Entertainment and Family History Mixed at Las Vegas Mob Experience

Mobster Tony "The Ant" Spilotro, infamous for his brutality, once reportedly squeezed a man's head in a vice until his eyes popped out of their sockets.But when he wasn't carrying out brutal interrogations or fulfilling contract killings -- duties required of him as a made man for the mob -- he was playing the role of dutiful father.

Spilotro and other mobsters with a Las Vegas connection all had softer, gentler sides that have rarely been acknowledged, says Jay Bloom, founder and managing partner of the Las Vegas Mob Experience at the Tropicana.

Bloom hopes the new attraction changes that by showing publicly the soft guy side that Spilotro, Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, Sam Giancana, Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky possessed.

The Las Vegas Mob Experience celebrated its grand opening Wednesday. It is not to be confused with the Las Vegas Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement, popularly known as the Mob Museum, which is scheduled to open later this year in downtown Las Vegas.

The Mob Museum will concentrate more on the law enforcement perspective, says Michael Unger, chief executive officer of Eagle Group Holdings, the parent company of the Mob Experience, while "we will focus on the bad guys."

The "show-seum is a little bit entertainment, a little bit excitement and a little bit history all rolled together," Unger says. "We expose the human side of these men, if you will. Siegel was a great father. Same thing with Spilotro. They were good family men."

Several family members of the infamous men, including Millicent Siegel Rosen, daughter of Siegel; Spilotro's son, Vincent, and his widow, Nancy; Meyer Lansky II and Cythina Duncan, grandchildren of Lansky; and Giancana's grandson, Carl Manno, donated or loaned more than 1,500 artifacts to be displayed. Among them are Spilotro's baby shoes and his handguns; Siegel's home movies, furniture and love letters; and Lansky's golf clubs and personal diaries.

"It's quite a showcase," says 80-year-old Rosen. "People have been after me for years to do something about my father, but I never wanted to get involved in anything. But when I met Jay, his ideas were different. I was very impressed with the way he treated my father."

Visitors to the attraction will get to watch home movies shot by Siegel while learning about how he built the Flamingo and helped popularize Las Vegas as a vacation destination. He wouldn't like today's Vegas, Rosen adds. It would be much too corporate for his tastes.

Don't go in expecting to hear the whole story of the mob, though. The Mob Experience covers prohibition and gaming apart from the family history.

"The narrative they're telling seems to have some problems," says David Schwartz, director of University of Nevada, Las Vegas' gaming studies. "It seems to skip over some of the stuff organized crime did in America."

And though the artifacts may have historical value, it may be difficult to understand why, because many of them are out of context, Schwartz adds.

Attraction organizers chose to focus strictly on mob figures who played a role in the rise and spread of casinos, Unger says.

In addition to the artifacts, the Mob Experience offers a pseudo-mob "experience" in which guests can become a made man, a snitch, get whacked or have a shootout. At the ticket counter, guests give their names and some personal information in exchange for a mob nickname and a badge embedded with radio frequency identification, or RFID.

The Mob Experience is divided into three acts: the immigration of the mob figures, the rise of the mob, and the decline and fall of the mob. A three-dimensional guide accompanies visitors through, offering facts and helping to navigate the mob. As a guest enters each area, computers sense the RFID badge and greet each person by his or her mob nickname.

Actors portraying various mob characters are situated throughout the 26,000-square-foot attraction and interact with guests. Your response to each character plays a role in your fate at the end, Bloom says.

Thanks to Sonya Padgett

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It's Official: John Travolta to Play John Gotti in "Three Generations"

John Travolta is set to play John Gotti Sr., the mobster known as the Dapper Don, in the indie pic Gotti: Three Generations.

Nick Cassavetes will direct the screenplay by Leo Rossi, which focuses on the relationship between John Gotti Sr., the head of the Gambino crime family who died in prison in 2002, and his son John Gotti Jr., who took over the family business for his father, served time in prison, but then successfully escaped conviction in four subsequent racketeering trials.

Marc Fiore is producing for his Fiore Films. Marty Ingels, the former comic turned talent broker, has come on board the project as executive producer.

Gotti Jr., who's given his blessing to the project, plans to join the producers, Travolta and Cassavetes at a press conference on April 12 at the Sheraton New York Hotel.

Travolta, repped by WME, last appeared in the action thriller From Paris with Love.

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Top 10 Best Irish Mob Movies

You like your criminals bleeding green, pissing Guinness and eating a steady diet of catholic guilt, so you turn to the 10 best Irish mafia movies. Well done, lad. Here you will find some of the best crime films of our time, thrilling pictures with complex depictions of violence, morality and religion.

• 1. “Angles With Dirty Faces” – This 1938 masterpiece is the original Irish mafia movie and surely one of the genre’s best films. “Angels With Dirty Faces” starts a volatile James Cagney and concerns the ultimate of all Irish moral battles: the church versus a life of violent crime, and the manner in which those two aren’t exactly mutually exclusive.
• 2. “On the Water Front” – Marlon Brando’s performance will wow you, but there’s more going on here than generation-defining acting. One of the best Irish mafia films, “On The Water Front” tells a tale of the Irish mob’s infiltration of unions and the influence organized crime had on the fates and fortunes of the American working class.
• 3. “The Departed” – Scorsese struck gold with this Irish mafia saga. An operatic film peppered with stellar performances and nail-biting intensity, “The Departed” digs beneath the skin of its characters like a tapeworm and doesn’t let up until the final shot is fired. This cat-and-mouse film details with mafia infiltration of the police and vice-versa.
• 4. “Miller’s Crossing” – This early Coen Brothers masterpiece is based on noir novelist Dashiell Hammett’s ground breaking early novel “Red Harvest.” The film tells the tale of prohibition-era Irish gangsters in a manner that is both hushed and menacing.
• 5. “State of Grace” – Opening opposite “Goodfellas,” this Irish mob movie didn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of finding a broad audience. Despite this initial box office disappointment, “State of Grace” is easily one of the best Irish mafia movies. The film deals with the moral and religious turmoil of Irish criminals and features excellent performances from Sean Penn, Gary Oldman, and Ed Harris.
• 6. “Gangs of New York” –“Angels” is the original Irish mafia movie and “Gangs of New York” is a movie about the original Irish gangsters. Though Leonardo DiCaprio comes across like a high school actor who’s trying his best to be worthy of standing next to Daniel Day-Lewis, the grandiose scope of the film and Day-Lewis’ jaw-dropping performance makes this one of the best Irish mafia movies of all time.
• 7. “The Friends of Eddie Coyle” – This 70’s crime gem doesn’t laud or glorify the Irish mob as other films on this list do, but rather portrays with stark and very depressing honesty the way in which criminal organizations ruin the lives of well intentioned working class people with no opportunity for societal advancement beyond crime.
• 8. “The Road to Perdition” – Sam Mendes turned his attention to Chicago’s Irish mafia circa 1930 in this stately and elegiac film. The film concerns the nature of love and relationships, particularly those between father and son, and the manner in which familial duty and desire often conflict with disastrous consequences.
• 9. “The Public Enemy” – “Public Enemey” was James Cagney’s first film. The film is about organized crime and the American mafia underworld in a very board sense. It’s a great movie, and a number of colorful Irish characters drift in and out of its narrative.
• 10. “The Town” – “The Town” concerns small time Boston Irish hoods. For its empathetic portrait of working class depression, anger, alcoholism and violence and the mob’s role in all of that, it is one of the best Irish mafia movies.

Thanks to Screen Junkies

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