"This Terrible Lawlessness"

Washington saw only the bland mask of racketeering. Its real face could be seen better last week in Kansas City, capital of the political machine that sent Harry Truman to Washington in 1934 as U.S. Senator.

In 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, somewhat flabbergasted at what it had learned, made public an interim report of its findings.

The 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 County Prosecutor Sam Hayden, who was promptly fired.

Former County Assessor George Clark, Binaggio's political ally, had carried on a tax-fixing racket, said the grand jury, which described it as "the most sordid and vicious situation existing in Jackson County." Tens of thousands of dollars were extorted by threatening to jack up the taxes of legitimate businessmen, or jacking them up and offering to lower them for a fee. "One arrogant racketeer, feeling that a prominent businessman had not been polite to him, had the businessman's real-estate assessment tripled." When the businessman apologized and let the racketeer open a charge account, "the original assessment was immediately restored."

After seven months of investigating, the grand jury of eleven men and ten women had decided that it could no longer delay in disclosing "this terrible lawlessness, this utter disregard of our state as well as our municipal laws." Missouri's Democratic Governor Forrest Smith, who appoints the board which controls Kansas City's police department, said in effect: Don't look at me; it all happened before my time.

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