McGraw, a career investigative reporter, already has one Pulitzer Prize under his belt for an early 1990s examination of shoddy practices at the U.S. Their September story prompted police to reopen the investigation. But McGraw and Rice might yet put the entire puzzle together. We still don’t know who fired the fatal shotgun blasts that morning: Witnesses said three lack men in a late-1960s-model Pontiac comprised the killing corps. She told police that whoever arranged the killing could easily have hired blacks as the triggermen. could deliver 12,000 votes and threatened the power of some potentially violent members of white political groups. In a September story, McGraw and Rice reported that a month after the murder, Orchid Jordan, Jordan’s widow (now deceased), told FBI agents that she thought her husband was killed because Freedom Inc. Watkins founded Freedom Inc., which remains a political force, in the mid-1960s. It is likely that Presta - and Civella by extension - would have viewed Jordan as an irritant, at the very least, as he organized black voters under the umbrella of the Freedom Inc. Civella’s political arm in Kansas City’s North End was the late Alex Presta, who would not have been in a position to order a killing. He is not believed to have ordered the hit but might have taken satisfaction in Jordan being killed. The local Mafia kingpin was Nick Civella, who ended up in prison and died in 1983. The reporters’ theory is that the person who commissioned the crime - an inner-city liquor store owner named Joe “Shotgun Joe” Centimano - hired black men for the job to make the killing look like something other than a mob killing. Traditionally, of course, the mob doesn’t entrust such work to outsiders because 1) they usually get caught, and 2) they usually talk. Part of the frustration ended Sunday with McGraw’s and Rice’s conclusion that Jordan’s murder was the product of a “freelance” hit job by a lower- to mid-level mobster who may have been seeking “to curry favor with the leaders of organized crime.” The Jordan case has long frustrated and intrigued politicians, law enforcement officials and devotees of Jackson County politics. Today (Monday) the Star will have a follow-up story.
Their riveting, almost breathtaking story (breathtaking if you love a murder mystery entwined with great journalism) appeared on Sunday’s front page. Rice, who have spent months, if not years, examining the case and clawing for answers. It came Sunday from Kansas City Star reporters Mike McGraw and Glenn E. We also know now, in all likelihood, who arranged the killing. Jordan was killed outside his Green Duck tavern early on July 15, 1970. After four decades, we have the probable answer as to why black political leader Leon M.
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