The Mafia Chronicles: Casino Skim Revealed At Kansas City’s Marlo House

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By Larry Henry

One of the most important houses in U.S. Mob history is on a quiet suburban street north of downtown Kansas City across the Missouri River.

Known as the Marlo House, this single-story residence is where Las Vegas casino executive Carl Thomas, unaware that federal authorities had bugged the home, revealed in detail how to skim money from a casino. You can view a video I recently shot of the residence by clicking here.

On Nov. 26, 1978, a few days after Thanksgiving, Thomas and Joe Agosto, two Mob-controlled insiders at the Tropicana hotel-casino in Las Vegas, met in Kansas City with crime boss Nick Civella and his top lieutenants at the home of Josephine Marlo, a Civella relative.

The house is in Filumena Acres, a decades-old residential area of tidy lawns and weathered wooden privacy fences. Civella and many of his family members and associates lived in the neighborhood. Cutting through back yards, Civella walked to the Marlo-house Mob meeting from his own nearby residence, shown here in a video I shot last year. 

In the Marlo House, Thomas explained how skimming works inside a casino and bragged about his skimming exploits.

The surveillance audio recorded inside the house, along with other wiretap recordings elsewhere of mobsters discussing the skim, mushroomed into further investigations at several Las Vegas casinos and resulted in the convictions of Mob bosses in Kansas City and other metropolitan areas in the Midwest.

Skimming is the term for profits illegally removed from a casino before the money is taxed.

Underworld figures lined their pockets for decades with cash skimmed from Las Vegas casinos. They were able to pull this off by placing their associates in key casino positions in return for securing Teamsters union pension loans for casino construction and growth. Mobsters controlled the union officials who decided on pension loans. The skim at the Tropicana brought in as much as $80,000 a month for Civella and other Midwestern Mob families.

For detailed information on what transpired inside the Marlo house, visit ganglandwire.com. The site is operated by Gary Jenkins, an attorney and former Kansas City detective active on the police force during the Civella years. He now is a Mob historian. Jenkins’ 2016 book, “Leaving Vegas,” explores the Las Vegas-Kansas City skimming connection in-depth, as does William Ouseley’s 2011 book “Mobsters in Our Midst: The Kansas City Crime Family.” Ouseley is the former FBI Organized Crime Squad supervisor in Kansas City.

Not many years after the meeting at the Marlo House, Civella and Agosto would be dead.

CIvella died in 1983 of lung cancer at age 70, still under indictment for casino skimming. He had been serving a sentence for conspiring to bribe a prison warden to transfer a relative to a minimum-security facility but was paroled from a federal prison medial center in Springfield, Missouri, to return home for private medical care and to “die in dignity,” according to a published account.

Agosto also died in 1983. Shortly after testifying for the government in the Tropicana case, while in federal custody in a Kansas City-area hospital, he died at age 61 of an apparent heart attack.

Thomas, once thought to be an upstanding member of the Las Vegas business community before being convicted of skimming, became a government witness in another skimming trial and was released early from prison. He died alone in a single-vehicle roll over 11 miles south of Frenchglen, Oregon, in 1993. He was 60.

Larry Henry’s YouTube channel includes videos he shot of mob sites in Las Vegas, the apartment building in Santa Monica, California, where Whitey Bulger was arrested, and the remote Arkansas airport where Barry Seal transported drugs into the U.S for the Medellin Cartel. Subscribe HERE.

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