Las Vegas embraces its mobster past

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. "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.

A plaque to Ben "Bugsy" Seigel is a stop on the Vegas Mob Tour at the Flamingo hotel and casino in Las Vegas.

Bugsy Siegel remade himself in Las Vegas when he opened the Flamingo. His mob partners became unhappy with its losses, and Siegel became increasingly paranoid, with good reason. He was gunned down in 1947 in Beverly Hills, and the killing was never solved.