Las Vegas Mob Museum celebrated its first birthday on February 14, 2013 and shares the day with St Valentine. It tells two stories, the Mob story and the story of the law.
Throughout the museum, there are some of the most infamous Mob artefacts, such as the wall from the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre and the barber chair where Albert Anastasia was murdered.
Ellen Knowlton, who retired in 2006 as FBI agent in charge in Las Vegas and was at the helm of the not-for-profit museum’s organization during conception, said FBI officials have shared photographs, transcripts of wiretaps and histories of efforts to kneecap organized crime in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. She comments:
“Despite the sort of edgy theme, this museum is historically accurate and it tells the true story of organized crime.”
It opened on February 14, 2012 in a brick federal building that was the centerpiece of this dusty town of 5,100 residents when it began in 1933. In 1950, the three-story building hosted a hearing by Tennessee Sen. Estes Kefauver’s special investigating committee on the rackets.
(c) The Mob Museum
The stories of mob’s biggest players including Al Capone, Whitey Bulger, Bugsy Siegel, John Gotti are revealed.
It was Bugsy Siegel who pioneered the transformation of this one-time desert stopover into a glittering tourist mecca, opening the $6 million Flamingo hotel on the fledgling Las Vegas Strip in 1946 with financial backing from Lansky.
The movie-star handsome Siegel was rubbed out six months later in Beverly Hills, perhaps because he angered the mob with cost overruns on the hotel.
(c) The Mob Museum
Spilotro and Rosenthal were associates in the 1970s, when Rosenthal ran several casinos, including the Stardust. Spilotro was killed in 1986 and buried in an Indiana cornfield.
Organized crime was eventually driven out of Las Vegas in the 1970s and ’80s by the FBI, local police and prosecutors, state crackdowns and casino purchases by corporate interests.
The Mob was brought to justice, including Joe Petrosino, Eliot Ness and Estes Kefauver. The museum has the actual courtroom where one of the 14 federal Kefauver Hearings was held in the early 1950s.
Many of these stories have been dramatized by Hollywood in such movies as Bugsy, The Godfather and Casino. But documenting Mob history was not easy.
Dennis Barrie, who directed the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland and the popular International Spy Museum in Washington designed the museum to show how organized crime and the fight against it shaped modern life. He says:
Whether it’s running the casinos in Las Vegas, or controlling cigarette sales or numbers, or trash collection in any city, organized crime is part of the American culture. Everybody has a Mob story or a brush with the Mob world. Or they at least say they do.
Entrance to the Museum costs $19.95 for adults and $13.95 for children and students.
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