Gary jenkins forensic scientist biography videos

Negroes To Hire tells the intriguing story of life on slaveholding antebellum farms in Missouri. The WPA Slave Narratives provide compelling first-hand accounts of the day-to-day existence of those held in bondage. Along with insightful commentary by noted historians, authors and educators, this unique documentary sheds new light on a controversial and troubling subject.

Not just history, but a shared heritage between African-Americans and European-Americans. A better understanding of this relationship allows us to see our shared humanity, and not fear our differences. Is he still practicing law today being he was an attorney? Gary Jenkins. Sep 10 Written By Tommy Canale. The Extra 5. InJenkins was promoted to the rank of detective, and he was assigned to the organized crime division.

As a detective, Jenkins focused on investigating the Kansas City Mafia, one of the most powerful criminal organizations in the United States at the time. He worked tirelessly with the local FBI to gather evidence and build cases against members of the organization. Their efforts paid off in the s when Jenkins helped to convict several high-ranking members of the Mafia on charges of racketeering, extortion, and murder.

He passed the bar and commenced a solo law practice in He has also worked as a consultant and lecturer on organized crime. Jenkins authored several books about the Civil War in Missouri and his experiences investigating the Mafia. Gary Jenkins produced five documentary films. The only titles available are listed with links below. He'd do body work and had a body man working for him.

Fix it up, slick it up, and Bobby started talking to him about buying a car from him. He ended up buying it from him actually, and I ended up having him detail my car in the end, but over that, all of a sudden he really started liking us, and he had something on his mind, and finally one day he said, well, he said, I might as well go ahead and tell you.

I said, well, John, what's that? He said, well, he said, you know, Carl Sparrow was hanging out over there a lot. And he started telling us about some other guys, a guy named Leonard Crago. He said, they call him the A-Rab. He says, the scariest man I ever saw. And he said, what I used to do when they'd have meetings there, and there was another guy who was some kind of a professional criminal.

I called him Strong, I think, Red Strong or something like that. And he said he's some kind of professional criminal from out of town. He said this ARAB guy, he's some kind of a killer guy. And he and Carl Sparrow used to go back in a little meeting room back there and have meetings. And actually, the office for the car salesman, a car dealership, or used car dealership, was just kind of a big shack is what it was.

He said, but we had a garage there, and we had a parts department in the garage. It was adjoining that. And he said, I'd go back in the parts department and listen through the wall to what they're saying. He said, man, he said they work like heck to get this Leonard Krego out of jail and to come up here and do something. He said, I don't know what he's going to do.

So hey, this is good. And then he tells us that he has his tow truck and his big secret. He said, you probably already know this. I better go ahead and tell you. He said, I got a call from Carl once, and he wanted me to meet him down here in South Central Missouri. He said, I gary jenkins forensic scientist biography videos know exactly what he meant, but I knew there was something wrong about it.

He said, I got down there and they had a trailer, a tractor and a low boy trailer with a bulldozer on it. And he said, I pulled him out of the ditch. And he said, that bulldozer was stolen. So I started searching reports in the metro area and I found about. This was about a month or so before this happened. And so I knew about what date it was within a few days.

And I found a stolen bulldozer just like he described. And we ended up, actually ended up tracing down that bulldozer a few months later. So he had sold it to some guy down there in the country. So did you ever have any surveillance work or personal interactions with the Savellas themselves, the top guys? Or did they stay pretty kind of far away on the periphery, not interacting with the day to day?

Because by this point in time, Nick Savella was long time in power at the end, I would say of his reign. And we'll get into some of the problems that came along. He might come to City Market, you'd see him talking to somebody down there. I personally never walked up and said, hey Nick, how you doing?

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Tell me something. But I never did that. But you know, you just see him and Pete down there and then they drive off. You might follow them a little bit and see where they went. They never really went too many places. Nick stayed back. He was like the Godfather. He was the puppet master of the Godfather. He pulled the strings. He had this "Tuffy" DeLuna Luna who was out there and he would go to tell people, talk to people and see what they were doing.

There was always, you know, follow him to some business then you would have to go research everything about that business and see who always maybe do a short quick surveillance on it and see what kind of a spot it was. And so you would, you know, just track them around and see what kind of their, what their pattern was. We like, they would go to this Villa Capri a lot.

It was the pizza place. It will become famous later on. The reason why I mentioned this, it would go to the Villa Capri a lot, both day afternoon, maybe, and nights. Uh, they had the social club, they called it the trap. It was the Northview social club, but they really, they called it the trap. For some reason, I never knew what the etymology of why they called it the trap.

And so they would go down there and they'd play cards down there and we'd write down like, write license numbers down, maybe pick up on somebody else who was down there we hadn't seen for a while, follow them away and see where they were going. And that was, you know, those were our days and hit some other spots that, you know, they would be at. And, uh.

So, you know, really we'd never really talk to any of those guys. We may try to find, they went to some business, there might be somebody there that could enlighten you more about what they were doing, like I did with this John guy, this tow truck driver. Might go in and try to talk to them, but there was no use us even trying to talk to these guys.

And so that's, you know, that was kind of the extent of, you know, if they saw him meet with Willie Commisano for a while, that would be an unusual meeting. Because what happens is you document these different meetings, you document where they're going, and then something else a month from now, or maybe they've already got it documented or some other informants telling the bureau something, because the bureau had some informants that were.

And so, all of a sudden, what that informant's saying or what they hear on another wiretap somewhere will then make sense because they've got these reports. And so, at the time, there was a lot of activity, shall we say, going on. There was more than anybody could keep up with. And some of it had to do with the Savellas, some of it had to do with the Comisanos, some of it, and then there was this whole other mob war between the Spiro brothers and the Savella brothers.

So it just got crazy. Just we were constantly running around trying to figure out what was going on, who was meeting who, and there were bodies being found and it was just nuts. In Kansas City by this point in time, and probably for some time by the mid 70s, had been big into Vegas in combination with Chicago, Milwaukee, and most other families across the country had a piece of Vegas.

Louis as being And Kansas City was a big, a big part of that. And you've done, you've done a lot of work yourself with respect to documenting. I mean, you were involved in a lot of the, the investigations with respect to the Vegas skim. Uh, so tell us a little bit about that connection and kind of where you fit into the picture with respect to investigating, uh, Kansas City and Vegas.

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I was kind of like the low rung on the ladder here, but the lowest figure on the totem pole in that investigation. But I was in there and I was part of it. I mentioned the Villa Capri where they would go to. We had like probably a year or two worth of surveillance reports of them meeting at the Villa Capri. So we have this mob war going on, and they're stalking each other, these other two brothers, other brothers, the Spiro brothers and the Savellas, Spiros, and they're stalking each other.

We catch them doing that every once in a while too.

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Like you catch Carl or Mike or somebody at a place. And then you'll see one of these other guys driving, you know, just like a policeman like us. They were just like us. They would drive around and see, you know, where they were. And they were out trying to find people who were informants for them to help set down these upstart Young Turk Spiro brothers.

And the Spiro brothers, they didn't even know about the skim. We didn't know about the skim. The Bureau knew, you know, it was probably going on, but they didn't know exactly how. They knew more really about, and not our office, St. Louis had going on out there at the Atlanta, I think, or Atlanta, but Kansas City, you know, they didn't know exactly what it was.

And so you got, that's where the wiretaps and the bugs come in. And, and so we hear, the Bureau hears that, especially that they always talk about some of their plans at this Villa Capri, which is restaurant. And they always sit at the same table. You know how people like, they go in a restaurant all the time, they'll many times sit at exactly the same table.

And these guys are like, you know, God over there in that area where they went into Villa Capri, so nobody else sat at their little banquet and tables. And the bureau had picked up from an informant that. You know, he had some what we call dirty talk at this one table about planting a bomb on a strip club owner that they wanted to extort some money from.

So to get probable cause to put a microphone in there where they're making these plans about different things and hopefully hear them talking about, you know, making some plan or getting some clue on a murder plot, you know, they get a Affidavit and order. It may make it look like it's in a corner store and it's up in a vent. Well, this was down on the floor, I think, somewhere in that table.

And so they get that bug in there and they start hearing stuff. And as an agent, my friend Bill Owsley said, I never heard the song Staying Alive so much in my life. Listen to that bug. Oh yeah, he was he cashed that check at the stardust. Oh, you know, and then somebody said, well, we in on that with them. We don't know what it is. And Jay Brown was Oscar Goodman's law partner.

And he was a corporate counsel for Alan Glick at the Stardust. And the Argent Corporation owned these four casinos. So it's building. And one of the next times, Tuffy's in there, and they're talking about getting hold of somebody in Las Vegas. And Tuffy garies jenkins forensic scientist biography videos, well, I've got to find a phone. But there was a phone right there and he didn't use it.

So, you know, when he says, I gotta find a phone, you know, you gotta find that phone. We gotta find that phone. And right, and Bureau, I tell you what, they had, I think three pilots, two of them, they brought in, they had one here. They had one plane here, they brought in another plane from another office. They always had one on the ground and one in the air.

One ran out of gas, the other one could then get up. They brought in about 20 agents. They got a whole bunch of us from the intelligence unit and gave us FBI walkie talkies. We had codes, had all these codes that, like, I remember Cork was cognac. It was always some kind of, Ragusa was rum. Tuffy was tequila. And so it was some kind of a booze that had the same first initials.

And so we just started finding them. Finally, they sat Tuffy down at this hotel. It was in an industrial area. It's kind of a nicer hotel, but it was an industrial area, but right next to I, right next to the beltway freeway that goes around the city. And so, catch him down there and he goes in and somebody, maybe probably not the first time, but when he stayed in there a long time, somebody probably got out and went up and just walked in the lobby and they seemed back on the payphone.

So then, okay, here's the payphone. So now you got a pattern. Anytime he would leave his house, you just sit close and watch him leave his house, get somebody down there on that hotel and you don't really have to follow him all the way down. Follow him around a little bit, but don't get burned. Let him go if you think, you know, there's a problem at all because he was real, real tail conscious, real tail conscious.

He was looking for the airplane. He'd stop and just stare up in the air. If he'd see that airplane making a lazy circle around him, he'd just, you know, he'd go on. He'd drive down in the airport. We have an older airport that's close to downtown. He'd drive down the airport and then drive out real fast because he knew a plane couldn't come into there.

I got him sat down and you didn't have to then follow him down there. And they got enough probable cause to put a wire on those phones. And then all they had to do is catch him, just leave somebody down there. And when they'd see him pull up and go in, you know, from a van or a business, I don't remember exactly where they sat down there, then just call down the wire room, say, okay, he's in.

And then they just start listening to all four phones, and whichever one he gets on, then they start listening to that phone and they can turn on the recording device as soon as they hear a little bit of dirty talk. So he's talking to this Joe Agosto, who works at the Tropicana. So in the end, it really got confusing for everybody.

In the end, there's two streams of skim, one coming from the Tropicana directly to Nixa Vela. He developed that skim himself without any help from Chicago. No teamsters money, no help from Milwaukee. It was just him and this guy Joe Augusto who was now. And all he was, he was from Sicily. He had a great Sicilian accent and he'd just been a con man all his life, but he was good.

And he worked his way in with the people at the trap and they wanted, and how he did this, he convinced them that he had connections to the Teamsters and of course, threw the mob. You know, those guys that ran it, there were several principals that ran it, but they knew he had connections to the mob in Kansas City and they could get the Teamsters loan that they wanted.

And they wanted to expand and they needed a Teamsters loan to do it. And so they thought Joe Augusto would do it. So they let him have this position of authority and power at the casino. And so Nick Savella, first thing he does is tell his Teamsters people, don't give them a loan. Like I said, he was a great con man so he could string them along.

And so we're hearing all these conversations. Well, Joe This is during the time when the Nevada Gaming Commission is trying to kick him out. He's having hearings and he's already been to court, been kicked out of the casino and then had an appeal, won on appeal and came back into the casino. And so, and Nick, he knows that he does not want this guy to keep all this stirring, stirring up, everything stirred up and in the newspapers.

And Lefty was a guy who wanted to be in the newspapers. He wanted to be bigger than life. And he wants to stay in that casino because he knows that's his, you know, that's his golden ticket. He's already making grand a year in like s to be the casino manager. Plus he liked that control of four casinos. I mean, he was, this was like, I got my dream.

I got my horse and my gun. He got his dream. He owns four, he's running four casinos and he puts the sports book in the one. He starts a sports book and hires women dealers and the blackjack tables. He was kind of an innovator. He really was. He was also a top gary jenkins forensic scientist biography videos informant during all this time too.

And I think he probably jerked the FBI off as much as he gave him good information because he was that guy. He was that guy. You could not trust that guy. So Joe is reporting all this gossip about Lefty and it really gets interesting because we get, then we got another hidden microphone with Nick Savella meeting Tuffy DeLuna. And they got the probable cause to put a bug in that lawyer's office.

When the lawyer wasn't there, you could listen, because they weren't talking law business. They weren't talking court cases. They were talking Lefty Rosenthal a lot. And they were also talking about setting up a meeting with Joy Ayoopa in Chicago and a lot of really cool things. And so, you know, we'd hear them talking about, well, you know, we need to go talk to Lefty.

And one of the really cool things I heard on those tapes was, Lefty, I mean Tuffy Luna and Nick Savelle are talking about whether Nick can call Lefty directly, or does he have to go through Chicago. They'd already talked about how Chicago didn't want to believe anything bad about Lefty. And Joe Augusto is telling him he's a snitch. And Tuffy's telling Nick that, hey, Joe says he's a snitch, but I don't really believe that.

And Nick, he's saying, well, you know, in some ways he is because he tried to, in a way, blackmail Harry Reid, who was the president of the. And, and, and next mine, that's being a snitch. He said, you know, he said, you're going to make those people mad. So we've got to cool this lefty down. So they were counseling back and forth and lefty was, and, and.

Tuffy was always counseling Nick and he said, and finally he said, you know, he said, we had a meeting in Chicago about this. I think you can talk to him directly. So then they started figuring out how to get the message to Lefty without anybody else knowing and then Lefty, eventually he did call Nick and they got that phone call.

And Nick is nice. But he keeps telling me, he said, you know, you're gonna hurt a lot of people if you keep this up. You know, there's a lot of money at stake here and you're gonna hurt people. And after that phone call, lefty acts like he always said, okay, I'll calm down, I'll cool it. But he can't cool it because if he does, he's just gonna get kicked out of the casino.

And so they come back and Nick is telling Tuffy about the call and he said, I told him just cool it, cool it.

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And Tuffy's going, yeah, but I think he might lie to you, Nick. So it was really enlightening about how Nick Savello worked, how he was a diplomat. He was willing to talk and talk and talk and convince people to do the right thing before he ever resort to any. It was really enlightening to listen to those tapes. And we ultimately know that Rosenthal does eventually get blown up.

He lives and lives out the rest of his life, but he does eventually get blown up. Most people believe that was out of Chicago, possibly to do with Tony Spilattro, of course, to do with all of the things going on with the skim. One thing I will say is a lot of people watch Casino and they see the scenes with the politician who then Uh, turns Robert De Niro's character away who is lefty Rosenthal from the gaming board and kicks him out.

People don't know that that's based on Harry Reid, Harry Reid, who became very famous, I believe is a, uh, either a Senator, uh, or a representative. I can't remember. And people don't know that he had a bit of a dastardly past that was, he was that guy. Now, one question, we're kind of along the lines of the movie, the movie Casino a little bit.

And I was curious if you know, if are you aware that your name is mentioned in the book Casino? Yeah, there's a nice shopping area. I used to live close to it over in the city. And I'm walking down the street and there's this young policeman I knew. He said, hey, Gary, what's going on? Hey, how you doing? He said, hey, and he said, did you know that I was reading this book about the mafia and your name's in there?

I said, what? I said, what is he out? He told me the name of it. So there's a Barnes and Noble down the street. It's in there, folks, just because I was there, helping serve the search warrant on Tuffany Luna at the underboss's house. And that's the place where they found the famous, very famous records that he kept. Yeah, and that's the funny thing is so Uh, if you if you equate to the movie, i'm just gonna read it for those people that have this book It's page and i'm gonna say, uh, so I had listened to gary's Yeah, yeah, so I had listened to gary's podcast for quite a while, of course big movie buff.

So I had watched the movie um, and when you when I first started listening to gary's podcast I was like, oh it's. That's pretty cool. He was a detective. He worked against these guys, but it never really registered exactly to what level. And again, I think Gary underplays it a little bit until I started reading this book and I get, I'm pretty deep into the book and it's page And I come across and I'm just going to read it.

I come across the excerpt that says, quote, less than three months after the Marlowe meeting. And this, this actually, this scene is in casino. And, well, that's, that's you. This scene of, of serving the warrant, it's Artie Piscano in casino.