As soon as you step in the elevator of Las Vegas' new Mob Museum, a cop on a video monitor reads you your rights. When the doors finally open, you're greeted by a huge photo of 1920s-era gangsters standing in a police lineup, wearing fedoras.
The Mob Museum — otherwise known as the National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement — tells the story of how the mob helped make Las Vegas, and how it influenced the rest of the country. The museum does that by giving visitors a chance to listen to wiretaps, practice FBI-style surveillance, spray pretend bullets from a Thompson — or Tommy — gun and even participate in their own police lineups.
The 'Ultimate' Museum Artifact
The museum's exhibits blur the line between entertainment and education, but there's also plenty of serious history there. For one thing, the 1930s-era building that houses the museum once served as a federal courthouse.
"We do consider the building to be really our ultimate artifact" says museum Executive Director Jonathan Ullman. "There were numerous cases tried that involved alleged mobsters, mob figures. But most importantly, it was the site of one of the Kefauver Committee hearings."
Those were a series of hearings held by Tennessee Sen. Estes Kefauver to investigate the mob across the U.S. Now, in the courtroom where some of those hearings took place, a video recreates the interrogations, including a scene with ex-bootlegger and Las Vegas founding father Moe Dalitz.
"If you people wouldn't have drunk it," says the video's Dalitz, "I wouldn't have bootlegged it."
'The Mob Doesn't Keep Records'
"When we started this project, it was really about the organized crime in Las Vegas," says museum Creative Director Dennis Barrie.
But soon he and his wife, museum Curator Kathleen Hickey Barrie, realized they couldn't tell the story of organized crime in Las Vegas without telling the story of organized crime in the U.S.
The Barries are the couple behind the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. They say mobsters and spies posed a similar challenge — each had a history that was meant to be kept secret.
"When they shoot somebody, they throw the gun away," Dennis says. "The mob doesn't keep records; they don't keep books, or not many."
So instead the Barries started their own record: A list of 10 things a mob museum needed to have. According to Kathleen, "one was a Tommy gun and one was a brick from the St. Valentine's Day Massacre wall."
In fact, they ended up getting the entire brick wall against which seven Chicago men were massacred in the 1929 hit orchestrated by Al Capone. A video about the massacre is projected onto the bricks. You can still see the bullet holes.
"You never know how you are going to find them, where you are going to find them," Dennis says of the museum's artifacts. "For example, the wall — they called us. And it was a family in Las Vegas that had inherited it from their uncle who had it in his restaurant in Vancouver after the building was torn down."
According to Kathleen, some of their best artifacts have come from people hearing about the museum then calling in to offer up their mob relics.
The Machine-Gun Experience
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