A Long Way from Tunis: The Vieux Carre Courier's 1976 Series on Carlos Marcello

50 years ago, the gritty New Orleans weekly published Mike Grangnani's four-part series on the legendary mob boss. It's never appeared online, until now.

The archives of the fledgling, feisty Vieux Carré Courier are hard to find. After a 17-year run, “the weekly newspaper of New Orleans” closed down in 1978. Editor Jeannette Hardy, who co-owned the paper with her husband, took a job with the States-Item and, following its merger with the Times-Picayune in 1980, served as editor of its weekly magazine Dixie. At Dixie, Hardy would push reporters Jim Amoss and Dean Baquet (who would eventually rise to become Executive Editor of the New York Times) to write a sprawling, three-part series on Marcello. Published in 1982, their series offers a much more intimate and accurate assessment of Marcello’s life and career than Grangnani’s 8,900-word “documentary,” but Grangnani, to his credit, provided a more vivid portrait of the Mafia boss than anyone else before him.

Since I needed to digitize Grangnani’s series as part of my research for my book on Marcello, I am making it available to paid subscribers for their educational use. To the best of m…