The latest mob enterprises are possible because of the Vegas ingenuity that has milked cash even from the atomic bomb, and the long passage of time since underworld types ruled the Strip. The last element, said mob tour founder Robert Allen, a native Chicagoan, might be most essential.
"I can only do this tour," he said, "because Tony Spilotro's dead."
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Two years ago, Allen put down the morning paper, inspired.
The Las Vegas Review-Journal had pieced together a "wise guide": a map that included the Tony Roma's, Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel's Flamingo Hotel, and the unusual spot where a thug named Herbert "Fat Herbie" Blitzstein was killed: his home. This, the paper said, defied an axiom of the city's gangster era: No one is killed in Vegas; they're driven to the desert first.
Why, Allen wondered, wasn't anyone in town making money off mob stories?
There was the dashing Siegel, who opened the Flamingo months before he was gunned down in Beverly Hills in 1947 -- possibly at the behest of another underworld figure, Meyer Lansky. In the 1970s, Lansky and others were charged with skimming tens of millions from the Flamingo, but a judge ruled he was too ill to stand trial.
Spilotro was a suspect in dozens of killings, according to the book "Of Rats and Men" by local columnist John L. Smith. Spilotro and his gang were charged in connection with a gift shop burglary, but before the case could be retried, Spilotro and his brother were killed and buried in an Indiana cornfield in 1986.
"Maybe people were afraid to tell their stories before," Allen said.
So Allen -- a comedian who had performed at the ostensibly mob-financed (and since-imploded) Dunes Hotel -- linked up with Denny Griffin, a former healthcare fraud investigator who has written several books about Vegas mobsters. Watching older casinos tumble like dominoes to make way for mega-resorts, Griffin fretted that Las Vegas was throwing away its history, particularly the organized-crime chapter.
"The mobsters weren't founding fathers in the sense of George Washington, but they served an equally important role here," Griffin said.
Griffin made sure the tour's hoodlum highlights tracked with his research. Allen sketched out a script and hired guides such as Baltus to deliver it with streetwise swagger. The tour's sights aren't spectacular -- the bus often idles in parking lots -- but the stories are.
