Vegas museum to link crime and law
LAS VEGAS -- After years of trying to forget Bugsy, Moe, Lefty, Tony the Ant and other mobsters who made their mark here, this city of casinos has decided to play them like a hand of aces.
It's betting $50 million.
Las Vegas is spending that much for a museum that will tell the story of the city's rise from a desert watering hole to glittering magnet for dreamers by focusing on what may have been the key — organized crime.
The old downtown federal courthouse and post office is to be transformed into the Las Vegas Museum of Law Enforcement and Organized Crime. Or, as locals call it, the Mob Museum.
It is appropriate, says Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman, because the city owes much of its success to the "made" men and associates of organized crime. They built the first big casinos in the 1940s and helped steer development into the 1980s, when mob control gave way to corporate owners.
"If we didn't have the mob in our background, we'd be like El Paso with gambling," he says.
Goodman, 69, knows a thing or two about the subject. He served as defense lawyer for prominent mob figures including Anthony "Tony the Ant" Spilotro, an enforcer from Chicago whose bloody character was memorably reprised under another name by Joe Pesci in the 1995 film Casino.
Another client was Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal, a sports handicapper who ran the Stardust and other properties when they were mob owned. Robert De Niro played the Rosenthal-based character in the same movie.
"Had I known who I was representing when I represented them," Goodman quips, "I would have charged them a lot more."
The mayor has been pushing for a museum devoted to the mob since winning election in 1999. The concept will incorporate law enforcement's side of the story and organized crime's development nationally, since so many crime families kept a finger in the Vegas pie.
The recently retired special agent-in-charge of the FBI's Las Vegas office, Ellen Knowlton, heads the board overseeing the project. She says the bureau and Justice Department in Washington have provided assistance, as have former police and agents.
