Same Book? Same Book. When Deadlines Failed & Deep Research Prevailed
Troves of new declassified files about Carlos Marcello, including 2,524 pages released this year, freed me from the tyranny of timelines & forced me to write a better, truer book.
Two days ago, on October 30, 2025, Robert Caro turned ninety. He’s arguably the world’s greatest living biographer. In nine decades, he’s published five books (six if you count Working, his 2019 craft memoir; for our purposes, we won’t).
By contrast, Walter Isaacson—New Orleans native, writer, humanitarian, civic leader, and Tulane professor—has published twelve. He wrote two in the 1980s (one co-authored), one in the 1990s, three in the 2000s, three in the 2010s, and three in the 2020s—despite juggling demanding day jobs: rising through TIME to become its 14th managing editor in 1996; moving in 2001 to chair and run CNN; and, starting in 2003, leading the Aspen Institute for fifteen years.
Over roughly the same span, Caro has focused almost entirely on one subject: Lyndon Baines Johnson. Since publishing Volume Four, The Passage of Power, in 2012—thirteen years ago—he’s been at work on the series finale. Isaacson finished five of his twelve books during those same thirteen years. None of this diminishes Caro; it underscores that these two masters practice very different arts.
Caro spent seven years—most of his thirties—researching and writing his first book. Apart from his legendary Knopf editor, Robert Gottlieb, almost no one knew what he’d been toiling over. Then, on September 16, 1974, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York arrived. It was gargantuan (1,296 pages), deeply reported, and—to the surprise of anyone who thinks documentation kills music—lyrical. He’d turned in more than a million words; Gottlieb made him cut roughly 300,000, not for editorial reasons, but because a paperback that big can’t be bound.
Bookstores often shelve Walter Isaacson and Robert Caro side by side. They both write sprawling, entertaining, definitive biographies of capital-G Great Men. Yet they’re entirely different kinds of writers.
Caro works in heavy metals: power, leverage, torque—the forces that move cities and bend institutions. Isaacson traces ingenuity—how a scribble becomes a device, a therapy, a habit in the culture.
When I set out to write a book about New Orleans Mafia boss Carlos Marcello five years ago, I gave myself a one-year deadline, imagining a clock would keep me honest. It didn’t. A deadline, I learned, can distort how you value your own work. I began treating time like a scarce commodity to be budgeted, which is not the same as doing the best work. I had never written a book and didn’t know how much I didn’t know. One year felt generous; I’d been a working writer for nineteen years and had probably produced three to four million words. 115,000 on Marcello? Manageable. I was so sure I’d hit the mark that I assembled a glossy “LamarWhiteJrBookProposal.pdf” and launched it into the world.
Friends and family were excited. Writers I knew were generous. A writer I didn’t know—Walter freakin’ Isaacson—called and said he’d long believed the right book on Marcello could be spectacular. I sent him the monster PDF with cheerfully reckless optimism.
Then the world tilted. On March 29, 2020, I published the first part of my Bayou Brief Godfather Trilogy: “Calogero Minacore and the Making of Carlos Marcello.” That night, New Orleans was all over national news; Mayor LaToya Cantrell was on CNN pleading for federal help. Three days after my first piece, I decamped to Dallas to stay with my mom. New Orleans was a public-health catastrophe. In Orleans Parish, COVID-19 would kill 1,169 people—deadlier than Katrina. Hospitals were overwhelmed; ventilators and beds were scarce. My disability sometimes affects my balance; I’d broken my hip a couple of years earlier. “What happens if you fall again?” my mom asked. I didn’t need convincing.
I spent April and half of May in Dallas. I wrote Part Two, “Carlos Marcello and the Making of a Mafia Myth,” and published it on May 2, 2020, at 3:30 a.m.—about 10,000 words. I waited more than four months to write the final installment; I was drafting a book and had already announced the project publicly to build attention—especially in New Orleans, where nearly everyone of a certain age has a Marcello story.
In late June, a lawyer I knew through friends called. One of his clients wanted to meet about the book.
New Orleans, June 23, 2020. We met at his office in Metairie—2709 Ridgelake Drive, Suite 100—five miles from my place in Gert Town. I got turned around under the cloverleaf (Jefferson Parish delights in deliberate incoherence) and arrived ten minutes late.
There was only one sign on the building, “Geo. WM Rueff, Inc.,” a 155-year-old customhouse broker and foreign freight forwarder founded in 1870 by, as those of you familiar with 19th-century directories may have surmised, George William Rueff. But if you look up the address online, you’ll find the names of another tenant, Churchill Farms, Inc., and its president, Joseph Carlos Marcello.
The lawyer who had arranged the meeting texted to tell me to call when I arrived. He knew I might have needed some assistance from the parking lot, but I had already asked a friend to join me. I called from the front reception, and within seconds, both the lawyer and his client waved me to the back.
“I must’ve missed the turn, because somehow, I almost ended up on the Causeway,” I explained. “Very nice to meet you, Mr. Marcello.”
“Call me Joe,” he told me.
For most of his life, Joe, the only son and youngest of Carlos and Jacqueline Marcello’s four children, had been known as “Joe C.” or “Little Joe” to his family and close friends of his father, a way of distinguishing him from his grandfather, Joe Marcello, Sr., who died in 1952, when he was 11, and his uncle, Joe, Jr., who passed away in 1999. Nearly all of the photographs I had seen of him were from decades ago, but he was clearly the same Joe Marcello. And now, he was the only Joe Marcello.
Tan and easy-going, Joe was 78 and that day looked at least a decade younger. We were meeting to discuss his father and the book I was writing, but I think it was essential for him first to provide some perspective about his life and career.
“We’re going to be in the conference room, but before we do that, I want to show you a few things in my office,” he said.
His office, also accessible through a side door adjacent to the gated parking lot (visible in the photograph above), was a large, fluorescent-lit room with white walls and commercial carpeting, featuring a handsome wooden desk. However, the most prominent and unusual feature in the room was an immaculately restored Indian Chief slot machine (circa 1930s). It was the same kind of “one-armed bandit” Frank Costello moved en masse out of New York City to New Orleans following the election of Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia, as part of a deal Costello claimed, in sworn testimony, to have made with Sen. Huey P. Long.
It was also the only visible reference to Joe’s father, Carlos, whose meteoric rise in the New Orleans underworld was attributable primarily to the close relationship he cultivated with Frank Costello, consigliere and later acting boss of the Luciano family. (Costello dispatched his friend and associate “Dandy Phil” Kastel to oversee the New Orleans operation, but for reasons I will explore in my book, Kastel never became the power broker, to borrow a term from Robert Caro, some believed him to be.)
“That may be the most gorgeous slot machine I’ve ever seen,” I told Joe. “Was it one of the machines Costello shipped down?”
He laughed. “I think so, but I bought it at auction,” he said. It was not, he told me, a family heirloom. “I was in the restaurant business for most of my life, in one way or another.”
“Broussard’s, right?” I asked.1
His eyes lit up. “I have some photos to show you.”
He clearly relished his time as a partner and co-owner of Broussard’s, and I could tell he still grieved the loss of his business partner, Joe Segreto, who passed away in 2015 from cancer at 75.
As I listened to him reminisce, I thought about how his father had come to prominence first, not as a nefarious underworld kingpin, but as the well-dressed, charismatic owner and operator of the swanky Beverly Country Club, a private gambling establishment in Jefferson Parish that, for a brief time, was one of the most exclusive nightlife destinations in the country.
In some respects, Joe had lived the type of life his father may have dreamt for himself, but make no mistake, “Little Joe” never dreamt of having the kind of life his father lived. (Joe’s restaurant business was not confined to the Greater New Orleans area. He lived part-time for many years in Destin, Florida, and was the original owner of the restaurant Cuvee Bistro in Destin.)
I’d previously and very briefly mentioned on social media that I had restored an old black and white photograph of the entire extended Marcello family for Joe, but that was about the extent of what I was willing to disclose.
Joe and I spoke for close to three hours that afternoon, and over the next two years, we met in person on several other occasions. Throughout, we also exchanged dozens of emails. He was always enormously generous and, on many occasions, surprisingly candid.
Joe passed away on September 17, 2025. He was 83 years old, the same age his father was when he died.
You’ll have to wait for the book to read the details and the revelations.
Part of the delay lives in me. As Robert Caro put it, “It’s the research that takes the time—the research…” and I recognize that reflex in my bones. Deadlines never made me faster; they only sharpened my anxiety about the questions I hadn’t asked and the files I hadn’t read. Journalism compressed that pressure into days; a book stretched it into years and, perversely, gave the habit room to grow. I’m not proud of it, and I don’t get to blame it either. It’s how I’m wired—and on Marcello, that wiring kept dragging me back to the archive until the pattern held.
Carlos Marcello isn’t an innovator; he’s a mechanic of influence. The question isn’t “How did a new idea take flight?” It’s “How did an old arrangement endure?” That answer requires patience and a map. The archive reveals what the system wanted to remember; interviews expose what it tried to forget.
You don’t get the truth without both.
And the archive kept shifting under my feet. In addition to the JFK Assassination Records released before 2020, new troves arrived after I’d already started: a fresh batch on December 15, 2021 (20 documents about Marcello); a larger release on December 15, 2022 (100+ Marcello documents); multiple releases across 2023 that included three full FBI volumes on Marcello (1,414 pages); and, in 2025, another wave—56 records under the JFK Records Act plus 10 FBI serials totaling 2,524 pages on Marcello.
Every document dump rearranged the puzzle. Some claims I’d tentatively accepted were confirmed, complicated, or overturned; footnotes multiplied; timelines buckled and then re-stabilized. The delay wasn’t just me; it was the evidence arriving late to its own story.
This is why the research has taken years. I’m not assembling a scrapbook of anecdotes; I’m auditing causation.
South Louisiana is generous with myth and stingy with documentation. Names change, fronts multiply, jurisdictions blur, and every hurricane rewrites the filing system. A quick pass yields a colorful story and a shrug. A long dig—depositions and parish records, ship manifests and franchise contracts, corporate shells and pre-digital campaign ledgers—reveals the plumbing. The plumbing is the point. It’s the difference between gossip and history, between a portrait of a gangster and a map of the civic ecosystem that made him plausible.
Robert Caro’s ethos—turn every page, walk every block—sanctioned the long hours with microfilm and bad coffee. It also disciplined me against melodrama. When a humble invoice will do, I don’t reach for a grand theory.
Walter Isaacson’s counterpoint kept the story breathing. Even in corrupted systems, people are learning and adapting. Influence has a product cycle. A successful shakedown is akin to a product-market fit; a captured board is governance A/B-tested to the point of failure. Seeing those iterations helps explain why certain rackets die while others mutate into “respectable” enterprises with better stationery.
There’s a public reason for the patience. Reconstructing how a bid was rigged in 1962 isn’t trivia; it’s a decoder ring for the present. The forms are glossier now, the LLCs more elegant, the messaging polished by consultants, but the patterns rhyme.
An extended timeline lets me trace those rhymes without forcing them. Network maps help show that “the Mafia” wasn’t a single silhouette but a lattice of incentives where ordinary people made consequential choices.
Louisiana rewards patience. This place is a palimpsest. Every new deal is inked over an older one, and the old words still show through if you tilt the page toward the light. That has been the craft: tilt, squint, annotate, return. Learn the topography of one wharf, the genealogy of one patronage job, the minute a committee quietly moved a decimal and redirected money for a generation. For a long time, it looks like overkill. Then, at mile 200, the road bends and the pins on the map line up. That’s the moment I work toward—the line that lets a reader say, “So that’s how it worked,” followed by, “So that’s how it might still be working.”
I don’t pretend to write like Caro or Isaacson, but I hope my Marcello work sits in conversation with theirs. I’m trying to demystify the machine. In this story, power—not brilliance—is the prime mover, and the “innovation” worth tracking is how a network adapts, survives, and sometimes launders itself into respectability. That takes time, and it should. In a state where memory is mercurial and the tide takes what it wants, durability isn’t a flourish. It’s the assignment.
When Robert Caro was a few years into writing The Power Broker, he got used to friends being a little astonished whenever he told them he was still working on a book about Robert Moses. “Same book?” they’d ask. “Same book,” he’d say.
One of the four “Grand Dames” of French Quarter fine dining, along with Antoine’s, Galatoire’s, and Arnaud’s, the restaurant “began as a love story” between Joseph Cezaire Broussard, a descendant of Joseph Broussard dit Beausoleil, and Rosalie Borrello, the daughter of Sicilian immigrants. Broussard, a standout chef at Antoine’s, accompanied the restaurant’s owner to Paris and spent a summer learning French classical cuisine. When he returned from Paris, Joseph and Rosalie married at St. Louis Cathedral, and as a wedding gift, Rosalie’s parents gave the newlyweds their mansion on 819 Conti Street. The couple decided to live on the second floor and turned the first floor into a restaurant, which officially opened for business in 1920. Rosalie passed away on December 27, 1965, and Joseph, devastated, died a little over a month later, on February 6, 1966. A testament to his influence and acclaim, the New York Times published a lengthy obituary about his death two days later.
In the early 1970s, the restaurant was purchased by Joe C. Marcello and Joe Marcello, Jr., who partnered with Joe Segreto, a widely respected New Orleans restaurateur. Segreto, who had previously collaborated with the Marcellos at their other fine dining restaurant, Elmwood Plantation, was mainly in charge. However, the Marcellos invested a substantial amount, $2 million ($13.1 million in 2025 dollars), to restore the restaurant to its former glory. The renovation took more than two years to complete, but in 1974, when the three Joes applied for a liquor license, Aaron Kohn, the Managing Director of the privately-funded Metropolitan Crime Commission and a man who dedicated most of his professional career to orchestrating an increasingly unhinged and fantastical campaign against members of the Marcellos’s sprawling family and their so-called “associates,” successfully lobbied city officials to reject their application. The three Joes sued and won.
Sources:
Broussard’s Restaurant & Courtyard, Facebook, March 28, 2012. LINK.
“Joseph C. Broussard, 76, Dies; Owned New Orleans Restaurant,” The New York Times, Feb. 8, 1966, pg. 36.