a loss facilitated by the immense profits he garnered from payoffs, kickbacks, bribes, and other bounties of graft. Because of his mismanagement, Kansas City had the greatest per capita deficit ever accumulated by a U.S. municipality. He routinely deployed thugs at electoral polls to guarantee results. His crew included plug-uglies, ruffians, and ex-convicts who would beat senseless any who complained. He thus had a unique tie to the underworld, yet Senator Truman assailed his prosecutors from the floor of Congress.6
This rationalization occurred, although threats, violence, and bombings accompanied Negro attempts to escape neighborhoods where they were consigned. Red-light districts favorable to brothels were sited routinely in Negro neighborhoods too, and then grew exponentially during the Pendergast reign since his machine skimmed a percentage of their profits. Pendergast and his comrade Johnny Lazia installed other forms of vice in Negro vicinities. Naturally police were far more draconian in confronting Negro-operated vice, as opposed to other varieties. There was a harbinger of the post-1932 shift of the Negro vote nationally from the Republicans to the Democrats: in brief, this shift was evident as early as 1925 in Kansas City. Ellis Burton and Felix Payne, Negro gamblers and nightclub owners, were in the vanguard of this epochal transition. However, this didn’t bar the 1929 kidnapping of Payne by his alleged “’business partners” with the order to produce $20,000 cash. The unseemly Burton was accused of hiring a thug to assault an organizer for the predominantly Negro union, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Bandleader Benny Moten, according to instrumentalist “Hot Lips” Page, was tied directly to Pendergast.7 Pendergast formed an alliance with Felix Payne, local Negro powerbroker, who was co-owner of the Kansas City Giants, a Negro baseball team. He also initiated a Negro newspaper and, like Pendergast, was close to Moten. However, when Pendergast fell, so did this periodical, along with clubs that employed the likes of Moten.8
But Moten and other Negro musicians did not have many choices. Not only did the local philharmonic orchestra refuse adamantly to hire these artists but also barred them from attending concerts. However, at Western University, the “Tuskegee Institute of the Midwest,” across the river in Kansas City, Kansas, Negro artists found a niche and were educated in the intricacies of music, and this trickled down to public elementary and high schools and into the wider community. As early as the 1920s, Negro elementary school teachers introduced into the curriculum of their schools the history of African Americans in music.9
Even after being placed on probation in the aftermath of a criminal conviction. Pendergast violated the terms of this status by aiding Senator Truman’s political campaigns. In fact, his nephew, Jimmy Pendergast, directed the successful attempt to win the Democratic nod for the future president.10 It was not just Truman who sought Pendergast’s favors, according to officialdom. Despite being described as a “political boss” by the authorities, governors, judges, and the like were “craving” an “audience and favors” from him. His influence over the “ready mixed concrete” market provided him with further reach in this boomtown. “Vote fraud investigations and prosecutions” dogged him.11
But as powerful as Pendergast was, in some ways he played second fiddle and deferred to Johnny Lazia, the top mobster in Kansas City. Born in 1897, he was jailed in 1916 on charges of highway robbery, but then received an early release from a Pendergast-connected lieutenant governor. One of his early ventures was forcing stores to carry his soft drinks. He claimed to control 7,500 votes of fellow Italian Americans.12 These voters, it was thought, were not necessarily progressive. As African Americans moved into neighborhoods favored by these relatively recent immigrants, they were said to have “turned with fury” on the newcomers, as “homes of Negroes were dynamited.”13
Lazia was part of a wider influx from Sicily that arrived in the Midwest in the late nineteenth century. Many had arrived in New Orleans, then fled north for various reasons, one factor being the lynching of the 1890s (suggesting that the lack of a direct river tie between the two cities did not bar connection). Many worked in the packing houses and rail yards of the Midwest. Many fell under the influence of “Brother John”—Lazia—and his burly bodyguard, Charles Carrollo. They effectuated an entente with their Irish and Irish-American competitors, on the higher altar of “whiteness.”14 In other words, by the beginning of the new century, many of the clubs in New Orleans were owned by Sicilian immigrants and tied to organized crime, but rampant bias drove many away to more favorable climes in Missouri and Illinois.15
Pendergast was receiving tens of thousands of dollars regularly from dog races, a good deal of which was poured into his incessant gambling, particularly on horseracing. Testifying against him, New Orleans’ Arthur Slavin, a nightclub owner in Kansas City with ties to the Cuban Gardens, spoke almost enviously about one of Lazia’s clubs: it “had a dance floor and dining room one side and a casino on the other side for gambling. Dice games, card games”—and more. Local banks were among Lazia’s boosters, he said; they were eager to handle his cashier’s checks. At one point, Lazia had an accident crossing a bridge and the result was that his eyes were affected, causing furious blinking and twitching. His spouse, Marie Lazia, says her husband “nearly lost his eye; he was ill for a long time” too, leading to “three operations.” By 1929, “he was not up at all,” virtually recumbent. He had developed glaucoma. Cuban Gardens opened on September 15, 1929, but Lazia was not in the mood to enjoy the festivities: “I had to wear a bandage on my right eye all through the year 1929,” he told the court and “it made me nervous” since “my eye was inflamed….” It was “terrible, torture, terrible pain,” he said, speaking in early 1934. Lazia’s bodyguard Carrollo, a felon but president of North Side Finance Company, was also an investor in Cuban Gardens. His alias was “Charlie the Wop” and along with Lazia he too was indicted for violating laws on prohibition of alcohol.16
In the courtroom, Lazia’s jaws and teeth rhythmically chomped on a wad of gum while he kept blinking, his weak eyes barely glimpsed through his thick spectacles. Previously it had been observed that Lazia was frequently in and out of the office of Eugene C. Reppert, the local police chief.17 It was Pendergast who appealed to White House honcho James Farley for assistance in settling the income tax charges faced by Lazia.18
In early July 1934, shortly before dawn, Lazia, a power in the Democratic Party political machine, was struck with a hail of machine gun bullets. Before expiring, he said breathlessly, “If anything happens,” call Pendergast, “my best friend, and tell him I love him.” Presumably, Lazia’s attempt to elbow his way into the beer business contributed to his demise. Lazia and his fellow corrupt politicos had been receiving payoffs from increasingly restive owners of beer parlors and night club proprietors. The funeral procession for Lazia extended for several miles, an indication of the overwhelming majorities at the polls he helped to deliver to Pendergast.19
At the zenith, there were about 250 clubs performing the new music in Kansas City. After Lazia’s murder, scrutiny of these enterprises intensified, to their detriment. Musicians were not oblivious to or protected from this gunplay. After Lazia’s death, Jesse Price and his bandmates were ordered into a large automobile by armed gangsters and driven to a lonely spot on Cliff Drive overlooking the city. There the mobsters impressed upon them the naked power wielded by nightclub operators, hammering home the utter seriousness of their anti-union policies, meaning, of course, that musicians better not complain about poor pay levels.20
AS SO FREQUENTLY HAPPENS AMONG the U.S. right wing in their perpetual quest to dilute the potency of Negrophobia, a myth developed suggesting that Irish Americans too faced rampant bias, not unlike that which ensnared Negroes, up to and including signs stating, “No Irish Need Apply”; as an attempt to dilute the poisonousness of white supremacy, this was an urban myth of victimization in that, as one analyst put it, “the names of local politicians read like the roster of a unit in the Irish Republican Army.” The Scotch-Irish Truman was among those favored, as suggested by his moniker: the “Senator from Pendergast.” Appropriately, the outlaw Frank James, brother of the more renowned Jesse, ended his life as a bouncer and floorwalker
