Curator's Choice

Episode 46: Mob Museum

• Ayla Anderson • Episode 46

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Step into the glittering past of Las Vegas and discover how the city's infamous mobsters played a pivotal role in its rise to fame. Our journey chronicles the visionaries like Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel, who laid the foundations of modern Vegas, and the likes of Moe Dalitz and Benny Binion, who left indelible marks on the city's landscape. Listen to the tales of ambition, power, and downfall that encapsulate the era when the mob ran the roost - a time that forever changed the face of this desert oasis and turned it into an international haven for entertainment and sin.

🔒 Unlocking America's Criminal Underbelly
This episode offers a rare glimpse into Al Capone's empire-building tactics, where talent trumped ethnicity and law enforcement's battle against the cunning of organized crime led to monumental advancements in policing. We don't just recount these tales; we dissect the symbiotic evolution of criminal enterprises and crime-fighting techniques that have shaped American society. Join us for a narrative that juxtaposes the mob's ruthless reality with its glamorized pop culture image, revealing the true cost of crime.

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Mob Museum https://themobmuseum.org/

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Geoff Schumacher:

But one of the interesting things about that is Al Capone in particular opened the door to include people from all walks of life. What you needed to be to keep Al Capone happy was a good criminal. If you're a good at stealing things or you're a good at selling liquor or whatever it was that you did in the underworld, it didn't care whether you were Italian or not. Sure, so the Mob Museum is essentially a history museum that focuses on the story of organized crime and law enforcement in America and sort of as a shadow history of the country, in that the mob and law enforcement have played such integral roles in so many aspects of American life. And so we want to tell the story about the mob and there's a lot of interesting characters, a lot of famous and infamous moments but we also tell the story of law enforcement and how law enforcement responded to the mob. You know, the rise of the mob led to increases in funding for police departments, increases in the professionalism of policing, and it added a lot of elements to law enforcement, such as forensic science techniques and undercover surveillance and all of these things that are really part of the mob story.

Geoff Schumacher:

We pride ourselves on sort of telling a balanced story. We were not glorifying the mob, we're not celebrating the mob. We're simply telling you what happened and then we're telling you how law enforcement responded to that. And we also, in more recent years, we have focused as a lot of attention as well on contemporary organized crime. So what's been happening in the 21st century? We're no longer focused so much in that period on traditional organized crime. We're, you know, the guys with Tommy Guns and Bent Noses and all that. We're now looking at things like human trafficking and cyber crime and the Mexican drug cartels and all of these facets of our lives. Today there is still very much organized crime, but they don't have that same kind of aura, you know, the same kind of personalities that you saw in the past.

Ayla Sparks:

And what's really interesting. When you look at, I mean, just the topic mob in general, I feel like it is a super romanticized concept. I mean particularly, you know, I think the Godfather probably had a huge part to do with that of really kind of making you know those cool guys with their Tommy Guns and the pinstripes suits. So I think it's also really cool that you guys tell the whole story without romanticizing it and then also telling the story of the law enforcement behind it, because it's a lot more complicated, I think, than I was even expecting until I came in and saw the place for myself. But I think at least myself I was thinking oh, the mob, that's kind of more like Chicago, new York. Why was there such a mob presence in Southern Nevada, of all places, where there's nothing but wild west and tumbleweeds?

Geoff Schumacher:

So the story that we tell in the museum does spend a fair amount of time on New York and Chicago, places where the mob was very, very prominent. But Las Vegas is where we are and the original argument for putting the museum here was that Las Vegas became a nexus for so much mob activity in America. It's really very simple as to why the mob came to Las Vegas, and that was because we had legal gambling. You know, for decades in the 20th century, from really the 30s through the mid-70s, nevada was the only place in America that had legal gambling. There was illegal gambling going on around the country during this time and the mob was involved in a lot of it.

Geoff Schumacher:

But when they had the opportunity to sort of at least have the appearance of going legit, this was an opportunity for the mob to infiltrate the casino industry here and to then skim from the profits. In other words, they would take the revenue that came into the count room in each casino and they would skim a little bit off the top the cash and take that money and deliver it back to Chicago or Kansas City or Cleveland or Detroit or New York, and this was the money that was not taxed and this was the money that went into the pockets of the mobsters back in the cities and it worked for them quite a while until the state of Nevada Gaming Control Board, as well as the FBI, started ferreting out what some of these schemes looked like and they were able to expose them and that really spelled the end of the mob's involvement with the casino industry here. But they had a pretty good run really from the mid-40s to the mid-80s.

Ayla Sparks:

And who are some of the more famous ones for the Nevada area. Who is the quintessential Las Vegas mobsters?

Geoff Schumacher:

Yeah, you can almost do it by decade in a way. But it really starts with Meyer Lansky and Benjamin Bugsy, siegel and the syndicate of investors, who came to Las Vegas in 1945 and they invested in the El Cortez Hotel. The El Cortez is in downtown Las Vegas still standing today, and it was. It was actually opened in 1941, but Lansky and Siegel in that group bought it in 1945. They only kept it a year but during that time they gained greater expertise in the casino business and then they sold it at a profit and some of those profits went into the construction of the Flamingo Hotel, which is the famous Flamingo, which still stands today on the strip. But it none of the original building is still standing, but they still have. You know, it's still a famous name in Las Vegas and that hasn't changed. So they, siegel and Lansky, and that crew became involved with the Flamingo. But it's important to understand that they didn't invent the Flamingo, they didn't start it from scratch.

Geoff Schumacher:

There was a different individual whose name is Billy Wilkerson, and Billy Wilkerson was a nightclub owner and a owner of the Hollywood reporter newspaper in LA. He had the original idea for the Flamingo and so he started building it in late 1945. When he ran out of money, he looked for investors and the mob kind of started filling that role for him and unfortunately for Billy. The mob sent Bugsy Siegel to Las Vegas to kind of oversee the project, make sure their money was being spent wisely. And Bugsy really took a liking to the Flamingo and decided that this was his chance to go legit. This was Bugsy's chance to escape his reputation and become this reputable resort operator in the desert. So he literally pushed Billy Wilkerson out of the Flamingo project and took it over and then he opened it in 1946 and then only six months later he was killed. There's a lot of speculation as to what the connection is between the Flamingo and Bugsy's death. There's multiple scenarios that historians have posited as to what exactly happened to Bugsy, who did it, who was responsible and why. But what we do know is that the Flamingo became really iconic in Las Vegas. He had a lot to do with that and it became a lot to do with Las Vegas becoming this international resort that it ultimately became. So you move on from Bugsy.

Geoff Schumacher:

Another very big name in the 50s was Moe Daylitz, and Moe Daylitz was a Cleveland gangster who, with his investors, bought into the Desert Inn Hotel. And the Desert Inn became one of, along with the Flamingo, one of the really iconic resorts in Las Vegas in the 50s and 60s and 70s. And Moe Daylitz unlike Bugsy, moe Daylitz kind of did go legit and he became to some extent and he became like a civic leader. He was a philanthropist. He gave a lot of money to charities here, to schools, he built a hospital here and so forth, and so people were very happy to forget about his past and to see him as a civic leader. And so Moe Daylitz died of old age in 1989 and always revered in Las Vegas as a real icon of the city.

Geoff Schumacher:

And then I guess the third one I might mention there's many would be Benny Binion. Benny Binion came to Las Vegas from Dallas, texas, where he had run a number of illegal casinos there, and when the politics changed in Dallas, in Fort Worth, and he no longer had control of the sheriff's office there as he had before, he decided to load up and move his family to Las Vegas. He bought into the casino, the casinos on Fremont Street in downtown Las Vegas, and became a kind of another sort of father figure of the casino business here, although when he was in Dallas in particular. I mean he was a ruthless gangster and he had killed a number of people. He and had had people kill other people. I mean he was very rough and he had. Some of that was happening in Las Vegas as well, but unlike sort of the traditional mob where you have this whole phalanx of bosses and underbosses and capos and soldiers, benny was kind of a one-man gang in a way.

Geoff Schumacher:

So then you kind of fast forward to the 70s and you have the story that is told essentially in the movie Casino right, you have Lefty Rosenthal, who's played by Robert De Niro in the movie, and you have Tony Spalatra, who was played by Joe Pesci in the movie, and that story plays out from the early 70s to the early 80s and those guys were representatives of the Chicago mob and they were skimming from the Stardust Casino as well as a couple of others, and that money was being sent back to the Midwest. That all kind of ended in a couple of ways. One, the skim was exposed by the gaming control board here in the FBI and secondly, there was a car bomb that almost killed Lefty Rosenthal and he was coming out of a restaurant. He gets in his car boom. Fortunately for him he was saved by the circumstances of having his door open of his vehicle still and also the steel plate that was in the bottom below the driver's side of the vehicle which presented the bomb from hitting him directly.

Geoff Schumacher:

So Lefty got out of town. Soon after that he's like I'm done with Las Vegas. Somebody's trying to kill me here. And then four years later Tony Spalatro and his brother Michael went back to Chicago for a meeting with their fellow mobsters and they were ultimately beaten to death. They were buried in a cornfield in Indiana and they were only by chance where they discovered by someone who was just sort of surveying the land. So Tony Spalatro was killed, lefty Rosenthal left town, the scam was exposed and by the end of the 1980s the traditional mob was pretty much out of Las Vegas.

Ayla Sparks:

So you're talking about the mob. We all have the idea of what the mob is, but there are all different kinds of mobsters and generally they kind of follow certain ethnicities within an area, right, so you'll have like an Irish mob of Irish minorities that might have immigrated and are located somewhere, and then is that? Do I kind of have the right idea?

Geoff Schumacher:

So when people talk about, most typically when people talk about the mob, they're thinking about the mafia, but the mafia they think mob and mafia are synonymous. I would say that's not really true. The mafia is specific to Italian American immigrants and typically the mafia does not have members who are not Italian, of Italian origin and they're very you know, very close knit that way. So the mafia is a particular thing. It was very well depicted in the Godfather and that's one type of ethnically oriented organized crime unit. You also have the Irish. Historically you had a lot of Irish mobsters and mob groups. You also had Eastern European Jews who created mobs and you had some interesting hybrids too. So, like the Chicago outfit, which is arguably one of the biggest and was one of the biggest and most powerful organized crime groups in America for many years, it was definitely of Italian origin. You know, when you go back to big Jim Colissimo and Johnny Torrio and Al Capone, you're talking about Italian Americans who had surrounded themselves with many other Italian Americans. But one of the interesting things about that is Al Capone in particular opened the door to include people from all walks of life. What you needed to be to keep Al Capone happy was a good criminal If you're a good at stealing things or you're a good at selling liquor or whatever it was that you did in the underworld. It didn't care whether you were Italian or not. And this actually continued into the 1930s when a lucky Luciano of New York became really the top man in the national syndicate.

Geoff Schumacher:

Now, when we talk about the national syndicate and Lucky Luciano you're typically you'll hear a reference to something called the commission, and the commission was kind of like a board of directors for the national mob, and it was a group that would make kind of big picture decisions for how things were going to proceed with mob activity around the country. Now that commission was entirely Italian, american in origin. The members of that commission, however, lucky Luciano was an equal opportunity criminal. One of his best friends was Meyer Lansky, who had emigrated as a child from Eastern Europe. He was Jewish and they were inseparable, luciano and Lansky.

Geoff Schumacher:

They were a team, even though Lansky could not be a member of the commission. He was sort of like their number one advisor and Luciano did not. He was like Al Capone. He was not particular about your nationality or your ethnic background as long as you were doing a good job, and so that continued in many mob groups up into the 40s and 50s and 60s and 70s. You didn't always have to be of that ethnic origin to be part of that particular gang. Still, in many cases the biggest organized crime groups were definitely of mafia origin.

Ayla Sparks:

I think you guys represented it well there at the museum as well, because I mean, when you're walking through, you can see pieces of all different kinds of mobsters. Really, do you have your own favorite two items or areas in the museum that you would like to tell people about?

Geoff Schumacher:

Sure, sure, I've had my fingerprints all over this museum over the past eight years, so I'm partial to a lot of the artifacts that we have. A lot of the video that we have presumably because I'm in charge of it I like it all right. I think there's actually a lot of improvements that we still want to make to make it better, but probably the two most important items in the museum from an artifact standpoint are what we call the massacre wall. So, as anybody who's followed mob history knows, one of the most horrific events ever was the St Valentine's Day Massacre. This was a shooting in Chicago in 1929 in which seven men were shot dead, rivals of Al Capone's gang.

Geoff Schumacher:

And this was something that really changed America, because people before that, during prohibition, had kind of a soft spot for the mob, because the mob was providing the liquor that everybody really wanted, even though it was prohibition. But when the violence got escalated to that extent, people were like, yeah, this is not good, this is. We need to crack down on these mobsters when they're, if they're, willing to do this kind of carnage. So it had a big effect. So we have 300 bricks from the wall of the building where these men were shot. Not only that, the bricks are from the wall where these men were lined up before they were shot.

Geoff Schumacher:

So this is definitely the historic event and that these artifacts are reflective of what happened there, and we were able to acquire these before the museum even opened, 10 years ago, and we've authenticated them and everything else. So I think they're just this great visual representation of that tragic event. Then we have a related artifact set which has to do with the evidence from the crime scene of the St Valentine's Day massacre, and I had the good fortune of being involved in the acquisition of that crime scene evidence. And man, it's just so amazing to have the bullets that were removed from the some of the bodies of the victims, that we have the original corners, reports and the original descriptions of what happened there, and so that display to me is very, very special and unique.

Ayla Sparks:

I really enjoyed that when I was walking through too. I'm also typical. I love true crime, I'm a big forensic files fan. But what's neat is when you're walking through there you actually have, like you said, the corners report. So it has the bodies drawn out like the male or female body, and then they marked where they had found bullet wounds with the little red X's and then you can actually see all of these objects and it really kind of puts you in a place where, wow, this is not just you know the wall is a great representation, but also seeing the impact on the physical body drawings is pretty intense. And I would love to also mention the ballistic situation, because it was kind of revolutionary when they were trying to determine what had actually happened. So can you tell us about that?

Geoff Schumacher:

Absolutely so. Dr Calvin Goddard was one of the pioneers in forensic science, but especially in ballistic testing, and by that I mean the ability to connect a particular firearm to a bullet that was fired from it. You know, each firearm leaves a unique mark on the bullet, and he was able to take this crime scene evidence, the bullets from the scene, and compare them with two Tommy guns that were recovered from a suspect in Michigan, and he was able to verify and prove that those two Tommy guns were used in the commission of the St Valentine's Day Massacre. This is 1929 we're talking about. This is at the very beginning of ballistic testing, and so not only I mentioned earlier that the massacre had this profound effect on America. One other effect was this it popularized or it made relevant ballistic testing as a form of forensic science and a way of solving crimes.

Ayla Sparks:

We still use that today. That is used in all different kinds of cases is the ballistic evidence.

Geoff Schumacher:

Absolutely the same techniques too. All the microscopes that got or developed to compare the bullets and everything are the same ones used today. I mean, there's more gougas that are attached to them today, but it's essentially the same thing.

Ayla Sparks:

Just for people who might not be familiar with the Valentine's Day massacre. So the men were lined up, but they thought they were being raided. Correct me if I'm wrong, but they thought they were being raided by the police, so there wasn't any resistance. They just had no idea that it was a rival gang who was planning on assassinating the volunteers so successfully.

Geoff Schumacher:

That is correct. Two of the men hired by Capone to commit this crime walked into the garage where these men were meeting and they were wearing police uniforms, so it gave the impression that it was a police raid. They were not real police uniforms but they looked like police. And the two other men who came in the door as well, where I look like maybe they were like plain clothes, detectives or something. They kind of dressed like that and we don't know what words were said. But one can easily imagine that these guys impersonated police officers, hands up, turn around and they'll face the wall and these seven guys lined up. And then these guys pulled out Tommy guns and shotguns and they just started firing, and 70 rounds of submachine gun fire were the primary killers of these seven individuals.

Geoff Schumacher:

Now, these individuals were members of what was known as the Northside Gang.

Geoff Schumacher:

Al Capone was based on the Southside of Chicago and there had been a lot of tit for tat, a lot of fighting going on between Capone and this group that was led by a man named Bugs Moran and they both they were bootleggers and they were rival bootleggers and they were fighting over territory and everything else.

Geoff Schumacher:

And it appears that Capone made the decision and we're gonna take care of this once and for all, and that's what he did. Interestingly, seven men were killed, but if it had gone the way they really planned it to happen, it probably would have been nine men, because there were two additional ones, one of whom was Bugs Moran, who were late for this meeting that was to occur in that garage. When they were walking toward the meeting on Clark Street, they noticed this fake police car, this what later became known to be a fake police car, parked in front of the garage and they're like we're out of here, we don't want anything to do with that. And what should have happened is the Capone team should have waited until Bugs Moran, who was their primary target, once he had gotten in the garage with his companion. Then they would have entered and it kind of messed up in a sense. I mean, they killed seven people instead of nine and they didn't kill Bugs Moran, but obviously it was horrific enough at seven.

Ayla Sparks:

Well, and the men. So there was one thing I really wanted to make sure that I got across, which has escaped my brain. It's probably gone forever now. Oh, so, whenever you said earlier that there wasn't a lot of resistance, right, they knew it was just probably a police raid, so they turned around and nobody put up any real resistance. What I'm thinking is was that because they had the police in their back pocket and they could just be like, oh, it's not a big deal, they might take our stuff and then slap us on the wrist, that's that there wasn't a real fear of any serious repercussions when dealing with the police in that way, because of who they were.

Geoff Schumacher:

I think the likely the men who saw the police come in the door saw it as a police raid, but probably more as a shakedown than anything else.

Geoff Schumacher:

In other words, you know, we just give these, got these cops, some money and they'll go away, or it'll be so minor that they'll go to, they'll be taken downtown to the jail for an hour and then they'll be released. There was this kind of stuff happened a lot within Chicago at the time and there was a lot more, a lot less to fear from the police than there was from Al Capone's guys. You know, they just obviously did not recognize these individuals who were hired to do this as people paid up, you know, hired by Capone, and so that's why Capone hired individuals who were not from Chicago. The men who perpetrated this crime were essentially from St Louis and they were were very good at their job of killing people, but they weren't recognized by the local gangsters. If they had recognized any of them as a potential Capone hitman, they would definitely would have put up resistance. So the police were something they didn't need to worry about so much. It was just about money or, you know, some minor inconvenience.

Ayla Sparks:

And nobody was ever arrested for the killings right.

Geoff Schumacher:

Nobody was ever prosecuted for the killing. There were people who were arrested and released. They thought they had somebody and they didn't have any evidence, so they let them go. What we do know over the past you know, 90 years is all the research that's been done both the investigations that happened at the time and what historians have pieced together since then is we have a pretty good idea of who perpetrated the crime and we have a pretty good sense that it was Capone's Chicago outfit put them up to it. The only reason that the man who had the Tommy guns in Michigan his name was Fred Burke the only reason he wasn't prosecuted is subsequently he killed a police officer in Michigan and he was convicted of killing the police officer and given life, a life prison term. So there was no reason to convict him again. He wasn't going anywhere. But it's pretty clear that Fred Burke was involved.

Ayla Sparks:

So I think that we would be doing a slight disservice to the fantastic museum as a whole if we didn't at least mention the old courthouse in the courtroom that you can go into today. So the original building that the mob museum is now used to be was it the courthouse of Las Vegas.

Geoff Schumacher:

Yeah, so you know what I mentioned on my favorite artifacts in the museum. I could just as easily have mentioned the building. So the building itself is an artifact, right. It was the first federal post office and courthouse in Las Vegas and it opened in 1933, which by Las Vegas standards is very old. I know that in other cities around the country 1933 is not all, but for us that's old, it's a sort of a classic. You know modern federal building design and it was very much a gathering place in Las Vegas from 1933 to about 1965 when it ceased being the main courthouse.

Geoff Schumacher:

We opened a new federal courthouse as the city grew, but the post office continued to operate into the early 2000s and it was the downtown post office that so many people used for business and so forth. So when that building, the federal government decided they didn't need a building anymore around the year 2000, the city of Las Vegas readily agreed to take it over and they were able to get it for $1, which is a good price. And then, but there were two conditions on that acquisition First, that they had to historically restore the building they want to make sure it retains its historic character and the second thing was it needed to be used for some kind of public cultural use. You couldn't turn it into some kind of commercial enterprise. That needed to be something like a performing arts center or an art museum or a mob museum. And ultimately the idea of a museum of organized crime and law enforcement took hold and became the plan and we're all very thankful for that.

Geoff Schumacher:

It has been great. The museum opened in 2012. And five years later we gained national accreditation. So we're very proud of that and we take our work very seriously at the museum. It's certainly a very fun museum. Lots of fun to be had there. We have a Speak Easy where you can buy cocktails and we make moonshine in the basement and we have a lot of people have a great time there. But it's also very educational Lots of good material to learn from. We take that very seriously.

Ayla Sparks:

Well, and it was a great time for us. I mean, there's three stories to explore and if you're a weirdo or I shouldn't say weirdo, but if you are such a history nerd or a museum nerd as I am you read almost everything and spend a lot of time. So it was fantastic because halfway through we ordered some coffee and we got to watch a short little film, and it was just a really awesome experience. So we really really loved it and thank you for giving me even more knowledge about it and for being willing to meet with me and talk to us about it.

Geoff Schumacher:

Oh, happy to do it. We love talking about the museum and encouraging people to come check it out.