Final answer:
Political careers in Kansas City during the 19th century often involved collusion with criminal activities. Bleeding Kansas was a particularly tumultuous time with electoral fraud and violent confrontations over slavery. John W. Geary and David Atchison were significant political figures during this time, although the specific person who began his political career as a saloonkeeper is not identified in the provided information.
Step-by-step explanation:
In Kansas City, political careers and criminal activities often intersected during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Kansas politics were particularly turbulent in the mid-1850s, a period known as Bleeding Kansas, which was a series of violent civil confrontations in the United States between 1854 and 1859 which emerged from a political and ideological debate over the legality of slavery in the proposed state of Kansas. The conflict was characterized by years of electoral fraud, raids, assaults, and repressive legislations. For instance, the proslavery legislature passed laws that made it a crime to express antislavery sentiment, and significantly, the entire period was marked by a series of administrative changes and resignations.
One noteworthy figure during the 1850s was John W. Geary, who was appointed as the governor of Kansas Territory in an attempt to quell the violence, but ultimately resigned when the proslavery legislature refused to seek a statewide referendum on controversial constitutional changes. Additionally, David Atchison, a senator from Missouri, led proslavery forces into Kansas to illegally vote and secure a proslavery majority. Violent events like the Sack of Lawrence and the Pottawatomie Massacre exemplified the conflict between antislavery and proslavery advocates, which also reverberated in the Senate with the caning of Charles Sumner, an event referred to as Bleeding Sumner.
However, neither the provided information nor historical records contain details about a saloonkeeper from Kansas City who began his political career and became involved with police protection for organized gambling, as mentioned in the original question. It is possible that the student has conflated historical events or figures, as the detailed information refers to more prominent political actions and figures during the era, none of which began as a saloonkeeper.