The Mob Museum – The Disneyland of Noir

mob museum

mob museumIn downtown Las Vegas, a few blocks away from the neon and glitter of the big casinos, is one of the true hidden gems of Sin City.  And one of its darkest!

The Mob Museum in Las Vegas holds what might be the world’s largest collection of crime exhibits and underworld collection and is the Promised Land for every noir and pulp mystery fan.

With a motto of “two sides to every story,” the Mob Museum’s mission is to advance the public understanding of organized crime’s history and impact on American society. It shows organized crime in all its facets, and puts a hard light on the glamour as well as the horrors of a real criminal underworld.

The museum is housed in the famous federal courthouse of downtown Las Vegas that saw the Kefauver Committee hearings on organized crime. It has restored the courtroom and turned it into a high-tech movie theater, where visitors can sit before the judge’s bench and watch on multiple screens reenactments of the trial’s highlights, where organized crime was dragged from dark alleys and into television watching America.

In true crime fashion, you start your tour at the top and work your way down. On the third floor you are introduced to the excitement and glamour of organized crime as you see how the mob helped shape popular culture in America and came to thrive in Speakeasies and underworld casinos. The exhibits guide you through the larger-than-life stories of how Vegas was made and the music and culture of the Speakeasies that made their way from the underworld and into everyday life.

Some of the great exhibits here are the casino and movie props, the interactive history displays, and the artifacts of the marriage between the mob and entertainment worlds. On the second floor you enter the courthouse, where the consequences of the underworld lifestyle come into focus.

In the courtroom you are introduced to the prosecutors and police who battled the mob as well as the callous, opportunists who made their bones.  Outside the courtroom doors is a display that illustrates rituals where the “Made Men” held burning prayer cards in their hands and pledged loyalty to their “families.”

Inside the courtroom you see how those loyalties were tested. One you leave the courtroom/movie theater, you are warned that some of the images are graphic and given a chance to leave the floor. These images are the reminders that the glamour of the underworld has real, violent consequences, and they can be very disturbing. In one particularly grim exhibit, a small room is turned into a meat refrigerator/theater with metal walls and plastic curtains, where the terrible fates of those who crossed the mob are portrayed.

mob museumThe first floor is dedicated to everyday law enforcement and their efforts to battle the mob, and the contrast between the two could not be greater. Where the mob artifacts are filled with gaudy showmanship and glitz, the exhibits to law enforcement are utilitarian almost to the point of being commonplace.

The Mob Museum goes to pains to show that those who worked against the mob toiled away, usually undercover and covertly, in the trenches of the underworld. The museum wraps itself up with an interactive display that is more fun than informative, where you put yourself in the position of an on-duty policeman in video gun training.

Afterwards the trail leads you to a hallway that illustrates the fates, good, bad, and ugly, of the leaders of the underworld and their opposite numbers. And of course, like any good museum, the exit is on the opposite side of the gift shop.

While the Mob Museum has literally something for everyone, it never loses sight of its mission. It acknowledges that there is a glamorous side to crime, but mixed in with the recreations of the G-Men Pulps and Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre wall, lays the true consequences of a criminal life.

 

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

The owner of this website, Steven Gomez, is a participant in the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for sites to earn advertising fees by advertising and linking The Noir Factory to Amazon properties including, but not limited to, amazon.com, endless.com, myhabit.com, smallparts.com, or amazonwireless.com. Certain content that appears on this site comes from Amazon Services LLC. This content is provided 'as is' and is subject to change or removal at any time.