They're Gunning for Him Now

Tony Ragusa was 23 years old when his uncle handed him the keys to the B&C Party Shoppe. "Be there at 6 a.m. Have the door open, and they will come," his uncle told him.

Ragusa went, abandoning plans to become a fireman and taking on a job that his older brother had turned down, probably wisely. In 1990, the B&C Party Shoppe at 27th and Troost was a store under siege. Ragusa's new corner was the intersection of choice for drunks, who lined up in the alley behind. Prostitutes took their johns to the nearby vacant buildings. Drug dealers occupied the bus shelter. The surrounding neighborhood was in free fall. Tiny, neglected apartments provided a stream of new, unsavory renters as well as horrifying anecdotes: the woman who poured hot oil on her boyfriend, another who stabbed hers to death.

After forty years in the neighborhood, Ragusa's Italian uncle had lost his stomach for the battles. "He fought his fair share of them," Ragusa says. "He knew I had the youth, the strength to come in here."

For minimum wage, Ragusa worked 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. six days a week. The deal with his uncle offered a dubious reward.

"I knew I had the opportunity coming," Ragusa says. "I was going to own the store."

Ragusa's immediate task was to fire the manager his uncle believed had been stealing from him. Next was to restore order. One of his first customers grabbed a case of beer and told Tony to put it on his tab.

"How much do you owe?" Ragusa asked.

"Thirty or forty dollars," came the response.

"Now you owe me forty dollars," Ragusa said. "You are going to pay me the forty dollars. And if you think you can walk out of here with it, get walking."

The confrontation set the tone for Ragusa's business. Determined to protect his borders and his customers from the chaos around them, he went on the offense. He hired strongmen and gave them guns.

Ragusa and his men made the parking lot their garrison. Within it, they tolerated no drinking or loitering. Maintaining control was one thing on a freezing January day -- but quite another on a hot July night, when they had to tap on tinted car windows and ask the occupants to leave while dozens of people looked on. Ragusa fought a turf war on a daily basis.

"Don't tell me what to do. This is my corner," the men on the corner said.

Ragusa responded in kind: "No, that's where you're wrong. This is my corner."

The B&C Party Shoppe is a former 7-Eleven with a parking lot out front. Ragusa's uncle bought it in the early '80s when he moved from his original location across the street. Inside, a makeshift wall of wood and Plexiglas divides customers and employees. Four grocery aisles supply mostly chips and snacks as well as a few essentials, such as soup and diapers. Humming glass-doored refrigerators line the rim, cooling beer, sodas and Totino's frozen pizzas. Behind the counter are smaller, more easily stolen items and rows of liquor bottles.

For almost twenty years, the Party Shoppe has dispensed tiny bottles of gin and giant bottles of malt liquor along with loaves of bread, condoms and sticks of butter. Ragusa's prices are jacked up comparably to those in any convenience store: a loaf of Wonder costs $1.89, SpaghettiOs $1.19 a can, a package of ramen noodles 39 cents. Ragusa's sales break down to about 60 percent booze and 40 percent food -- and the prices include tax, which makes it easier on customers like the old man who counts out his quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies with cracked, crooked fingers. Counting twice, he slides $1.75 across the countertop in exchange for a small bottle of Barton's gin. The laminate, once green, is a rubbed paper-sack brown from so many coins, so many bottles of gin.

A buck seventy-five at a time, Ragusa has paid his uncle for the business. He made the final installment in 1997. From his own place -- opposite a tiny Chinese restaurant and diagonally across from another convenience store, the J&P Market -- he's given jobs to his two brothers, both of whom drive new cars and live north of the river. He's paid the medical bills for his daughter, born in 1992 with a diaphragmatic hernia. He's bought a 6,000-square-foot house with a view of Smithville Lake. The store grosses $800,000 a year, Ragusa says.

But Ragusa's run at 27th and Troost appears to be coming to an end. He's not being scared away by the dealers and crack whores. Instead, he is succumbing to a Troost redevelopment plan that doesn't include a corner liquor store. Pressure from city hall isn't easily fought with fists or shiny black guns.

Mary Williams-Neal moved to the Beacon Hill neighborhood in 1992, taking over as manager of the Courtyard Apartments, half a block south of the Party Shoppe. The seven sturdy brick buildings had been rotting from the inside out, and the more than eighty small units had attracted a destructive mix of dope dealers and poor people. Williams-Neal's management was part of a salvage effort by the Kansas City Neighborhood Alliance, a nonprofit organization that builds and renovates affordable housing for poor people. The Alliance renovated the apartments, slicing their number in half, and Williams-Neal's management brought a firm hand.