LAS VEGAS — , a city forged on gambling, booze and flesh, has been strangely reluctant -- and perhaps a little nervous -- to make money off its mob roots. Until now.
On a recent drizzly night, a small, white Vegas Mob Tour bus rumbled past aging strip malls, its passengers eager to see the spots where wiseguys were killed.
Thug Jerry Lisner was repeatedly shot, strangled with an electrical cord and dumped in his swimming pool on a tree-lined street named Rawhide. Tour guide Robert Baltus pointed out the street but not the house -- the owners are uneasy about publicizing its bloody past.
In a Tony Roma's parking space next to a light pole, Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal was nearly blown up in his booby-trapped Cadillac Eldorado. "He should have been in 50 different pieces," Baltus told a dozen silent tourists, but a steel plate under the car saved the casino executive's life.
Paul Johnson, 56, was transfixed as the bus whizzed past a pizza parlor, church and hotel that at one time were linked to the mob. An industrial electrical contractor from Dickinson, N.D., Johnson said he had run across mobsters during his oil industry days. But he wasn't spilling anything about his brush with organized crime. Not in this city.
"Vegas was built with mob money," he said. "They did a hell of a job."
Americans have long been entranced by hooligans who laundered money, bootlegged, bullied and killed. Entrepreneurs have bused tourists to mob haunts in Newark, N.J.; Kansas City, Mo.; and Chicago. Vegas' own godfathers were immortalized in the 1995 Martin Scorsese movie "Casino," which was partly filmed here.
Sin City has dusted off its gangster skeletons with the Vegas Mob Tour based at the Greek Isles Hotel & Casino, "Sopranos"-inspired dinner theater at the Riviera Hotel & Casino and a proposed mob museum.
The tour offers insight into how this city has -- mostly -- made peace with gangsters such as Tony "the Ant" Spilotro and mob bosses who helped turn the remote town into a resort by investing in casinos that mainstream businessmen scorned.
The tour devotes time to Frank "King Rat" Cullotta, the hitman-turned-informant who killed Lisner, a low-level criminal whom Spilotro feared was a turncoat. Baltus said Cullotta -- who's still alive -- told him that after the slaying he drove to a pizza restaurant for a snack.
You can learn more, Baltus tells passengers, by buying "Cullotta" the book or "Cullotta" the DVD -- both available at Greek Isles.
