They interviewed his associates, tracked his emerging role in the family gambling enterprise, stalked his vacations and, from time to time, sat down for eye-opening personal interviews.

More than 1,700 pages of previously secret intelligence files, obtained recently by The Kansas City Star, paint a revealing picture of the man who became an FBI target in the late 1950s and later led the local mob as it crumbled under relentless federal investigations.

One of the mob's greatest strengths, retired agents said recently, was its compact size and fierce loyalty to Civella's uncle, legendary mob boss Nick Civella.

While crime families in other cities crumbled from within as members betrayed their oaths of silence, no "made" member of the Kansas City mob ever turned against it to testify.

In contrast, the FBI's local organized crime squad had between 12 and 30 members, depending on the time frame and the number of associates and wannabes they also tracked.

According to Gary Hart, a former FBI investigator who now practices law, Nick Civella bought loyalty by spreading the wealth and taking care of his people.

"Nick ran a tightly disciplined organization," Hart said. "The … records showed they had a retirement system. If you went to prison, your family was taken care of. It was like General Motors but with murder."

Born in 1930, Tony Civella acquired the nickname "Tony Ripe" or just "Ripe" because of an odd speech impediment. While some described it as a lisp, others said that the way Civella rolled his words around sounded like he was speaking with a ripe tomato in his mouth.

While agents respected Civella's uncle and his father, Carl Civella, for operating a ruthless and efficient criminal organization, they collected information suggesting that the younger Civella was, perhaps, vulnerable. Informants told agents that he wasn't well liked and leaned too heavily on his father's reputation.

"It is informant's opinion that subject will never be one of the leaders … in Kansas City as he has neither the ability nor the personality," an agent noted in 1964.

Civella came under scrutiny not long after FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover instituted his "Top Hoodlum" program in 1957, when dozens of mobsters were detained while attending a summit in Apalachin, N.Y.

Before the game and at halftime, spectators crowded into the lobby to hand bets to Ripe and his father. Nick Civella, meanwhile, stood back and observed.

"Its economic base is principally derived from a virtual monopoly on illegal gambling, and to a large extent it underwrites the loan sharking business in the area," the agent wrote.

Agents also suspected that Civella was responsible for a notorious crap game above a produce stand at the City Market. Authorities raided it in January 1964. Nick Civella responded with an order to his people "not to fool around until things die down."

"The game would run as high as $3,000 on one throw, and Tony Civella reportedly netted over $200 a day from the operation of this game," a report noted.

Though the FBI kept Tony Civella under intense surveillance for years, authorities often had trouble getting convictions. Informants never wanted to testify, and the family could be persuasive.

"The formidable political influence of his father and uncle has been brought to bear on the criminal justice system with remarkable success on a local level," an FBI agent wrote in 1975.

The report cited a September 1963 incident when police found Tony Civella and two others stripping a stolen Oldsmobile. They'd already stacked two tires in the back seat of a nearby Pontiac, according to the FBI report.

And in May 1970, a Lafayette County judge acquitted Civella on charges that he had perjured himself years earlier during a civil case. The case derailed when Civella's lawyer successfully argued that the magistrate in that case was incompetent to testify about what had occurred in his own courtroom.

Almost every year Ripe, his father and several friends headed for the Gulf Hills Dude Ranch, a high-end resort in Ocean Springs, Miss., that featured excellent golf and private Spanish colonial revival cottages.

Followed by the usual contingent of cops, deputies and agents, Civella and his friends drove to Mississippi, where the reception grew hotter. Reporters called their cottages. A newspaper photographer lurked around the golf course, snapping photos.

In a statewide television address, Lt. Gov. Charles Sullivan announced that members of a "Mafia family" from Kansas City had arrived. He questioned why they were there, ignoring, or unaware, that the group had vacationed in Mississippi for almost a decade.

FBI agents spent a fair amount of time actually talking with Anthony Civella over the years, initiating street encounters or dropping in to see him at a favorite haunt.

But on April 17, 1968, about two weeks after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., Ripe contacted an FBI agent and proposed lunch at Stephenson's Apple Farm Restaurant.

Civella then fished for a moment about receiving immunity from prosecution — a tantalizing prospect, so the agent encouraged him. But then Civella proposed using the Kansas City mob to spy on the African-American community, a proposal that bordered on the absurd.

"Civella said that ‘we' have information which comes to ‘us' from negroes relative to the racial situation in Kansas City," the agent reported later. "Civella volunteered that he would be willing to assist the FBI relative to any information he learned concerning a possible racial flare-up in Kansas City."

Just what Civella and the mob could offer is not clear. Though six people died in local riots after King's murder, tensions largely had subsided.

Federal investigators' persistence paid off in the 1970s, when Tony Civella finally was convicted of conspiring to run an interstate gambling ring and sentenced to 42 months in prison. During this time, the FBI wiretapped telephone conversations that became the core of the government's massive prosecution of mobsters from Kansas City and elsewhere who had skimmed millions from Las Vegas casinos.

Known as the "Strawman" case, the investigation sent Ripe's father to prison in the 1980s. Meanwhile, Ripe pleaded guilty in 1984 to running a sport book and served about three years in prison.

With the skimming scheme's collapse, the Kansas City mob's economic foundation began to crumble. But the outfit still needed leadership. And so with his uncle's death and his father's long-term imprisonment, Ripe assumed leadership of a Kansas City mob in decline.

As Ripe was waiting to begin his 54-month sentence the following summer, FBI agents explored whether he had an illegal financial interest in a Lee's Summit development corporation. The case went nowhere.

He served his last sentence at a low-security prison near Dallas and was released in July 1996. The FBI's interest in him appeared to have cooled.

Lanza, the FBI's spokesman in Kansas City, said the mob remains alive in Kansas City but has only a fraction of the power and influence it wielded in previous decades.

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