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The Mob? What Mob?
Las Vegas’
association with the mob has been dramatized by Hollywood
in movies such as “Bugsy,” “The Godfather”
and “Casino.” The story lines were a combination
of fact and fiction. Now there are plans to build a museum
to tell the real story of the founding fathers and to stand
as frank acknowledgment of the major roles mobsters played
in developing Las Vegas into the gambling capital of America
and giving the city its rakish glamour during the 1940s and
'50s.
“Let’s be brutally honest, warts and all. This
is more than legend. It’s fact,'' said Mayor Oscar Goodman,
a former defense attorney whose clients once included mobsters
Meyer Lansky and Anthony “Tony the Ant” Spilotro.
“This is something that differentiates us from other
cities.”
The project has gained the support of the FBI and is guided
by a retired FBI agent. They say they are involved because
you can’t tell the stories of Benjamin “Bugsy”
Siegel, his banker, Lansky, casino boss Frank “Lefty”
Rosenthal and others without telling the story of the lawmen
that pursued them.
“This is a way to connect with the public and show the
results of our work,” Dan McCarron, a spokesman for
the FBI in Washington, told the Associated Press.
Ellen Knowlton, who retired in 2006 as FBI agent in charge
in Las Vegas and now heads the not-for-profit museum organization,
said FBI officials have offered to share photographs, transcripts
of wiretaps and histories of efforts to kneecap organized
crime in the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s.
“Despite the sort of edgy theme, this museum will be
historically accurate and it will tell the true story of organized
crime,” Knowlton said. “The plan is to give people
a kind of gritty taste of what it would have been like to
be not only a person involved or affiliated with organized
crime, but also what it would have been like to be in law
enforcement.”
Officials expect to open the museum by 2010 in a brick three-story
federal building that was the centerpiece of town of 5,100
residents when it opened in 1933. Goodman, who showed his
own willingness to play up Las Vegas’ mob past by making
a cameo in “Casino,” has pushed the idea of a
mob museum from the time he was elected mayor in 1999.
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He brokered a deal for the city to buy the building in 2000
for $1, with the understanding it would be turned into cultural
center. Officials expect the final cost, including renovations,
to reach almost $50 million. About $15 million has been raised
through grants, city funds, contributions and
the sale of commemorative license plates that marked Las Vegas’
centennial in 2005.
It was 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. Siegel was killed
six months later in Beverly Hills, perhaps because he angered
the mob with cost overruns on the hotel. 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 eventually was 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.
Documenting mob history isn't going to be easy.
“If anybody out there finds a memo saying: ‘To
the boys, from Meyer. Re: Bugsy. Kill him,’ We’d
love to have it,” said Michael Green, a College of Southern
Nevada history professor who is researching exhibits for the
museum. “But we doubt it’s there.
“Because of that, you have to do a lot of reconstructing,
inferring and implying,” he said. “There’s
a lot of winking we’re going to have to do.”
Green pointed to stories about Moe Dalitz, a Cleveland businessman
who rescued the Desert Inn and Stardust casinos in the 1950s
and ‘60s and built a hospital, golf courses and shopping
centers.
“Was he tied to the mob or involved with the mob? Yes,”
Green said. “A mobster? Harder to explain.”
Dennis Barrie, who designed the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
in Cleveland and the popular International Spy Museum in Washington,
said he will design the as-yet-unnamed museum to show how
organized crime and the fight against it shaped modern life.
“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,”
Barrie said. “Everybody has a mob story or a brush with
the mob world. Or they at least say they do.”
Organizers say paying visitors might be asked to decide as
they arrive which side of the law they want to be on, and
then be given a story line tracing the life of a famous lawman
or mobster or a street cop or numbers runner.
“Were you a hit man? Were you a prosecutor? What choices
do you have to make?” Green said. “We’re
telling a story of things that are multisided.”
Organizers also hope to have an oral-history area where visitors
“can sit down in front of a camera and say, ‘I
knew Bugsy,’ or ‘I saw Meyer,’ or
whatever,” he said.
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