MISSOURI: Murder on Truman Road

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Or Money Back. But Charlie had miscalculated. He got little patronage from the new governor, none at all from Harry Truman. A bill to legalize horse-race betting was laughed out of the legislature. Police raids on gambling joints continued. The President, annoyed that a noisome character like Binaggio should shunt aside his good friend Jim Pendergast, loosed a swarm of FBI men on him. A grand jury began investigating Binaggio and Kansas City crime. What was worse, the racketeers became insistent: an open city or their $100,000 back.

Charlie Binaggio got jumpy and snappish; he announced plaintively that he wished to God he could get out of politics and retire.

Last Chance. One night after dinner last week, Charlie Binaggio had his bodyguard Nick Penna drive him over to the Last Chance Tavern, a gambling joint which straddles the Missouri-Kansas line so that when the heat is on in one state, the dice tables can be shoved over into the other. There he met Charlie Gargotta, a gunman who was his chief "enforcer." Soon they left. Penna got up to go along. "You don't need to. come, Nick," said Binaggio. "We'll be'back in 15 or 20 minutes."

At 4 o'clock next morning, a cabbie left his cab near the First District Democratic Club to get a bite to eat. He heard water dripping inside the darkened club and called a cop. Just inside the door, they stumbled over Gargotta's body. He had clawed at the Venetian blind as he fell. Slumped in a chair at the desk, facing a big picture of Harry Truman, lay Charlie Binaggio. Someone had put a pistol close to his head, and fired four times. The water, coming from a clogged toilet in the hotel above, dripped on the bare floor.

Charlie Binaggio, smalltime hood and over-optimistic politician, had paid the price of ineptness.