Badda Bam!

YOU REALLY DON'T KNOW ME SO LET ME TELL YOU A LITTLE ABOUT MYSELF. I COME FROM A SMALL ITALIAN NEIGHBORHOOD. THE ITALIAN CULTURE IS BASED ON RESPECT AND I CARRY A GREAT DEAL OF RESPECT.

Phil Corbin thought of himself as a bad dude.

In fact, he seemed anything but a badass. He had a reputation for doting on his mother, for being an affectionate boyfriend and for being a gregarious fixture in Kansas City's night life. At 26, he still lived with his parents and hit up his brother for cash. To his Italian friends, he came off as the nice one, the good kid who was always sharply dressed. He'd been arrested only once -- in a beer-can-throwing altercation with a liquor store customer.

But in his mind, Corbin was the kind of guy you didn't mess with.

It was that sense of himself -- as an Italian of the old-school type, the kind you'd better not fuck with -- that apparently motivated him to write a letter to a St. Joseph man named Fritz Ambrozi Jr.

Corbin may have worn neatly pressed slacks and loved his mom, but the note shows that he was also a vindictive son of a bitch.

I AM A REAL NICE GUY BUT I CAN BE A REAL MOTHER FUCKER TOO. I LOVE TO FUCK WITH PEOPLE, ASK [BECKY] ... I TOLD HER NOT TO FUCK WITH ME AND SHE DID. THIS IS WHAT I CALL -- BACK AT YOU.

The letter was an all-caps personal assault on Ambrozi, telling him that he soon would receive photos Corbin had made of himself having sex with his former (and Ambrozi's current) girlfriend, Rebecca (not her real name). Corbin wrote that he would distribute the video to Ambrozi's friends and co-workers. It was nothing personal, Corbin explained. He had just picked Ambrozi to fuck with as a way to get at Rebecca.

So maybe, considering Corbin's predilection for conflict, it shouldn't have come as a surprise that early on the morning of July 8, 2001, as Corbin was coming home from work at about 2 a.m., someone hiding in his neighbor's bushes stepped out and executed him with multiple gunshots.

Three years later, the murder is still unsolved. But maybe that shouldn't be a surprise, either.

Ambrozi wasn't the only person with reason to be unhappy with Phil Corbin.

Perhaps a violent death was only inevitable for a young man who was trying so hard to live up to an image of himself as a motherfucker among men -- and as the heir to his grandfather's legacy. Twenty-eight years ago, in the bicentennial month of July 1976, David Bonadonna's corpse was found stuffed in the trunk of a Ford Mustang on the corner of Ninth and Olive streets. A nightclub owner in what was then known as the River Quay -- today's River Market -- Bonadonna had been shot five times in the head in what looked like a mob hit. His death touched off a wave of retaliation in the entertainment district, resulting in shootings, fires and explosions that echoed across the area's historic brick buildings.

Naturally, suspicion fell on the Cammisano brothers.

Joseph Cammisano and his brother, William, had long been rumored to be part of Kansas City's Italian Mafia and had become rivals to the Bonadonna family. According to FBI testimony at a U.S. Senate subcommittee hearing in 1986, "Willie the Rat," as the press dubbed him, had risen to the top spot in the local mob.

While it was under attack in other parts of the country, the Mafia was still thriving in Kansas City in the 1970s, thanks in part to its long, robust history here and its earlier partnership with the notorious political-machine boss Tom Pendergast.

Johnny Lazia, Charles Binaggio, Nick Civella -- each in turn had run Kansas City's underworld since the 1940s, operating local scams and numbers rackets and networking with national criminal organizations, particularly in Chicago and Las Vegas.

But in the burgeoning district near the river in the 1970s, infighting threatened to tear Kansas City's mob apart. And at the center of the struggle were the Cammisano brothers, men who would become notorious figures in the city's history.

To young Phil Corbin, they were family.

Grandson to Joseph, grandnephew to Willie the Rat -- it was the kind of family background that could weigh heavily on a young man searching for an identity. "The River Quay, that was a case where they got greedy," says University of Missouri-Kansas City professor emeritus of history Lawrence H. Larsen about the mob's downfall in Kansas City. "They had a good thing going and fell out over money."

The 1970s signified a rebirth for the rows of brick buildings surrounding the historic City Market, which was pinned between the Missouri River and the skyscrapers of downtown.

Billed as a center of family fun, the River Quay was an eclectic mix of folksy shops and restaurants. With savvy marketing, the combination drew large crowds on weekends. Meanwhile, the city was destroying the downtown party strip that had been 12th Street to make way for what is now the Marriott Hotel and Barney Allis Plaza.