Las Vegas Marks its Mob Roots with Two New Attractions

Jimmy Caan hologram tells the deal
in the not-yet-open Mob Museum.

The Tropicana Hotel launched the Las Vegas Mob Experience this spring: part museum, part theme park, with nifty interactive special effects designed by Disney "imagineers," reports the Pittsburgh Post-Gazzette website.

The visitor becomes a character in the story, and has choices to make. The wrong one could get you whacked. The right one -- per the underworld code of morality -- you get "made."

Not yet up and running: the city's official "mob museum" -- formally the Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement. The $42 million project, housed in a 1933 downtown post office/federal courthouse, is set to open on Feb. 14, 2012.

The date is deliberate, since one of its marquee attractions will be a section of the Chicago garage wall in front of which seven Prohibition-era hoods met their demise on Feb. 14, 1929, in the St. Valentine's Day Massacre. Original machine gun-slug pock marks are clearly evident.

The facility also snagged the barber chair in which Albert Anastasia, New York boss of what would become the Gambino family, died in a hail of gunfire -- the dying former head of Murder Inc. lunged at the mirror, in which he viewed his assassins' reflection, before crumbling onto the floor.

And an audiotape from an actual "made man" induction ceremony also is on tap.
  • THE BOTTOM LINE:
  • Las Vegas
  • Las Vegas Mob Experience: At the Tropicana Hotel, 3801 Las Vegas Blvd. S, on the Strip. General admission is $39.95. Information: www.lvme.com, 1-702-739-2662.
  • Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement: At 300 Stewart Ave., downtown. It will open in February. Information: www.themobmuseum.org, 1-702-229-6581.
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