The Mafia Chronicles: Kansas City’s Mob Past Subject Of Film Festival

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By Larry Henry

Kansas City’s historical role as a prominent Mafia city is the focus of the Kansas City Mafia Film Festival this year on Nov. 24-25 at the MTH Theater at Crown Center.

The festival will feature showings of documentary films by Gary Jenkins of the Gangland Wire website and podcast and Mob historian Terence Michael O’Malley.

Author and retired FBI supervisor William Ouseley is scheduled to participate in a panel discussion with Jenkins and O’Malley at the Nov. 24 screening. The Nov. 25 showing includes a question-and-answer session with the two documentary filmmakers.

Among the topics likely to come up at the festival is Filumena Acres, an older, nice neighborhood of quiet streets north of downtown Kansas City across the Missouri River.

During the 1970s, Filumena Acres was a hotbed of Mafia activity centered on Kansas City Mob boss Nick Civella and others in his criminal organization who lived there.

Below are brief descriptions of two of the most historically relevant homes in the neighborhood and a link to video that I shot of each residence.

From his house atop a sloping lawn in Filumena Acres, Nick Civella oversaw a criminal empire that included casino skimming operations in Las Vegas, bringing in at least $80,000 a month for his outlaw organization and other Midwestern Mafia families. Civella died of cancer in 1983 at age 70 while under indictment for casino skimming.

Click here to view VIDEO.

In November 1978, during a meeting with Civella and his top lieutenants at the nearby Filumena Acres home of Josephine Marlo, a Civella relative, Tropicana hotel-casino executive Carl Thomas of Las Vegas revealed details on how to skim money illegally from casinos. What Thomas and the mobsters didn’t know is that authorities had bugged the house and were recording his remarks. This and other investigations led to later criminal convictions and prison sentences for those involved. Thomas, who became a government witness, was released early from prison and died at age 60 in a single-vehicle rollover in Oregon in 1993.
Click here to view VIDEO.

This former Mafia neighborhood is one of many Mob sites around Kansas City that will be of interest to those in attendance at the film festival.

For tickets, click here.

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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