How the Mob (Museum) Was Won: Building a History of Organized Crime in the U.S.

Few places are as image-conscious as Las Vegas, making it an object lesson for other places with legal gambling and an emphasis on tourism. Not only does Las Vegas sculpt its image - after all, what happens here, stays here, except for what appears in the commercials - but Las Vegans also worry about how other places perceive them. The irony in that statement should be obvious: Las Vegas is marketed as a funhouse where gambling and sex are pervasive, but its residents worry about their community's reputation. Another irony is that what tourists think is Las Vegas, and what is Las Vegas, are two different things. The recent International Conference on Gambling and Risk Taking took place on the Las Vegas Strip, but not in Las Vegas. The Strip is in Paradise- literally, in an unincorporated township created to keep the city from annexing county land where hotels were being built in the 1940s and early 1950s.That is part ofLas Vegas history, a subject that the scholarly community has taken increasingly seriously in the past quarter of a century, and valuable for the gaming industry to understand as it recovers here and grows elsewhere. The Las Vegas past seems unusual, and in some ways it is: a metropolitan area settled early in the twentieth century with a population of more than a million by the twenty-first; an economy and a society built on the foundation of legal gambling and tourism; captains of industry with rap sheets. But it is less unique than we think. Consider the growth of the Sunbelt and various international cities within a limited period of time; the spread of legal gambling from one state to 48 and as an increasingly important part of the national economy; and the settlers of the American colonies included Pilgrims largely unwanted in England, Puritans unsure of their status as religious dissenters, and debtors in Georgia.More crucially, gambling and its evolution - including organized crime and tourism - are part of the cycles and context of American history. Their existence reflects the impact and importance of immigration: consider that the story of modem American organized crime is inseparable from that of the southern and eastern European immigration of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. How Americans spend their leisure time has been intertwined with understanding the frontier and urbanization, and more recently with the post-industrial society of recent America and technological advances ranging from transportation - interstate highways andjet airplanes - to computer technology.The National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement, better known as The Mob Museum, examines this combination of continuity and change while probing the seamier side of Las Vegas history - and its ties to American and world history. How The Mob Museum originated and evolved provides a valuable lesson about the preservation and value of history, the history of gambling, and the history of organized crime, and their importance for the sake of knowledge and tourism.The building that houses the museum is part of the story it tells. Inl933, two years after Nevada made gambling legal, the federal government completed construction of a courthouse in downtown Las Vegas. It served as the post office and included offices for all of the federal agencies in Las Vegas. On November 15, 1950, its courtroom was the site of a hearing held by the Senate Select Committee on Organized Crime, chaired by Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, at which the committee and its counsel questioned several casino operators and state officials; Kefauver and the committee subsequently attacked Las Vegas over the role of organized crime and the interplay between gambling and politics. More than two years later, the building was the site of a trial at which a local newspaper publisher, Hank Greenspun, sued almost every casino owner in southern Nevada and U.S. Senator Pat McCarran, accusing them of a conspiracy to deny him advertising because he had dared to challenge McCarran. …

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