TulaneLSU's Top 10 memories and dishes at Mosca's

Dearest Friends,

Trauma is often the seed from which sprouts our fears. In 1992 my family and I took our semi-annual trek across the Mississippi River to Avondale. At the time our route was St. Charles to the River Road. We of course did not call it that -- we called it the road to Ocshner. For the longest time the lack of a stop sign at the east corner of St. Charles and Carrollton in front of la Madeleine bothered me. I always told father to stop there, but he never did. Upriver we went until the old left turn at the Huey P Long bridge, affectionately called, “The Huey P.”

The bridge was dirty and narrow. Its entrance sign, steel with black block letters, lead paint peeling, looked better suited as an entrance sign for Angola Penitentiary, not the most important bridge in Middle America. Grandfather joked that it was the gate to the “suffering city, eternal pain, and the way that runs among the lost.” He had a low opinion of the West Bank. The sign was entirely befitting an antique, decaying structure. I am told that sign has been repainted and now stands above only the train tracks.

The traffic was quite compact this evening. It was probably 5:30 or 6:00 and there had been an accident on the other side of the bridge. We were creeping along. At the bridge’s crest we came to a complete stop. It was my first experience at rest on a bridge, but soon, I would be the most restless I have ever felt.

Uncle complained: “I told you to take the GNO. Now we’re going to miss the early seating.”

Cars moved without impediment from the other direction. The bridge then slowly began to tremble. Within a minute, it took on a slight sway which only increased in intensity with every passing second. It was a train causing this disturbance, and it passed just feet to our left.

We were in the old Jeep Grand Wagoneer, which was later stolen and never recovered -- a story for another time.I was seated between father and Mother on the front bench seat. Behind us were Uncle, Aunt, and Cousin. In the boot were my other two cousins. Compared to today’s cars, it did not ride high. The barely four foot tall barricade-like walls, with slits in them that allowed you to look into the muddy abyss below, canceled any advantage a large vehicle might give.

All four of us had been raised with Grandmother’s bedtime stories. One of them was about this bridge. Looking back, I wonder if she got pleasure from terrorizing us. According to her, many men died constructing the bridge. Some had fallen and drowned in the river. Others fell in the wet cement that would form the bridge’s supports.

Bodies forever trapped in the concrete, their spirits haunt the bridge. Grandmother, as you guessed, was, out of political necessity, a Catholic. These ghosts, she told us, shake the bridge as they climb the rafters. From time to time, they will run out in traffic and cause a wreck. Grandmother’s superstitions were poison to a developing mind.

The approaching train towed a tickle chain trawl for the spirits. The echoes and ghosts awoke and were soon in unison swaying to and fro. The bridge followed their lead. I looked to my right and the pipe railing looked as though it were about to give. It was all that separated us from plunging into the River.

Like the living trapped in a casket underground, I began yelling, “Let me out!”

My parents thought I was mad. They told me to sit still and count to ten. I could not.

In an act of disobedience and desperation, I crawled over Mother and opened the door. The bridge shook and my heart pounded. Like Rummey, I had no intention of fighting. So I took flight. Tunnel vision guided me onward to the west or south. I ran as fast as I could. Soon I approached the scene of the accident that delayed us.

A man in a blue Chrysler LeBaron with faux wood paneling sat in his car bleeding as the paramedics attended to him. I stood there silently, frightfully, not knowing which way to go. A policeman yelled something to me. But before I could understand the scene, father took tight hold of my hand and dragged me back to the car, yelling at me the entire way.

The shaking never stopped. I was forced to the seat with Uncle and Aunt. I curled up as if in a cocoon. I closed my eyes and sucked my fifth digit to comfort me. Ten minutes or ten hours -- I don’t know -- later, we began to move. We learned in the paper the next day that the man in the LeBaron survived.

We found our way into the great darkness of the Westbank. There is no where in the world so formless and empty. Its darkness so deep, I think of it every time I read the opening chapter in Genesis.





We arrived at our destination: a plain white building with a plain white sign: Mosca’s. I still remember the pungent air when the Wagoneer’s doors opened. The air was stale with the smell of the nearby landfills. Any time there’s a west wind or no wind, Mosca’s smells like the back of a garbage truck. Who builds a restaurant next to a landfill?

It was either Leslie Nielsen or Charlie Sheen who said, “You can learn a lot about a man by going through his garbage.” The same can be said about a city, and I hope soon to do a TulaneLSU’s Top 10 landfills of NOLA. It’s no coincidence that the Metro’s highest concentration of landfills is on this stretch. Nor is it coincidental that organized crime controlled American garbage and landfills for most of the last century. What I uncovered in my teen years nearly cost my life, and is the reason I am still on the lamb.

No story of Mosca’s is a story without mention of Carlos Marcello. Without him, Mosca’s does not exist. Born in northern Africa in 1910, he certainly carried some Hannibal of Carthage in him. Just months after he was born, he and his family arrived in Algiers where they started a citrus and vegetable farm. As a teen, he sold the crops in the French Quarter, where he became involved with the wrong crowd. He spent a four year stint in prison for armed robbery in his early 20s. Once out, he was ready to construct a depraved dominion.

Marcello’s bailiwick was going to be Jefferson’s West Bank. It was undeveloped and unencumbered by pesky things like law enforcement and Protestantism. Having grown up there, he was familiar with it. By his mid-20’s he owned The Brown Bomber bar in Gretna and allegedly had been made. A brief stay in the federal pen for illegal drug distribution was hardly a speedbump.

With his brothers, he founded the Jefferson Music Company, which operated pinball and jukebox machines (the jukebox in Mosca’s today is owned by Lucky Coin). Like garbage, organized crime loved these machines (cf. the great film Portland Expose’) and they were legal. Under the table they were running slot machines with the consent of dirty dog Sheriff Frank Clancy. The timing was perfect for Marcello when Mayor LaGuardia clamped down on illicit coin machines and gambling in New York. Marcello and his boss, Silver Dollar Sam Carollo, connected with Frank Costello, Dandy Kastel, and Meyer Lansky, and with the blessing of Huey P, ran gambling in the South. Although drugs, alcohol, prostitution, stolen goods and even a tour company (Southern Tours) were important in the Marcello empire, it was gambling, fear, and real estate that was the backbone of it.