An offer you can’t refuse: Las Vegas opens new Mob Museum

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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 mob attorney turned mayor Oscar Goodman -- 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 2½-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 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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-- Ashley Powers in Las Vegas
Twitter.com/ashleypowers