New Las Vegas museum puts mob past on display

LAS VEGAS – In this casino town partly built on gangster money, it’s a sentiment you hear with some frequency: “Things were better when the mob ran Vegas.”

It conveys a certain wistfulness for the smaller, ostensibly friendlier city where, decades ago, locals shrugged at mobsters’ running casinos and reinventing themselves as civic leaders.

The city began formally cashing in on its mafia legacy Tuesday with the opening of the Las Vegas Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement – better known as the Mob Museum.

The publicly funded museum opened in a former federal courthouse where a U.S. Senate hearing on organized crime was held in the 1950s. Its exhibits were shaped by historians and former FBI agents, and include crime scene photos, Tommy guns and a brick wall shot up during the 1929 St. Valentine’s Day massacre in Chicago.

The $42 million project has raised some hackles among fiscal conservatives, who consider it a waste of taxpayer money. But the museum’s cheerleaders – including Oscar Goodman, a onetime mob attorney and former mayor – are betting it will draw tourists from the Las Vegas Strip to a slowly gentrifying section of downtown.

Other recent efforts to capitalize on Sin City’s mobster past have had mixed success. The Vegas Mob Tour, a 21/2-hour jaunt that includes a stop at Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel’s Flamingo hotel, has managed to rumble along for several years.

“I try to do it tactfully and with taste, as much as you can with a mob tour,” founder Robert Allen told the Los Angeles Times in 2008. “You can say someone cut off someone’s head with a machete, but we prefer to say ‘decapitated.’ ”

The Mob Experience at the Tropicana casino had a tougher time, despite its Strip location. It closed last year.