Suspended In Time

The room is quiet, musty and dimly lit. Long gone are the days when a half-dozen full-time employees spent their days cutting up The Star’s print edition and filing articles away in bright yellow envelopes labeled by subject or name or place. The Star is in the midst of a digitization project to scan the clippings, one that is slowly moving the analog world into the digital era.

But here, history is frozen. Reporters and editors call this room “the morgue” because it’s where stories go to die. But sometimes those stories wake up.

McGraw, now the special projects reporter with KCPT and its digital magazine, Flatland, was working for The Star two decades ago. He had walked up to the morgue to do research, when he noticed a librarian tossing files into a 50-gallon drum. He asked what she was doing, and she told him there was no room to keep them.

McGraw glanced at the table next to the drum and saw a stack of clearly very old and fragile reporters’ notes, photographs and files. This was a peek into the newsroom, a generation or two before him, an intimate record of how his predecessors had once worked the crime beat.

“I’ve always had an interest in The Star’s history,” McGraw said. “I predate the digital revolution.”

McGraw swooped up the papers and photos and beat a retreat back to the newsroom. He didn’t have a plan. He just didn’t want to see history destroyed. He asked his editor if he could keep the files, and they went into another cabinet next to his desk. When The Star pushed for a paperless newsroom in 2012, he brought them home and stuck them in another file cabinet.

McGraw never had a desire to keep the files private; he just wanted to rescue them. Then inspiration struck in another library.

It was late last year, when McGraw was researching another story in the Kansas City Public Library’s Missouri Valley Special Collections, that he realized the files would be at home among the maps, photos and documents that detail the fabric of Kansas City.

“It was important to me that these weren’t lost to time,” McGraw said. “The mug shots and office memos written by some of The Star’s most famous reporters should be preserved.”

Those reporters include Ira McCarty, a political and legislative reporter for The Star during the era of Charles Binaggio, Tony Gizzo and Nick Civella. His notes and letters to editors and others are found throughout the documents.

The team inside the Missouri Valley Special Collections believed this could provide an important addition to its files and photos documenting its history of the mafia in Kansas City. The files were delivered from McGraw late last year. The library staff has since been focused on archiving them.

Special Collections did not have a dedicated collection on the Kansas City mafia, so these files were the beginning of a new collection for the library detailing one of city’s most romanticized and violent eras.

Just as these files were in peril at The Star, many agencies looking to eliminate clutter often destroy history in the process. It’s the nature of our relationship with paper. We file it in a cabinet before we file it in a waste paper basket. That act of spring cleaning could threaten the information there is on crime families.

Since the information on mobsters is divided between police departments, the FBI, personal collections and newspapers like The Star, the story of organized crime in Kansas City is an unfinished puzzle. Consolidating the information in the Missouri Valley Special Collections could shed light on major players and minor players alike.

Many of the files in this collection are from 1950. While the photos, police reports and letters to editor were not kept in a discernible order, the variety of source material suggests that reporters were attempting to build files on individuals in the crime family.

The documents offer a “who’s who” in the Kansas City Mob of the mid-twentieth century, an “anything goes” era in the city’s criminal history. Murder. Gambling. Bribery. Election rigging. Labor racketeering. It was also a time when police departments were being forced to combat organized crime, not tolerate it.

Big names, like Charles Binaggio, are in the file. Binaggio became the boss of Kansas City in 1939. A major player in politics, Binaggio was eventually linked to voter fraud. That investigation nearly stalled after a safe containing evidence of the case was blown up.

On April 5, 1950, Binaggio and Charles Gargotta, his right hand man, were found dead in the First District Democratic Club. Gargotta and Binaggio had each been shot four times at close range. Investigators theorize that Gargotta may have been killed in his own assassination attempt of Binaggio. This would lead to a new, but short-lived, crime boss for the city: Tony Gizzo.

Gizzo was only at the head of Kansas City’s crime family for three years, but he served during a key period connecting two major bosses: Binaggio and Nick Civella. Gizzo was born in New York City, but made his way to Kansas City, where he befriended Binaggio. Gizzo led many gambling operations and held considerable political power on the city’s north side before he died in 1953.

Each document that arrives at The Kansas City Public Library’s Missouri Valley Special Collections is a new mystery. So when McGraw arrived with an armful of five folders from The Kansas City Star, senior archivist Kate Hill and manager Jeremy Drouin were curious about what was inside.“We don’t have organizational papers for the mafia. There are no minutes for the meetings,” Drouin said. “But here we had photos and reporters’ notes, information that would let researchers dig deeper into organized crime.”

The Missouri Valley Special Collections is on the fifth floor of the Kansas City Public Library’s central branch. Stacks of materials ring a series of tables, where researchers can pour over maps, photos and documents about local and regional churches, military conflicts and African American history.

“Our scope is as large as people’s interest in history,” Drouin said.

The size of each collection is just as varied. Donations range from a single book to 5,000 bankers’ boxes, but the intake process is the same. Archivists and library staff – there are five full-time and two part-time employees in the Special Collections department – examine potential collections after being contacted by a donor.

“We love to meet people with their collections when possible because we want to see what the creator of the files was thinking,” Hill said. “That thought process can inform the collection and provide the context for what we’re seeing.”

“Historically it would be marvelous to have this,” Ouseley said. “And if you start it, when I pass on, you’ll get all of my stuff, and you’ll have a hell of a collection.”When asked if Ouseley would really let Special Collections take all of his old notes, he laughs.

“Sure. What else am I going to do with it? My wife don’t want it.”

After the initial assessment, the staff determines if the library is able to accept the files. Some collections are too small or too large or in poor condition. The library may also already have a copy or extensive documents in that arena. Drouin
estimates they have a collection of more than 17,000 local postcards, an ocean of yearbooks (the Kansas City Public Library separated from the Kansas City Public School District in 1986), and more than a century of newspaper articles stored on
microfilm. On some occasions, another area historical society or library might also be a better fit based on the subject matter of the materials.

“We accept files on a case-by-case basis,” Hill said. “Even if we can’t accept a collection, we still want to make sure it’s saved and available to the public.”

Once a collection is accepted, an archivist will inventory the files. Archivists are assigned to a given project based on their expertise or availability. They’re trained to look for what Hill terms, “inherent vice,” the properties of a given document
that make preservation difficult.

“Newspaper degrades quickly and can do acidic damage to anything it comes in contact with,” Hill said. “Fingerprints and oils from hands can damage photos over time. We just want to get things chemically stable.”

In the case of the mob collection files, the newspaper clippings will be scanned. The originals will remain in the back room, while photocopies will be made available to researchers. The mug shots and photos will be encased in a plastic sleeve.
And a finding aide — a thorough description and explanation of how the files came to the library — will be created to let researchers understand the background of a collection and search the documents by name. While the collection will be available in hard copies at the library, the staff is still determining what can be placed online based on privacy or copyright issues.

The Special Collections staff has begun to find cross-references within their existing collections. There are mobsters referenced in The Star files, who also appear in a cache of several hundred photos from The Kansas City Journal-Post (a Star
rival that was published between 1928 and the 1940s).

The process of archiving files can take months to years. Drouin admits that this collection has been fast-tracked, in part because of this story, but also because the library has been contacted by several people interested in looking at them. He
expects to have the collection available to the public in April.

“They were a hidden collection of sorts,” Drouin said. “This could be the start of a whole organized crime collection. When the researchers come, that’s when it gets interesting.”

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