Las Vegas is not generally known for its educational offerings, but by next year it plans to offer a new attraction that the mayor is convinced will be a hit with tourists: a mob museum.
The planned $50 million Las Vegas Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement, due to open in 2010, would be the first centre to examine the complex role of Mafia families in American history and culture as well as the FBI agents who sought their demise.
It is expected to occupy the entire 42,000 square feet of a threestorey neo-classical building in downtown Las Vegas which was the first federal courthouse in the county and then served as a post office. Visitors will be allowed to have their mug shots taken, wiretap their friends and stand in mock police line-ups, museum creative director Dennis Barrie said. The building itself is already part of mob lore, having staged a 1950 hearing held by the Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce into organized crime spearheaded by Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver. In 2000, the federal government deeded the decaying building to the city for one dollar on the promise that it would be restored and used for educational or museum purposes. Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman, a former defence attorney who defended several Mafia figures in the 1970s and 1980s, hit upon the idea of commemorating this angle of history.
“I’m saying to myself, although my mother was a great artist, nobody’s going to come to downtown Las Vegas to look at paintings, they’re not going to look at watercolours, they’re not going to look at porcelain, they’re not going to look at miniature trains,” said Goodman.
“What will they look at? They’ll look at something that’s really embedded in history, that makes us unique and distinctive from any other city, that has a historical nexus, a keystone because of the Kefauver hearings, and I said, ‘A mob museum!’ And I think it’s natural.” As simple as that sounds, the idea has had critics. The mayor acknowledged the Italian-American community was so alarmed by the idea when he first hit upon it in 2002 that he backed off at first with a quip that he had actually proposed a “mop museum.” To allay concerns of those who fear the museum will glorify criminals and their acts, Goodman recruited retired FBI Special Agent-inCharge Ellen Knowlton to chair the museum’s non-profit board.
Knowlton convinced the FBI to loan a variety of pieces of evidence to the museum for display.
The planned $50 million Las Vegas Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement, due to open in 2010, would be the first centre to examine the complex role of Mafia families in American history and culture as well as the FBI agents who sought their demise.
It is expected to occupy the entire 42,000 square feet of a threestorey neo-classical building in downtown Las Vegas which was the first federal courthouse in the county and then served as a post office. Visitors will be allowed to have their mug shots taken, wiretap their friends and stand in mock police line-ups, museum creative director Dennis Barrie said. The building itself is already part of mob lore, having staged a 1950 hearing held by the Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce into organized crime spearheaded by Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver. In 2000, the federal government deeded the decaying building to the city for one dollar on the promise that it would be restored and used for educational or museum purposes. Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman, a former defence attorney who defended several Mafia figures in the 1970s and 1980s, hit upon the idea of commemorating this angle of history.
“I’m saying to myself, although my mother was a great artist, nobody’s going to come to downtown Las Vegas to look at paintings, they’re not going to look at watercolours, they’re not going to look at porcelain, they’re not going to look at miniature trains,” said Goodman.
“What will they look at? They’ll look at something that’s really embedded in history, that makes us unique and distinctive from any other city, that has a historical nexus, a keystone because of the Kefauver hearings, and I said, ‘A mob museum!’ And I think it’s natural.” As simple as that sounds, the idea has had critics. The mayor acknowledged the Italian-American community was so alarmed by the idea when he first hit upon it in 2002 that he backed off at first with a quip that he had actually proposed a “mop museum.” To allay concerns of those who fear the museum will glorify criminals and their acts, Goodman recruited retired FBI Special Agent-inCharge Ellen Knowlton to chair the museum’s non-profit board.
Knowlton convinced the FBI to loan a variety of pieces of evidence to the museum for display.
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