Blaring in the background at the pizzeria, adding an ironic soundtrack to this underworld setting in a town ripped by targeted Mob explosions and shooting deaths, was the Bee Gees’ disco song “Stayin’ Alive.” (“Feel the city breakin’ and everybody shakin’…”) Kansas City Mafia boss Nick Civella lived in this house in a subdivision once described as “the Mob neighborhood.” Courtesy of Larry Henry Hoping to learn about late-1970s warring Mob factions in this Missouri city on the Kansas border, authorities instead uncovered a bombshell: Kansas City’s Civella crime family illegally controlled a money pipeline originating from inside the Las Vegas Strip’s Tropicana hotel-casino.
In reality, the bug was planted at a dinner table with bench seats in a now-demolished Kansas City pizzeria, the Villa Capri. In the 1995 movie Casino, the Mob’s control of skimming at Las Vegas casinos is exposed when authorities learn about it from a surveillance microphone in a Kansas City grocery store.
O’Malley, William Ouseley and Gary Jenkins at the Kansas City Mafia Film Festival on November 24, 2018.
