Man tied to Kansas City Mafia, strip clubs is behind Missouri AG’s discrimination case

The person Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway chose to illustrate that Kansas City’s contracting system is biased has a history of ties to Kansas City Mafia figures.

Charles Cacioppo Jr., who is being represented by Hanaway in a lawsuit alleging the way Kansas City solicits outside contracts discriminates against men and white people, was prosecuted in 2003 by the Organized Crime Strike Force Unit, a U.S. Department of Justice unit tasked with disrupting and dismantling the Mafia, Irish Mob, Russian Mafia and other gangs.

He also spent months in prison for contempt of court after refusing to testify to a grand jury about mob influence in the adult entertainment industry.

His father, Charles “Chuckie Morgan” Cacioppo Sr., as well as uncles Frank “Hobo Morgan” and Thomas “Tommy Morgan” Cacioppo, were reputed members of the Kansas City Mafia, according to a 1970 Kansas City Crime Commission report.

The same report said Cacioppo’s business, Industrial Salvage and Wrecking Company, also represented by Hanaway in the lawsuit, was “mob affiliated.”

At the time, the company was owned by Cacioppo’s father, but the younger Cacciopo would join the business two years later in 1972.

Cacioppo was at the center of an attempt to bring strip clubs to the River Market, which raised concerns among neighboring businesses that the move would reignite the mob violence that shook the River Market area throughout the 1970s.

Now, Cacioppo is joining the state’s top law enforcement officer to defeat a city program they say unlawfully discriminates against men and white people. They allege that the city’s Minority and Women-owned Business Enterprise Program unlawfully prioritizes businesses owned by women and racial minorities.

On August 10, Hanaway filed a motion for preliminary injunction to stop Kansas City’s contracting practices until the litigation is completed, and on August 11 the Kansas City Council advanced a plan to end the program.

Charles Cacioppo Jr.

As an attorney general filing a civil rights case, Hanaway didn’t need to include a plaintiff in the case.

“I don’t know why they decided this particular plaintiff was the best one,” said Paul Nolette, a political science professor at Marquette University who studies attorneys general. “Looking at the facts here, you have the mafia stuff, he owned a strip club and all this. I mean, it’s not exactly somebody who is the most clean plaintiff that you can imagine.”

The Attorney General’s Office didn’t respond to interview requests or a list of questions about how Cacioppo was vetted prior to filing the lawsuit.

Cacioppo didn’t return a message left on Wednesday at Industrial Wrecking and Salvage.

Law enforcement officials are cautious about labeling someone as a member of, or even affiliated with, the mafia.

But Scott Burnstein, a mob historian and journalist from Detroit, says Cacioppo has connections with figures involved in the mob.

“He has a lineage and a bloodline that traces back decades in the organization,” Burnstein said. “He’s not up to his ears in mob activity, he’s a guy that’s been able to keep kind of a foot in both the legitimate and illegitimate spaces.”

Criminal history in Kansas City

Cacioppo’s criminal history isn’t extensive. His only criminal conviction was in 2004, when he pleaded guilty to, and was convicted of, bribery, fraud and conspiracy in a scheme he orchestrated against Rockhurst University through his business, Industrial Salvage and Wrecking Company.

The case involved Cacioppo bribing officials for projects that were either nonexistent or had inflated costs. He brought in nearly $1 million through the scheme.

A source familiar with the matter, who requested anonymity due to fear of retaliation, said a bookkeeper at the business was placed in the federal witness protection program.

The attorneys who prosecuted the case, Paul Becker and Bruce Clark, were assigned to the Organized Crime Strike Force Unit in the U.S. Department of Justice. One of Cacioppo’s co-defendants in that case, Anthony Conforti, made a threat against Becker to an off-duty police officer during the case, according to court records.

Becker declined an interview request for this story.

Cacioppo was sentenced to 20 months in prison in December 2004. It’s unclear how long he actually spent in prison.

Steve Leben, a law professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City said that he expects the court argument to center around the constitutionality of the city’s contracting system, but Cacioppo’s history could make a difference.

“Because his convictions reportedly arose from fraud and kickbacks involving contracting work, however, his background could present questions about credibility or the factual basis for his claimed injury,” Leben said.

“But I expect the court proceedings to focus much more heavily on the constitutionality of the city’s policy than on whether Mr. Cacioppo is a sympathetic plaintiff.”

Industrial Wrecking

Caccioppo joined the family business full time at Industrial Wrecking in 1972, according to the company’s website.

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Cacioppo was first mentioned in The Star on Nov. 6, 1978, in a story about Industrial Wrecking’s work demolishing a building that was razed in a fire. The building was owned in part by Anthony Civella, who would later lead the Kansas City Mafia, according to federal investigators.

The building was used for mob-led gambling operations and was the site of the suspected mob slaying of Myron Mancuso.

A police officer with the arson unit believed the house was set ablaze intentionally, but Cacioppo downplayed the possibility, saying he believed the house was uninsured and that faulty wiring or Halloween vandals may have set the fire.

Two years later, the business and Cacioppo Sr. were referenced in a Star article about legitimate businesses with Mafia ties.

In 1990 the Missouri attorney general sued Industrial Wrecking for operating after its permit was suspended and allowing polluted water to flow into a drainage ditch. At the time, a garbage fire at a landfill owned by Industrial Wrecking was drawing complaints from nearby residents.

In 1991, Cacioppo took credit for political donations to a candidate after The Star flagged that the candidate was receiving support from mafia-linked figures and the adult entertainment industry. The article indicated the donations were originally believed to come from his father.

“I have a very clean name and I’m a very good businessman,” Cacioppo Jr. said at the time.

It was around this time in the early 1990s that Cacioppo started Bunns, a strip club at 7400 40 Highway, which is now under new ownership under the name Club Skin.

Strip club owner

Cacioppo filed articles of incorporation for Bunns in October 1990. His foray into the adult entertainment industry would lead to months of imprisonment and a confrontation with businesses in the River Market.

Cacioppo sought to help bring strip bars into the River Market in the 1990s. The saga echoed events in the 1970s, when the River Market’s precursor, the River Quay, was beset by violence from competing mob-affiliated nightlife businesses.

Cacioppo Jr. loaned dancers from his club to a restaurant called Mama Orlando’s in the River Market in May 1992, according to a contemporary article in The Star. After River Market officials sought to shut down Mama Orlando’s for violating its lease, Cacioppo planned to build his own more risqué club.

“You’re tempting me now to do something crazy,” Cacioppo is quoted as saying at the time. “I’ll give those people something to talk about.”

“If it looks like they are going to give her a lot of trouble, I might bring them about 70,000 people down there,” Cacioppo said in the 1992 article. “I’ll make that joint, and I can do it all within the law – and there ain’t nothing nobody can say about it.”

Cacioppo backed off the plans a couple of weeks later. A Star news article from June 24, 1992, said neighbors feared Cacioppo’s club would lead to increased mafia activity in the area.

He was attempting to build the club in a location of the then-shuttered Cotton-Eyed Joe’s tavern owned by Vincenzo Cammisano, the son of reputed mobster Joseph Cammisano, who previously co-owned the bar with his brother William “Willie the Rat” Cammisano.

Under the elder Camissanos the bar, then called Uncle Joe’s, was a flashpoint for mafia violence in the River Quay throughout the 1970s. The bar was damaged in a fire in 1976, and leveled by an explosion a year later.

In 1994, Cacioppo spent months in prison for refusing to cooperate in an investigation of mafia influence in the adult entertainment industry. He was one of seven people detained for not cooperating.

“This isn’t a matter of a code of silence,” Cacioppo said at the time. “It’s just a matter of respect and dignity, the way we were brought up.”

Bunns would make the news again in 1999, when strippers posed with a Kansas City Fire Department truck for a promotional calendar.

Mafia heyday over

The power of the mafia in Kansas City gradually waned over the years, and by the time Caccioppo Jr. was convicted in 2004 the figures most associated with the heyday had largely transitioned to legitimate businesses.

In “The Mafia and the Machine,” author Frank Hayde writes that the families remained active in businesses, and may still be involved in crime, but that they hardly resembled the heyday of the mafia’s influence.

“Many of the surnames mentioned in this book seem to have forsaken the rough stuff while remaining active in gentlemen’s club, coin-operated machines, check-cashing firms, car dealerships, construction companies, restaurants and taverns,” Hayde wrote.

There hasn’t been a mafia-linked murder since the 1996 killing of Harold Ash, and criminal prosecutions targeting mafia-linked figures are scarce.

In 2010, Gerlarmo “Jerry” Cammisano was convicted of hosting an illegal online gambling business. Cacioppo posted a photo of himself and Cammisano on Facebook from when they were young.

Cammisano’s conviction was one of the last major blows against the Kansas City Mafia, with only one major conviction since — when two were convicted in 2013 of burning down the Hereford House in an insurance scheme.

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