Barrie, a museum specialist, is principal of the museum and culture planning consulting group, Barrie Projects, and has a 30-year history of museum, civic arts and cultural experiences. She was previously involved with the design and development of the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C.

As curator, Barrie’s role is to develop the content and coordinate the way the story is presented. She works closely with the designers and the interactive team.

Her research process began back in 2006, with a brainstorming session with about 50 experts who came in and talked to the team about the unique history of Las Vegas. From those conversations, the main ideas emerged and the mission statement of the museum was born. Because so many people who knew the topic were involved, says Barrie, “…we had a pretty good sense of what should be in it.”

Barrie acquired the artifacts from various sources. Many came from a few key collectors including the family of Meyer Lansky. While others, were contributed by the general public. “Some of the most interesting things have come from the public or someone who has a connection to the story and calls up the museum and says they have something that might be of interest,” says Barrie.

One of the most iconic artifacts in the museum is the brick wall from the bloody St. Valentine’s Day Massacre, underscoring the violence that existed during the tumultuous prohibition era. After a long search for just one brick, the entire dismantled wall was located in a Las Vegas woman’s garage and then reassembled for the exhibit.

The museum creates an exciting interactive experience that immerses people into the world of law enforcement and organized crime and leads them through a chronological tour of history. And there is quite a bit of history and a limited amount of space. In fact, one of the challenges, said Barrie, was “to make the stories fit the space.” To solve that problem, stories are condensed by weaving key story lines throughout the museum so people aren’t overwhelmed by plotlines that span several decades. “People want authentic experiences,” says Barrie, “given in small bites that are digestible.”

The interactive, multi-media exhibits do just that by engaging all of the senses. Barrie thinks people will be surprised by their strong visceral feelings as they progress through the exhibits. The interactive What’s Your Connection audio booth even allows visitors, at the end of their visit, to record their thoughts and impressions and relay personal stories.

The famed Kefauver hearings on organized crime are brought to life in the beautifully restored courtroom. Visitors can watch archival footage and dramatizations of mob bosses’ and other criminal figures’ testimonies, just as an estimated 30 million people watched the nationally televised hearings over 50 years ago.

Barrie wants visitors to be surprised at what they learn and to fully understand the impact of organized crime.

Says Barrie of the Mob Museum, “I think it will be one of the most interesting museums in the world.”

Written by Andrea Smith, Special educational consultant to The Mob Museum

Wednesday night, in a surreal grand opening party scene, it packed in some former gangland figures, including a police informant and alleged hitman seen in the film Casino as well as the inspiration for GoodFellas, former protected witness Henry Hill. I chatted with the affable Hill, who told me he used to be “a scumbag” when he was doping and killing, and with Meyer Lansky II, the dapper grandson and namesake of the organized crime boss whose gambling empire included early Vegas casinos. Both say they’re working on TV shows dealing with mobster exploits.

Museum honcho Dennis Barrie was a force behind the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland and The Spy Museum in Washington, so it’s no surprise that the downtown museum — in a renovated courthouse where Tennessee Sen. Estes Kefauver held 1950 hearings that exposed organized crime — is no penny-ante deal. “The idea is to be as immersive as possible,” Barrie says, and that means “participating” in a police lineup, reading actual files of mobsters, punching in a city and seeing its mob crime history, watching how agents spied on mobsters and listening to actual wiretaps and tapes of gangster schemes. Photos from mob hits are chilling.

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Shadow and light converge on Mob Museum

It turns out not all the mobsters were in display cases Tuesday morning at the grand opening of the sparkling National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement. The Mob Museum does a spectacular job of hauling into custody the major elements of the violent American criminal subculture, but it appears one tough customer slipped the dragnet.

Moving from shadow to light through the crowd of well- wishers, reporters and gawkers was none other than New England mafia figure Vinny Ferrara. The man once known as “the Animal” kept a low profile during the ceremony.

With his background, Ferrara could have taught a doctoral seminar on organized crime. Educated on Hanover Street in Boston’s North End as well as at St. John’s University, Ferrara gained infamy as capo in the Patriarca crime family.

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Mob Men: The Mob Gets Its Own Museum in Las Vegas

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Las Vegas Embraces Bad Guys of Its Past

And now, here in a city where such figures were once as comfortably in their element as Zeus and his family on Olympus, they are finally getting something close to the museum they deserve: the Mob Museum, a $42 million survey of the American gangster, unfolding in 17,000 square feet of exhibition space, on three floors of a 41,000-square-foot landmark building on Stewart Avenue.

With artifacts, clever interactive displays, atmospheric exhibits and photographs and videos, we learn how Las Vegas developed out of the early-20th-century desert, and how workers on the nearby Hoover Dam gave the town its first population explosion. We see how the mob maneuvered into businesses of pleasure, not releasing its hold until late in the 20th century, when corporate casinos trumped their almost quaint predecessors.

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