Mob lifestyle didn’t compare to Tulsa’s | Only in Oklahoma

“This is really living. I’m not making money but there ain’t nobody waiting around the corner to shoot me in the head,” former gangster Gus Gargotta told a reporter in 1958.

Gargotta had been one of the top figures in the Kansas City underworld until his brother, Charlie Gargotta, known as “The Enforcer,” was killed along with Charles Binaggio in a gangland slaying in 1950 and Gus decided to change careers.

He got rid of his expensive car, his eight night clubs, slot machines, dice games and policy wheels and moved to Tulsa, where he eventually became a philanthropist who fed thousands, especially at Thanksgiving and Christmas, a member of the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce and the recipient of a “Good Samaritan” award from Liberty Investors Life Insurance Co.

But his road to respectability wasn’t easy.

“The first 30 days I was in Tulsa, I was arrested probably 30 times,” he told a World reporter. “But I had made up my mind to take it, and I hadn’t done nothing. It was a long time coming, but eventually they let me alone.”

He frequently was told by police to leave town within a week but always refused. After arriving in Tulsa, Gargotta got a job working for his brother-in-law’s produce company — the first time in his life he had ever worked — for $48 a week. At the end of the first week, he had sore hands and feet but he had a check for $48, the first money he had ever earned.

He eventually went into business for himself peddling produce from a truck and soon leased a building where his business flourished. His firm specialized in supplying restaurants and clubs.

During his days in the Kansas City gangs, “I didn’t care if I won $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 or even $40,000 at dice. I just went home and went to sleep. “Today if I sell four sacks of potatoes, oh man, is that a good feeling!”

He maintained his office in the warehouse along with used restaurant equipment that he had for sale, several dining tables, a television and a large cook stove and refrigerator that he used for his favorite activity, cooking for others — others being anyone who showed up hungry.

Every day at midmorning, he began cooking a meal for his warehouse men and truck drivers and others from the neighborhood — down-and-outers from skid row, neighboring businessmen or workers and often businessmen from downtown.

His favorite dishes were spaghetti and meat sauce, stew, chili and baked beans.

“Man, I love to cook. What I’m going to fix the next day is always the last thing I think of at night,” he said. “I never turn anyone away. I always ask them to come back,” he told a reporter. “Many do, some almost every day.

“Times are hard. If you don’t believe it, you ought to be around here and see the folk who come down the alley early to go through our garbage cans.”

He also gave sacks of produce to hundreds of needy Tulsans. Beginning in 1958, Gargotta fed several hundred people Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s dinners at his warehouse.

Entire families would show up to eat. Gargotta had those meals, which included turkeys, hams and other meats, catered by Danner’s Cafeteria, one of his customers. At one of those meals, Gargotta stood with a World reporter watching people eat.

“Look at those guys over there,” he said. “They think I don’t know they’re stuffing food in their pockets. I just hope they get enough.”

Those free holiday meals ended after Gargotta died in May 1967.

“I just can’t do it,” his widow, Daisy, said. “There sure will be a lot of people who are going to miss him, but I just can’t do it.”

Gargotta’s customers included Southern Hills Country Club, the Louisiane, and, fortunately, the Golden Drumstick. He told a reporter about being at the Golden Drumstick on business and learning that the chicken restaurant’s dishwasher was ill.

So he rolled up his sleeves and began washing dishes. A week later, FBI agents and police showed up at his house to arrest him because he had been identified from photographs as the robber of a Kansas City bank. But he had an alibi.

The bank had been robbed on the day he was washing dishes at the Golden Drumstick, and 30 witnesses were willing to testify he was in Tulsa at the time of the robbery.

“If I hadn’t washed those dishes, I’d be in prison now,” he said. “I feel sure of it.”

Like this column? Read all the columns in the Only in Oklahoma series from the Tulsa World Archive.

Only in Oklahoma is a series from the Tulsa World Archive that was written by former Tulsa World Managing Editor Gene Curtis during the Oklahoma Centennial in 2007. The columns told interesting stories from the history of the country’s 46th state. The Tulsa World Archive is home to more than 2.3 million stories, 1.5 million photographs and 55,000 videos. Tulsa World subscribers have full access to all the content in the archive. Not a subscriber? We have a digital subscription special offer of $1 for three months for a limited time at tulsaworld.com/subscribe.