"I try to do it tactfully and with taste, as much as you can with a mob tour," Allen said. "You can say someone cut off someone's head with a machete, but we prefer to say decapitated."
He apparently tapped into something. About the same time, "The Soprano's Last Supper," now running at the Riviera, opened. It's set at a going-away party for just-indicted crime boss Tony Soprano, who's hiding in Vegas as Tony Baritone. (Cue laughter.)
The dinnertime musical -- with pasta, naturally, as the main dish -- has done well enough that its producer is in talks to run sightseeing tours to the Grand Canyon with comedic mobster characters behind the wheel.
City officials are pushing forward with a multimillion-dollar mob museum slated for a brick building downtown, where in 1950 a congressional committee grilled a Flamingo executive about his links to Siegel and Lansky.
The proposed museum has raked in plenty of attention. Some old-timers reminisce about how gangster-run Vegas was cheaper, cleaner, safer and smaller. But scoldings have poured in from as far away as Michigan. "It's bad enough to be called 'Sin City,' " the Oakland Press editorialized, "but a museum to mobsters?"
The mob was a force in Las Vegas until the mid-1980s, when law enforcement pressure and the corporate takeover of casinos loosened the gangsters' grip. Las Vegas can't wipe away its past, said Michael Green, a College of Southern Nevada history professor and mob museum consultant, so it's coping the only way it knows how.
"The mentality is, 'You know what? [Outsiders are] never going to accept us. So let's get rich from them,' " Green said.
Museum backers are haggling over the same things Allen did: How do you tell stories about gangsters without lionizing -- or demonizing -- them?
It's tricky. But mobsters' relatives who have taken the tour, Allen said, thanked the guides for treating the men's legacies with respect.
"There's been a few nights when I'm like, uh, should we be doing this?" he said. "But I think we've got the tone right: Even if he's a mobster, you still don't speak badly of the dead."
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Aboard the tour bus, Baltus, a bespectacled man in suspenders and pinstriped pants, launched into a tutorial unfit for grade-schoolers.
The mob is a web of made men, he said.
A made guy knows enough about dirty dealings "to get himself buried."
Also, "you've got to be 100% Sicilian and clip, whack or kill someone."
