Hollywood’s ‘Bugsy’ is entertaining but plays fast and loose with the facts
In the 1991 movie Bugsy, Warren Beatty, portraying mobster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, stands in the desert near Highway 91 south…
Las Vegas Mob stories attract Hollywood interest
Of the many Mob movies and television shows now in the works, several are focused on underworld figures who had…
Were Richard Nixon’s alleged ties to organized crime real or mere speculation?
In the final days before the 1968 presidential election, the so-called “war on crime” was the top domestic issue of…
The rise of Castro and the fall of the Havana Mob
When Fidel Castro, his brother Raul, Che Guevara and 79 other Cuban rebels piled into the 43-foot yacht Granma on…
Don’t dare call him ‘Three Finger Brown’
The 1960s marked the end of an era for some of America’s underworld leaders. The forward-thinking, Prohibition-era architects of New…
Seventy years ago today, Bugsy Siegel’s storied Mob life came to an abrupt end
It is important to our Museum and to me as the resident historian that criminals and their criminal acts are…
Sixty years ago, the Tropicana opened under Mob’s hidden control
Las Vegas was in the middle of a slump. It was April 1957, and the town was still coming to…
Seventy years ago, Luciano’s Havana sojourn was cut short
Written February 2017 In 1946, Charles “Lucky” Luciano was persona non grata in America. Though he was granted a pardon…
The Hollywood legend, the Mob and the jukebox racket
The venerable actress and singer Debbie Reynolds, who died last week at age 84, was a risk-taker for decades when…
Mob involved in attempts to assassinate Castro
This is the second of three blogs on the death of Fidel Castro. Part one looks at the harsh blow…