Peter “Las Vegas Pete” Simone, reputed Kansas City Mafia underboss, gambling kingpin and unindicted co-conspirator in a 1990 mob hit has died. He was 79.
Simone died last Thursday, two days shy of his 80th birthday, from lung cancer.
“Pete spent his 80 years in a way that reflected his core values of loyalty, honor, and friendship,” according to his Passantino Bros. Funeral Home obituary.
Loyalty and honor, however, means something very different to an organized crime investigator.
“If you know anything about the Mafia, the code of ‘omerta,’ you keep your mouth shut. And he always kept his mouth shut,” former Kansas City Police Department mob investigator Gary Jenkins said.
Simone was the underboss in Kansas City’s crime family for three decades, “and made his bones under the Civella brothers in the 1970s managing their vast slate of gambling operations and running travel junkets to Las Vegas (hence the nickname),” according to The Gangster Report.
Simone was the family’s number two under both Nick Civella and his brother Carl "Cork" Civella.
Simone did two stretches in federal prison. He served four years for gambling and money laundering convictions in 1992, and went back to prison in 1999 after violating his parole by meeting with mobsters at local strip clubs and casinos.
Simone was an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1990 hit on mob associate Larry Strade. Strade was cooperating with the government’s drug investigation into mobster John Mandacina, and was gunned down in his Gladstone, Missouri driveway.
Although the government connected Simone to the hit, he wasn’t known as an enforcer.
“He never had that reputation at all,” Jenkins, who produces the mob podcast Gangland Wire, told KCUR.
But he wasn’t opposed to murder, Jenkins added.
“He was a kind of a person that didn't mind that somebody had to be killed because that keeps the business going or was a threat to somebody in the family,” he said.
While most of the American Mafia has been decimated by federal prosecutions, a small remnant still runs illegal card games, a sportsbook and video poker in Kansas City. Jenkins said he would see Simone out and about.
“I recognized that he was just having these quiet conversations,” he said. “He's the underboss, the kind of guy that goes out and tells people, okay, this is what's going on.”
Simone remains on the Missouri, Nevada and New Jersey Gaming Commissions' black books that banned him from casinos in all three states.
