Our town had a city hall where government business was conducted.
Mafia business was conducted at another structure where the towns people got down to business, a place which smelled of cigars and bourbon and resonated with the sounds of slot machines and roullette wheels. In another room accessible only by a secret knock sequence high dollar poker games were played.
This place was called 'The Casino' by locals. As I was growing up I would visit the casino many times with my father as he delivered money to an accountant who sat in a tiny room behind a green door at the end of a hallway. There were always stacks of cash on the table, Mr. Marcello's money, carefully being counted. Many times I went with my mother on bingo nights in the building next door to the casino, where high dollar bingo games were played.
The building was visited by gambling and alcohol enforcement but was never cited, nor did they ever uncover what was really going on there due to it's special security features and the quick thinking of my Father and others, who agreed to put an end to years of illegal gambling operations. The building was no longer a banking center. The casino had been dismantled. It seemed as if the air had been sucked out of the room. The slot machines, poker tables,and roulette wheels that adorned the large rooms, along with thousands of poker chips with unopened decks of cards were stuffed into a deep-freezer which was then concealed behind a false wall only to be discovered by construction workers in 2015.
My cousin was one of the workers who found the cache, he stole a bunch of chips and decks of cards, he gave me one deck, I still have it. This is the same cousin that stole New Orlean's Saint's quarterback Archie Manning's hubcaps from his yellow Mercedes when it was parked outside a grocery store in Mississippi. The hubcaps hung on a wall in a shed at my cousin's farm until they were washed away in hurricane Katrina.
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The Mississippi Gulf Coast Mafia
Non-FictionI grew up the son of a mafia soldier. My Father worked for the Little Man Carlos Marcello of New Orleans. This is a recollection of memories from my childhood growing up in New Orleans and The Mississippi Gulf Coast. This is a non-fictiona...
