Nicholas Civella: The Kingpin of Kansas City Mafia – HT
December 19th, 1983, 6:47 a.m. Las Vegas, Nevada. FBI special agent Michael Wax stood in the casino counting room of the Tropicana, watching technicians dismantle a hidden microphone system that had been recording every word spoken for 3 years. In front of him, spreadsheets documented something unprecedented.
The Kansas City mob had skimmed over $280 million from Vegas casinos. Not over decades, over seven years. And the man who engineered it all operated from a city most Americans considered flyover country, Kansas City, Missouri. This wasn’t some satellite operation paying tribute to New York or Chicago. The Seella family had built something different.
They control casinos from the Missouri River to the Las Vegas strip. They own police chiefs, judges, union presidents, and casino executives. They turned Kansas City into a crime capital that rivaled anything on the East Coast. And for 40 years, they operated in plain sight while the FBI chased bigger names in bigger cities.
This is a story of how a quiet Midwest city became the mafia’s money machine. How Nick transformed his family from street thugs into casino overlords. How the skim operation funneled millions into mob coffers across America. how corruption reached so deep that the police chief worked for gangsters and how the FBI’s Operation Strawman brought it all crashing down in the biggest organized crime bust of the 1980s.
But here’s what makes this different from every other mob story you’ve heard. Kansas City wasn’t trying to be New York. They built their own model. They stayed quiet, avoided headlines, and made more money than families that got all the attention. They prove you didn’t need to control Manhattan to control America’s underworld.
You just needed to control the cash flow. And nobody controlled cash flow like Kansas City. Let’s go back to where it started. Not in Vegas. Not in some dramatic mob war, but in the Italian neighborhood of Kansas City’s North End, where a kid named Nick Sevela learned that real power doesn’t announce itself, it just collects.
Nicholas Sevela was born in 1912 in Kansas City’s North End, a tight cluster blocks where Sicilian immigrants built their own world within a world. His father ran a small grocery. His mother spoke broken English. The neighborhood operated on old country rules. You didn’t talk to outsiders. You handled your own problems. You took care of your own.
Nick absorbed these lessons before he could read. By 15, he was running dice games in basement. By 18, he was hijacking trucks. But Nick was different from the other young hoods flooding Kansas City’s criminal landscape in the 1930s. He didn’t want to be the toughest guy in the room.
He wanted to be the one everyone needed, the connector, the problem solver, the guy who could make things happen quietly. Kansas City in the 1930s was wide open. Prohibition had created a criminal infrastructure that didn’t disappear when booze became legal again. The Pendergas political machine controlled the city.
Tom Pendagas, the political boss, didn’t just tolerate organized crime. He partnered with it. Gambling dens, brothel, and nightclubs operated openly under police protection. The cops were on the pad. The judges were bought. And young Nick Sevela paid attention to how it all worked. He watched how Johnny Lazia, the top Italian mobster, didn’t just run rackets.
He delivered votes for Pendagast. He made himself useful to the people with legitimate power. When Lazy was murdered in 1934, shot down outside his apartment building. Nick learned another lesson. Being flashy gets you killed. Lazy drove fancy cars, wore expensive suits, made the newspapers. Three gunmen put eight bullets in him.
Nick decided he’d operate differently. Through the 1940s, Nick built his organization brick by brick. He ran bookmaking operations across Kansas City and into the suburbs. He controlled dice games, card games, and wire services that fed gambling information to bookies. He loan money at rates that doubled every month.
He never raised his voice. He never carried a gun himself. He had people for that. his enforcer, a stone cold killer named Willie Camasano. Handle problems. Nick handled strategy. By 1950, at 38, Nick Sevela controlled organized crime in Kansas City. Not through violence, though he’d use it when necessary. Through relationships, he knew every politician worth knowing.
Every police captain, every union boss, every business owner who needed a favor or owed money. He operated like a banker, not a gangster. You came to Nick with a problem. He solved it, then you owed him. And in Kansas City, everyone eventually owed Nick. Here’s how his operation worked. The core business was gambling.
Sports betting, dice games, card games, slot machines. Kansas City was a major stopover for truckers and traveling salesmen. Men with money in their pockets far from home looking for action. Nick gave them action. His bookmaking network took in an estimated $25 million a year in bets. The house edge, even being conservative, netted around $3 million annually.
That’s 1950s money. Multiply by 10 for today’s value. The loan sharking operation was simpler and more brutal. You borrowed $10,000 on Monday. You owed $11,000 by Friday. Couldn’t pay. The interest compounded. Still couldn’t pay. Willie Kamisano paid you a visit. Maybe he broke your hand. Maybe he burned down your business.
Maybe you just disappeared. Nick didn’t care which. As long as the message was clear. Pay your debts or suffer consequences that made paying seem attractive. But Nick understood something other mobsters missed. Gambling and lone sharking had limits. You could only squeeze so much from the local population.
Real wealth, the kind that could sustain an organization for generations, required legitimate business infiltration. And in the 1950s, the biggest legitimate business opportunity in America was Las Vegas. The Nevada desert was transforming. Bug Seagull had opened the Flamingo in 1946 and proved Vegas could work. By the early 1950s, major casinos were rising on the strip.
the Thunderbird, the Desert Inn, The Sands. These weren’t small operations. They required massive capital investment. And most importantly, they required operating licenses from Nevada Gaming Commission. Here’s where Kansas City saw opportunity. The Gaming Commission wouldn’t license known mobsters, but they would license fronts.
Businessmen with clean records and mob backing. And Kansas City had something other families needed. The Teamsters Union. Kansas City controlled Teamstster’s local 41. Through it, they influenced the Central States Pension Fund, a gigantic pool of union money looking for investment opportunities. Nick Sevela built relationships with Jimmy Hawa and other Teamsters officials.
When casinos needed construction loans, Teamsters money became available. When casinos needed operating capital, Teamstster’s money flowed. And when the loans were approved, Nick made sure Kansas City got a piece of the action, not ownership on paper. Hidden interests, silent partnerships, and most importantly, the skim.
The skim is what made Vegas work for the mob. Here’s how it operated. A casino counts its cash in the accounting room before reporting revenue to the state. The state taxes gambling revenue. So before the count went official, trusted mob associates pulled money out. Cash that never got reported. Cash that never got taxed.
Cash that got divided among the crime families that controlled the casino. In the 1960s, Kansas City positioned itself as a primary ski operator for multiple casinos. Nick sent his people to Vegas. They became casino managers, shift bosses, and counting room supervisors. Men who look legitimate on paper but answered to Kansas City and every night before the official count. They set aside the skim.
The Tropicana became Kansas City’s crown jewel. The family gained hidden control through a series of frontmen and Teamsters loans. Joe Austoto, a Kansas City associate, became the entertainment director. On paper, he booked shows. In reality, he oversaw the skim operation. Every 24 hours, between $40,000 and $80,000 in cash was pulled from the counting room, packed into suitcases, and sent back to Kansas City on commercial flights.
Let’s break down the mechanics because this is where it gets fascinating. The Tropicana’s daily gross gaming revenue in the late 1970s average around $400,000. The official count reported to the state came in around 32000. That $80,000 gap, that was the skim. Multiply that by 365 days. That’s $29.2 million a year in untaxed unreported cash. And that was just one casino.
Kansas City controlled skim operations at the Tropicana, the Stardust of Fremont, and had pieces of others. Conservative estimates put their total annual skim at $40 million. That money got divided. Kansas City kept the largest share around 40%. Cleveland, Milwaukee, and Chicago families got cuts.
It was consortium, a criminal corporation, and Nick Sevel, the board of directors. But running this operation required more than greed. It required absolute discipline. Every person in the chain had to be trusted completely. One week Link talking to the FBI and the whole system collapsed. Nick built his organization on blood ties and lifelong loyalty.
His brother Cork Sevela handled dayto-day operations. His nephew Anthony Sevela was being groomed for leadership. Carl Deluna managed casinos. Carl Tffy Deluna ran enforcement. These weren’t associates. They were family by blood or by bond deeper than blood. Kansas City also required political protection and Nick maintained it through strategic corruption.
He didn’t just bribe individual cops, he owned police chiefs. Clarence Kelly, who served as Kansas City police chief from 1961 to 1973 before becoming FBI director, either didn’t see or chose not to see the mob’s control over his city. After Kelly left for the FBI, the corruption became more blatant. Officers on Nick’s payroll provided warning of raids, destroyed evidence, and intimidated witnesses.
The political machine that Pentag built in the 1930s had evolved, but never disappeared. Kansas City city council members received campaign contributions from mob control businesses. Judges received cash in envelopes. Union officials received no show jobs or relatives. It was systematic, comprehensive, and remarkably effective.
Nick Sevela operated with near impunity in his home city. But Nick understood that power attracts attention. In 1971, a federal grand jury indicted him for interstate gambling conspiracy. The evidence was solid. Wire taps, surveillance photos, informant testimony. Nick was convicted and sentenced to four years in federal prison.
He served 30 months at Levvenworth. You’d think this would damage his organization. It didn’t. From prison, Nick ran everything through messages passed by his lawyer and prison visits from Cork. The money kept flowing. The scam continued. The organization didn’t miss a beat. What the FBI didn’t understand yet was that Kansas City had built something resilient.
It wasn’t dependent on one man’s charisma or toughness. It was a business structure. Remove the CEO. The COO steps up. The revenue streams continue. The corruption network stays in place. This wasn’t the mafia of the 1930s where killing the boss destroyed the family. This was modern organized crime and Kansas City had perfected it. When Nick got out in 1975, he returned to an empire more profitable than when he left. Vegas was booming.
The Tropicana scheme alone had increased to over 30 million annually. New casinos were opening with Teamsters’s funding and Kansas City positioned itself to control the skim operations. Nick was 63, wealthy beyond measure, and seemingly untouchable. He bought a ranch outside Kansas City where he held meetings surrounded by acres of privacy.
He dressed conservatively, drove a modest car, and lived quietly. To neighbors, he was just another successful businessman. But the FBI was evolving, too. A new generation of agents trained in financial crimes and electronic surveillance was targeting organized crime differently. They weren’t trying to catch mobsters with guns. They were following the money.
And in 1978, the FBI launched Operation Strawman, targeting casino skim operations that were enriching mob families across America. The operation was massive. FBI agents in Las Vegas, Kansas City, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and Chicago worked together, sharing intelligence and coordinating surveillance.
They identified the casino executives who were pulling the scam. They tracked the couriers carrying cash. They documented every link in the chain from the counting rooms to the mob bosses. And they installed listening devices everywhere. The FBI planted bugs in the Tropicana’s executive offices. They bugged Joe Austo’s home in Las Vegas.
They bugged Carl Deluna’s Kansas City residence. And most devastatingly, they bugged the Villa Capri, a Kansas City restaurant where Nickella Hill court. For 3 years from 1978 to 1981, the FBI recorded thousands of hours of conversations, mobsters discussing the scam, dividing money, planning operations, confessing the crimes on tape.
Nick Sevela, the man who had operated quietly for 40 years, who had avoided the spotlight and never said more than necessary, was now being recorded daily. The tapes captured him discussing specific dollar amounts, naming conspirators, planning further crimes. The evidence wasn’t circumstantial. It was damning, direct, and voluminous.
In 1981, the FBI moved, coordinated raids in five cities, 63 indictments, the entire leadership of the Kansas City family, the casino executives in Vegas, the money counters, the couriers, the bosses in Cleveland and Milwaukee who received skim money. Operation Strawman didn’t just target one family. It targeted the entire interstate conspiracy.
Nick Sevela was charged with conspiracy to skim millions from Las Vegas casinos, interstate transportation of stolen property, and conducting an illegal gambling business. The evidence included 100 recorded conversations, financial records showing unreported income, and testimony from casino employees who flipped.
It was the most comprehensive organized crime case in FBI history. But Nick would never see trial. On March 12th, 1983, at age 71, Nick Sevela died of lung cancer at his Kansas City home. He’d smoked three packs a day for 50 years. The cancer had spread to his bones. In his final months, he was beded in, skeletal, in constant pain.
The man who had built an empire died watching it collapse around him. His death didn’t stop the prosecutions. In 1985, the trials began. Joe Agusto facing life in prison became a government witness. He testified for days about how the ski worked, who was involved, who got paid. His testimony was specific, detailed, and corroborated by the FBI recordings.
Carl Deluna was convicted and sentenced to 30 years. Carl Tffy Deluna got 20 years. Anthony Sevela, Nick’s nephew, received 15 years. across all the cities. Over 40 mobsters were convicted. The sentences total more than 500 years in federal prison. The financial penalties were equally crushing. The government seized casinos, personal assets, properties, and bank accounts.
They documented that between 1974 and 1983, the Kansas City Skim operation had netted over $280 million. All of it illegally obtained. All of it untaxed. The IRS filed civil claims for back taxes, penalties, and interest totaling over $400 million. Estates were bankrupted. Families lost homes. Legitimate businesses built with mob money were forfeited.
But the real destruction was organizational. The Kansas City family never recovered. With his entire leadership in prison, dead, or cooperated with the government, the structure collapsed. The gambling operations were taken over by independent operators or shut down by police who were no longer on the payroll.
The lone sharking business dried up. The political corruption network disbanded as prosecutors indicted councilmen and police officers. By 1990, the Kansas City mob was functionally extinct. What happened to the other key figures tells the rest of the story. Corka, Nick’s brother, died of a heart attack in 1994. a broken man who’d watched his family’s empire destroyed.
Willie Kamisano, the enforcer, died in prison in 1995 while serving a sentence for raketeering. Joe Agusto, the government witness, entered witness protection and died in 2012 under a new identity in an undisclosed location. The Villa Capri, where the FBI recorded all those conversations, was demolished in 1998.
Nothing remains except parking lot. The Tropicana in Las Vegas underwent new ownership, massive renovations, and eventually corporate acquisition. The skim is impossible now. Modern casinos use computer systems that track every dollar, digital surveillance covering every angle, and regulatory oversight that makes the old methods obsolete.
What Kansas City did for decades couldn’t happen today. But here’s what this story reveals about organized crime in America. Location didn’t determine power. New York had the reputation, but Kansas City had the money. The families that stayed quiet, avoided headlines, and focus on sustainable revenue streams lasted longer than the ones that craved attention.
Nick Sevela never became a household name like Al Capone or John Gotti. That’s why he operated successfully for 40 years. The Kansas City model also proved that modern organized crime required modern business methods. Nick didn’t rule through fear alone. He built systems. He diversified revenue. He created redundancy so the loss of any individual didn’t destroy the organization.
He invested in long-term relationships rather than short-term scores. He was a CEO more than a gangster. And for decades, it worked brilliantly. The downfall came from technology. The FBI’s ability to plant sophisticated listening devices and conduct long-term financial surveillance change the game. Conversations that happened behind closed doors were now evidence.
Money that moved in secret was now tracked. The old methods of intimidating witnesses and bribing local cops couldn’t stop federal RICO prosecutions backed by years of electronic surveillance. Kansas City also revealed how deep organized crime penetration could go in American cities. This wasn’t some neighborhood racket.
This was corruption reaching the police chief’s office, the city council, the courts, and the casinos. For 40 years, a criminal organization operated as a shadow government in a major American city. That’s not ancient history. People who lived through it are still alive. The systems that allowed it still exist in weakened form.
The Teamster Central States’s pension fund, which financed so much of the Vegas expansion that the mob exploited, was eventually placed under government oversight in 1982. The reforms came too late to prevent billions and fraudulent loans, but they ended the mob’s ability to use union money as a criminal bank. That was a direct result of Operation Strawman and the Kansas City prosecutions.
Today, Kansas City’s Italian-American neighborhood, where Nick Sevela grew up, is gentrified. The old social clubs are gone. The younger generations move the suburbs. The culture that produced and protected the mob has dissipated, but the history remains. The FBI maintains Operation Strawman Files as a teaching tool for new agents.
The case is studied in law schools as an example of successful RICO prosecution. And the story endures as a reminder that America’s heartland wasn’t innocent. It was just quieter about its sins. Nick Sevela built a criminal empire from nothing. He turned a regional gambling operation into a multi-state conspiracy that controls some of America’s most famous casinos.
He generated hundreds of millions in illegal profits. He corrupted an entire city’s power structure. He operated for four decades with minimal law enforcement interference. And in the end, technology and federal persistence destroyed everything he built. That’s the pattern that repeats across organized crime history.
Build in the shadows, prosper in silence. But eventually, the law catches up. The FBI is patient. The recordings are, and the RICO statute makes conspiracy itself a crime. Kansas City thought they were too far from the spotlight to get burned. They were wrong. The spotlight just took longer to arrive. If you found this story fascinating, hit subscribe.
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