This section holds the Kansas City records filed so far, grouped by event. Each statement below comes from the record linked beside it. Descriptions of living or dead persons that come from police lists, informants or committee counsel are quoted as such and are not findings.
Union Station, 17 June 1933
The FBI’s history essay states that officers escorting the federal prisoner Frank Nash reached a car “parked directly in front of the east entrance of Union Station,” where gunmen opened fire, killing two Kansas City police officers, an FBI agent, a McAlester, Oklahoma police chief and Nash. The FBI says its investigation identified Vernon C. Miller, Adam C. Richetti and Charles Arthur “Pretty Boy” Floyd. The essay does not connect the shooting to a crime family, and neither does this page.
The Bureau’s file, 62-28915, is filed as Part 01, whose page 22 records the first telephone report of the shooting, and Part 02, whose page 23 shows Floyd’s name among the subjects of identification orders three days later; the Vault’s single Floyd file holds the Bureau’s display page. The federal court papers are in the National Archives: the Richetti indictment naming Richetti, Floyd and Miller in a conspiracy concerning Nash’s custody, a praecipe in a second file, and the Galatas conspiracy file, whose first page is a Leavenworth form. The Alcatraz notebook pages for Galatas and Mulloy give the prison committee’s 1936 reasons for transferring them. The FBI’s display photograph of Nash is held by the National Archives. Library of Congress views of the building as it stood before 1930 are here, here and here; they do not show the 1933 events.
Racketeering in 1928
A 1928 Associated Press item reports Jackson County indictments over bombings and sluggings “laid to labor trouble.” It names no figure of the later period and is context only.
Pendergast, 1939 to 1943
Judge Otis’s 1939 memorandum describes Thomas J. Pendergast as a private citizen who had “exercised a dominating influence in city, county and state politics for a quarter of a century,” and records his guilty plea to attempted income-tax evasion and his sentence of 22 May 1939. The later contempt proceedings are in the 1940 ruling and the 1941 judgment; the Supreme Court reversed the contempt convictions on limitations grounds in 1943.
The Kefauver Committee in Kansas City, 1950
Sessions of 28, 29 and 30 September 1950 were held in courtroom No. 1 of the United States Courthouse. The printed volumes are Part 4 and Part 4-A. The filed passages are a Kansas City police list of unsolved killings (Exhibit 20), which places Nick Civella with a victim in 1946 and records that Charles Binaggio and Charles Gargotta were “found shot to death in political club at 718 Truman Road” on 5 April 1950; a Treasury narcotics agent’s testimony calling John Lazia “the leader or czar of the underworld,” which rests on informants; Anthony Gizzo agreeing with counsel’s description of Lazia; the police commissioner’s account of two 1949 meetings with Binaggio; the former sheriff’s testimony; and McKissick’s answer giving the club’s address as 716 and 718 East Fifteenth Street, “now known as Truman Road.” The committee’s charts of alleged Mafia membership were not read; they are allegations.
The Tropicana, Stardust and Fremont skims
United States v. DeLuna (8th Cir. 1985) affirmed the convictions of Carl DeLuna, Carl Civella and three others in the Western District of Missouri and recounts testimony that skimmed money from the Tropicana in Las Vegas was carried to Kansas City, where FBI agents seized $80,000 on 14 February 1979; it says “Defendant Nick Civella died before trial.” Nick Civella appears in the 1981 bribery-conspiracy appeal and in a 1981 tax appeal by a relative. The 1985 double-jeopardy opinion links the Tropicana indictment to the later one, and Cerone (1987) and the 1986 bail opinion concern the Stardust and Fremont case. A volume of the 1985 trial transcript is in the National Archives; its pages read do not name the casinos. The opinions name the Western District of Missouri and not always the trial city, so this page does not name one.
Not filed yet
The Truman Library’s photographs of Pendergast and Union Station, the HABS documentation of the station, and newspaper reports of the 1934 and 1950 shootings are not filed: the first are restricted or of unconfirmed rights, the second is qualified, and the newspaper pages are post-1930 issues not yet cleared. The Missouri state records of Richetti’s trial and the rest of the Alcatraz and docket files were not read.
