50 years later, Kansas City mobster’s death is still a mystery

The boys downtown probably weren’t all that surprised when Sam Palma turned up dead.

It happened a couple of hours before he was due in federal court on a robbery pinch. No telling what he was gonna tell some judge. Yeah, he’d been around, knew all the names.

Too much, that’s what he knew.

So that morning, somebody finds him — white shirt, sport jacket, top coat — face down in an East Side cemetery with a bullet hole in the back and another through his head, temple to temple.

So much for all Sam Palma knew.

Palma’s family doesn’t go along with the crime noir version of what happened on a January morning 50 years ago. Gangster fantasy, they call it. Palma had money woes and didn’t want to leave his family to go to prison, so he committed suicide.

“Sam had the cold guts to kill himself,” his brother, James Palma, said back then.

The coroner didn’t see it that way.

“Anyone found with two bullet wounds in the head without a gun around isn’t suicide,” the coroner —future mayor Charles Wheeler — told police.

Palma, 41, had been shot once in the back, with the bullet ending up near an eye. Police suspected he was hit while running. The second shot was point-blank.

Investigators and historians say the never-solved killing of Salvatore (Sam) Palma was a one-of-a-kind mob hit that showed the public for the first time that Kansas City organized crime reached far beyond the North End.

Consider: A few weeks after Palma’s death, a plane lands at midnight at the downtown airport and out steps Mafia royalty in a gray sharkskin suit.

Salvatore “Teets” Battaglia, head of the Chicago crime family. The feds bring him to town because they’d learned he might know something about how Palma came to be in that cemetery.

The dapper Battaglia has his lawyer with him — and a bail bondsman because he doesn’t want to stay long.

He steps off the plane, flashbulbs explode, reporters fire questions.

“Why are you here?” someone asks.

“He got an invitation,” the lawyer answers.

The horde laughs. Battaglia smiles.

Up to that point, the notion of organized crime in Kansas City hadn’t been fully realized by the public or even some authorities. Many residents doubted the existence of a national syndicate. Missouri Gov. Warren Hearnes seemed bewildered that a Chicago crime boss could preside over gangsters in Kansas City.

The Palma case changed all that. A federal judge declared his killing to be obstruction of justice. There was talk of a “Cosa Nostra decree” that allowed Battaglia to run operations in Kansas City.

Palma, the thinking went, had been silenced because he had refused to do what the bosses wanted: Plead guilty to the robbery, quietly.

An editorial in The Star said: “In some manner, the existence of Sam Palma threatened the jungle and so Sam Palma ceased to exist.”

Palma’s tale has a man getting shot in the foot, a barber running for his life, a wild police chase through Brookside and a package containing $15,000 cash and a gun being put in the mail. FBI agents were brought in from other cities, one being Mark Felt — later “Deep Throat” of Watergate fame.

But through all that and still today, the family sticks to the suicide story. That cemetery? Mount Olivet on Blue Ridge Boulevard, where Palma’s father is buried.

Earlier this month, Palma’s cousin recalled that he saw a suicide note and knew the troubles that drove Sam Palma.

“They found him at his father’s grave,” Johnny Palma said. “The rest of it — all the gangster and Mafia stuff is just made up.

“How did he do it? Use your imagination.”

In 1966, U.S. Attorney Russell Millin labeled the suicide theory “absurd.”

There’s also the matter of Palma’s car. After the white 1958 Chevrolet was found, with bloodstains in the back seat, a witness told police that on Jan. 5 he was near 20th and McGee streets when he saw what looked like an altercation — two men throwing a third man into the back of a white Chevy.

The witness said: “I almost stopped and got out, but the way they looked at me, well, I figured it was none of my business.”

Go back five months. July 30, 1965. Houston.

Three armed men enter the Lewis & Coker supermarket and commence to rob it. Things go bad. Bullets fly.

A customer gets hit in the foot. A barber dodges bullets while running for the door. The robbers grab nearly $20,000 and speed away in a 1964 Pontiac.

It was already known that Kansas City mobsters generated revenue by traveling to other cities, knocking over supermarkets and mailing the loot back home.

“Before ATMs and credit cards, grocery stores had the cash. They were the places to rob,” said Gary Jenkins, who spent 25 years with Kansas City police, some in intelligence, and now operates a website called “Gangland Wire.”

On Sept. 2, 1965, a federal indictment charged Palma, Vincent “Beans” Inzerillo, 39, and Vincent Mangiaracina, 60, with illegal transport through the mail relating to the Houston heist. All three had criminal records, including Mangiaracina, who had a 1929 Prohibition-era rap for possessing “distilling apparatus.”

Palma’s sheet showed a burglary conviction and a 1959 arrest for a brawl with police officers outside the Brown Derby tavern on 12th Street between Grand and McGee streets.

Newspaper accounts say Palma operated a restaurant called the Pancake Patio at 3726 Broadway that later turned into Gino’s, a cocktail lounge. It burned. Mainly, he allegedly did loansharking and ran the “pro football parley” for the Civella crime family.

In his book, “The Battle Behind the Badge,” former Kansas City police captain Robert Heinen tells this story involving Palma:

In 1952, a married woman has an affair with a mob associate named Felix Ferina. He steals $35,000 worth of jewelry from her but offers to return the jewels in exchange for cash.

Fearing her husband will find out about her love in the afternoon, she comes clean to police about the shakedown.

A subsequent stakeout at a Brookside drugstore goes bad because the woman gets cold feet and doesn’t show. Cops decide to take the two guys anyway, which turns into a high-speed chase through residential neighborhoods — with a Kansas City Star photographer in the police car.

“As we pulled alongside the Olds, I stuck my revolver out the window, aiming at Palma’s head,” Heinen writes. “He braked to a screeching stop.”

But the jewelry wasn’t in the car.

“I’m going to book their asses anyway,” a police lieutenant grumbled.

According to the seven-count federal indictment charging Palma and the two others in the Houston holdup, a package at the main post office in Kansas City “accidentally ruptured,” exposing $15,700 in cash and a .38 revolver — both linked to the supermarket robbery.

Also, Houston police had traced Missouri plates on a 1964 Pontiac seen the day before the robbery back to Palma’s wife.

The three defendants were arrested Aug. 6, 1965, when they went to the post office to pick up the package.

Lawyers for the men challenged the charges, arguing that the package did not accidentally open. They contended that authorities had unlawfully used information obtained through microphone surveillance of Palma’s business at 4153 Broadway and knew the package was coming.

Jenkins and others also find the “rupture” story rather dubious, but a judge rejected the argument.

Pressure from mob higher-ups mounted on the three men to plead guilty. Palma was slow to commit, but his attorney had arranged a court appearance for 9 a.m. Jan. 6, 1966, presumably for that purpose.

The night before the hearing, Palma was seen at the soda fountain of the Katz Drug Store on Main Street. He was having coffee with Carl “Tuffy” DeLuna, who was his cousin and also an underboss in the Civella crime family.

Hours later, a cemetery worker found Palma’s body in Mount Olivet.

In pleading in a court affidavit for his death to be ruled a suicide, Palma’s widow, Beverly, explained the lack of a gun by saying somebody had helped him with the act. She said her husband had called her at 2:30 a.m., sounding distressed.

“He told me that he loved me with all his heart,” she said. “He stated that I would never see him again, and I tried to get him to talk more but he hung up.”

She complained in the affidavit of FBI harassment: “They don’t want to believe me. They want this to be a gangland killing.”

Also, she said that when Palma left the house that last evening, she noticed he was carrying a gun. She meant to ask him about it but got distracted by a daughter watching “Gidget” on TV.

A month later, Inzerillo and Mangiaracina pleaded guilty.

On a recent day, Charles Wheeler sat in the Westport Flea Market knocking back a cold glass of Angry Orchard hard cider.

After leaving the coroner job, he went on to be a judge, Kansas City mayor and state senator. The airport Battaglia flew into that February night 50 years ago is now Charles B. Wheeler Downtown Airport.

Wheeler is 89 now and probably hadn’t heard the name Sam Palma in decades.

“Shot in the back,” he remembered instantly.

Then he chuckled as more flowed back.

“His wife said it was suicide — shot in the back and there was no gun around.”

Wheeler says he’s running for governor this year.

Battaglia died in 1973. His nickname, by the way, “Teets,” reportedly came from the way he said “teeth,” as in yelling at another mobster: “Shaddup or I’ll bust ya in da teets!”

Most everyone, the senior types anyway, are gone from the postwar heyday of the Kansas City mob. DeLuna died in 2008.

But people remember it as a time when the mob was big, influencing politicians and labor unions. In 1985, former Teamsters president Roy Williams was asked during a federal corruption trial if he was afraid of Nick Civella.

Williams said he was and referred to a dead guy “lying across his father.” Authorities presumed he meant Palma.

Former FBI agent William Ouseley, who wrote “Mobsters in Our Midst” about the Kansas City crime family, said the mob here managed to pull off its glory days because they came before widespread organized crime task forces, sophisticated surveillance and, mostly, RICO — the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.

“But they were sure riding high for a while,” Ouseley said.

Johnny Palma, 75, knows that’s the story. He wants this side out there:

“Sam Palma was the kind of guy that when he went into a crowded room, everybody came over to him. He was smart, kind, friendly, generous — he was the most unforgettable guy I ever knew. It’s been 50 years — why would I make this (stuff) up?”

Early one morning this month under a gray sky, a cold wind scattered the leaves across the grave of Salvatore Palma in Mount Olivet Cemetery.

Fifty years have passed since that morning he was found here, near his father’s grave. And still, nobody knows for sure how he died.

That’s saying something, you know, about a guy who knew too much.

This story was originally published January 27, 2016 at 4:27 PM with the headline "50 years later, Kansas City mobster’s death is still a mystery."