Retired Intelligence Detective Gary Jenkins brings you the best in mob history with his unique perception of the mafia. In this video, Gary interviews retired Assistant US Attorney Chuck Ambrose. He tells us the story of two brothers who were mob associates. Steven Vest was married to the granddaughter of Joe Filardo. Filardo took Nick Civella to the famous Mob Meeting in upstate New York when New York State Troopers arrested them. Steven Vest was a vicious and greedy cocaine dealer. Chuck tells how a witness described a double murder and pointed out the burial site. This investigation took the FBI into a dark underground of addicts, cocaine, and drug houses. Among many other crimes, Steven and Darrell Vest murdered two Colombian drug mules, buried the body, and kept the cocaine claiming the couriers never arrived.
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Transcript
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
mob, kansas city, book, couriers, case, money, son, homicide, brothers, food stamp fraud, prosecutors, running, kilos, business, chuck, cocaine, spend, cartel, vest, rules
SPEAKERS
Chuck Ambrose, GARY JENKINS
00:00
One thing I can get into a little bit if you want me to is that you got the old mob mythology that they never did dope. But we all know that not the case. Even the New York families were running heroin wherever the money was the fastest. That’s where they win. You are listening to gangland wire hosted by former Kansas City Police Intelligence Unit detective, Gary Jenkins.
00:24
Welcome all you Wiretappers out there back here in the studio gangland wire. And I have an old friend of mine in many ways. We crossed paths many times. But we didn’t really know each other. He worked with the guys that worked for me, I was a sergeant in the intelligence unit. So I kind of stayed out of the day to day activities. And I had, you know, 12 guys that I was overseeing what everybody was doing and, and so my guys work with US Attorney’s Office and a particular FBI agent, who was one of the best I’ve ever met Larry Tongate. We have the US attorney that’s Assistant US Attorney that a lot of the guys worked with on several narcotics cases involving the mob in Kansas City. Chuck Ambrose, welcome, Chuck. Thank you, glad to be with you. It’s great to have you and kind of get to know you. Like I said, I heard your name so many times from these guys. But somehow we just our paths never crossed, never met face to face. So it’s really been good catching up with you. Before we started recording to hear some of the stories we’re not going to tell on the area. You have been writing crime fiction, and you have used your experience as a US Attorney here in Kansas City and other places a lot to create the storylines in these books. And that’s really sounds interesting. Chuck why don’t name off some of those books.
01:38
Okay, well, the first I wrote just a little bit of background I did several years in DC before moving to Kansas City, I’d come home every day and tell my wife what we’ve been doing it work and he can’t make this stuff up, he ought to write a book. So I finally did. The first one published about 10 years ago now is Capital Kill set in DC and it had to do with a Jamaican posse and a serial killer. And most of my books are based on either real cases or real investigations. Sometimes I will blend two or three into one novel. Often I will use actual court appearances and transcripts from my cases in those novels. And what I’ve tried to do is to write realism to bring realism back into this field because we’ve all seen the Hollywood overdone model with some guy, snap shooting someone off the roof 200 yards away. And out running machine gun fire and all that other ridiculous stuff. And I’ve gotten lots of positive feedbacks, both from prosecutors and from officers and agents who say finally, someone’s getting this right. And that’s probably the most rewarding type of review that I get. I’ve gotten 2000 Plus Reviews now on Amazon with the seven books and they are all averaging four and a half stars or higher. The first book did actually go to number one in Amazon’s Kindle Store for mystery series novels. And then the fifth book that I have out. One of them award winning one of the trade magazines for general fiction book of the year. And the one that might interest you is the sixth than the series based on the time I spend Kansas City Mob Rules having to do with the outfit they’re in a very fictional sense.
03:32
I understand I understand. You were Assistant US Attorney, the FBI had their one squad or Organized Crime Squad and we had a 12 person complement in the intelligence unit and about six or seven of them, worked a lot and worked on organized crime, but they work a lot with the Bureau. And so you had the prosecutors view what everybody was doing both in the one squad and the other squads in the FBI office, and we’re working maybe some other kinds of violent crime or work and extortion or white collar crimes and mob guys will get their fingers in and narcotics do. So that leads us to the question. Well, you know, historically, they always said that the mob doesn’t deal in narcotics. And we know that’s not exactly true. And Nick’s Civella who was the Godfather boss of the Kansas City family and had been since Gosh, their early 50s or middle 50s. We know by 57 He was at Appalachian. And so historically supposedly did not approve anybody dealing with narcotics. But you ran into some of that as a prosecutor. Is that not correct?
04:35
Lots of it. Like you mentioned that whole we don’t do dope line was a public relations move, I think by the mob and as a whole, but the New York families were running heroin back in the 30s. Yeah, Capone in his mob when alcohol was essentially an illegal drug made their bones off of that. And what I ran into in Kansas City was a substantial amount of cocaine. Trade and you mentioned Nick Civella and the Appalachian conference in 57. He and his driver, his underboss, at the time to Florida, are caught outside the conference in a cornfield wearing three piece suits. And when the state police picked them up, they said, What are you doing out here and they said, we’re looking for women. The narcotics mythology is about as accurate as that was. And in fact, Joe Filardo, his granddaughter, gal named Vicki Vogliardo. Married a mob want to be by the name of Steve Vest. And in the early 90s, we had lots of people saying that they knew the Vests were trading all kinds of cocaine, but everybody was refusing to talk about them because they said these guys will kill us. And you hear that a lot. And most of the time, it’s an overblown threat, it turned out not to be the case with the best brothers. As a wedding present, the Filardo-Voligardo family gave Steve Vest a convenience store called the Roma Deli, which was attached in a common wall to the old Roma bakery. And the only way that he was able to keep that afloat not being a very good businessman was to commit tons of food stamp fraud. And when we took that away from him and the Department of Agriculture investigation, he couldn’t make it work anymore. So he burned it down. And unfortunately, Billy, for the people that had given him this business, it also took the rumbo bakery with the fire, a roll of arson proceeds into a carwash out in Blue Springs, we ended up going up on four or five wiretaps at the same time. And when we did the initial round of indictments there, I think we indicted 28 or 31 of the mid level figures there spun became a cooperating witness. And the next thing you know, we’re investigating three homicides and on top of that tremendous amount of cocaine trafficking. So both the Mob members the mob wannabes had their hands heavily in the cocaine trade in Kansas City, at least in the 90s.
07:15
I explained to the guys, this food stamp fraud, I know what it is in several of the corner stores the mob associate own corner stores out in the neighborhoods, admitted food stamp fraud, tell the folks how that worked.
07:30
Well, it can take two or three different forms. One of the more common ones is to accept food stamp fraud, or food stamps for prohibited items like alcohol or cigarettes. The other things they would commonly do is buy up food stamps from the people who are getting them paying 40 or 50 cents on the dollar. And then they would turn those in for payment as if they had been submitted for grocery purposes. And we had a Department of Agriculture undercover investigator that we ran in there several times and you use that as a justification once we were able to document the illegal transactions for taking away the food stamp license from the Roma Deli. And then next crime we uncovered was insurance fraud. When I took the insurance claim on the arson they had said they rolled that into the carwash out in Blue Springs. And then away we went.
08:23
And now you mentioned murders that they were involved there. There was one particularly gruesome double murder that these Vest brothers it was Steve and I can’t remember the brother’s name.
08:32
There were four brothers involved in the case of where I’m okay. Darrell was not involved in the homicide, but he was the main street dealer for the cocaine. The other three who were involved in the murders were Steve, Mark, and Jane.
