Paddy Whacked

by T. J. English

  Jim Pendergast was from a large Irish Catholic family of nine. Both of his parents hailed from County Tipperary and had come to America as potato-famine refugees. His mother first arrived in the United States through the city of New Orleans, at a time when Irish immigrants were dying in the thousands from yellow fever and hellish labor conditions. His mother’s stories of starvation and death in the Louisiana swamps haunted Jim Pendergast and his siblings, instilling in their clan a drive and ambition that would dramatically reshape the environment in which they lived.

  Although Jim Pendergast was a hugely popular district leader, the era he presided over was known for its fierce political rivalries. Kansas City was a Democratic town, but the Democrats were divided into two factions known as the Rabbits and the Goats. Rabbit Democrats were so named by their enemies for the way they flocked to the polls in close elections like scared rabbits. The Goats, led by Boss Jim, were so called because many of them lived in shanties clinging to the sides of the West Bluffs like mountain goats. Others claimed the name came from the large number of billy goats Pendergast registered as legitimate voters in the First Ward.

  Two of Jim’s brothers served important roles in his Machine. Mike, boss of the Tenth Ward, was a dedicated organizer, but his stage fright undermined his role as a leader. Thomas Joseph “T. J.” Pendergast, however, was dynamic and charismatic. A stocky, former semiprofessional baseball player, he’d gotten his start as a bouncer in his brother’s saloon. Whereas Jim was soft-spoken and a master of the art of political compromise, Tom (twelve years Jim’s junior) was blustery and tough, a man’s man who would not hesitate to use his fists if circumstances called for it. He also carried a revolver.

  In 1910, not long after his wife died, Jim Pendergast retired from politics, turning his council seat over to Brother Tom, who was elected the following year by an overwhelming majority. Jim’s health soon deteriorated, and in September 1911, after weeks of being bed-ridden with an unknown respiratory ailment, he woke and asked a nurse, “Where’s Tom?” Tom hurried to his bedside. Jim looked at his brother and said cheerfully, “Hello Tom.” Those were his last comprehensible words before he expired in his bed.

  Tom Pendergast picked up the mantel bequeathed to him by his older brother and turned it into one of the most astounding municipal operations in twentieth-century America. The guiding principle of the Pendergast Machine was an epigram that Jim kept posted behind the bars in his saloons: “You can’t saw wood with a hammer.” Inspired by blunt practicality, Tom Pendergast improved upon his brother’s model by first appeasing and then combining the Goat and Rabbit factions under one organization. This was done in the usual manner; thuggery, voter fraud, and intimidation were all part of the Pendergast arsenal. The machine that he devised was loyal and generally responsive to the needs of the people, with a monolithic system of patronage that compelled the Kansas City Star, an avowed enemy of the Pendergast Machine, to refer to it as “Little Tammany.”

  In his modest office at 1908 Main Street, the unassuming, brick-façade headquarters of the Jackson Democratic Club, T. J. (as Pendergast preferred to be called) received a daily stream of small business owners, senior citizens, aspiring aldermen, clergymen, lobbyists, and mafiosi. Fat and animated, with huge ears and a lively, salt-of-the-earth face, Pendergast was the opposite of New York’s Jimmy Walker. Where Beau James was witty and attractive, T. J. was blunt and earthy. Even his enemies were sometimes beguiled by his larger-than-life persona. He was a local chieftain who laughed, cried, and seemed to care genuinely about the lives of his constituents. He could be kindly and sentimental, especially when it came to his Irish heritage. He was also a tough-as-nails, gravelly-voiced brute who mangled the English language and wasn’t afraid to get rough with anyone he felt deserved it.

  In a newspaper interview, Pendergast once explained how he handled two underlings who questioned an order: “One of them hesitated, said he didn’t know anything about it. Well, I slapped him with my open hand. The other tried to protest. I hit him with my fist and knocked him through the glass door.”

  T. J. didn’t have to get rough very often. As his power grew, so did his reputation. Locally, City Hall became known as “the House of Pendergast.” The state capital in Jefferson City was referred to as “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Harry S. Truman, who was hand-picked by Boss Tom to run for the senate and eventually became the thirty-third president of the United States, was sarcastically known as “the Senator from Pendergast.” The boss was unapologetic about his power: “I’m not bragging when I say I run the show in Kansas City. I am the boss. If I were a Republican, they would call me a leader.”

  Prohibition had much to do with T. J.’s ability to establish a prosperous and powerful dictatorship. Borrowing from Chicago’s pioneering example of the wide open town, Kansas City promoted itself as a city where anything went. Not a single felony conviction for violation of the Volstead Act was ever imposed in Kansas City. Saloons and speakeasies doubled as gambling dens and assignation houses. The Blue Goose, the Winnie Winkle, the Oriental, and the Jubilesta were known Pendergast sin places.

  The most notorious was the Chesterfield Club, located only one block from the federal courthouse downtown. The establishment pretended to operate as a swank supper club, offering a menu of soup and striptease. The waitresses wore only shoes and a change belt. On Friday afternoons, members of the Machine held regularly scheduled ribald parties featuring nude dancing and backroom sex as a reward for male precinct workers and local lobbyists. Given the mix of booze and nudity, the club could get unruly. A gang of bouncers routinely rolled drunks and beat up overly randy customers. One night, a Texas cattleman who became amorous with a waitress was beaten to death inside the Chesterfield, then taken over the state border to Kansas City, Kansas, dumped in the street, and reported as a hit-and-run accident.

  Even more important than booze and sex to the financial well-being of the Machine was gambling. Wrote one visitor from New York, “If you want excitement with roulette, cards, dice, the races, or a dozen other forms of chance ask a patrolman on the Kansas City streets. He’ll guide you. It’s perfectly open. You just walk in.” It was reported in the press that the annual take for the Pendergast Machine from gambling alone was $20 million.

  The Kansas City underworld also gave birth to a unique brand of jazz that thrived in the black-and-tans, a cluster of clubs that sprung up in the vicinity of Eighteenth and Vine, east of downtown in a large African American district. For a musician to secure a booking, the man to see was Bennie Moten, a dapper African American pianist and bandleader who controlled many of the music jobs in town. Moten was an adjunct of the Pendergast Machine, a regular visitor to the boss’s Jefferson Democratic Club headquarters at 1908 Main.

  The Kansas City sound was characterized as “dirty jazz,” a hard-driving Southwestern variation on the Delta blues, much different from the sophisticated European-influenced orchestrations of Duke Ellington and others in New York City. The Panama Club, the Elk’s Rest, the Boulevard Lounge, the Hi Hat, the Hey-Hay (where customers sat on hay bales), and Dante’s Inferno (where the waitresses wore devil costumes) were just a few of the clubs that became home to jazz musicians who flocked from all over the United States to take part in the most vibrant musical epoch since the glory days of Storyville in New Orleans. Countless luminaries like Lester Young, Jay McShann, Coleman Hawkins, Count Basie, and Charlie Parker developed and honed their styles in the Eighteenth and Vine district.

  While Kansas City may have represented a kind of hell for the Goo Goos and other reform-minded citizens, for musicians it was, according to pianist Mary Lou Williams, “a heavenly city.” Amidst the myriad forms of vice, including booze, drugs, and prostitution, a musical culture and classic American style was born. Perhaps none of it would have been possible were it not for the wide open, laissez-faire morality of the Pendergast Machine. In fact, if the Volstead Act had been enforced, few of the clubs in Kansas City, Harlem, Storyville, or anywhere else in the Unite
d States where jazz was born would ever have been able to exist.

  Of course, the gangsters and cops on the take who fed off the flourishing jazz scene in Kansas City did not restrict their extortion to the downtown nightclubs. The cost of doing business in town often involved exorbitant fees paid to men like Johnny Lazia, a local mafiosi closely aligned with the Capone syndicate. Starting in the years of Prohibition, the Kansas City family would become an integral aspect of the Mob, later referred to as the Outfit. Many years later, the Outfit would pull off its biggest power play with the systematic skimming of casino gambling money in Las Vegas, which was funneled back into the underworld through the Kansas City family.

  The Mob—and Al Capone—had no problems with T. J. Pendergast. Kansas City, like Chicago, was a pioneer of the attitude that money generated by organized vice worked its way back into the system, not only through graft and payoffs, but through licensing fees and taxation that funded untold civic projects; the city grew fat on the concept of dirty money. The man who benefited most, not surprisingly, was Boss Tom. Neither an elected official nor a political appointee, Pendergast was that classic avatar of American capitalism, the businessman. As owner and president of the Ready-Mixed Concrete Company, he held an exclusive contract on every cubic inch of concrete that was poured in the city and surrounding county. The man who gave final approval on all public works projects in Kansas City was the city manager, Henry McElroy, a partisan member of the Pendergast machine (as was Water Commissioner O’Malley and Director of Police Higgins). Every time a highway, city park, parking lot, or building foundation was initiated and put in place, Pendergast got the contract. In so doing, he violated no laws. Simply through political maneuverings and the force of his personality, the man seemed to control everything. No wonder they called the place “Tom’s Town.”

  Fall of the House of Pendergast

  During the years of his reign, Pendergast made many enemies. Most of them were local Republican businessmen who had a hard time getting projects off the ground in a city and county where the Machine had a lock on everything. The disgruntled and the bitter formed a loosely structured coalition, a vocal opposition that expressed itself often in the pages of the Kansas City Star, a newspaper founded and owned by one of the areas wealthiest WASP families, the Nelsons. The Star had positioned itself as a harsh critic of the Democratic Machine since the early days of Jim Pendergast’s tenure as alderman, though they reserved their harshest attacks for Brother Tom. In editorial cartoons inspired by Thomas Nast’s anti-Tammany depictions from an earlier era, Pendergast was portrayed as a gangster-politician in the Boss Tweed mold, complete with a monstrously oversized stomach, Irish derby hat, and piggish inclinations. Knowingly or unknowingly, this portrayal evoked the most virulent anti-Irish stereotypes of the postfamine era.

  For a time, the Star’s anti-Pendergast crusade played right into the boss’s hands. Irish American machine politics had always been based on an element of populism, if not outright demagoguery, the perception that the powers that be—namely the WASPs and the blue bloods—deemed themselves morally and socially superior to the average Joe. The bosses rarely missed an opportunity to twist this latent American snobbery in their favor by attacking the institutions of the well-to-do. The unparalleled master at this was James Michael Curley of Boston. Once, in response to an anti-Irish editorial in the Boston Globe (a newspaper that served basically the same function in Boston as the Star did in Kansas City), Curley declared to a gathering of the faithful, “A strange and stupid race, the Anglo-Saxon. Beaten in a fair, stand-up fight, he seeks by political chicanery and hypocrisy to gain the ends he lost in battle, and this temperamental peculiarity he calls fair play…. No country is ever ruined by a virile, intelligent, God-fearing, patriotic people like the Irish.”

  Pendergast did not possess Curley’s verbal dexterity, nor were there enough Irish in Kansas City to make playing the shamrock card a big winner. Nonetheless, Pendergast benefited by positioning himself as a self-made man who’d risen from the gutter and understood the needs of common folk—as opposed to the desires of bankers, corporations, and newspaper editorialists. This philosophy played well in the Heartland of America, among the cowboys and the cattle ranchers, until the excesses of “bossism” began to appear ever more venal and corrupt during the hard, lean years of the 1930s.

  The roots of Boss Tom’s downfall, like that of many larger-than-life public figures, were to be found in the man’s character. Generally a proud family man, content to while away evenings in his mansion with his wife and three kids, Pendergast was a teetotaler who rarely partook of the criminal rackets that his regime helped to create. But he did have one uncontrollable vice: gambling. Although he was known occasionally to go to the track to bet on the ponies (he owned several thoroughbreds and an interest in two local tracks), Boss Tom was mainly a gambler in the way some people are masturbators; he gambled behind closed doors, by himself. He had a wire service teletype installed in the basement of his mansion, enabling him to communicate directly with bookmakers. He used an elaborate system of fictitious names to cover his transactions, betting as much as $20,000 on a single horse race. At the behest of his family, he sometimes promised to stop, only to resume his addiction. His son, Tom Pendergast, Jr., said of his father, “He was like a man on dope. He needed a fix. A fix for him was each race.”

  Boss Tom’s lawyer described his client’s habit this way: “He told me that when the afternoon was here, two-thirty, three o’clock, he would go into a little room, and there he would take the form sheet, and with the advice of a friend of his would handicap horses, and then he would sit with the telephone at his ear and he would hear the call, ‘They’re at the post.’ Later, ‘They’re off,’ and so over that telephone, by ear and not by eye, he watched those horses run to the finish line—all the thrill that can come to any man, for which possesses him and which he cannot down.” The lawyer quoted a remorseful Pendergast as saying, “I don’t know what it is, but [this addiction] has been with me all my life.”

  Informants claimed that Boss Tom lost as much as $100,000 per week to big New Jersey and New York bookmakers, who code named him “Sucker.” Pendergast once told an associate he needed to “slow down” because “bookies from the Atlantic to the Pacific have me pegged as their biggest sucker.” He did not slow down.

  To avoid leaving a paper trail, Boss Tom rarely used money from his personal accounts to finance his habit. Given his stature and reputation, he was extended credit by bookmakers, or he borrowed directly from Capone’s man in Kansas City, Johnny Lazia. In return, Lazia was given the run of the town. This arrangement was especially beneficial to Lazia during the years of the Noble Experiment. After Prohibition, however, the federal government came after him the same way they had Capone, Waxey Gordon, Dutch Schultz, and all the others. In February 1934, Lazia was found guilty of tax evasion.

  T. J. Pendergast wrote a letter to the U.S. Postmaster General, pleading for leniency for Lazia, claiming he was “being jobbed because of his Democratic activities.” At the same time, rumors circulated in the street that Lazia was going to turn canary and detail the many loans Pendergast had been extended by local racketeers.

  In the early morning hours of July 10, 1934, Lazia, free on parole, arrived with his wife and driver at his fashionable midtown apartment. A gang of four hitmen pulled up alongside his car, aimed a tommy gun and shot gun, and opened fire. They hit Lazia eight times without hurting his wife or driver. An ambulance rushed the bleeding mafioso to St. Joseph’s Hospital. Boss Pendergast arrived and exhorted his personal physicians to save Lazia, but all their efforts failed. “Kansas City’s Al Capone,” as the newspapers called the local mafia boss, was dead by dawn. As the end neared, he reportedly said to a doctor, “If anything happens, notify Tom Pendergast, my best friend, and tell him I love him.”

  Front and center at Lazia’s funeral was Boss Pendergast, but that did not stop the rumors from swirling like buzzards at a garbage dump. Many believed th
at T.J. himself must have ordered the hit to silence Lazia before he had a chance to sing. It was an outlandish notion; Pendergast could be a bully, and he often engaged in threats and verbal intimidation, but he was basically a white collar criminal—not a killer. Furthermore, there was never any real evidence that Lazia was about to turn informant. More than likely, Lazia was taken out in a professional mob hit. While there were many theories about why it might have happened, there was no evidence, and the murder went unsolved.

  Boss Tom, who was nothing if not loyal, found the accusations that he killed Johnny Lazia insulting, but he only had himself to blame. He could hardly deny that his relationship with the city’s preeminent mobster was far-reaching and complicated. For decades, Pendergast had flourished in that gray zone between right and wrong, good and evil. He had made it possible for the underworld to hold sway in Tom’s Town, to kill or be killed depending on which way the dice rolled. Now he was being portrayed not as the political facilitator and benign manipulator he saw himself to be, but as a common gangster.

  The seamy nature of the Lazia-Pendergast alliance, as it was splashed across newspaper headlines in the weeks and months following the mafioso’s murder, emboldened the anti-Pendergast forces, who had been gaining steam since the inception of the New Deal. It is a testament to Pendergast’s arrogance that, even as public sentiment turned against him, he refused or was unable to change his ways. He continued to run up huge gambling debts. Since Lazia was no longer available as a source of money, he had to look for other ways to feed the beast.