Nick Civella

Nicholas “Nick” Civella (born Giuseppe Nicoli Civella, 1912–1983) was the longest-serving boss of the Kansas City crime family, leading the organization from 1953 until his death in 1983.¹ A product of the city’s Italian Northeast, he extended the local mob’s reach far beyond Kansas City through the Teamsters’ Central States Pension Fund and the systematic “skim” of untaxed cash from Las Vegas casinos.¹² The FBI’s Kansas City–based “Strawman” investigation exposed that skim, producing convictions that broke the mob’s grip on Las Vegas and inspired the film Casino.²³

Biography

Early life

Civella was born March 19, 1912 in Kansas City, Missouri, to Italian immigrant parents, and was christened Giuseppe Nicoli Civella.¹ He grew up in the Italian “Northeast” neighborhood of Kansas City and began running afoul of the law as a child — reportedly first arrested at age 10, after which he dropped out of school.⁴ Before he turned 20 he had been arrested for auto theft, illegal gambling, robbery, and vagrancy, and in 1932 he served roughly two months for a bootlegging offense.⁴ He married a woman named Katherine in 1934; the couple had no children.¹

Rise to boss (1950s)

In the early 1940s Civella worked as a Democratic precinct worker on Kansas City’s North Side and became associated with then-boss Charles Binaggio.⁴ The leadership of the Kansas City organization had passed through several hands after the 1934 assassination of Johnny Lazia — through Charles Carrollo, then Binaggio (murdered April 6, 1950), then Anthony Gizzo.⁵ When Gizzo died of a heart attack in 1953, Civella assumed control of the family.¹⁵

Civella’s national standing was already on record: he had been named as an organized-crime figure during the U.S. Senate’s 1950 Kefauver hearings, and he attended the 1957 Apalachin meeting of Mafia bosses in New York.¹ He was later listed in the Nevada Gaming Commission’s “Black Book,” barring him from the state’s casinos.¹ As boss he expanded the family’s rackets and forged alliances with crime families in other cities.⁵

The Las Vegas skim and the Teamsters pension fund

Civella’s most consequential operation was his control of the “skim” — tens of thousands of dollars per month in untaxed gambling revenue diverted from Las Vegas casinos to the Kansas City family and allied Midwest mobs.² Through his relationship with Teamsters president Roy Lee Williams, Civella helped influence the union’s Central States Pension Fund, a major source of financing for Las Vegas casinos.¹

The Kansas City family’s primary Las Vegas asset was the Tropicana hotel-casino, where Joe Agosto, head of the casino’s entertainment division, and casino executive Carl Thomas managed the diversion of cash.⁵² FBI surveillance later captured Thomas explaining skimming techniques — including removing roughly $40,000 a week — to Civella-family leadership.² A parallel skim ran at the four Argent Corporation casinos (Stardust, Fremont, Marina, Hacienda), controlled by the Chicago Outfit under Joseph Aiuppa, exposing the multi-city coordination behind the operation.³

Strawman investigation and final years

Suspecting mob control of the Tropicana, the Kansas City office of the FBI launched Operation Strawman, a wiretap-driven investigation that ran roughly 1978–1983.³ Agents bugged Kansas City locations including the Villa Capri pizzeria (June 1978) and a private home where the skimming was discussed.² In 1981, a Kansas City grand jury indicted Agosto, Nick Civella, his brother Carl “Cork” Civella, family figure Carl “Tuffy” DeLuna, and Carl Thomas in the Tropicana skim conspiracy; the defendants were convicted in 1983.⁵³ A follow-up prosecution (“Strawman II”) aimed at the Argent skim led to a 1985 Kansas City trial that convicted Chicago Outfit figures including Joseph Aiuppa and Joseph “the Clown” Lombardo.³ The Strawman cases produced eighteen indictments and the conviction of fifteen defendants across the families involved.³

Civella’s own legal troubles spanned decades: a 1959 tax-evasion case, a 1977 illegal-gambling conviction tied to a wiretapped Super Bowl IV betting loss, and a 1980 conviction for attempting to bribe a prison official.¹ He had been imprisoned in the mid-1970s on the gambling charge, during which Carl DeLuna served as acting boss before his own imprisonment.⁵ In poor health, Civella was released from the Federal Medical Center in Springfield, Missouri, on medical grounds in February 1983.¹

Death (1983)

Civella died of lung cancer in Kansas City on March 12, 1983, days short of his 71st birthday.¹ His brother Carl “Cork” Civella succeeded him as boss.¹

Significance to Kansas City

Civella’s 30-year reign represents the mature, modern phase of organized crime in Kansas City — the direct successor lineage to the Pendergast-era machine politics and the gangland leadership of Johnny Lazia and Charles Binaggio.⁴⁵ His era is significant not for purely local crime but because Kansas City — through Civella’s Teamsters access and the Tropicana skim — became a control node in the national mob’s exploitation of Las Vegas.¹² Fittingly, it was the Kansas City FBI field office, not a Las Vegas or Chicago one, that built the Strawman case that ultimately ended mob ownership of the Strip’s casinos.³ The story was a primary real-world basis for Martin Scorsese’s 1995 film Casino.²

Contemporaries + associates

• johnny-lazia — earlier (1930s) Kansas City mob leader, part of the lineage Civella inherited
• charles-binaggio — 1940s boss + Civella’s early political-machine associate
• carl-tuffy-deluna — Civella-family figure + acting boss during Civella’s imprisonment; co-defendant in the Tropicana case
• Carl “Cork” Civella — Nick’s brother + successor as boss
• tom-pendergast — Pendergast-machine context for KC’s earlier organized-crime/political nexus

Sources

Footnotes

1. Wikipedia — “Nicholas Civella.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Civella ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹ ↩¹² ↩¹³

2. The Mob Museum — “The Kansas City connection” (blog). https://themobmuseum.org/blog/kansas-city-connection/ ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸

3. Las Vegas Review-Journal — “Mobbed Up podcast: Part 8 — Strawman.” https://www.reviewjournal.com/crime/mobbed-up-podcast-strawman-part-8-2066455/ ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷

4. KC History / Missouri Valley Special Collections, Kansas City Public Library — “Biography of Nick Civella (1912–1983), Crime Boss.” https://kchistory.org/document/biography-nick-civella-1912-1983-crime-boss ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴

5. Wikipedia — “Kansas City crime family.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kansas_City_crime_family ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷