Filmmaker Terence O’Malley documents Kansas City’s gangster past

When Terence O’Malley’s documentary Shots Back in Time: The Union Station Massacre debuts at Union Station next week, it’ll put an end to some of the denial that haunts this city about its past.

June 17 is the 75th anniversary of the infamous massacre, when gangsters botched an attempt to free one of their own, Frank Nash, while lawmen were transferring Nash to Leavenworth. Killed in the spray of gunfire were Nash and four officers. It’s the most well-known flare-up in KC’s mob history, and visitors to Union Station always want to see the bullet holes supposedly still in the walls. But the massacre was also just one in a long string of gruesome but intriguing moments in the city’s mob history.

It seems the city has done everything it can to resist acknowledging that history. Sure, political corruption and murderous mobsters aren’t the kind of thing a city wants to celebrate, exactly. But c’mon. People are fascinated by that kind of stuff — and there’s so much more than just that legend about bodies buried in the concrete beneath Brush Creek.

In last year’s The Mafia and the Machine: The Story of the Kansas City Mob, one-time hometowner Frank Hayde surveyed the work of historians who came before him and compiled what appears to be the first overview of the two forces — Tom Pendergast’s corrupt political machine and the city’s ruling mobsters — that created this city’s heyday. Those two forces also provoked the city’s intense desire for reform, its yearning for Midwestern peace and quiet. As Hayde puts it, “Among natives, there is a long-standing conflict between those who would celebrate the gritty, freewheeling town of yesteryear and those who prefer a reformed version of a prosperous ‘City of Fountains.'”

It’s not great literature, but Hayde’s book does a service for those of us who are curious. Even better is the work of filmmaker O’Malley.

With his movie on the Union Station Massacre, O’Malley has come to the relief of station information-booth workers who constantly answer questions about those bullet holes in the wall. Station officials commissioned a 20-minute film, but it eventually doubled in length. Shots Back in Time debuts on the station’s Extreme Screen at 6:30 p.m. on June 17 as part of the station’s commemoration of the massacre’s anniversary; afterward, the DVD goes on sale in the museum gift shop.

When Union Station officials approached him to make a film about the massacre, O’Malley says, he was already working on a mob movie called Black Hand Strawman: The History of Organized Crime in Kansas City. That film is now set to screen at local independent theaters in November, he says.

Shots Back in Time feels like a preview Black Hand Strawman. In the Union Station movie, O’Malley maps out the events leading up to the massacre, then jumps ahead to the murder of local mob king Johnny Lazia: At 3 a.m. on July 10, 1934, rival gangsters opened fire just as Lazia stepped out of his car in the circular driveway of the Park Central Hotel at 300 East Armour — as O’Malley tells it, the barrage of bullets nearly severed Lazia’s arm and Lazia spent the next 12 hours screaming in pain as he underwent three blood transfusions at St. Joseph’s hospital on Linwood Boulevard before he finally died. From there, O’Malley backtracks to connect Lazia to the Union Station Massacre.

All of that is plenty dramatic. But O’Malley’s film offers something more: images of everyday places in Kansas City, such as the bungalow in the 6600 block of Edgevale where sheriff-turned-bankrobber-turned-hitman Verne Miller was staying at the time of the massacre. In the film, the Edgevale bungalow looks so classically Brooksidian that suddenly you realize: Hey! This is my town! You get the same feeling, only more complicated, seeing footage of Kansas City’s lively downtown streets back in the day. Our city looked like New York or Chicago then, you think as you watch those images, but it never will again, and no prefab entertainment district will change that.

[page]

Of those evocative historic street shots, O’Malley says, “Wait until you see the next film. I’ve got probably 4,000 images, maybe 5,000 images, related to organized crime and Kansas City capturing that period.”

O’Malley grew interested in the subject when he was working on 2006’s Nelly Don: A Stitch in Time. In that well-received documentary, O’Malley detailed the story of Nell Donnelly, the Kansas City fashion designer who, by 1947, had built the largest dress factory in the world, had an affair — and a child — with Missouri Sen. James A. Reed, and been kidnapped. “When I was researching the Nelly Don story, I knew that she had been kidnapped, but I didn’t know she’d been rescued by the mob,” O’Malley explains. “It occurred to me that nobody had given a very good treatment of Kansas City’s organized-crime history.”

With his background, O’Malley knew he could do it. He has a master’s degree in radio, television and film from the University of Kansas, he’d worked as a TV reporter, and he was deputy press secretary to the governor of Alaska from 1984 to 1992. In 1992, he went to law school and now practices from a midtown office. Also a musician, O’Malley spent several years as the house piano player at B.B.’s Lawnside BBQ. By the time he felt inspired to start making films, computer editing software had evolved so much that he could do it himself.

As one of the people working to fill in the blanks of Kansas City history, O’Malley understands the frustration that so much of the city’s identity seems to have been lost.

“One thing you have to appreciate is that, for us who are looking at it historically now, we find it to be fascinating. But for the civic leaders of the day, this is not what they wanted for Kansas City. They wanted to project the image of that Norman Rockwell painting, ‘The Spirit of Kansas City,’ with the big engineer standing over Kansas City.”

Besides, as O’Malley points out, there’s another reason that locals might be inclined to keep their mouths shut about this particular thread of our city’s past.

“This history’s not very old. My film goes up to 1986. That’s not that long ago. Felix Ferina and Tiger Cardarella were killed in gangland killings in the ’80s. So this has been a dangerous subject up until now. In the 1970s, there were Star reporters risking their lives to cover that beat. Tuffy DeLuna is still alive. There’s still quite a few of them alive.”

O’Malley admits there’s another explanation for why we seem reluctant to engage with so much of our past.

“Let me give you a Chuck Haddix quote,” he says, deferring to the jazz historian and host of KCUR 89.3’s Fish Fry, whom O’Malley interviews in Black Hand Strawman. According to Haddix, O’Malley says, “Kansas City is like a former lady of ill repute who’s embarrassed to talk about her past. She’s got this scandalous past, and she’s just trying to put it behind her, and she just can’t get it done.”

Fair enough. But former ladies of ill repute possess something special that prudes never had. Having straightened out their lives, they’ve earned the right to tell great old stories.