The Mob Museum

I'm spending a long weekend in Las Vegas, ostensibly to visit my long-distance girlfriend and her sons. This is my third trip here, and yet there will probably be no gambling involved, and not even a trip to the Strip. There's plenty else to do.

Our first stop was The Mob Museum, officially called the National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement. The museum opened just over two years ago in the Las Vegas Post Office and Courthouse, built in 1933 (and which was one of the sites of the Kefauver organized crime hearings in the 1950s). It's a big hit, and it deserves to be.

Since I was with two teens and a woman with a sore leg, we didn't devote enough time to it, as there's a lot to process. It details the origins of organized crime, mostly through immigrants (Italian and Jewish) that established criminal networks at the turn of the century. There are exhibits on the St. Valentine's Day Massacre (including the actual bloodstained wall), various kinds of weapons, the founding of Las Vegas as a gambling mecca by Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky, and the efforts of law enforcement to topple the criminal empire.

The best part for kids and some adults who still act like kids are hands-on exhibits. You can appear in a line-up, shoot a Tommy gun (with no bullets, of course), take part in a cop training scenario, and sit in the electric chair. To properly do the museum, it would take at least two hours, but we did it in one.

Later in the day we went to the top of the Stratosphere, the tallest freestanding tower in the United States, which looms over 100 stories above the desert. The views are breathtaking of course, but if that wasn't enough there are rides on top of it. For the truly brave, you can sky jump off the top hooked to a line. I went on one ride, the X-Stream, which just basically tilts the rider and shoots forward a few feet. Of course, when it shoots forward a few feet on top of a 100-story tower, that adds some dramatic effect.

And, as always in Vegas, there is the local color. I'm staying at an off-strip hotel, but it's still hopping with people playing slots, even at seven in the morning. They are a certain type of people, mostly older and disheveled, who could be mistaken for homeless in other circumstances. Men with gray pony-tails, wearing black socks with sandals, or women carting oxygen tanks. The smell of tobacco lingers--an unusual one, as back east smoking in public places has pretty much been eradicated. I've never gotten the allure of slot machines, but whatever makes people happy. To me, the fascination with Vegas is not the gambling, but the world that the gambling creates. More to come.