Southern fried Mafia: the story of Chicken Louie

The story of Dallas gangster “Chicken Louie” Ferrantello is a southern gothic portrait of the Sicilian Mafia. 

The South has been alive with organized crime for longer than any of those Yankee cities you usually read about. The Mafia would have to fight for its share from among smugglers, gamblers, thieves, and murderers of every ethnic background who’d populated New Orleans since long before the Italians got there. Immigrants from southern Italy, some of them mafiosi and the ancestors of future American gangsters, passed through the port town on their way to the sugar plantations and mills. Following the coastline west, travelers found cattle country, like the interior of Sicily, and settled in ethnic enclaves like Bryan, Texas, outside Houston. Where rivers, rails, and roads intersected, they made cities. If you drew a line from Houston, north, and one from Shreveport, going west, the lines would meet in Dallas.

Louis Ferrantello was born in sugar cane country, in Schriever, Louisiana, in 1918. Both his parents were from Corleone, where Louis’ maternal grandfather was a rural guard: a profession closely associated with the Mafia in Sicily. His father, Liborio, emigrated as a teenager with his mother in 1891. Louis’ mother, Caterina, came from Corleone two years later with a sister. Liborio owned a grocery store: the kind of family-owned business that was so popular with new Italian immigrants, but in particular, with Italian gangsters, who liked having their own businesses as fronts for their illegal side hustles. Future Mafia bosses Carlo and Joe Piranio were both in Dallas by the 1910 census: in the grocery trade, like Liborio Ferrantello.

 The Mafia in Dallas was active by the eve of Prohibition, founded by the elder brother, Carlo Piranio, who also came from Corleone by way of Louisiana. Schriever, where the Ferrantello family first lived upon emigration, is just outside New Orleans. Many Corleonesi immigrants found their twisting way north, up the Mississippi River through sugar cane country to Baton Rouge, or into Louisiana’s vast interior, five times the size of Sicily, to do agricultural labor. Shreveport, some 300 miles north-northwest of New Orleans, was like Corleone in that it was a transportation nexus in the interior of a country with a lot of shoreline. Shreveport linked the only overland east-west route to Texas with the Red River, which emptied into the Gulf of Mexico.

The Piranio and Ferrantello families are distantly related: Louie and the Piranio brothers are third cousins, twice removed, with multiple common ancestors. Despite their distance in Louisiana, they certainly knew each other from Corleone, and the Piranios may have even invited the Ferrantellos to join them in Dallas. Joe Zabbia, another early member of the Dallas crime family originally from Corleone, moved to the city in 1927 from Chicago, where he was working as a hod carrier: another profession, particularly in Chicago, with connections to organized crime. 

The Ferrantello family moved to Dallas, Texas, around 1928. Liborio continued to work as a grocer, while the Piranio brothers had expanded into real estate, a tobacconist’s shop, and fencing stolen war bonds. 

In February 1930, Carlo Piranio died from cancer of the spine, leaving the Dallas crime family to his brother. Joe Zabbia died that November from rectal cancer, and later that month, Liborio Ferrantello died from a ruptured ulcer. 

After the death of their father, Louis Ferrantello and his siblings supported their family by starting a company, the Texas Poultry and Egg Co., that earned Louis the nickname “Chicken Louie” among his associates in the Dallas Mafia. In addition to the poultry business, Ferrantello was a nightclub owner and a bookmaker. He served in World War II, married Miss Dorothy McCully, and had one child, a son. 

In the early 1950s, he was under investigation for his ties to organized crime and gambling. Joseph Civello, who succeeded Joseph Piranio upon his death in 1956, ran gambling operations. In a surprise raid on Civello, Chicken Louie and two other men were arrested. Ferrantello pleaded the fifth before the legislative committee over one hundred times. There was insufficient evidence to incriminate him, so he was cited for contempt, and sentenced to a year in prison and a $1,000 fine. (He appealed, and lost.)

After his release from prison in 1954, Ferrantello divorced his wife so that she could live a “normal” life. He claimed to be “going straight” after his prison term, but Ferrantello still owned a gambling venue in Arlington, Texas, when he died.

Two years later, Ferrantello was killed by his pregnant girlfriend. Twenty-four-year old Betty Louise Barry came to his office in Antony’s Lounge, in the Lakewood section of North Dallas, to tell him that she was pregnant. She brought a gun, and threatened to kill herself if he wouldn’t marry her. The two struggled, with Ferrantello trying to prevent Miss Barry from shooting herself. According to her later testimony, she just “couldn’t stop firing.” She was struck in the knee, but Louis was fatally wounded. He was pronounced dead on arrival at Parkland Memorial Hospital on 17 July 1956. Although Barry admitted to shooting him, she swore it was accidental.

Three months after his death, Louie Ferrantello’s former wife, Mary Dorothy McCully, was found murdered in Pasadena, California. (Later that month, Joe Piranio died from suicide, grief-stricken at the sudden loss of his wife in February, he’d become reclusive in the ensuing months.) An investigation into McCully’s death led directly back to her late husband and his criminal associates.

McCully’s boyfriend claimed that Louie’s associates made frequent visits to her apartment, where safe cracking tools were found after her death. These clues linked a Texas safe burglary ring, suspected of robbing a California hotel, with McCully. Authorities believed that her apartment was used as a headquarters for the crime. The investigation led to Dallas safecracker Nick Cascio, “the thief you could trust.” 

The self-described “self-employed speculator” was quoted by the press, explaining his profession this way: “I’m always speculating whether a safe is going to have any money in it or not.” Nick, whose criminal career was well documented in the press, was a “dapper,” “swarthy” thief, and a man of his word: rare in his profession. He was also a former lieutenant in the Lois Green gang of Dallas. Green was a powerful Dallas racketeer in the 1920-30s, and the largest of at least three serious competitors to the Piranio Family’s primacy in Dallas, before his assassination in 1949. Nick Cascio’s father was also a Dallas grocer, originally from Cefalù, a coastal town east of Palermo: the same place the Maceo brothers, also gang leaders in Dallas, were from. (Nick and his family are of no relation to the Piranio brothers, who have half-siblings named Cascio.)

Although Dorothy McCully’s gangster ex-husband said he wanted her to enjoy a “normal” life, she was not on track for that goal. In addition to letting her ex and his friends stash their tools in her home, McCully’s new boyfriend was also her boss. Walter G. Borchers, an insurance agent with money trouble, claimed that Louie’s associates made frequent visits to his secretary/girlfriend’s apartment, and that fear of them drove him to hire a private detective to spy on Dorothy, take out an insurance policy on himself, and name her as the beneficiary. 

That kind of controlling behavior never ends well. Like Ferrantello and Barry in the end, Borchers and McCully struggled over a gun. Unlike Barry, Borchers’ killing was not an accident. Walter and Dorothy were arguing in his car, when he shot her. He then hit her over the head, killing her. Dorothy was 31. Borchers drove around with her body in the trunk for the next 36 hours.

 

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