Inquiries: lamar@lamarwhitejr.com

The Original Gangster, an upcoming book by Lamar White, Jr. is the definitive literary biography of America’s most enduring and misunderstood crime boss—a Sicilian immigrant who rose from the backstreets of New Orleans to become, for nearly half a century, one of the most powerful men in the South. Carlos Marcello’s story is not a footnote in Mafia lore; it is the untold American epic that shaped Louisiana politics, the Kennedy era, and the mythology of organized crime itself.

From the docks of Prohibition-era New Orleans to the corridors of Washington power, Marcello’s empire was built less on gunfire than on graft, influence, and a uniquely Louisiana alchemy of politics and profit. Drawing on more than five years of research—including FBI surveillance transcripts, court records, archival news reports, and exclusive sources no previous writer possessed—this book reconstructs Marcello’s life in full. It reveals a man both feared and strangely respected: a businessman fluent in corruption’s dialect, a devout Catholic who bribed judges and financed governors, a patriarch whose deportation by Robert F. Kennedy sparked one of the strangest legal odysseys in U.S. history. 

At once biography and social history, The Original Gangster places Marcello within the fabric of twentieth-century America—his rise paralleling the growth of oil, tourism, and segregation-era politics; his fall coinciding with a national reckoning over corruption and power. It is the first book to tell this story not as tabloid crime but as an American saga of migration, ambition, and mythmaking.