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Vegas Museum Offers A Mob History You Can't Refuse

<strong>Look Out, Copper:</strong> A 1928 Ford Model A car (left) and a 1938 Ford paddy wagon arrive at the Feb. 14 grand opening of The Mob Museum in Las Vegas.
Ethan Miller
/
Getty Images
Look Out, Copper: A 1928 Ford Model A car (left) and a 1938 Ford paddy wagon arrive at the Feb. 14 grand opening of The Mob Museum in Las Vegas.

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.

 <strong></strong>The Mob Museum is housed in a historic federal courthouse that once hosted the Kefauver Committee hearings on organized crime. The museum has recreated one of the courtrooms to appear as it did during the 1950 hearings.
/ Courtesy of The Mob Museum
/
Courtesy of The Mob Museum
The Mob Museum is housed in a historic federal courthouse that once hosted the Kefauver Committee hearings on organized crime. The museum has recreated one of the courtrooms to appear as it did during the 1950 hearings.

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.

 Included in the museum's collection is a bullet-hole riddled brick wall against which seven men were executed in 1929's St. Valentine's Day Massacre.
Jeff Green / The Mob Museum
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The Mob Museum
Included in the museum's collection is a bullet-hole riddled brick wall against which seven men were executed in 1929's St. Valentine's Day Massacre.

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.

 Visitors to the Mob Museum can try shooting a replica Tommy gun for themselves.
Jeff Green / The Mob Museum
/
The Mob Museum
Visitors to the Mob Museum can try shooting a replica Tommy gun for themselves.

"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

Back on the museum floor, Kathleen is interrupted by the sound of machine gun fire. The museum didn't just get a Tommy gun — it got a whole collection. They even made a Tommy gun replica that museum-goers can try out for themselves, sound effects and all.

Copyright 2012 KJZZ

Jude Joffe-Block