly harmless may be too trivial or irrelevant to support the statutory requirement of pertinency.

A prosecutor cannot simply aggregate more than one hundred invocations and tell a jury that the number proves contempt. Each criminal count must identify a particular question, establish its pertinency, demonstrate a clear direction to answer, and overcome the constitutional privilege applicable to that answer.

Marcello’s forty-nine-count indictment is the warning. Prosecutors charged forty-nine refusals. The trial court rejected forty-three. The Fifth Circuit rejected the remaining six.

Volume is not validity.

Paul’s pardon argument is substantial—but incomplete

Paul’s strongest legal argument is President Biden’s pardon.

On January 19, 2025, Biden granted Fauci a full and unconditional pardon for any federal offenses he may have committed or participated in between January 1, 2014, and the date of the pardon, provided that the offenses arose from or related to Fauci’s service as director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, his membership on the White House coronavirus bodies, or his service as chief medical adviser to the president.11

A valid pardon ordinarily eliminates the danger of federal prosecution for the offenses it covers. The Supreme Court stated long ago that a witness who has been pardoned may not rely on the Fifth Amendment with respect to the pardoned offense because the criminal jeopardy has been removed.12

Paul is therefore correct about an important proposition: Fauci cannot invoke the Fifth solely to avoid admitting a completely pardoned federal offense when no other realistic criminal exposure remains.

But Paul treats that proposition as though Biden granted Fauci immunity from every possible prosecution by every government for every act at every point in time. The warrant does not say that.

First, a president may pardon only offenses against the United States. Presidential clemency does not reach state crimes.

That distinction became concrete immediately after the hearing. Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier announced that his office was opening an investigation into Fauci. The announcement did not identify a specific charge, establish that a viable state crime exists, or resolve substantial questions of jurisdiction, limitation periods, causation, federal-officer immunity, and proof. It is not evidence of Fauci’s guilt.

It does, however, undermine Paul’s categorical insistence that no government could possibly prosecute Fauci. A court evaluating the privilege would have to determine whether state exposure was real and reasonable—not merely accept the committee chairman’s assurance that the federal pardon settled everything.13

Second, the pardon has temporal limits. It ends on January 19, 2025. It does not cover an offense committed afterward.

Third, its substantive language is broad but not limitless. It covers offenses arising from or related to Fauci’s specified government positions. A question that reaches conduct beyond those roles—or connects pardoned conduct to potentially unpardoned conduct—would require an independent analysis.

Fourth, Paul himself has challenged the pardon’s legal validity. In renewing his referral, he asked the Justice Department to investigate whether Biden personally authorized it.

Paul cannot comfortably maintain both propositions at once:

• The pardon may be invalid, so Fauci can still be federally prosecuted.

• The pardon is so comprehensive and conclusive that Fauci has no Fifth Amendment privilege.

If Paul is right that the pardon may be invalid, the federal criminal danger he has repeatedly invoked remains alive. If the pardon is valid, it may defeat federal exposure within its scope, but not automatically every possible state or post-pardon theory.

The Fifth Amendment also does not protect Fauci from prosecution for perjury or false statements he might commit while testifying now. A witness may not remain silent merely because he fears that he will lie. The privilege protects truthful testimony that could expose him to criminal liability; it does not authorize false testimony.

But this limitation does not solve Paul’s problem. The questions at issue were not merely invitations to commit future perjury. Many sought truthful answers about conduct Paul had already characterized as criminal.

Modern law strengthens one part of Marcello’s argument

There is an additional historical irony.

When the Fifth Circuit decided Marcello’s appeal in 1952, Supreme Court doctrine concerning one sovereign’s use of testimony compelled by another was less protective than it is today. The Marcello court openly criticized the idea that a witness might be forced to choose among contempt, perjury, or testimony that could send him to a state penitentiary merely because a federal committee had compelled the answer.

In 1964, the Supreme Court resolved the problem in Murphy v. Waterfront Commission. It held that one government cannot compel testimony over a valid Fifth Amendment claim and then leave another sovereign free to use that testimony against the witness. Compelled testimony must be protected against prosecutorial use across the federal-state boundary.14

That means the modern inquiry cannot end with Paul’s assertion that Biden eliminated federal liability. If a truthful answer could reasonably expose Fauci to a state prosecution, the Fifth Amendment remains implicated unless adequate immunity also protects him from that use.

The Florida announcement does not prove that such a prosecution could succeed. It does mean that a court cannot dismiss the state question without examining it.

Why Paul’s sweeping contempt theory is likely doomed

Paul may secure a committee vote. As of July 31, the committee had scheduled an August 5 business meeting whose first listed agenda item was a resolution concerning contempt of Congress.15

A committee resolution, however, is not a criminal conviction. It does not settle the Fifth Amendment question.

For a sustainable prosecution under § 192, the government would need to proceed count by count and prove that:

• Fauci was lawfully summoned;

• the particular question was pertinent to the authorized inquiry;

• he was clearly directed to answer;

• his refusal was willful; and

• the Fifth Amendment did not protect the answer.

The committee’s announced theory—that Biden’s pardon eradicated the privilege across the entire hearing—is too broad.

A court would have to examine the pardon’s dates, its relationship-to-service language, Paul’s challenge to its validity, potential state exposure, each question’s subject matter, and the ways a truthful answer could provide evidence or investigative leads.

A narrowly drafted contempt count might conceivably survive. A court could find that a particular question was pertinent, wholly confined to pardoned federal conduct, incapable of exposing any state or post-pardon offense, and unsupported by any reasonable fear of incrimination.

But Paul’s existing record makes the larger prosecution extraordinarily vulnerable.

His committee did not merely seek a historical explanation. Paul had already referred Fauci for prosecution. He had alleged false testimony, destroyed records, obstruction, and a cover-up. He questioned the pardon because he wanted federal prosecution to remain possible. He then used the pardon as proof that Fauci had no right to protect himself from prosecution.

Hawley accused Fauci of unlawful self-dealing while repeatedly invoking the pandemic death toll. Paul ended by connecting Fauci to what he described as a man-made plague.

These statements do not prove Fauci committed a crime.

They do prove that Fauci was reasonable to understand himself as the accused.

That is the same constitutional circumstance the Fifth Circuit recognized in Marcello’s case.

Congress already has a lawful solution

Congress does not have to choose between accepting Fauci’s silence and prosecuting him for asserting the Fifth Amendment.

Federal law provides a procedure for compelling testimony under immunity.

Under 18 U.S.C. §§ 6002 and 6005, an authorized congressional committee may request a federal court order requiring a witness to testify. Once the order takes effect, the witness may no longer refuse on Fifth Amendment grounds. In exchange, neither the compelled testimony nor evidence derived from it may be used against the witness in a criminal case, except in a prosecution for perjury, a false statement made during the immunized testimony, or refusal to obey the order.16

The Supreme Court upheld this form of use-and-derivative-use immunity in Kastigar v. United States, holding that it is coextensive with the protection supplied by the Fifth Amendment.17

That is the constitutionally honest route.

If Paul’s primary objective is to learn what Fauci knows, Congress can seek an immunity order broad enough to eliminate the criminal danger and then compel answers.

If Paul refuses to immunize Fauci because he wants the answers preserved for possible prosecution, he validates the reason Fauci invoked the Fifth.

Congress cannot simultaneously say:

Your testimony cannot incriminate you, so you must answer.

and:

We need your answers so that you can finally be prosecuted.

One purpose defeats the other.

The Constitution protects the accused before the indictment

Carlos Marcello was a convicted criminal and a powerful organized-crime figure. The Fifth Circuit did not exonerate him from the broader allegations surrounding his gambling interests, businesses, or underworld associations. It did not admire him or find that the Kefauver Committee had treated him politely.

It held something narrower and more important: Congress had placed Marcello in the functional position of a criminal defendant and could not make him help construct the case against himself.

Anthony Fauci is not Carlos Marcello. Their careers, conduct, public reputations, and places in American history could scarcely be more different. The comparison is constitutional, not moral.

But constitutional rights do not depend on whether the witness is sympathetic. They do not disappear when senators believe they have finally cornered someone they despise. And they do not become crimes because the witness invokes them repeatedly.

The historical coincidence remains extraordinary.

Fauci’s grandparents came from Sciacca. Marcello’s parents came from Ravanusa. Their families reached America from the same Sicilian province.

Generations later, each man sat at a Senate witness table while lawmakers described him as the embodiment of a national menace.

Kefauver’s committee called Marcello one of the principal criminals in America.

Paul asked whether Fauci had helped cause the largest man-made plague in human history.

Both committees wanted answers. Both also contemplated prosecution. Once those objectives converged, the Fifth Amendment became more—not less—important.

Congress may investigate. It may subpoena witnesses, expose contradictions, test explanations, and grant immunity when the public interest requires testimony.

What it may not do is publicly convert a witness into the accused, demand that he furnish the evidence against himself, and then declare his reliance on the Constitution to be a crime.

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The full story of Alexandria’s emergence as a “baseball town,” its entry into the scrappy but electrifying Evangeline League,1 and its decades-long dance with minor league baseball2 hasn’t been forgotten so much as it has been misremembered. The local media has, for example, long repeated the claim that its historic ballpark, Bringhurst Field, was built in 1933. It was actually constructed in only three weeks, one year later, in 1934,3 right in time for the home opener of the Evangeline League’s inaugural season.4567

That may seem like a trivial inaccuracy, but it points to a larger, more significant problem: a form of civic amnesia that occurs when a community loses the institutions that once preserved and corrected its own memory. The facts were not hidden. For more than 100 years, Alexandria’s local newspaper, The Town Talk, extensively chronicled the rises, falls, and rebirths of the city’s professional baseball teams, and its 1.4 million-page digital archive is available online.

Retelling this story requires reconstructing a complicated past, and it forces an uncomfortable but unavoidable confrontation with the present. The Alexandria of 1934 was vastly different from the city of today, even though they are both unmistakably the same place.

Among the Evangeline League’s charter cities, Alexandria would become both the outlier and the anchor. It was there from the beginning, and it remained when every other original city disappeared, returned, reorganized, or gave way to some later version of the circuit.8 Eventually, the Alexandria franchise would become the only one to play every regular season of the Evangeline League, maintaining the same civic baseball identity while other cities changed names, affiliations, arrangements, and operators.

Location mattered. New Orleans had the port and the romance; Baton Rouge had the Capitol and the Tigers; Shreveport had oil money and swagger; Lafayette had the prairie Cajun pulse that would later define Acadiana. Alexandria had something quieter but no less consequential: the crossroads. Situated at the hinge of north Louisiana, Acadiana, the piney woods, and the old river parishes, Alexandria was not a single culture so much as a meeting place: Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Black, white, rural, commercial, legal, medical, military, and mercantile. Central Louisiana in the fullest sense.

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By 1934, Alexandria’s confidence had been built over nearly half a century of progress.910 Between 1890 and 1910, the city grew from a small riverside town of 2,861 people into a bona fide American city of 11,213,11 asserting itself as the commercial capital of central Louisiana. “Alexandria has more paved streets and sidewalks than any city of its size in the Union,” The Alexandria Weekly Town Talk boasted in 1907. “It was one of the first cities of the South to own its waterworks and electric light systems. It has a larger and better sewer system than any city of 12,000 inhabitants in the Union.”12

But despite its advantages and its appetite for baseball, Alexandria had reason to be cautious. All six of the Evangeline League’s charter cities had seen professional baseball before, and all six still dreamt of the magic that the game unlocked. Only Alexandria, however, had recently experienced the heartache and humiliation of losing its hometown team, and in 1934, that loss still stung.

Alexandria’s first major purpose-built public ballpark, Sportsman’s Park, opened in 1907.13 It was located at the end of the city’s electric streetcar line, adjacent to the existing Electric Park skating rink and near the present-day intersection of Jackson Street and Texas Avenue. That same year, the White Sox of the Gulf Coast League became the city’s first professional baseball team. The league’s directors, The Town Talk reported, “were all pleased with Sportsman’s Park, and the verdict of all was that Alexandria would have one of the finest parks in the League.”14

Alexandria already knew what professional baseball could promise, and what it could cost. The city’s minor-league record was long enough to inspire nostalgia but uneven enough to justify caution: the Alexandria White Sox of the Gulf Coast League in 1907 and 1908;15 the Alexandria Hoo Hoos16 of the Arkansas State League in 1909;17 the Alexandria Tigers of the Louisiana State League in 1920;18 and, most recently and most memorably, the Alexandria Reds of the Cotton States League, who played from 1925 until their bitter collapse, mid-season, in 1930.19

But this list, useful as it may be, needs one more sentence of correction: it is the lineage of Alexandria’s white professional clubs.

Black Alexandria had built a baseball world of its own long before the Evangeline League arrived. Michael D. Wynne, a local historian and writer, recently unearthed evidence of at least one documented Black club, the West Alexandria Lightfoots,20 that played competitively—and for cash—in June of 1906,21 one year before the White Sox entered the Gulf Coast League. To be sure, the Lightfoots did not belong to a professional league, and there are earlier reports of competitive club and amateur baseball teams, both Black and white, dating back to at least 1901. Regardless, given the structural and institutional barriers that existed for Black Alexandrians during the Jim Crow Era, the fact that a Black team was both recognized and named—an earlier Black team was simply referred to as “Alexandria’s Colored Club”—by the white establishment newspaper is significant. Alexandria’s story as a “baseball town” does not begin with the White Sox, the Hoo Hoos, the Tigers, or the Reds. It begins, at least in part, with the Black teams—the Lightfoots, the All-Stars,2223 the Pioneers, and the Lincoln Giants—whose games were segregated or simply erased from the official civic narrative.

The same is true of Alexandria’s baseball geography. While the city’s first organized white team, the White Sox, played at Sportsman’s Park, organized Black baseball first played at Alexandria’s “Negro Base Ball Grounds,” located on Casson Street and better known as Lincoln Park. The site and much of the surrounding neighborhood were later demolished and are now part of Interstate 49 and the Pineville Expressway Overpass.

On July 1, 1932, The Town Talk announced the opening of a newly constructed “Negro baseball field” at Lee and Harris streets and, confusingly, also named Lincoln Park. The formal opening was scheduled for July 3 and 4, with the Alexandria Pioneers playing a strong semi-pro club from Lake Charles. The park had been built for approximately $900, with a 150-foot grandstand and seating for about 700 spectators. Special reservations were made for white spectators, because “scores” of white people had already been attending games there that season.24 Even in segregation, the Black game was not invisible. It was visible enough that white spectators came to watch, and visible enough that the white newspaper had to acknowledge the crowd.

The new Lincoln Park was a purpose-built ballpark, constructed on land owned by local attorney Ralph Thornton25 two years before Bringhurst Field, with officers, a grandstand, scheduled holiday openings, visiting opponents, and a team. The Pioneers’ opening series against Lake Charles placed Alexandria’s Black baseball scene inside the broader semi-pro network of Louisiana. The language was booster language. The pride was institutional. Black Alexandria was building more than a team. It was creating a baseball public.

Within a month, the Alexandria Pioneers had been replaced by a larger and more ambitious arrangement when the owners of the Shreveport Giants struck a deal to relocate to Alexandria. On August 29, 1932, as the newly renamed Alexandria Lincoln Giants prepared to host two games against the Natchitoches Reds, The Town Talk not only promoted the games but also gave special attention to one of the hometown team’s pitchers: Tom “Big Train” Parker, described as a star Alexandria hurler who had already turned back three teams that season with only one hit each.26

He more than deserved the special attention. Parker was an Alexandria native. After spending the previous season with the Indianapolis ABCs of the first National Negro League, he went on to build a long and notable career as a member of numerous Negro League clubs across the country, culminating in 1948, his final season, with a World Series championship as a starting pitcher for the Homestead (Pittsburgh) Grays. 1948, it turned out, would be the last-ever Negro League World Series. Although he was known primarily as a pitcher, Parker actually played more seasons as an outfielder.

The Town Talk’s reporting on Parker’s two seasons with the Alexandria Lincoln Giants appears to clarify a gap in Parker’s documented career.27 Tom Parker seemed to disappear after leaving Indianapolis in 1931, only to emerge in 1934 as a member of the New Orleans Crescent Stars. He wasn’t, as baseball historian James Riley claimed without any corroborating evidence, with the Monroe Monarchs.28 Parker, still a teenager at the end of his season in Indianapolis, decided to return home, and, fortuitously for him, he did so at the same time Black baseball had truly arrived.

Both Parker and the team were a sensation. On August 29, 1932, The Town Talk acknowledged something special was happening at Lincoln Park:29

In 1933, the Lincoln Giants of Alexandria were admitted into the (Black) Dixie League, a Black baseball circuit composed of teams from New Orleans, Shreveport, Little Rock, Memphis, Monroe, Jackson, and Algiers (New Orleans). R. D. Marcus and Glen Bradford were placed in charge of the local club. Lincoln Park was to be repaired, the grandstand covered, players signed, and exhibition games opened in March.30

The connection between the Alexandria Lincoln Giants and the broader Negro League-era baseball world places Central Louisiana inside the same segregated baseball ecosystem that, for generations, baseball writers treated as peripheral. But it was not peripheral. It was parallel.

None of that means every game at Lincoln Park belonged to the same category as formal Negro League competition. Local histories like Alexandria’s often blur formal league games, exhibitions, and semi-pro contests in the same ballparks and newspaper columns. But it does mean Alexandria’s Black baseball history belongs in the same paragraph as its white professional history, not in a footnote. The city had two baseball inheritances moving side by side: one better funded, more loudly promoted, and more easily remembered; the other segregated, under-documented, but just as rooted as white baseball and substantial enough to build its own field before Bringhurst existed.

That organization also complicates the birth story of Alexandria’s Evangeline League franchise. In June 1933, with Alexandria still without a white professional club, Lincoln Park became part of the conversation about bringing league baseball back to the city. When Baton Rouge and Jackson, two (white) Dixie League teams, arranged an exhibition at Lincoln Park, Josh Billings of Baton Rouge used the occasion to urge Alexandria fans to improve their ballpark.31 According to The Town Talk, Billings called Lincoln Park “a good beginning in the right direction,” suggesting that if the infield were skinned back, box seats and dugouts built, and the outfield fences extended and improved, the field “would do.”32

It is a striking moment: a Black ballpark, built by and for segregated Black baseball, was suddenly being evaluated as the possible foundation for Alexandria’s return to professional league baseball.

That was Jim Crow’s double logic at work. Segregation forced Black Alexandrians to build their own institutions, but once those institutions proved useful, white baseball men could imagine converting them into civic assets for the city at large—or, more precisely, for the white city that claimed the authority to speak for the whole. Lincoln Park was good enough to draw crowds, host traveling clubs, attract white spectators, and be discussed as a possible professional venue. Yet in the traditional story, it nearly disappears, replaced by Bringhurst Field as if Alexandria’s baseball geography began only when white professional baseball returned.

The Lincoln Park thread continued into 1934. As Alexandria maneuvered toward a place in what would become the Evangeline League, The Town Talk described prospective players, groundkeepers, umpires, ticket-sellers, rookies, and veterans swarming around Lincoln Park, as well as local men trying to bring baseball back.33 Before Alexandria’s new professional franchise had fully taken shape, Lincoln Park was one of the places where the city’s baseball future was being imagined.34 The park built for Black baseball stood, for a brief and revealing moment, at the edge of the white professional game’s return.

That history changes the frame. The Evangeline League arrived in a city that carried two baseball histories at once: one segregated, under-documented, and older than the civic story usually admits; the other better publicized, more commercially organized, and still raw from recent disappointment.

Among Alexandria’s four white professional predecessors, the Reds remained the most vivid cautionary tale. The wound had not scarred over. Former fans, merchants, boosters, and civic leaders still remembered the embarrassment of having rallied around a team that disappeared almost overnight. What made the loss sting even more was that the Reds had not been a failed experiment in any simple sense.

The Reds played at City Park Diamond, Alexandria’s public ballpark behind Bolton High School on Country Club Road, near what is now Masonic Drive and Lee Street. They had begun auspiciously enough. More than 4,000 fans crowded into the park on Sunday, April 19, 1925, to watch the club’s home debut against the Monroe Drillers, a 14-3 Alexandria victory that gave the Reds their third consecutive win.35

Attendance mattered in the Cotton States League almost as much as the standings, because gate receipts were the oxygen of Class D baseball. “If Alexandria doesn’t capture the attendance cup with yesterday’s crowd,” The Town Talk surmised the next day, “this city should at least feel proud of its showing as it has not had professional baseball in some time.” The paper could not resist the comparison: Alexandria’s crowd was nearly half as large as the one at New Orleans’ opener. “It proved beyond a doubt,” the paper declared, “that Alexandria is ready for baseball.”36

But even in that moment of triumph, the ceiling was already visible. Alexandria did not capture the 1925 attendance cup. The Reds would draw the league’s largest opening-day crowd the following year—an official attendance of 3,741—but the more than 4,000 who saw the 1925 home debut remained the club’s local high-water mark, later surpassed elsewhere by a crowd of more than 4,500 at Jackson, Mississippi.

After that, the promise began to fray. By July 1926, barely fifteen months after the Reds’ triumphant debut, the club was already asking Alexandria to save its professional baseball club from financial ruin. Reds boosters urged 2,000 fans to attend a benefit game and help wipe out a $1,888 deficit. The appeal was not subtle: if the deficit could be retired, Alexandria would remain in the league in 1927; if not, its future was uncertain. The numbers told the story. Weekday attendance, once estimated at around 610, had fallen to roughly 200. Sunday crowds, once near 900, had slipped closer to 600.37

By 1928, the question was being asked in print with almost accusatory bluntness: Did Alexandria even want baseball?38

The Town Talk reported that attendance that season had fallen so low that some recent gates barely covered the visiting club’s guarantee, leaving ordinary expenses unpaid. Crowds that had once numbered 500 or 600 had dwindled to 150 or 200. Players complained that City Park had become too quiet, that the home crowd waited for mistakes instead of lifting the team, and that the Reds needed not merely spectators but believers.

This was when the argument turned. The Reds were no longer simply a team trying to win games. They had become a referendum on Alexandria’s civic seriousness, a test of whether the city could sustain what it had once so loudly celebrated.

And then, the very next year, the Reds treated fans to a season more riveting and rewarding than they could have imagined.

The unlikely star of the 1929 club was a young right-handed pitcher named Lon Warneke. A gangly Arkansas farm boy known as “Dixie Dude” by his Alexandria teammates, Warneke had talked his way onto the team at the tail end of the 1928 season after being cut from the Cotton States club in Laurel, Mississippi.39 He had been a clumsy first baseman with little apparent hope of making it in the big leagues. But in Alexandria, he reinvented himself.

“I refused to quit just because they had let me go,” Warneke recalled later. In Alexandria, Warneke completed his reinvention as a pitcher.40 As part of the Reds’ starting rotation, he honed his craft and added a devastating curveball to his repertoire. He finished the year as the team’s co-MVP, with a 16-10 record and a $7,500 contract with the Chicago Cubs. Lon Warneke would become one of the National League’s best pitchers of the 1930s, an ace on two pennant-winning Cubs clubs, a five-time All-Star, and a 192-game major-league winner whose career totals were likely shortened by wartime service.

Today, Lon Warneke may be one of baseball’s most accomplished forgotten figures, but for much of the twentieth century, he remained cherished in Alexandria, appreciated not simply for anything he accomplished in a Reds uniform but as an emblem of the “future great” that Alexandria had helped cultivate.

In addition to Warneke, the 1929 squad also featured Odell Hale, a preternaturally gifted rookie infielder and a deceptively powerful slugger who would spend the bulk of his major-league career shuffling between second and third base with the Cleveland Indians. During his season with the Reds, Hale’s sensational clutch hitting, offensive productivity, league-leading 116 runs scored, and towering home runs made him an immediate fan favorite in Alexandria and earned him one of baseball’s most spectacular nicknames. In central Louisiana, Arvel Odell Hale was simply known as “Bad News.”41

In 1929, the Reds finished first in the Cotton States League and helped nurture the careers of at least seven future major leaguers, including “Dixie Dude” Warneke and “Bad News” Hale. They proved that minor-league baseball could generate civic pride in abundance and that Alexandria could matter to the larger baseball world. But they also proved that pride, talent, and even a first-place finish were not enough when crowds thinned, deficits mounted, and outside baseball interests decided a town was no longer worth the trouble.

The team’s successes only sharpened the bitterness of what followed.

The final break came in 1930, after Ollie Lee Biedenharn of the Shreveport Baseball Association had taken control of the franchise. Alexandria’s leaders later argued that supporters had raised about $5,000 before the season after Biedenharn allegedly told them the club would remain for the full schedule if local investors produced that amount.

Instead, after five-and-a-half seasons in the Class D Cotton States League, “saddened fans attended the funeral of the Alexandria Reds,” their final game as a professional baseball team, The Town Talk reported. At one hour and twenty minutes, it was said to have been “the fastest nine-inning game in the city’s professional baseball history.” Ultimately, the Reds fell to the Pine Bluff Judges, 8-7.42

The Alexandria Reds, however, would not go gently.

The local complaint wasn’t that the Reds had failed at the gate. It was that Alexandria had been used: its fans had bought in, its merchants had contributed, its players had been developed and sold, and then the city had been dropped when the arrangement no longer suited outside interests. Alexandria asked Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, commissioner of Major League Baseball, and Mike Sexton, president of the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues, to intervene and force the Cotton States League to readmit the Reds in 1931, but the appeal went nowhere.43 Biedenharn, for his part, categorically denied Alexandria’s version of the story.

In 1931, the Cotton States League continued without Alexandria, narrowing to six clubs in Jackson, Vicksburg, Pine Bluff, Baton Rouge, Monroe, and El Dorado. By 1932, even that reduced circuit could not hold. Franchises lurched from Port Arthur to DeQuincy to Opelousas, from Vicksburg to Jackson, and then the league itself folded on July 13. By 1933, the old Class D Cotton States League had effectively been supplanted by a broader Class C Dixie League, a more expensive and less hospitable arrangement that included Baton Rouge and Shreveport but still left Alexandria outside the map.

The city wanted professional baseball, but the league it hoped to rejoin was no longer there in any meaningful sense.

What survived in Alexandria from 1931 through 1933 was not a franchise in any formal sense. The professional Reds were gone, and with them the payrolls, league obligations, and fragile illusion that civic pride alone could keep a Class D club solvent.

But Paul A. Gilham, Sr., understood that the habit of baseball had not disappeared with the franchise. He was not just another fan with a scorecard. Gilham, an Atlanta native who built a prosperous career as the head of Alexandria Coca-Cola, was a respected businessman and a politically ambitious civic leader. In 1929, he had challenged Mayor Victor V. Lamkin,44 a local bank executive whom Huey Long had appointed following the death of Mayor John F. Foisy. Gilham lost despite the local paper’s endorsement, finishing fourth in the Democratic primary,45 but the campaign marked him as one of those familiar Alexandria figures who believed public life belonged not only to officeholders but also to merchants, boosters, clubmen, and organizers.

Baseball gave Gilham a different arena for that same instinct. The town still had players, fans, a ballpark, newspaper space, merchants willing to talk, and the stubborn conviction that Alexandria was too much of a baseball town to sit out the summer in silence.

So in 1931, Gilham helped reconstitute the Reds in humbler form. They were no longer Alexandria’s emissaries to organized baseball, no longer a professional club chasing standings in the Cotton States League. They became instead a local amateur and semi-professional team, part of a scrappy Central Louisiana Baseball League built from courthouse towns, lumber settlements, hospital clubs, and mill communities—places like Colfax, Urania, Rochelle, Glenmora, Hodge, and Winnfield.46

This was baseball stripped of its more expensive pretensions but not of its importance. It had schedules, officers, rules, standings, opening ceremonies, disputes over eligibility, arguments about former professionals, and enough seriousness to make the sports page treat it as more than a pastime.

Gilham’s achievement was more than administrative. He kept the Reds’ name in circulation when it might easily have become a synonym for embarrassment. Under his hand, the name became something more forgiving and more durable: not the broken promise of the old professional club, but the sign of a community unwilling to give up the game.47

The amateur Reds represented a kind of civic salvage operation. They allowed Alexandria to continue imagining itself through baseball without asking the city to finance another dream it could not yet afford. They also gave local players a stage, local fans a team, and local boosters a reason to keep talking in the language of innings, schedules, rivalries, and summer crowds.

That mattered because Alexandria’s baseball problem was never only athletic. It was civic and economic. The old professional Reds had exposed the danger of confusing enthusiasm with solvency. Gilham’s Central Louisiana League offered a smaller, safer bargain: keep the name, keep the games, keep the summer ritual, but lower the stakes.

In that sense, the amateur Reds were both a consolation and a rehearsal. They preserved the appetite for professional baseball while teaching the town to be more careful about the terms on which it would return.

There was also a lesson embedded in that revival. The Central Louisiana League proved that baseball could still organize Alexandria’s civic imagination, but it also revealed the limits of nostalgia. The amateur Reds could preserve the habit, but they could not restore the status. They could keep the game alive, but they could not make Alexandria whole again as a professional baseball city.

By 1933, Alexandria had not stopped being a baseball town. It had become a more complicated one. Black Alexandrians had built their own baseball institutions under segregation, including a purpose-built ballpark before Bringhurst existed. White Alexandrians had watched a professional club make them proud, develop future major leaguers, finish first, and then vanish under the control of outside baseball interests. Paul Gilham had kept the old Reds name alive, but only in a smaller, safer form.

The city did not need to be taught to love baseball. It needed to be convinced that professional baseball could return without betraying it again.

That was the Alexandria J. Walter Morris would soon try to recruit. Not an empty market. Not a naïve town. Not a place waiting for baseball to arrive for the first time.

A baseball town on the brink.

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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 w…

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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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