Anyone would be hard-pressed to guess what the late John Gotti might have in common with rural Cass County, Missouri. Located some 1,200 miles and a cultural light-year away from Gotti’s old haunts on Mulberry Street, it is farm country hard by the Kansas state line, a place where the county fair in July boasts livestock exhibits, a horseshoe pitching contest, and the Mo-Kan Youth rodeo. There is one local phone company, appropriately called Cass County Telephone, which has about 8,000 subscribers and makes its headquarters in the wonderfully named town of Peculiar, about 25 miles south of Kansas City.

Aside from its location, the other peculiar thing about the company is its ownership: According to federal investigators in New York pursuing mob-orchestrated telecommunications schemes, while the company is headed by an otherwise upright local citizen, it really belongs lock, stock, and switchboards to members and associates of Gotti’s Gambino crime family.

The news that a group of New York wiseguys had somehow penetrated their little rural phone company was unsettling to local residents in Cass County. “It was definitely a surprise,” said Peculiar city administrator Mike Fisher. “We’ll take a wait-and-see attitude.”

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