The Chris Moeller Archives

Mr. New Orleans and the Baby Kingpins

When one is perusing an independently-owned neighborhood book store in uptown New Orleans that is tucked almost discreetly into the city and has something less than 200 square feet of showroom, one does not expect to find a self-published local book that elucidates the greatest unsolved crime of the 20th century in the United States, as told by an underworld pimp and hustler with a 1,600-plus page FBI file, but that's what happened to me.

The book is Mr. New Orleans, from 2014, by and about Frenchy Brouillette (BROO-let), and co-authored by Matthew Randazzo V, a then-20-something New Orleans writer, who also provided Frenchy the service of publishing (MRV Entertainment, LLC). Frenchy put his colorful life to print only one year before he was stabbed to death at the age of 84 by a local musician (in a very likely case of self-defense), after the jazz and rock club performer returned to New Orleans to find that Frenchy had sold $25,000 worth of his musical equipment to feed a now-on-again drug habit.

In his book, Brouillette cops to being a fixer for Mafia kingpin, Carlos Marcello, whose notorious name you may already know, and to being a Marcello go-between for Brouillette's third-cousin-once-removed, Edwin Edwards, the four-term governor of Louisiana, who also spent nine years in prison for racketeering, extortion, money laundering, mail fraud, and wire fraud. Edwards ran for the state's top office, after two previous voter dismissals, in 1991, against former Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, David Duke, when popular bumper stickers supporting Edwards across the state read "Vote For the Crook," and "Vote for the Lizard, not the Wizard."

What Frenchy Brouillette has to say about the Kennedy assassination is pertinent as a long-time Marcello associate. He was mostly a small-time, neighborhood wise guy and roustabout who his co-author described upon his death as basically having been on an extended alcoholic bender from 1953 to 2015, but there was plenty of time in that interim for the Cajun hustler to consort with each of Frank Costello, the Marcello brothers, Lee Harvey Oswald, Santo Trafficante Jr., Tex Cody, David Ferrie, and Jim Garrison. Frenchy wasn't in on any assassination, but nor has the conspiracy to kill the president been a very well-kept secret-- except by a national news media pliant to the Intelligence State. He writes that if "that old fraud Jim Garrison claimed to be "On the Trail of the Assassins," as the title of his book advertised, then he, Frenchy, was at least "On the Christmas List of Assassins."

As Frenchy explains it, David Ferrie was the hairless homosexual oddball as almost precisely portrayed by Joe Pesci in Oliver Stone's JFK (Dixie Mafia hoods were apparently quick to praise "Joe Pepsi"), but the similarities between Stone's narrative regarding Ferrie and Clay Shaw and reality don't extend much further than the shared fiction of a lone gunman. Rather than being a crusading hero, as portrayed by Kevin Costner in the same film, Frenchy says that Jim Garrison was as sexually-deviant as these other men, and as hypocritical as they come.

Frenchy says he doesn't know for sure who killed Kennedy, but that most of these acquaintances were "crazy enough" to have done it, and many have been fingered as being connected, if not issued outright confessions. Michael and William McLaney were violent Irish thugs in the city who had associated with both Joe Kennedy and J. Edgar Hoover, and who were naturally headhunted by Carlos Marcello when they were all in the business of trying to kill Fidel Castro. The McLaneys featured their own private CIA in Latin America, basically, and were "loaned out" to many of the mob bosses you know from basic cable documentaries-- Marcello, Costello, Tampa's Trafficante, Chicago's Sam Giancana, New York's Albert Anastasia, even Iowa and Des Moines South Side's own Luigi Fratto, according to Frenchy. In the late '50s, the McLaneys were operating the most lucrative casino in Havana, the Hotel Nacional, partnering with Meyer Lansky, as well as responsible for the fixing of the 1958 NFL championship game, but as we all know, in a victory for the proletariat of Cuba, Fidel and Raul Castro, Che Guevara, and their band of rebels punted the gangsters and the gamblers out of Cuba and toppled what had been an enormous gaming empire for the American Mafia.

Enter John F. Kennedy and his brother Bobby, whom Frenchy calls "baby kingpins": "You see it all the time on the street: untested young guns who talk a great game as they wait decades for their old men to step aside who immediately flame out in a tantrum of paranoia, insecurity, and fear when they become boss. Once baby kingpins begin to shoulder the awful responsibility of controlling life and death, they discover, to their horror, that they're not up to withstanding pressure." JFK, he says was a constant partier and self-destructive drug addict, as we now all know, and was a man "better suited to the Absinthe House than the White House." He was addicted to speed and steroids and couldn't have been in his right mind, Frenchy maintains, when he named his fellow baby kingpin brother attorney general. Jack's two years in office featured no less than a disastrous invasion of Cuba, a game of nuclear chicken with the Soviet Union, top-secret attempts to kill Castro, an ill-advised sojourn into Vietnam, attempts to topple Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamsters, and a legal assault against gangsters--- all of which had just helped him get elected. In Frenchy's words, "If you look at it this way, it's almost surprising that this rabid dog wasn't put down quicker before he got us all killed."

It's this betrayal of the Mafia, with Brother Bobby in the drivers' seat-- taunting Godfathers directly to their face on television ("I thought only schoolgirls giggled, Mr. Giancana")-- that led to Kennedy's end. It makes you wonder just how reckless two men can be, to have Frenchy Brouillette put it in his plain Cajun English. You set out after your father's business partners, after using them to the height of their power, and play them almost as dirty as conceivably possible. The level of backstabbing displayed by the Kennedys was historically-epic. RFK deported the Tunisian-born Carlos Marcello to Guatamala in 1961-- flying him in an empty cargo plane to a country where he's never been (Marcello had a fake Guatamalan birth certificate) and simply dropping him off. He didn't care enough not to avoid illegally detaining or manhandling the mobster, but then didn't have the balls to have a CIA killer simply "disappear' him. Per Frenchy.

Then the Kennedys raised the bar by backstabbing the CIA. The Mafia, with the McLaneys providing the logistics, were secretly conspiring to invade Cuba-- at the behest of the White House, but then the Kennedys sabotaged the Bay of Pigs by calling off the support of the U.S. Air Force. Most of the CIA's Cuban pals were killed. You've probably heard it told that, more than 60 years on, the Hotel Nacional has still not re-opened in Havana.

Forget that J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI-- whose name is still on their headquarters-- had been covering for decades for Marcello, Giancana, Trafficante, Joe Kennedy, and the New York five families. Into the late '50s, the aging bureau director still publicly denied there was such a thing as La Cosa Nostra operating in the U.S., and he had been doing so since Ruth was batting third for the Yankees. Baby kingpins. Frenchy says that, "in street terms, the Kennedys were begging for it. It was as if they meticulously set about doing everything they could to get shot."

Then there was more. The Kennedys basically collected all the people they had backstabbed, handed them money and weapons, and trained them to be a killing militia. This was ostensibly to assassinate Castro, and perhaps you've heard of Operation Mongoose, which included even the idea to use an exploding cigar to kill the Cuban leader. The mobsters still cooperated because no sane political leader would presumably betray them again, but at the same time, the Kennedys continued your legal assaults upon the secret societies. The McLaneys were close family friends to Joe Kennedy's clan, but when senators started to hear rumors of the clandestine activity on the Caribbean island, the president denied it and offered up the McLaneys for prosecution.

According to Frenchy, it's not difficult to know how the lineup of the JFK assassination came to be constructed, it was each of these aforementioned gangsters, the McLaneys, some Cuban exiles, and some rogue elements of the CIA (including future Watergate felon E. Howard Hunt, who admitted to his participation in the coup d'etat to his two sons on his deathbed). It was the exact same group of conspirators in Operation Mongoose. All that needed to be changed was the location... and the target. There's nothing more radical to believe about this plot than what we already accept as truth about the Cuban plot.

Frenchy encountered Lee Harvey Oswald several times in New Orleans also. Oswald, as you know from your government, was the lone gunman that killed Kennedy in Dallas from the sixth floor of the book depository, but before that he was "an underworld curiosity" in New Orleans. Your government also wants you to believe that Oswald, a high school dropout and twice-court-martialed Marine managed to get the KGB to let him defect to the Soviet Union and then convinced the CIA to let him defect back. Somehow, according to multiple reports from multiple people, old school Italian mob boss Carlos Marcello was hanging out with both nerdy and "pro-Castro" leafleteer Oswald and queer "sexual deviant" David Ferrie in the months that led up to November of 1963. On the last day of Marcello's deportation trial in New Orleans, having returned from Guatamala only briefly after having been relocated, and shortly before he would win his hearing to stay in the U.S., Kennedy was shot in Dallas, another city under Marcello's control. Friends in the courtroom say that Marcello never raised an eyebrow upon hearing the news of the murder of his mortal enemy.

Farish "Tex" Cody was a personal acquaintance of Frenchy Brouillette in New Orleans that became a top enforcer for the McLaneys. He had helped train the Cuban exiles in New Orleans for the secret Cuban activities. You know those exiles-- according to President Trump, they included Ted Cruz's father. Anyway, Cody died in Frenchy Brouillette's home in 1983, but not before laying out what he knew. Cody said that the security surrounding Kennedy was "a joke." He and the other shooters took triangulated positions around the presidential motorcade on November 22nd, 1963. A professional shooter who was not Lee Harvey Oswald was said to be on the sixth floor of the book depository, Cody was on the grassy knoll, and another man was beneath a manhole on Elm Street. Cody says his position on the knoll was actually closer to the boxcars and the railroad overpass than is popularly reported. It all went perfectly to plan, including the getaways. Oswald was just who he told us he was-- a patsy. He was "a wannabe the Marcellos knew with a Marine background." He could be got easily because Dallas was Marcello territory and the duty of plugging him fell to Chicago mob man and Dallas strip club front, Jack Ruby, who was deep in debt to Marcello's crew "and had ass cancer [rectal cancer] and was going to die anyway." By the conclusion of 1964, Mike and Bill McLaney are set up with a major casino operation, the Carousel Club, in Las Vegas, and Tex Cody, their top enforcer, is in a management position. Mike McLaney eventually moved to Haiti, where he enjoyed a near-monopoly on the casino business under the Duvalier dictatorship, one presumably similar to the one he dreamed of for Cuba.

No, this is not a well-kept secret. The national news media, which in 1963, blew the story completely, simply chooses to ignore it still today. Journalistic monuments like Walter Cronkite staked their entire reputations on the discredited Warren Commission, and that's what they're careful not to advertise. (Even the U.S. Congress officially believes in a conspiracy, thanks to the 1979 commission on assassinations.) Frank Ragano, an attorney for Trafficante in Florida, said that each of his client, Marcello, and Jimmy Hoffa confessed to being part of the crime. Marcello also confessed to an FBI informant while in prison in the late '80s. The payoff on the Kennedy excursion inside Mr. New Orleans is the reveal of why Marcello purportedly chose Oswald as the patsy, but I'll leave that to the author since I've taken so much already of this story.

Oliver Stone was on to something as the highest-profile "conspiracy theorist" to date on the crime, and I'm personally partial to him. (What can I say? Kevin Costner was very heroic on film.) But Frenchy is having none of that. He says Garrison, as New Orleans district attorney, was "owned wholesale" by Marcello. The rap instead against Clay Shaw (portrayed by Tommy Lee Jones) and David Ferrie (Pesci) was Garrison selling out his fellow closeted homosexuals and was an attempt made to save his own corrupted reputation as a DA owned by a gangster. It's strange, isn't it, that the two criminals fingered by Garrison would both hail from his same "underground queer French Quarter circle"? It wasn't hard to discredit a person in 1963 simply for being gay. It meant that it was virtually impossible for them to fight back since their very being was illegal. Frenchy holds a major grudge against Garrison for his raids on the French Quarter brothels during the '60s, and in his estimation, having chased honest people out of the prostitution racket. This "single publicity stunt," he says, rescued the Garrison reputation, and Marcello let it go on because he wasn't named. Marcello had J. Edgar Hoover in charge of the Warren Commission, and Garrison in charge of the "alternative" investigation. There wasn't going to be justice.

Frenchy Brouillette puts major disclaimers throughout the book. He could be full of shit, he acknowledges, and his co-author, Randazzo, prefaces the entire memoir by describing it as "where objective truth is a particularly conspicuous and lonely tourist." Frenchy admits, on cue, that Tex Cody was in prison in Indiana on a burglary charge on the day of the Kennedy assassination, but then he goes on to explain how easy it was in those days for mobbed-up thugs to come and go as they pleased from prison, and that he did it himself in and around Orleans Parish. And even if Cody was putting himself too deeply into the narrative, it doesn't mean the conspiracy wasn't there in the Southern Mafia family to add oneself to. This is a street history. The New Orleans Times-Picayune is not name-dropped in the closing references, nor is the New York Times or Washington Post. Instead, there are thanks to The English Queen, The Dentist, and "Evangeline the Oyster Queen." We're left with this oral report, a lot of supporting direct and circumstantial evidence, and a veritable mountain of government investigative information that dissents, but that we're not allowed to see. And we have one more Kennedy successor in the White House who promised to open the books on the assassination in 2016, and then, a few weeks into office, announced he was breaking his promise. Dale "Frenchy" Brouillette, conversely, is a man already smeared. He says he saw the apocalypse, lived for today, and hoped that tomorrow wouldn't come because... well, Frenchy must have known that it would eventually end the way it did-- of essentially a self-inflicted stabbing in a flophouse. He got his story told before he left.

posted by CM @ 11:31 PM