The building that houses The Mob Museum began its life as the first federal structure in Las Vegas. For decades after it opened in 1933, it held the city’s main post office, federal courtroom and offices for various federal agencies. In 1950, the building cemented its role in history when the U.S. Senate’s Kefauver Committee held a hearing in the courtroom to question individuals about organized crime in Las Vegas. It is largely because of this significant event that the building was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1983. But the Kefauver hearing is only one piece of the building’s rich history.

The town of Las Vegas was established in 1905 as a stop along the San Pedro, Los Angeles and Salt Lake Railroad route. Railroad officials drew up a 40-block townsite and auctioned lots in what is now downtown Las Vegas. By the 1920s, the city had grown up around the dusty railroad depot, but Southern Nevada was still geographically isolated. With no federal building, Las Vegans had to travel more than 400 miles to Nevada’s capital, Carson City, to visit the state’s only federal courthouse. Southern Nevadans began to lobby for their own federal building.

Congress passed the Public Buildings Act in 1926, and allocated money to construct federal buildings across the nation. During the first quarter of the 20th century, the United States saw large waves of immigrants, urbanization and continued settlement in the Western states, and these factors led to a need for more federal facilities. The initial act did not stipulate where new buildings would be constructed, but Las Vegas saw the opportunity to lobby for a piece of the pie.

In December 1928, President Calvin Coolidge signed the Boulder Canyon Project Act. This initiated the process of building Hoover Dam, 35 miles southeast of Las Vegas. The population of Las Vegas grew from about 2,000 to about 5,500 nearly overnight as job-seekers descended on the community.

With planned construction of the dam, it became apparent that Southern Nevada would need a federal building. In 1929, Congress allocated $200,000 for construction and $20,000 to purchase a site for a Las Vegas federal building. In 1931, $100,000 was added to the budget to include a courtroom.

Federal officials surveying Las Vegas for a suitable site received offers from multiple property owners. But the prices of the privately held parcels exceeded the government’s budget. The city offered land for the building at Stewart Avenue and Third Street, where the fairgrounds were then located. However, a federal construction engineer with the Office of the Supervising Architect, John Lammers, objected because of what he called its location in “an undesirable part of the city.”

At the time, the fairgrounds, where The Mob Museum now stands, was a block away from the city’s vice district, known as Block 16, and across the street from Block 17, where the city’s Black community lived and worked. Lammers’s questioning of the site’s proximity to the Black community reflected the discriminatory attitudes of that era.

City officials promised to shut down Block 16 and to work with the Black community to relocate, leading to the fairgrounds site being embraced and selected for the federal building. Las Vegas transferred the deed for the land to the federal government on December 5, 1930.

(The city did shut down Block 16 for a time in the early 1930s but its bars and brothels later reopened. There is no known historical record that city officials took any steps to move the Black community out of Block 17. However, by the early 1940s most African Americans in Las Vegas resided in a neighborhood west of the railroad tracks called the Westside.)

In 1931, the federal government solicited construction bids and awarded the contract to the low bidder, Plains Construction of Pampa, Texas. Within a few weeks of breaking ground, residents noticed the building’s foundation was being constructed 32 feet off center. After financial setbacks, Plains Construction abandoned the project, and in June 1932 a new company was selected to finish the project. Rosen & Fischel Inc. of Chicago resumed work in August 1932.

The building was designed in a neoclassical style, which was popular for federal buildings at the time. It features a combination of architectural terracotta with blended yellow brick accented with bas relief columns and featuring distinct materials at each level of the three-story building.

Inspired by Classical Greek and Roman architecture, neoclassical is considered a timeless style that represents the national character and solidity of the vast nation. The federal government hoped it would unify the country by mirroring the architecture in Washington, D.C., rather than adhering too closely to specific regions’ vernacular building styles.

On November 11, 1933, the building was dedicated. The post office was the first tenant. Later, the Internal Revenue Service opened an office, along with the FBI, the Department of Agriculture and other federal agencies. For the first few years, judges traveled from California and Carson City to hold hearings and trials for a few weeks each spring and fall. At the beginning of the first-ever court session, presiding Judge Paul McCormick of Los Angeles made a grand pronouncement:

“This building and courtroom are a credit to the genius of the engineering persons who brought it into being and had to do with its construction. It is dignified and elegant. Let us hope that the character of the work done here will be in keeping with this. … It is hoped that justice may always prevail here.”

Although the courtroom was not heavily used for the first few years, the rest of the building quickly became a center of community activity. During World War II, with the influx of defense workers at the new Las Vegas Army Air Field and the Basic Magnesium plant in Henderson, the post office was bursting at the seams, and the IRS often stayed open until midnight during tax season.

Beginning in 1942, the U.S. Senate’s Truman Committee, investigating potential corruption, waste and profiteering in the defense industry, visited Las Vegas a few times and used the courthouse as its base of operation. The committee was named for its chairman, Senator Harry S. Truman of Missouri, who would become president a few years later. A Civil Aeronautics Board investigation into a plane crash in 1942 at nearby Mount Potosi, which killed actress Carole Lombard and 21 others, also used the federal courtroom for hearings.

In 1945, Judge Roger T. Foley became the city’s first full-time federal judge. Nominated by President Franklin Roosevelt on March 30, 1945, and appointed by President Truman in May of that year, Foley served until 1974. His son, Roger D. Foley, also was a federal judge and used the building’s courtroom.

In the 1950s and ’60s the building hosted a number of organized crime-related hearings and trials. This began on November 15, 1950, when the U.S. Senate’s Kefauver Committee met in Las Vegas to question individuals about organized crime in the Las Vegas casino industry. The committee, named for and led by Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee, quizzed eight people in Las Vegas, including Desert Inn developer Wilbur Clark, Flamingo manager Moe Sedway and Nevada Lieutenant Governor Clifford Jones. The Kefauver Committee failed to push the Mob out of Las Vegas. In fact, it inadvertently brought more organized crime to the city, as mobsters across the country, under pressure to shut down illegal operations, invested in the only state where casinos were legal.

One of those underworld figures, Benny Binion, moved from Dallas to Las Vegas in 1946. Binion ran the gambling rackets in Dallas in the 1930s and early ’40s, but when a new, reform-minded sheriff took over, Binion decided to relocate to Las Vegas. Because of his criminal past, including two murders, the Nevada Tax Commission initially rejected Binion’s application for a gaming license. But in 1951, the commission, meeting in the federal courtroom, reconsidered his application and gave him a license.

As more individuals with ties to organized crime invested in Las Vegas casinos, the Nevada Gaming Control Board worked to tighten oversight of the industry. It created the List of Excluded Persons in 1960, which banned individuals with criminal pasts from owning or even setting foot in Nevada casinos. The list became known as the Black Book. One of the men on the list, Chicago mobster Johnny Marshall, challenged the Black Book on constitutional grounds in 1963, and his trial was held in the federal building. Marshall lost his case, which bolstered the state’s efforts to crack down on organized crime in the casino industry.

Las Vegas grew rapidly in the 1940s, and ’50s, and the federal building became too small to handle all the government’s needs. In 1967, the government opened a new federal courthouse, later named the Foley Federal Building for judges Roger T. Foley and Roger D. Foley.

The original federal building remained relevant. Tax trials and grand jury hearings continued to be held in the building. In 1967, the singer and actor Frank Sinatra testified before a grand jury meeting on the third floor. The grand jury was investigating allegations of casino skimming. In addition, naturalization ceremonies were also held in the old federal building. In 1968, the Kim Sisters, a popular Korean-born girl group and frequent Strip performers, took their oath of citizenship in the building.

By the early 2000s, a third federal building was constructed in Las Vegas, and the government decided the old federal building was no longer needed. Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman expressed an interest in acquiring the building as a way to revitalize downtown Las Vegas. As a young attorney, Goodman had tried a case in the courtroom. Before becoming mayor, he was a prominent defense attorney representing alleged mobsters.

When the federal government told Goodman the city could acquire the building at no cost as long as it was historically preserved and used for a cultural purpose, it was an offer he couldn’t refuse. He suggested the development of a museum devoted to the history of organized crime and law enforcement. The building transferred to the city of Las Vegas in 2002. Goodman recruited Ellen Knowlton, recently retired special agent in charge of the FBI’s Las Vegas Field Office, to chair the museum’s inaugural board.

Preservation architects worked to restore the building to its original grandeur. This included removing traces of modern renovations, uncovering the original paint colors and re-creating some of the historical lighting fixtures that had been removed or damaged over the building’s then 70-year history. Meanwhile, the city hired curators Dennis and Kathie Barrie to lead development of museum exhibits chronicling the story of organized crime and law enforcement in America. The Mob Museum opened on February 14, 2012, and the rest is history.