Guess Who’s Flipping on Trump Right Now?

The guy pictured above, Carlo Marcello, was the head of the New Orleans Mafia for more than thirty years until he was convicted of various offenses in 1981. He then went on an all-expenses paid vacation courtesy of the United States Bureau of Prisons, and then settled down to a quiet, retired existence until he died in 1989.

Marcello was one of a bunch of gangsters who were suspected of having in some way been involved in the JFK assassination, in his case largely because his gang collected a payoff from Jack Ruby over the years, and obviously if you mention Ruby, you then have to tie him to Oswald and then the conspiracy goes on and on.

For me, the reason I have always found myself with a bit of positive feeling for Marcello, however, is because when he appeared in front of Kefauver’s Senate Committee which was holding hearings on organized crime, he took the 5th Amendment — ready? — 152 times!

How do you sit there and begin an answer to a question with the standard, ‘On the advice of counsel…’ 152 times? If that performance isn’t listed somewhere in the Guinness Book of Records, there’s something really wrong.

Over the past few years, there has been a lot of chatter about how Trump has been running a Mafia-like kind of operation, with frequent commentary about how he values loyalty above everything else. Here’s a commentary which appeared in The Hill, just two months before the 2020 election: “No administration has placed as high a value on loyalty as the current…