Mob Wars Return to Vegas in Competing Attractions

LAS VEGAS -- It took decades to wrest control of this city's casinos from the mob, a bloody and drawn-out battle between law enforcement and its prey that left countless gangsters in jail, in witness protection or buried in unmarked desert graves.

So imagine how surprised Bugsy, Lefty and their brethren would be to discover that a new Vegas mob war is brewing. Except this time, it's between the venerable Tropicana Hotel-Casino and the city of Las Vegas to see which can draw the most tourists to different multimillion-dollar attractions due to open by year's end.

First to open is the high-tech $24 million Las Vegas Mob Experience, bowing for previews this week in a 27,000-square-foot space at the Tropicana, which itself was once owned by a Mafioso. The official grand opening is March 29.

Then in December, the $42 million Las Vegas Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement, also called the Mob Museum, opens in a neoclassical former post office building in the city's ailing downtown area. The two are substantially different attractions, but those involved with both are well aware that many tourists will either be confused by the existence of both or choose just one to fulfill their craving for a mob hit.

"We're an attraction, they're a static museum," said Spence Johnston, spokesman for the Las Vegas Mob Experience, during a sneak preview tour given to AOL News. "I think both will be good for Las Vegas, but a lot of people already contact us thinking we're the Mob Museum, and I'm sure they get calls for us, too."

Those working on both projects insist they're not looking to glorify or glamorize the men whose colorful lives have been Hollywood catnip for decades. But it's clear that both believe there is a public appetite to revisit a wilder, less corporate era in ways that could help stimulate a moribund economy.

The Mob Experience is wagering that tourists will fork over $40 a person for an immersive, theme-park-style production narrated by holograms of Hollywood figures such as James Caan and Mickey Rourke, who have played mobsters in movies or TV shows.

Guests walk through dozens of movie-set-quality rooms, first being "booked" at Ellis Island to reflect the immigrant experience, then being slipped money by an actor playing a mobster to give to another actor/mobster and then being interrogated by the police. Later, when visitors are shown surveillance footage of a cheater in a casino, they get to decide whether the cheater is let off with a warning or beaten up.

"I have a feeling a lot of sweet little schoolteachers from the Midwest are going to be like, 'Kill him! Let's get rid of them,' " casting director Chris Cecot said. "I mean, when else would you ever get to act something like that out ever? Hopefully never."

The holograms are only the beginning of the Mob Experience's high-tech bells and whistles. Guests get badges embedded with a computer chip of personal information that tracks their movements, so each of the decisions they make will eventually result in a "final fate" in which they're deemed good or bad mobsters and get congratulated or whacked.

The chip, which uses radio waves to transmit identifying information to other devices, also allows actors along the way to know who guests are and address them by name, and folks who give e-mail addresses that match their Facebook profiles will have some surveillance video of them walking through the attractions posted to their walls, Johnston said.

In addition, the midsection of the Mob Experience includes several rooms displaying more than 1,000 artifacts provided by the descendants of famous mobsters. Among the treasures is a 1933 Packard that Bugsy Siegel drove to and from Los Angeles, the keys to the car that exploded in a Tony Roma's parking lot in a failed assassination attempt on Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal and 200 pages of Meyer Lansky's diaries.

The Tropicana, one of the Strip's oldest resorts, is attempting a comeback with a $125 million renovation and hopes that this attraction will help drive foot traffic. Managing partner Jay Bloom believes it will with the help of radio-frequency identification technology.

"Nobody's taken RFID-driven technology and integrated it with a variable-based personalization engine in real time and combine that with holograms and flat screens and scrim projections," Bloom said. "The Mob Museum is a more traditional museum. Here it's ... an immersive environment. For the hour or so that you're with us, you become a part of the story as opposed to just looking at something under the glass."

The folks behind the city's nonprofit Mob Museum, due to open in December, beg to differ. True, they are taking a more serious, academic approach to the topic, assembling 16,800 square feet of exhibits in the 80-year-old building where the U.S. Senate held some of its most famous hearings on organized crime.

Mayor Oscar Goodman, who came to prominence defending several reputed mob figures, managed to get the participation of several mobster descendants as well as high-profile former FBI agents. Also, the exhibit is being put together by famed museum curators Dennis and Kathy Barrie.

The Barries, responsible for the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C., as well as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland, are known for creating fun and interesting institutions on offbeat but legitimately historical topics. Both Goodman and Dennis Barrie point to the spy museum in Washington as having helped to revitalize a decaying area in bolstering their claim that the Mob Museum can do the same for the downtown Las Vegas area.

"I don't think it's the same kind of thing, whatever's happening at the Tropicana," Dennis Barrie said. "We're a museum, and we're doing a credible job and we have rigorous standards. What they're doing at the Trop is setting the scene. It's a temporary exhibit with not the same standards or quality as the Mob Museum."

[HEAR STEVE FRIESS' INTERVIEWS WITH MEYER LANSKY II AND DENNIS BARRIE ON "THE STRIP" PODCAST BY CLICKING HERE.]

Barrie's project obtained some impressive artifacts, including what he calls the "Mona Lisa of the mob world," the wall against which the St. Valentine's Day massacre occurred. It also delves into the mob history of cities other than Las Vegas, and visitors will be able to look up information about Mafia history in their own towns.

What handicaps the Mob Museum, however, is that it is a $25 cab ride from the Strip and it could be perceived as overly cerebral for Vegas revelers, said Las Vegas Review-Journal columnist John L. Smith. Smith, who has covered the mob in Vegas for 25 years, believes both attractions can work, but agreed that the Mob Experience will cause headaches for the Mob Museum.

"They can both work because the Tropicana has a potentially high-traffic location, whereas the downtown museum is going to have a better grasp of the subject," Smith said. "It is apples to apples, but different varieties of apples. But maybe tourists will just want blood on their shoes and guys talking out of the side of their mouths about Lefty and Louie and Fat Tony. We'll have to see."