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Kansas City, the seat of mob power in the US,
Huh? What?
I haven’t watched Casino in a long time, but was that where their connection was to East Coast in that movie?
In Casino specifically, the bosses running the skim are from "The Midwest" which, for the movie's purposes, is an amalgamation of Chicago and KC. The FBI gets wise to the skim op by bugging a KC grocery store the bosses work out of.
In reality, my understanding is that Kansas City was the location the really top guys operated from due to it's centralization. I haven't read it but there's a book called The Mafia and the Machine that can fill you in on the specific historical details.
EDIT: The Teamsters Pension Fund is what made them so juiced up. From the Wikipedia entry on Kansas City Crime Family:
"The new boss was now Nicholas Civella, who greatly expanded the family's rackets and forged alliances with families from other cities, making the organization very powerful. Civella used the Teamsters to fund casinos in Las Vegas."