About Lamar White, Jr.

For more than 20 years, I’ve written about the people, the politics, and the history of my home state of Louisiana, both as the founder of two popular online publications, CenLamar and the Bayou Brief, and as a contributing writer for the Daily Beast, Salon, and the Independent of Acadiana. My work as an investigative journalist has generated international attention, sparked political scandals, and influenced elections. During the past three years, I’ve focused nearly all of my attention on researching and writing about the life, times, crimes, trials, tribulations, and triumphs of Carlos Marcello, the powerful and elusive boss of the New Orleans Mafia, purportedly the first and oldest syndicate in the United States.

As a result of my efforts, I have acquired troves of documents and other material previously unreleased and unknown to the public. Some of these documents were among the 15,490 files released by the National Archives pursuant to the JFK Assassinations Records Act (13,173 files in December 2022 and a total of 2,317 in April, May, and June of this year). I’ve also uncovered details of his biography that are conspicuously missing in every other account of his life. I’ve collected and read more than 150 books and nearly two terabytes of digitized documents: Court pleadings and opinions, transcripts, photographs and videos, thousands of archival news reports, and more than 100,000 declassified government documents and files, many of which have never before been available to the public. I’ve interviewed members of Marcello’s family, including his only son, as well Marcello’s lawyers, employees, and friends, and I’ve also spoken with his adversaries. Because of two recent FOIA requests, I’ve received more than 1,500 pages of classified documents.

Additionally, I obtained a 270-minute-long audio recording—tthe existence of which had previously unknown to anyone outside of Marcello’s small inner circle— of the late Shreveport lawyer Michael Maroun, one of Marcello’s closest confidantes for more than 45 years, revealing the incredible story of Marcello’s “kidnapping” and of his experience acompanying Marcello on a treacherous journey from Guatemala and through the jungles of El Salvador. 

My book, The Original Gangster: The American Saga of Carlos Marcello, is a sprawling and definitive biography of “the Little Man” who loomed large in Louisiana, the first book about Marcello since the 1988 publication of John H. Davis’s deeply flawed and poorly researched bestseller, Mafia Kingfish. I am currently seeking the consultation of an experienced literary agent capable of negotiating and securing the book’s print publication by the end of 2023, which marks the 30th anniversary of Marcello’s death and the 60th anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.