Word: gargotta
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Dates: during 1950-1950
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...Kansas City the motive for last month's assassination of Mobster Charles Gargotta was made a little clearer: Gargotta had squealed. Hauled before the federal grand jury in February, he had implicated partners and associates in Kansas City's sleazy underworld. After him, gamblers, saloonkeepers, triggermen and politicians had paraded before the jury spilling all-or almost all-they knew. An enraged underworld, apparently, had decided that it must rub out Witness Gargotta, had forthwith shot him down along with his partner, Political Boss Charles Binaggio, in the First District Democratic Club on Truman Road. The grand jury...
...Binaggio-Gargotta gang, a potent force in Jackson County's corrupt Democratic political machine, had also operated, said the grand jury, a Kansas City gambling ring which had grossed as much as $34,500,000 a year. Its gambling enterprises included dice and card games ($19 million), numbers racket ($3,500,000), bookmaking on horse racing, baseball, football ($12 million). Among the Binaggio-Gargotta partners in the biggest crap game in Kansas City, said the grand jury, were Jackson County's Superintendent of Buildings Robert S. Greene, at week's end still on the job, and Assistant...
...boys lay in state in true gangster tradition. Undertaker Pete Lapetina supplied two solid copper 900-lb. caskets that cost $1,500 apiece. The crowd that came to see the mortal remains of Kansas City's murdered Northside boss, Charley Binaggio, and his gun-toting henchman, Charles Gargotta, was bigger than the funeral home's large "chapel" could accommodate. Each body was laid to rest with a Requiem Mass...
...week, Charlie Binaggio had his bodyguard Nick Penna drive him over to the Last Chance Tavern, a gambling joint which straddles the Missouri-Kansas line so that when the heat is on in one state, the dice tables can be shoved over into the other. There he met Charlie Gargotta, a gunman who was his chief "enforcer." Soon they left. Penna got up to go along. "You don't need to. come, Nick," said Binaggio. "We'll be'back in 15 or 20 minutes...
...clock next morning, a cabbie left his cab near the First District Democratic Club to get a bite to eat. He heard water dripping inside the darkened club and called a cop. Just inside the door, they stumbled over Gargotta's body. He had clawed at the Venetian blind as he fell. Slumped in a chair at the desk, facing a big picture of Harry Truman, lay Charlie Binaggio. Someone had put a pistol close to his head, and fired four times. The water, coming from a clogged toilet in the hotel above, dripped on the bare floor...