las Vegas opens new Mob Museum

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. Sports handicapper Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal hosted a television show. Bootlegger Moe Dalitz helped build a hospital.

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, The Associated Press reported. 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 2 1/2-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 and an extensive collection of gangster artifacts. For example, it displayed one of Meyer Lansky's love letters to his wife: "Keep your legs crossed and go to sleep."

The attraction closed last year amid a bevy of problems, including the bankruptcy of its owner, Murder Inc. LLC. It's slated to reopen under a different name.

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