Free Kansas City Lightning by Stanley Crouch Page B

master blues and swing.
    Edward Reeves, Charlie Parker’s childhood buddy from the old neighborhood in Kansas, collected a little coin himself in these years chauffeuring for the mob and serving at their parties. “The poor people loved Pendergast,” he recalled. “He wouldn’t let you starve. You could go right up there on Market Street and get what you needed. Cornmeal, beans, slab of bacon.” In those Depression days, that Pendergast money made the machine a virtual godsend. The Pendergast machine fueled Kansas City’s nightlife in countless ways—right down to its monopoly on liquor distribution. “When you opened a liquor store,” Reeves recalled, “they gave you sixty or ninety days, usually ninety days, to get all the name brands off your shelf, to sell them. Then you had to start ordering Mistletoe beers, wines, and liquors. Everything in Kansas City was Mistletoe, which was Pendergast. If you tried to be bullheaded, you wouldn’t have a business very long.”
    Behind the benevolence and the looseness, there was cold steel and hot lead. And as the profits swelled, the competition for sections of this independent underworld economy resulted in precautions that led Reeves to understand the dangers of working as a mob chauffeur:
    They didn’t drive Cadillacs then: the sixteen-cylinder Packard couldn’t be beat. Engine four or five feet long. I went to pick up a Packard once and they had glass so thick the man had a little crane to put it in, bulletproof. When I looked at that glass as he was putting it in the door, I started to thinking. I realized what it was all about and knew that there was plenty of danger in there. Then was when it got clear I had better find myself another way to make a living. I didn’t need to get shot down driving gangsters around.
    The most famous shooting in the kingdom of Tom Pendergast became known as the Kansas City Massacre.
    In June 1933, as Charlie Parker was nearing thirteen and one of his favorite comic strips, Dick Tracy , was in its second year, federal agents captured a fugitive named Frank “Jelly” Nash in Hot Springs, Arkansas. The agents whisked him out of a cigar store and into a car that they drove away as fast as possible. The lawmen didn’t intend to become casualties of the hoodlums who ran free and easy in Hot Springs and just might miss the company of their chum. They took Nash to Fort Smith, Arkansas, and boarded a Missouri Pacific train. The next morning they would be met at Kansas City’s Union Station by local police, who were to assist in whisking Nash off to the federal prison at Leavenworth, a short drive away.
    Though Kansas City’s telephone wires were surely humming with speculation on where Nash was and what the arresting officers had in mind for him, legend has it that Johnny Lazia overheard the actual plans through his own private wiretap of the central Kansas City police station. When the lawmen arrived at Union Station with Nash, they were met by two federal agents and two local police officers. Handcuffed and surrounded by seven armed men, two of them carrying shotguns, Nash followed orders to walk through the station’s lobby and out the east entrance, where two cars were parked and ready for the trip to Leavenworth. Suddenly, from behind a car, two men armed with submachine guns stepped forward and commanded the officers and agents to put their hands up. Then someone ordered them to shoot, and the gunmen let it rip. The chattering dose of lead rubbed out the lives of Nash, a federal agent, an Oklahoma police chief, and the two local cops. Blood ran in the gutter; bullet holes were left in the walls of Union Station; two wounded lawmen lay writhing next to the dead.
    In all its shock and gore, the Kansas City Massacre was a godsend to J. Edgar Hoover, who was incensed by the romantic images criminals inspired in the public mind at the expense of law enforcement, both in