Johnny Lazia

Johnny Lazia was a Kansas City racketeer whose power rested on a bargain with Tom Pendergast: loyalty in the Ninth Ward in return for control over liquor and gambling, and influence over police hiring. A small, dapper Italian-American with a master-of-ceremonies manner, Lazia combined underworld authority with a reputation for personal helpfulness. His rise, public usefulness, and violent death reveal how the Pendergast organization’s political relationships extended into the rackets—and how difficult it could be to separate local protection from criminal power.

Position in the Pendergast Organization

Lazia was one of Tom Pendergast’s acknowledged chief lieutenants. In 1926 he took control of Little Italy from Mike Ross, formerly Pendergast’s Ninth Ward leader. Pendergast accepted him into the organization largely because he had little choice, apparently on the understanding that Lazia would keep Al Capone and other out-of-town gangsters out of the city. The arrangement joined neighborhood authority to the larger machine: Lazia’s local following mattered to Pendergast, while the organization gave Lazia room to consolidate his position.

The terms of their alliance were concrete. In return for support in the Ninth Ward, Lazia was to control liquor and gambling in the city and have a say in police-department hiring. He allegedly maintained an office inside police headquarters; a federal agent investigating him reported that, when he called the department, Lazia answered the telephone. The reported incident captures the extent of his perceived reach, although it does not establish that he formally held a police post.

His authority belonged to a political system sustained by more than elections alone. The Pendergast organization maintained ward, precinct, and block leaders, and its precinct captains helped newcomers secure basic services. The machine also distributed food, clothing, coal, and medical attention to people in need, expecting gratitude at the polls in return. In a county where political loyalty was cultivated through direct contact and assistance, Lazia’s control of a ward was both an underworld position and a contribution to the organization’s electoral strength. That system could present reciprocal help as personal service even as it linked neighborhood support to political power and illegal activity.

Gambling, Rackets, and Local Influence

Lazia’s influence flourished in a city described as safe from ordinary street crime but permissive toward rackets. Respected citizens could privately regard this wide-open climate as good business, especially in hard times. Lazia, meanwhile, was a prominent figure in the city’s gambling world. By this period Pendergast himself had become a heavy horse-race gambler; at his office on 1908 Main, a direct wire connected him to eastern tracks, and betting cages operated at the rear of the clubroom. Across the Missouri River, in Platte County, Pendergast established the Riverside Park Jockey Club and kept a stable of horses. The evidence places Lazia within this wider gambling environment but does not specify that he ran these particular operations.

The political arrangement gave Lazia a degree of protection and influence, but it also made him a public symbol of the rackets. His connections to Pendergast were close enough that the organization’s fortunes and his own could not easily be disentangled. When federal investigators began proceedings against him for income-tax evasion in 1933, Pendergast immediately wrote to James A. Farley, then Postmaster General, emphasizing how important Lazia was to him. The appeal shows that Lazia was not a marginal associate: Pendergast treated his welfare as a matter worthy of intervention at the highest levels of his political network.

Rescue Work and Public Reputation

Lazia’s public identity was not limited to coercion or gambling. In 1931, when Nell Donnelly, the companion and later wife of former Senator James Reed, was kidnapped, Reed went directly to Lazia for help. Lazia brought her safely home. In 1933, Mary, the twenty-five-year-old daughter of City Manager McElroy, was kidnapped; Lazia again intervened, producing $30,000 in ransom money with striking speed by collecting it from gambling associates.

These episodes help explain why he could be remembered as a friend in need as well as a racketeer. The rescue of the two women depended on access to people and resources that ordinary civic channels apparently could not mobilize as quickly. Yet the same capacity that made Lazia useful also reflected his power outside formal institutions. His actions brought relief to individual families without dissolving the criminal and political networks on which that capacity depended.

His position also drew protest. In the spring of 1932, Rabbi Samuel S. Mayerberg spoke against the rackets before a government study club of about forty people, most of them women. Mayerberg later recalled that persuading respectable citizens to join the fight was harder than confronting the underworld itself. The account places Lazia’s influence in a civic climate where opposition existed but had not yet become a broad public movement.

The Union Station Massacre and Death

On June 17, 1933, gunmen attempting to free the handcuffed prisoner Frank Nash attacked law officers outside Union Station. The assault killed five men: two Kansas City police officers, an FBI agent, an Oklahoma police chief, and Nash. None of the three alleged attackers—Verne Miller, Adam Richetti, and Pretty Boy Floyd—was known to have ties to Kansas City. Later, however, the local racketeer Michael James LaCapra testified that Lazia had arranged to get them out of town. The allegation is presented as uncertain, not established fact, but it made Lazia the city’s most talked-about man, attracting even more public attention than Pendergast.

A few weeks later, during Harry S. Truman’s campaign for the U.S. Senate, violence struck Lazia himself. At 3:00 a.m. on Tuesday, July 10, two unknown assailants shot him eight times as he was about to open a car door for his wife in front of the Park Central Hotel. At the hospital, he asked why someone who had been a friend to everybody had been attacked. The account in the Kansas City Journal-Post reported that, anticipating what might happen, he asked that Pendergast be notified and described him as his best friend. The assailants’ identities and motive are not established in the evidence.

Pendergast and City Manager McElroy were among the mourners at Lazia’s funeral at Holy Rosary Catholic Church. Despite a temperature of 106 degrees, the funeral drew a crowd that Jim Pendergast estimated at more than ten thousand people outside the church, too many to get in. The turnout suggested a reach extending beyond the organization’s political ranks: some came from curiosity, but Lazia also had many friends. His death closed a life in which personal loyalty, political utility, public service, and underworld power had repeatedly occupied the same space.