Every day at Charlie Binaggio's First District Democratic Club on Truman Road in Kansas City, boon seekers ran a gauntlet of stony-faced hoodlums, sought their favors of the gimlet-eyed man sitting beneath the bare light bulb behind the bare desk. Charlie was a political big-shot in Jackson County, President Truman's home county. He had 30,000 votes in his pocket. He boasted that he controlled 40 state legislators, that he had elected Governor Forrest Smith. But Charlie Binaggio, who looked deceptively like a mild and prosperous chiropodist, made a mistake which is as fatal in politics as it is in the underworld—he overestimated himself.
Bums & Gandy-Dancers. Charles Binaggio started modestly enough, in the Kansas City underworld nurtured by the late Boss Tom Pendergast. The storm that swept old Tom into prison passed him by, and he was arrested only occasionally on gambling and bootlegging charges. He took over the heavily Italian First Ward with its flophouse bums, indigents, and gandy-dancers, slowly began building back the lopsided majorities of Pendergast days. He took cuts on gambling, used his "influence" to sell Canadian Ace Beer, a brew produced by prosperous relicts of the old Capone syndicate in Chicago. He bought a handsome house in Kansas City's Country Club section, began to cultivate rosebushes and an air of respectability.
By 1946, when Harry Truman ordered the purge of Representative Roger Slaughter, Binaggio was able to deliver the votes in good oldtime style. There was some unpleasantness when a grand jury indicted 67 Binaggio helpers for vote fraud, but that was taken care of: someone blew open the election board's safe and made off with the incriminating poll books.
Join—or Else. Gangland murders increased, rival racketeers died untidily, and Charlie prospered. Binaggio decided he was big enough to take on Tom Pendergast's nephew Jim, the titular Democratic boss of Kansas City. In the 1948 primary, Binaggio's candidates beat Pendergast's for every county office.
Success went to Binaggio's head. He went to bigger men than he in the underworld, promised that if his man Forrest Smith was elected governor, the state would be thrown wide open to gambling, slots and betting. All Charlie wanted was $100,000 or so for the campaign. He got it. Said Jim Pendergast: "My God, how he spent that money. He was paying-as high as $50 for some of the boarding houses we used to get for $10."
Smith got elected; Charlie Binaggio swaggered around the state capital at Jefferson City, dropped in casually to see the governor. At the big Kansas City dinner for Democratic Chairman Bill Boyle, Binaggio planted himself right in front of the President of the U.S., sat cheek by jowl with such notables as Attorney General Howard McGrath and Secretary of the Air Force Stuart Symington.