re: How Powerful was Carlos Marcello?

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How did no one mention Mosca's as a favorite hangout?

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John Mosca, whose family opened a roadhouse outside New Orleans in 1946, doesn’t like change. Actually, New Orleans itself resists change—an attitude that is widely thought of as both part of its glory and one of its problems. When people talk about change in New Orleans, it’s often to explain how they’re doing their best to avoid it. A headline in the New Orleans Times-Picayune not long ago about the sale of a bar known for its po’ boy sandwiches read “new parasol’s owners promise minimal changes for the legendary bar and restaurant.”

I’m not much on change myself, particularly when I’m in New Orleans. The city has some remarkable restaurants of recent vintage, for instance, but when I’m back in town I gravitate toward places like Casamento’s, a seafood café on Magazine Street that has been around since 1919. It’s comforting to find Casamento’s virtually unchanged from when I first walked in, decades ago—two simple rooms all done in tiles, so that sitting down to eat one of the renowned oyster loaves is sometimes compared to having lunch in a drained swimming pool. The Napoleon House bar, at St. Louis and Chartres, looks pretty much the way it looked when I visited New Orleans back in high school. So does Galatoire’s, whose interior resembles a large and unusually elegant barbershop. Yes, Galatoire’s now has an additional dining room and a bar on the second floor, but I make it a point not to go up there.

From Highway 90, which runs through what people in New Orleans call the West Bank (the side of the Mississippi River that someone studying a map would be tempted to call south of the city), Mosca’s looks roughly the same as it did in 1946, around the time John Mosca came back from the war in Europe—a small white clapboard building on a deserted stretch of a double-lane highway thirty or forty minutes from the center of the city. When John’s father, Provino Mosca, who had previously operated a restaurant in Chicago Heights, Illinois, opened for business that year, he moved his family into a few rooms in the back. The area around Mosca’s is still deserted. My friend James Edmunds, who lives in New Iberia, Louisiana, about a hundred and thirty miles to the west, says, “It always had the feel of a neighborhood restaurant, except there was no neighborhood.”

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Mafia chieftain Carlos Marcello was still alive and very much kicking, and could be found several nights a week holding court at Mosca's, the best restaurant in the whole world. Across the Huey Long Bridge and 20 miles from the Quarter, Mosca's was straight out of "The Godfather," an old family business with Mama in the kitchen and her boys out front, serving up baked oysters with garlic and masses of pasta and shrimp to the local power brokers.

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