Vegas Museum Offers A Mob History You Can't Refuse

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.

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AUDIE CORNISH, HOST: From NPR News, this is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED. I'm Audie Cornish.

MELISSA BLOCK, HOST: And I'm Melissa Block. At a new museum in Las Vegas, you can listen to wiretaps, practice surveillance and spray pretend bullets from a Tommy gun. It's The Mob Museum, and it tells the story of how the mob helped create Las Vegas. From member station KJZZ, Jude Joffe-Block went in search of the history of organized crime.

JUDE JOFFE-BLOCK, BYLINE: As soon as you step inside The Mob Museum's elevator, a cop on a video monitor greets you.

(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO)

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #1: You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law.

JOFFE-BLOCK: Stepping out, you see a huge photo of 1920s-era gangsters. They're standing in a police lineup, wearing fedoras.

UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: I need suspects for my lineup, if you don't mind, right behind the glass.

JOFFE-BLOCK: Then museum staff guide you into a police lineup.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #2: Number five, step forward.

JOFFE-BLOCK: Exhibits like this one blur the line between entertainment and education. But there's also plenty of serious history here, starting with the structure itself.

JONATHAN ULLMAN: We do consider the building to be, you know, really our ultimate artifact.

JOFFE-BLOCK: Jonathan Ullman is the executive director. This 1930s-era building once served as a federal courthouse.

ULLMAN: There were numerous cases tried that involved alleged mobsters, mob figures. But most importantly, that it was a site of one of the Kefauver committee hearings.

JOFFE-BLOCK: Those were a series of hearings held by Senator Estes Kefauver to investigate the mob across the U.S., including Las Vegas. Now in the courtroom where those hearings took place, a video recreates the interrogations, including a scene with ex-bootlegger and Las Vegas founding father Moe Dalitz.

(SOUNDBITE OF VIDEO)

MOE DALITZ: If you people wouldn't have drunk it, I wouldn't have bootlegged.

UNIDENTIFIED MAN #3: Order.

DENNIS BARRIE: When we started this project, it was really about the organized crime in Las Vegas.

JOFFE-BLOCK: That's Dennis Barrie, the museum's creative director. His wife, Kathleen, is the curator. As they did research, they realized...

BARRIE: We could not tell the story of organized crime in Las Vegas without telling the story of organized crime nationally and vice versa.

JOFFE-BLOCK: They are the couple behind the International Spy Museum in Washington D.C. Mobsters, like spies, posed a similar challenge: history that was meant to be kept secret.

BARRIE: People, when they shoot somebody, they throw the gun away. The mob doesn't keep records, OK? They don't keep books or not many.

KATHLEEN BARRIE, CURATOR, THE MOB MUSEUM: We did a little list of maybe 10 things that we really thought you needed to have in a mob museum, and one was a Tommy gun, and one was a brick from the St. Valentine's Day Massacre wall.

JOFFE-BLOCK: In fact, they got the entire brick wall from the 1929 massacre that Al Capone orchestrated in Chicago.

BARRIE: This is the actual part of the wall where the seven men were executed.

JOFFE-BLOCK: You can see the actual bullet holes. A video about the massacre is projected onto the bricks.

BARRIE: To find these things, you never know how you're going to find them, where you're going to find them. And, for example, the wall, they called us. And it was a family in Las Vegas that inherited it from their uncle who had it in his restaurant in Vancouver after the building was torn down.

MUSEUM: Many of the best things we have are because people got a little bit of wind of the fact that this project was going on, and they would call and say: I don't know if you think this is of interest or if this would be good...

(SOUNDBITE OF GUNFIRE)

JOFFE-BLOCK: We're interrupted by the sound of a spray of bullets coming from the other side of the room. Remember that Thompson machine gun or Tommy gun that they were searching for? It turns out they got a whole collection. They even created a replica that museumgoers can try out.

BARRIE: So that's what you hear in the background, the ability to fire a Thompson, which you should do.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

JOFFE-BLOCK: I adjust the height and pull the trigger.

(SOUNDBITE OF GUNFIRE)

JOFFE-BLOCK: For NPR News, I'm Jude Joffe-Block in Las Vegas.

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