Mob museum recalls grit of Vegas

Published 11:19 pm Monday, December 10, 2007

LAS VEGAS — Las Vegas is building a museum about some of its founding fathers and most influential figures — guys with names like Bugsy, Lefty and Lansky.

The mob museum will stand as frank acknowledgment of the major role 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 who pursued them.

“This is a way to connect with the public and show the results of our work,” said Dan McCarron, a spokesman for the FBI.

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 federal building that was the centerpiece of this dusty town of 5,100 residents when it opened in 1933. In 1950, the three-story building hosted a hearing by Tennessee Sen. Estes Kefauver’s special investigating committee on the rackets.

Goodman 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.

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.

The movie-star handsome Siegel was rubbed out six months later in Beverly Hills, Calif., 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.

Many of these stories have been dramatized by Hollywood in such movies as “Bugsy,” “The Godfather” and “Casino.” But 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.”