In this eye-opening episode of Gangland Wire, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective Gary Jenkins pulls back the curtain on a lesser-known chapter of American crime history — how the Kansas City mob capitalized on the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s to fuel its criminal empire.
Gary takes listeners deep into the shadowy world of Nick Civella, the shrewd Kansas City mob boss whose knack for high-stakes financial deals made him a pivotal figure long after his rise to p...
In this eye-opening episode of Gangland Wire, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective Gary Jenkins pulls back the curtain on a lesser-known chapter of American crime history — how the Kansas City mob capitalized on the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s to fuel its criminal empire.
Gary takes listeners deep into the shadowy world of Nick Civella, the shrewd Kansas City mob boss whose knack for high-stakes financial deals made him a pivotal figure long after his rise to power in 1957. Discover how Civella leveraged massive loans — including the notorious $62 million from the Teamsters Pension Fund — to help finance Las Vegas casinos like the Stardust, creating opportunities for mobsters like Lefty Rosenthal to skim untold millions from the gaming floors.
The episode traces how shifting interest rates and lax lending regulations cracked open the door for organized crime to exploit savings and loan institutions. Gary details how local mobsters compromised bank employees, funneled unsecured loans, and left behind a trail of financial ruin that reverberated far beyond Kansas City. You’ll hear gripping accounts of banks like Shawnee State Bank and Indian Springs State Bank, where insiders turned a blind eye — or worse — to the mob’s schemes.
Listeners also meet Anthony Russo, a criminal attorney with deep ties to mob-run banking ventures, and Farhad Azima, a businessman whose name appears in allegations linking financial crime to covert government operations. These tangled connections paint a vivid picture of how the lines between legitimate business, organized crime, and shadowy politics can blur.
Through vivid stories and insider knowledge, Gary breaks down how these Kansas City schemes mirrored the nationwide savings and loan crisis that ultimately cost taxpayers billions. From questionable loans backed by worthless assets to the fallout that reshaped the Teamsters Union and federal oversight, this episode reveals how deep the mob’s influence ran — and how fragile the American financial system can be when corruption goes unchecked.
Tune in for a fascinating blend of true crime, history, and financial intrigue that exposes how power, money, and organized crime colluded behind the scenes to leave a lasting mark on American society.
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Chapters
0:04 Introduction to Kansas City Mob
3:03 The Savings and Loan Scandal
5:45 The Shawnee State Bank Scheme
7:19 The Indian Spring State Bank
9:45 Anthony Russo: The Mob Lawyer
12:08 Russo’s Legal Troubles
15:23 Global International Airways Connection
18:19 The Arms Smuggling Allegations
21:09 Azima and Russo’s Partnership
25:10 Russo’s Goodwill Trip
26:44 The Rental Money Scheme
28:42 The Dunes Hotel Loan
32:16 The Savella Family Indictment
34:10 Conclusion: Mafia and Scandals
35:15 Final Thoughts and Recommendations
Transcript
Transcript
[0:00] Well, hey, all you wiretappers, good to be back here in the studio of Gangland Wire. This is Gary Jenkins, retired Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective, with another story, and it’s going to be about Kansas City, but it’s going to be how Kansas City was really, part of the, remember the big savings and loan debacle back in the 80s? Anyhow, we had a piece of that action here in Kansas City. Let’s start off a little bit about the Kansas City mob family, which many of you guys may not know. Most of you probably do. Most of you guys, most of my guys that listen to this regularly, they know all about Kansas City. They know all about all the mob families. They like these kind of obscure stories that haven’t been told and retold and retold. So my job is to continually try to find more of those stories. So this is one of them. uh you know we don’t get you know uh Michael DeLeonardo we don’t get John Gotti involved but but we’ve got a guy here in Kansas City that is a little known guy but he made a lot of money for the mob he was an interesting guy Nick Zabella has been the Kansas City mob boss you know since the 19th I would say since 1957 or so he was at Appalachian they just didn’t get caught at the meeting himself. He was down the road. He was at a train station, a couple of train stops away.
[1:30] Nick Savella, he didn’t have any formal education, but he had a nose for good, big, sophisticated, money-making deals. He knew an opportunity when he saw it. I was on this local podcast with a guy named John Termini, and he had Nick Savella’s great-grandnephew. I guess that’s how you say it. It was Tony Ripe’s grandson. Tony Ripe is Nick Savella’s nephew.
[2:00] And his kid, Anthony Savella, and he told me, and he called him Zio, which is Italian for uncle, said Zio plays chess while others play checkers, and that’s true. I agree with that. Remember, Nick Savella is a guy that helped orchestrate that deal with the Teamsters Pension Fund to loan $62 million to a man named Alan Glick to purchase a Stardust and three other casinos, And Alan Glick, he was like a 32-year-old untested shopping center developer is all he’d ever done. Now, in exchange for that money that he was able to borrow from the Teamsters Pension Fund, he allowed them, that cartel of Kansas City, Chicago, Milwaukee, and Cleveland, he allowed them to put Lefty Rosenthal in the hotel and then Lefty Rosenthal, then put other people in the hotel and in the count room and, and in other areas of the hotel where they could then skim millions off the top of the casino receipts before the money even got counted.
[3:04] Now, do you recall the savings and loan scandals in the 1980s? I kind of do. And, you know, by this time, by the 80s, the trials, the skim trials were starting and it was all exposed what they’d been doing. The Teamsters Pension Fund was under heavy, heavy federal scrutiny at the time. They’ll eventually put the Teamsters Union into trusteeship and the fund and trusteeship. And the government will help appoint new overseers and regulators. And they’ll really monitor that closely. And so all those loan kickback schemes they had done for years are dried up. They’re gone. Alan Dormans, who was their main guy in Chicago, the guy that really was integral to getting all these pension fund loans, he’s been killed. Mob bosses are all going to jail. One of their other guys, Jackie Presser out of Cleveland, they find out he’s been an informant and he’s testifying. And Roy Lee Williams, who was a teamster out of Kansas City, they got him on a case trying to bribe the senator from Howard Cannon, the senator from Nevada, with Joey Lombardo. He’s going to jail, and he testifies about how, you know, they had been, the teamsters had been controlled by the mob and by him and Cleveland and Milwaukee and Chicago.
[4:31] Now, if you remember in the 1970s, the feds raised interest big time on loans to combat inflation, when inflation was just out of control. We were getting, if you were getting paid during the early 70s or middle 70s when inflation went out of control, you remember you got 10, 12, 15% increases in your paycheck. It was crazy. And I also remember paying, I think it was 12% maybe on my first home loan during those years. So that will slow inflation down. As inflation slowed down, then they wanted to generate new business in the lending industry. So the Fed started losing their control on it. They had put a lot more controls on it with that much higher interest rate than other controls. They started loosening control on the lending institutions.
[5:26] Now the mob is never going to sit on its hands when control is loosened, where there’s a lot of money involved, whether it’s casinos or banks or whatever. They see an opening. There’s nobody watching the till, if you will, and nobody really monitoring the employees quite so closely.
[5:43] They’re going to start trying to get their hands into it. Now, for example, kind of during that time, there was a small scheme in the Kansas City Bank at the Shawnee State Bank. Somebody in our local mob family compromised a banker at this bank. Pretty soon, policemen were in there and they saw these low-level mob associates just accidentally and they called the FBI. A couple of low-level mob associates coming in and getting loans.
[6:11] So they started looking at it and started kind of watching the bank. And at the same time, we came up with some other information that they had compromised a guy, a bank officer at the Shawnee State Bank. So then pretty soon they opened up a whole investigation on it. And they found out that these guys were getting these loans. They’d pass the money along to somebody in the mob, take a little piece of the action themselves. And then they’d never pay it back. I mean, you know, I understand it would ruin their credit. See, they never had any credit when they went in there. These were guys that didn’t have any credit when they walked in. They never should have gotten a loan. They ended up taking everybody down on that. Shortly after that, there’s another small bank in Kansas City, Kansas. It’s called the Indian Spring State Bank. Now, Kansas City, Missouri, and Kansas City, Kansas are like East St. Louis and St. Louis, you know, just across the state line. They have a small bank in a shopping mall. There’s a little strip mall bank. It’s called the Indian Spring State Bank. And the board kind of wants to, you know, banking business is starting to go again and money’s being loosened up.
[7:14] And they hired a small town Lexington, Missouri banker named William Le Master. And he was told, you know, he needed to save this bank and make it profitable. And he claimed that he could do that. Now, this small town guy, you know, he’s an older guy. He’s been out here in Lexington. This is about 40, 50 miles out of Kansas City, up along the Missouri River, a real old town.
[7:36] And this guy, he was interesting in that he dressed like a Wall Street banker. You know, he wore, you know, kind of narrow ties and, you know, he looked like, and really good suits, you know, like at that time, probably $500 suits and, you know, really good shoes. And he looked like a big city banker. One of his early moves was to hire a local man, a Kansas City criminal lawyer named Anthony Russo. And in contrast to Mr.
[8:08] Conservative dressing banker, Anthony Russo and quiet. Anthony Russo was loud. He wore double-breasted pinstripe suits. He wore ostentatious display of jewelry and a big, big, heavy gold jewelry. I mean, he looked like a gangster. What can I say? He certainly looked like a mob lawyer, at least. I mean, on the TV, I realize people in real life aren’t always like this, but he looked like what you would think a mob lawyer would look like. I suspect our friend Joe Lopez, the shark up in Chicago, was probably not like that. Bruce Cutler, he always wore really nice conservative clothes and all those New York mob lawyers. And the ones, the real ones we had here, this guy was kind of a minor mob lawyer, shall we say. Anthony Russo had spent many years as a well-known criminal attorney. He was known by everybody in both sides of the state line and power brokers and members of the mafia. and he had represented Nick Savella and some other people, not in any great big cases, but he had represented them. They trusted him.
[9:14] He had been the subject of a bribery investigation and actually had taken a conviction by this time. In the early 1970s, Kansas City, Kansas, had a big increase in massage parlors that were really brothels. And Russo started out defending prostitutes as they were caught and make a case on a prostitute. He was one of those lawyers that would be down there at city court and get them
[9:40] a deal of some kind and take $500 in cash money, maybe even $1,000 back then. Another thing interesting about Russo, though, he was also the attorney for the Kansas City, Kansas Police Department’s Fraternal Order of Police, so he knew all the cops. Now, cops are like Tim. Believe me, if you’re in the FOP.
[10:01] And you have a lawyer that works for you, then he’s your go-to guy. And if he wants you to ask you about something, you know, you’re going to talk to him and try to do, you know, try to get along with him. And maybe if he needs something, well, at least try to help him out. And just one hand waspses the other. It’s kind of how it works. And as long as you don’t have, they don’t ask you to do anything criminal. But sometimes they might. I never had that. We never really had this kind of a situation in Missouri. But in Kansas, they did. Well, there was a pimp over there in KCK or in Kansas City, Kansas. That was paying Rousseau to defend some of his girls. And he asked him, he said, hey, can you, you know, you know cops, can you get a contact in the vice unit and see, you know, see if we can’t work something out? Come on, man. He said, these guys are costing me money.
[10:48] So he had a, he also owned a massage parlor, of course.
[10:53] And Rousseau went to the head of the vice unit. He was a sergeant at the time, but kind of the stick. He’ll go on, go on up in rank. actually, and he went to him and they ended up making a deal.
[11:06] And so by 1973, you know, if the KCK vice unit was going to go out and hit some massage parlors this one particular night, then they would know that they were coming out, at least with his massage parlors. And the word started getting around and somebody got caught, somebody testified, and I can’t even remember all the details of the case, but they got testified. Glad they charged some policemen and they charged Russo. The policeman got off, to be quite honest. If I remember right, the policeman got off. But Rousseau didn’t. He went into federal court and they convicted him of several counts. He got, I don’t know, three or four years in prison. He served 16 months up at Leavenworth for bribery and interstate promotion of prostitution. And as a result of that, in order to not be disbarred, where maybe he can go back and get his license back, you can go in, you can give up your law license for a period of time.
[12:05] And then if you have to go back, you want to go back and reactivate it. You can inactivate it, I think is the word. Then you reactivate it. You got to go in and take some consumer, some CLEs, some continuing legal education classes, and then just reactivate your license.
[12:23] He gets hired. this LeMaster hires Anthony Russo. Bank regulators who were familiar with this, Russo was willing to own enough character in KCK that they’re like, hey, and any simple investigation will reveal you can go in and run Anthony Russo in KCK and you can find out about all this bribery and prostitution thing today. And back then, you couldn’t run it in a computer, but you could find it out pretty easy, Probably just by reading the newspapers, you probably would remember the name or asking around.
[12:59] Found out about that. Locally, they denied approval for him to become a bank officer, but then they had to forward this. They aren’t the final say-so. They forwarded his application in denial to Washington, D.C. Well, the FDIC Board of Review overruled the local investigators and approved this convicted felon, mob associate, Anthony Russo, to serve as an officer at the Indian Springs State Bank. They did add a restriction that said his duty should be limited to new business development, which means he’s like a salesman. He goes out and knocks on doors, goes to businesses, joins Rotary, gets to know business people, other business people he already knows, and says, hey, come on down to the bank here and make your deposits down here or come on down and do some expansion. Let me look at your business. You can expand here. We can make you a loan for that to generate new business. And he had a lot of personal contacts, a lot of business contacts. You know, it would be okay for him to do something like that, which, you know, it would get the bank going again. And he really didn’t have anything to do as long as they were all straight up loans. You know, he had a lot to.
[14:14] To, uh, uh, offer to the bank, you know, there was a banker and one of the other bankers at the time said that there was something about him. He said, Russo could just walk up to somebody, a businessman or a person, individual that had to a substantial, had substantial means and just ask them if they would move their account to an Indian Springs state bank and they would do it. No questions asked. Now, uh, I’m not sure about that, but, but that’s what one of the other bankers said That was in, there’s a book out there called Inside Job by a guy named Stephen Pritzel. And it’s a really, it’s an overview. I mean, overview, it’s a really extensive look at the looting of American savings and loans back in the days. And it cost the government, it cost the taxpayers a lot of money to clean that mess up, to bail out all these banks. How many times are we going to have to keep bailing these banks out?
[15:05] We’ve done it more than once in my lifetime. So during this same time, Lemaster and Russo invited an Iranian-American businessman named Farhad Azima, who’s about 40 years old, a middle-aged guy,
[15:21] to join the bank’s board of directors. And Le Master and Russo also at the same time described themselves as advisory directors of Global International Airways, which in the Global International Airways was owned by Fareed Azima. It was headquartered in Kansas City. They had a small set of offices. I remember going by them after we found out about some of this stuff and just going by and picking up some license plates. And, you know, there wasn’t really anything ever there. There wasn’t any mob guys there. It wasn’t anybody there. It didn’t seem like. And we’re in a small set of offices. It’s really maybe three or four rooms in this little office building, in this part of this office building. And it’s nondescript. It was in a strip mall. It was mainly frequented in that area by students from nearby University of Missouri, Kansas City. They had a coffee shop across the street and a sandwich place and a Chinese restaurant, Ken Lynn’s and a pizza place. So, you know, just a real unassuming little place. But this airline, it was making money. They had a lot of planes. You couldn’t tell by looking at this office. I know that.
[16:31] Now, in Prizo’s book, he reveals many clues that shows.
[16:37] Global International Airlines was either a CIA front, owned by the CIA, or was extremely lucky in getting paid to ship guns into Africa and other secretive missions around the Middle East and Central America and places like that. Remember, this is during the time of the guns for, what was it, what did they call that, with the Contras, the guns for the Contra thing that Reagan and all those guys were involved in. and they get involved in some of that. He started this company, supposedly, just three years before this, to ship cattle to Iran, and this was about the time the Shah of Iran fell, and he’s out, and now he can’t do business with the new government. There’s no way he’s going to do business with them directly. He’d borrowed a lot of money from a Saudi bank. He’s one of these international entrepreneurs. He then started getting other contracts, and over the next couple of three years, by 82 or so, 83.
[17:38] Global International will become one of the nation’s largest charter airlines, you know, or bigger passenger airlines. This is a charter airline, had 900 employees worldwide, 20 planes, had 17 707s, two 727s, and one 747, which is a monster. So they started making headlines right away through some, you know, that many planes, that many employees. Yeah. They were doing a lot more than this, but this one situation, one of their planes got stranded for three days on an airfield in Tunis, Tunisia, North Africa, along the Mediterranean coast, right next to Egypt, I believe.
[18:19] In Prizo’s book, he has interviewed the pilot who claimed that he’d been paid $93,000 cash in advance to deliver relief supplies. Well, now who pays somebody $93,000 in cash to deliver relief supplies? I don’t think anybody would buy that story. Some reporters at the time when this started coming out asked Zima about it, and he said, oh, he said, these cash transactions like that, they’re every day. We always do that in the international charter, you know, the international charter business, the double-knot spy business, I think.
[18:53] But later on, after some workers has kind of, you know, they got enough whatever oomph to get this plane going, that workers loaded cargo on the plane. And this pilot, because he knew the heat was on, I believe, he demanded to see these relief supplies. He was supposed to be flying to Nicaraguan refugees in Costa Rica. And they were labeled lettuce. Let me see the lettuce. Well, he found out this lettuce were twin-barrel 57-millimeter guns with several dozen cases of ammunition, and it was all labeled in Chinese. Reporters found the Zima after that. he said that, well, global will not deliver cargo like that. If we know that’s what the contents are, we will not deliver cargo like that. Now, the Tunisian government was involved in this because as this all started falling down, they said the Palestinian Liberation Organization, or the PLO, was sending arms to the Sandinistas. So, you know, who knows in this, like I said, this double knot spy game, who really knows what the truth is? You know, a global crewman was interviewed, and he said it was kind of a standing joke among crews at that time that when he was in the air, When inspectors, airport people would ask what their cargo was, they’d say, well, they’re cabbages and cabbage launchers.
[20:13] And after this time, though, pilots said that their company stopped labeling shipments as cabbages. Then they just put Red Cross stickers over all the sides so it looked like Red Cross supplies, which is, you know, better covered than cabbages or lettuce. Although if you got something that will spoil, you can better put easier push customs people and people that want to hold you up. You can push them easier and say, hey, man, you’re going to spoil, you know, $50,000 worth of food supplies for these poor people over here. And they might let you go. It’s a pretty good, both of them are pretty good scams. Now, during these next few years, everybody in the intelligence community, if they’re an insider, will say, well, that’s Global International is really like Air America, which Air America was well known at the time to be actually owned by the CIA.
[21:07] It’s their own secret charter airline. It’s an open secret at that time. But what was interesting, why Air America pilots started showing up on Global’s pilot rosters and on the logs, and they were showing, they have logs that were showing flying arms and other supplies to Ecuador and Peru and into Southeast Asia, Thailand and Nairobi, Africa and Pakistan, different hotspots like that.
[21:35] And Zima will be asked about this later on. He’ll always claim that his loads had State Department approval. When he was asked if he really worked for the CIA, he’ll say, you know, we don’t knowingly work for the CIA. He never said no.
[21:50] Now, going back, that’s a lot about Azima and his global international airways. But he and Russo were buddies during all this. Anthony Russo, you know, remember him? He’s a small-time criminal lawyer. He’s a small-time criminal lawyer.
[22:08] Fixer, bribes policemen, knows Savellas, knows all the mob people in Kansas City.
[22:17] Now he’s a bank, he and he and Azima both are buddies and they’re also both bankers, bank officers at Indian Spring State Bank. Azima was directly involved with Indian Spring State Bank. If he involved Global’s activities in it, don’t really know for sure. But here is one story where they were intertwined. Russo, during the investigation after all this, Russo had a $25,000 check from Global International. He was questioned about that check in court. He was in a trial for a tax fraud. And he gave the following explanation. He said the government, U.S. Government, had hired Global International to transport a former army sergeant, a Liberian army sergeant named Samuel Doe, who had, you know, they’d had a coup and he was now the new president of Liberia and he appointed his new cabinet and they were supposed to fly Samuel Doe and his new cabinet all around the world on a goodwill tour. He said Azima asked him to go as a host to the president and his cabinet just to escort him around, make connections for him and just kind of be their buddy. And they’ll later say to kiss his ass and keep him happy because they want maybe some librarian deposits, of course, like to get into some of that government money from over in Africa deposited in their bank.
[23:42] Rousseau claimed that he got the approval from the bank president, Mr.
[23:47] LeMaster, and LeMaster will later agree. He said, yeah, and I covered for his duties while he went on this goodwill trip around the world because he believed that he’d become friends with Sergeant Doe and his cabinet, and after that, from that relationship, they’d be able to get bank deposits from Liberia.
[24:05] And he said that that $25,000, he split that fee with Russo. That $25,000 check was Russo’s share of it. And LeMaster got the other part of it. And he said it was because he covered for Russo while he was gone. It was his bank director job or whatever it was. You know it was a no-show job. Zima will later be asked about this. and he said he just wanted somebody, wanted Russo or somebody like that. He was a real hale and hearty, well-meet guy. He said he’d greet Doe with a hearty high prez, and he just was one of those guys that could get along with anybody. A global attorney will say Russo’s main job was to keep Doe’s bodyguards from showing their guns out too often when they were in these other countries. It sounds to me like just probably a many months-long or a month-long trip around the world to hoard and drink and party for a month or so on their librarian’s dollar.
[25:11] And Azima, of course, he was helping out with this because they wanted that money out of a librarian, wanted business out of a librarian, didn’t mind bribing people to get it.
[25:22] You know, there was a trial for tax fraud I just mentioned. Well, during that time, this Azima testified at that, and he got found. First, he got a hung jury, and then I think he got a not guilty. Yeah, he got acquitted on the third trial after two hung juries. And the prosecutor is really frustrated because they believe that Azima’s connections to the government and references to the CIA gave him this, Russo, Anthony Russo, this aura of respectability. Well, you know, during this time, the real scam, Indian Sprig State Bank and other banks around the country was starting to come to light. They were figuring some stuff out, and they were using the Indian Springs State Bank to do it. And I’ll tell you about what that was in a minute. But they actually placed an ad in the New York Times, the Washington Post, I think maybe the L.A. Paper, the big city newspapers, and it said, Money for rent. Obstacles to borrowing neutralized by having us deposit funds and your local bank. New turnstile approach to financing. Right to fund. Suite 311, 1001 Franklin Avenue, Garden City, New York. People rent money? WTF? I mean, people go around renting money to banks to then loan out? I don’t know.
[26:44] I’m not a high finance guy. Maybe somebody out there can explain that one to me.
[26:50] Now, you remember the teamsters’ loans that were obtained by casino owners who knew they had to kick back cash to mobsters. Mobsters had already pressured the pension funds to make those loans to people who may not be able to pay them back weren’t the best risk. Remember the Shawnee Mission State Bank officer who made loans to mob associates who shared the majority of loan money back to the mob and just kept a little piece of it? Well, it was along those same lines. They rented money to a financial institution. At the same time, people or businesses would appear and they want to borrow money at the same time. And they’d agree to pay a really high rate of interest and some extra fees.
[27:33] Because, see, these new borrowers, they were straw borrowers. They didn’t care how much the bank charged his fees or interest or anything about that. And once they got the money, they’d been sent there by Le Master, Russo, and some other people that got involved with this on the national basis. And then, of course, strong borrowers evaporate and loans are never repaid. Pretty soon the people that lease their money want their money back along with their rental fee. You know, they say, hey, it’s not my fault you made bad loans to people that didn’t repay them. You know, the rental time’s up, giving my money back, paying my rental fee. So on a local level, Azimun also had other connections to the Indian State Bank. He recommended that the bank loan $200,000 to the Dunes Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas. It’s an unsecured loan, which like all these others were, and it was going to be for $200,000, and it was going to be guaranteed by Dunes owner, Morris Schenker.
[28:30] Now, Morris Schenker is the same St. Louis lawyer who owned the Dunes, but he also is the same guy who stiffed Alan Dorfman on his finder’s fee for a pension fund loaned to the Dunes Casino.
[28:42] Listen to this clip of Joy Lombardo, the Chicago outfit capo, threatening Schenker to pay that money back as Schenker is refusing to pay it back. We’re going to go to Chicago. Yeah, you know what I mean by Chicago. Should have gone off the top, you know? We didn’t even get covered over there. Because when we got covered, all the people here. You have to find a way to clean it. Very good. So I’m the nicest guy in the world that has that in hand. Nobody’s going to make me do anything. I never did business with him. That’s true. I’ve just been in the conference. I’ve been in the conference. I’ve been in the conference. You it is. Excuse me. I just heard a message back. You can take the system if you want. I’ll tell you what you want.
[29:29] He said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he said he or any hidden interest in the Dunes Hotel. I’m willing to stake my life, my reputation, and everything I’ve got on that statement. But I’ll tell you this, I’m opposed to organized crime, not only in Las Vegas, I’m opposed to it in every matter, shape, or form. Schenker will eventually declare bankruptcy and be millions and millions of dollars that he’ll get discharged. I think $197 million in bank loans and savings and loan loans, pension fund loans. Their whole, you know, just, it was bad. The IRS said actually at that time he owed $66 million in taxes.
[30:41] Regulators looked at that loan and Indian State Bank books, and they said, you need to, you know, you need to collect on that and get him out of there. That guy’s not credit worthy, but, you know, nothing ever happened. It was never paid back. Nothing ever happened. Now, Morris Schenker was an associate of Nick Savella in Kansas City, and when bank regulators started looking at the books, they discovered that the Indian Springs State Bank had loaned other members of the Savella family money on unsecured loans. We go back to the Shawnee State Bank, same deal. They learned that Most of these loans were part of the new business Tony Russo was bringing into the bank. Actually, different mob guys got a total of $400,000 in loans from the Indian Springs State Bank. One was even for an Italian restaurant. I don’t remember what the restaurant was. It probably didn’t last any time. Maybe they’d never even opened it. Their accounts were always overdrawn.
[31:37] They weren’t paying them back. They weren’t making their payments. One thing they did, regulators caught, was there was a loan to Nixabella that he wasn’t making any payments, but they kept it current by just keep rolling it over and renewing it and renewing it. And they decreased the amount of the loan at each renewal to cover the interest rates, the interest costs that they had never paid. But, you know, eventually it’s just, you know, actually he’s going to die. He’s going to go to jail and die, and he’s never going to pay that back either. Same time, Indian Springs is making these sweetheart loans to members of the Savella crime family.
[32:12] The Savellas are embroiled in a criminal prosecution in Kansas City, if you remember that. They indicted Nick and Carl Savella and Charlie Mortina and Tufty Luna and some others for skimming from the Tropicana. And then later, the second trial will be from the Stardust, part of the whole caper that was in the Casino movie. I know you all have seen Casino. Nick will die of cancer before that trial is over.
[32:40] Carl, his brother Carl, is convicted and he dies in prison. Now, there’s another guy that had a loan to the Indian Springs State Bank that never got paid back. Carl Caruso, they called him the singer on the wiretaps. He operated junkets to Las Vegas and the dunes and other casinos. And he was the bag man for the skimming operation. and he was transporting the scam from the trial back to Kansas City. And that’s the one they caught him with, $80,000. He had $40,000 in one pocket and $40,000 in the other just inside his coat pocket. And when they took him off at the airport and arrested him, he just pulled it out and laid it on the table. These were all near-perfect scams. They had all these phony borrows. They had the banks rigged on a national basis. They were even putting money into these savings and loans. And on a national basis they were getting rent money to the banks and then sending their own people in to borrow that money back and never paying it back giving the bulk of the money that they borrowed back to…
[33:44] The criminals then pretty soon the people that put the money into the bank wanted their money back and had to deal with the bank and the bank was legitimate and and they’re going to have to give the money back plus pay the uh the interest rate or the the fee for renting the money however they catch that and on a local basis you know all the mob guys are going over there getting these money getting
[34:06] these loans that they are never intended on paying back because they had the bank wired. So anyhow, that’s a story about how the mafia got involved in the savings and loan scams and the scandals of the 1980s. So thanks a lot, guys. I really appreciate everybody who’s listening and watching. Don’t forget, I like to ride motorcycles, so watch out for motorcycles when you’re on the street driving your F-150 or your Denali, De Niro, and all that kind of stuff. Those things are huge, man. You put a motorcycle up between that and a big truck, and it’s pretty scary sometimes. If you have a problem with the PTSD and you’ve been in the service, be sure and go to that VA website, get that hotline number. If you have a problem with drugs or alcohol, VA will help you. But if you’re not been in the service, then you can go to Anthony Rugiano down in Florida and he’s got a hotline on his website.
[35:00] If you want to read some good mob books, you know, I’ve got three out there. I’ve got the, uh, windy city mafia, the Chicago outfit. I’ve got a big apple mafia, the five New York, New York’s five family stories from the podcast. You may recognize some of them.
[35:16] And then I’ve got my, uh, leaving Vegas, FBI wiretaps, Indian mob nomination, Las Vegas casinos, which tells all about the skimming investigation from the Kansas city and what we saw and what we did here in Kansas city. You know, not what particularly what lefty did out there and that soap proper stuff with Sharon Stone and whatever, Jill, I think, whatever his real wife’s name was. And Tony Splattro, you know, I know he’s real popular to read about and learn about.
[35:43] You know, learn about this from the Kansas City side of this whole story. And it was a heck of a story. It was one heck of a story that the FBI took down these guys. And like, really, if you think about it, historically, they irrevocably changed the Teamsters Union for good or for bad. I don’t know. But in the end, they caused the Teamsters Union to be taken over by a trusteeship and the pension fund all be taken over and, you know, good, legitimate people being installed, you know, especially after Jimmy Hoffa died. You know, there were just and everybody had gone to jail by the end. I mean, all the upper echelon and the Teamsters and the mob that were into the Teamster racketeering, they all went to jail during these years. Now, don’t forget, I have this YouTube channel, like and subscribe. Put it on your social media. Put links to your social media. Tell your friends about it. Same way with the audio podcast. You can put a link on your social media. Help me out by just telling other people about it. It helps immensely. Thanks a lot, guys. Mentally. Thanks a lot, guys. Mentally. Thanks a lot, guys. Mentally. Thanks a lot, guys. Mentally.
