Sinners' Friend

The 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.

But at Binaggio's funeral, before the cortege departed for St. Mary's Cemetery, something more needed saying. The Rev. Raymond Jackson, vice-chancellor of the Kansas City Roman Catholic Diocese, stepped forward and read an official statement to set Catholics and non-Catholics straight on why his church had seen fit to give a Christian burial to a notorious hoodlum:

"Among those designated by the law of the church as unworthy of ecclesiastical burial are all public and evident sinners. But the church decrees that each case be studied carefully for the slightest circumstance which can be interpreted in favor of the sinner. To condemn this merciful outlook is to misunderstand the entire gospel of Christ. With the hatred of the Lord Jesus Himself the church hates sin, but with His own compassion she stands, as long as there is the slightest foothold, between the sinner and the terrible consequences of his sin. If this means that she will be called the friend of sinners, she does not forget that the same charge was hurled at her Master.

"The doubt in favor of the deceased whom we bury stems from the fact that recently he was seen receiving the sacraments and attending Sunday Mass . . .

"As Catholics we abominate and we condemn syndicated crime and vice. It is as despicable as it is evil. We condemn the underworld and all its barbarous and cowardly ways. But we condemn also the overworld--liquor executives, public officials . . . and the like who, though able to retain the aura of respectability, sacrifice every decent principle for their own contemptible and selfish ends."

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