Forty-one such community leaders wrote letters mentioning nothing of Webbe’s mob ties. Only one of them truly came to regret it: Col. John A. Doherty, who was then the chief of detectives for the St. Louis Police Department.

That one of the city’s top cops, whose job it was to put away mobsters at a time in which there were car bombings galore in St. Louis, as rival Syrian and Lebanese gangsters fought over labor power, didn’t sit well with law-and-order types. In fact, the federal prosecutor was so upset he subpoenaed Doherty to appear at the Nevada sentencing.

“You should advise the chief (of police) not to allow these kinds of letters on department stationery and to rid the department of these connections,” special U.S. attorney Marvin L. Rudnick told a police board attorney at the time.