year-old Castellano under several indictments and likely facing a long imprisonment, it appeared that Bilotti would jump over Gotti.
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But, on December 16, 1985two weeks to the day after underboss Dellacroce diedCastellano and Bilotti stepped from a limousine on New York's East 46th Street near the Sparks Steak House, where they had reservations to dine with three unknown individuals. The three men who showed up on the sidewalk carried semi-automatic weapons under their trenchcoats and put six bullets each in Castellano and his protégé.
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For a time authorities believed the motive was to kill Castellano, and Bilotti had to go just because he was there. However, after a period of gleaning information from informers and through electronic eavesdropping, investigators concluded that the Gotti faction had marked Bilotti as a primary target.
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Bilotti, it was theorized, was not taken out first, according to custom, since it would alert both Castellano and the authorities. A protective ring would surround Castellano and make him harder to kill. Castellano and Bilotti had to go together.
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In the shifting eddies that mark Mafia power struggles, there are a few who make it to the top and some like Tommy Bilotti who are stopped just short.
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See also:
Castellano, Paul
.
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Binaggio, Charles (19091950): Kansas City political-criminal leader
The murder of Charley Binaggio, the political and criminal boss of Kansas City and real successor to Tom Pendergast, was arguably the most important killing in decades. Although the underworld itself might number many other homicidesthat of O'Banion, Rothstein, Masseria, Marazano, Schultz, Reles and Siegel, to name a fewas far more momentous, from the view of law and order, the April 6, 1950, killing of Binaggio and his "enforcer," Charley Gargotta, is paramount. Without those murders it is entirely possible that the famed Kefauver hearings might never have come about.
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Even Kansas City, which had seen almost everything during the heyday of the Pendergast Machine, was shocked. Binaggio, at age 41, was found dead, shot four times in the head and stretched out in a swivel chair at his headquarters at the First District Democratic Club. Gargotta, a vicious muscleman and killer, lay on the floor nearby, the same number of bullet wounds in his head. Looking down on the scene were large portraits of President Harry Truman and Governor Forrest Smith, a man for whose recent election Binaggio took much credit.
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The method of execution told much about Binaggio, who law enforcement men would speculate was an actual member of the Mafiaand if so, the highest ranked mafioso on any political ladder, a political boss on the brink of national importance.
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In death there could be no doubt he had been subjected to Mafia violence. The bullet wounds in the heads of both men were arranged in two straight rows, forming "two deuces." This is called Little Joe in dice parlance, and it has long been the mob's sign for a welsher. When used in a murder it indicates the mob not only did the job but also wanted everyone to know it. Clearly, Binaggio had welshed to the crime syndicate and he was paying for it.
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Binaggio was considered a political "comer," steeped in scandal perhaps, but likely to overcome such trivialities through the exercise of raw power. Born in Texas, Binaggio was a drifter with arrests in Denver for vagrancy and carrying a concealed weapon. He landed in Kansas City at 23 and joined the operations of North Side leader Johnny Lazia, probably through the sponsorship of mafioso Jim Balestrere. Lazia delivered the votes of the North Side to Democratic boss Pendergast and was in turn allowed to control all gambling, racing wires, liquor and vice in the area.
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Lazia was murdered in 1934 after he got into tax trouble and made signs of informing against the machine in exchange for gentle treatment. This left the way clear for Binaggio's climb up the criminal ladder. By the early 1940s, Binaggio had a lock on the North Side while the Pendergast machine was foundering.
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In 1946 President Truman ordered a purge of Congressman Roger C. Slaughter who was consistently voting against the administration. Truman called in Jim Pendergast, the late Tom's nephew successor, and ordered him to get the nomination for Enos Axtell. Slaughter was defeated but the
Kansas City Star
uncovered evidence of wholesale ballot fraud. In the ensuing investigations, a woman election watcher was shot to death on the porch of her home. And just before critical state hearings were scheduled to begin, the safe at City Hall went up in a huge dynamite blast that destroyed the fraudulent ballot evidence.
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Binaggio, everyone suspected but could not prove, was the brain behind both the ballot fraud and the City Hall bombing. As a result, only one minor hanger-on, Snags Klein, was punished with a short prison term for the crime.
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Now Binaggio was ready to make his move for supremacy against Jim Pendergast. Pendergast was nowhere near as astute as his late uncle and, by 1948, Kansas City, politically and criminally, belonged to Binaggio. However, Binaggio needed a political slush fund to wipe out the Pendergast forces and he appealed to Mafia crime families around the country for financial aid. Many responded, Chicago most generously. More
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