One of the quieter Mafia borgatas to operate in the last 20 years has been the Kansas City Crime Family. But it wasn’t always that way.
Once upon a time, not that long ago, corrupt politics and gangsterism were rife throughout this city. Kansas City was a wide-open cesspool of blatant corruption and wanton gangland violence that shocked the entire city and the nation.
It was a bloody business model that the Kansas City Crime Family would repeat over and over through the years. This is their story.
Note: For even more insight into this crime family, please see Equal Parts “Smart, Savvy, and Deadly”: The Kansas City Outfit and The Nicholas Civella Family Leadership Chart.
Kansas City, Missouri, is the largest city in the entire state. It has a population of just under a half-million residents. The 2019 federal government census recorded 497,000 people, making Kansas City the 38th most populated city in the entire United States.
When Kansas City’s greater metropolitan area, which straddles the Kansas-Missouri state line, is included in the equation, the combined population is just shy of 2,500,000.
Italian immigration to the state of Missouri started in the early 1880s. Within less than two decades, by 1900, there was a sizable block of Italians mostly from Southern Italy and the Island of Sicily who had settled into the major urban cities of St. Louis and Kansas City.
Similar to other immigrant ethnicities, they were a very insular people who congregated close together forming their own neighborhoods for their mutual benefit that came to be called Little Italy’s and Little Sicily’s.
Along with these hard-working Italian immigrants came small bands of criminals who were lawless back in the old country and continued this lawlessness in their new homeland.
And because of the tremendous abject poverty and discrimination that these new immigrants faced in America, many of their now American-born young sons and nephews soon also took to crime as a way of life.
Dating to the years before Prohibition, back to the 1910s, there were many fledgling gangs of independent hoodlums and gangsters of varying ethnicities forming in Missouri.
This was especially true in big cities such as St. Louis and Kansas City. Some were independent bank robbers and heist men like Pretty Boy Floyd, who later became notorious names and even folk heroes to some.
