Dec 21 at the Mob Museum

The next day, we took the local bus to our destination.

The local transit system serves Las Vegas Boulevard pretty well. There are two bus routes that cover it on weekdays. One has a double deck, the other is  a double horizontal bus (as in the images). On the double deck, the view from the top is nice but sometimes you can't get off the bus before the driver tears away from your stop (we didn't use the upper deck). 

On the double horizontal, they don't sell bus tickets so you are supposed to buy them and keep a valid ticket with you (honor code- yes that's right - in Vegas).


Our destination was the Mob Museum and it was at about the northern most point the bus goes (on the Las Vegas Blvd routes).

In the third image, Ann is standing next to the wall that was the site of the Saint Valentine day massacre of February 14, 1929.  This day was when seven members of the so called North Side Gang were executed by Al Capone's gang using Tommy Guns.

The wall was on a garage that was torn down in 1967 but someone numbered the bricks and bought them and assembled them for different exhibits.  In 2009, the bricks were purchased for the Mob Museum. The red marks are paint that enhances some bullet holes (blood was once on the bricks but the visible remains of the blood have long since worn off).

The 4th image show me firing a Tommy Gun (blanks). The Thompson Machine Gun was developed by General John Thompson for use in WWI but didn't complete development until the war was over.  The National Firearms Act of 1934 required registration of fully automatic weapons (such as the Tommy Gun) and its use in criminal activities ended after a few years.

The biggest surprise factoid was that in the 90s Frank Cullota, a former mobster who cooperated with the FBI when facing a death threat from his former mobsters, was a consultant in the Martin Scorsese film Casino.  In the 1992 film Frank appeared in several scenes as a killer, including one that was a fictionalized version of a murder he actually committed in Las Vegas in 1979. The fifth image is a still from that movie and the guy with the gun is Cullota.

The second biggest surprise factoid is that O'Hare airport is named for the son of lawyer who worked for Al Capone. The mob lawyer, Edward O'Hare, eventually turned against Capone. The sixth image is Edward 'Easy Ed' O'Hare with Capone - O'Hare is on the left and, to me, looks more like a gangster than Capone in this image. Ed O'Hare was later assassinated (1939), presumably by the mob, and his fiancee at the time (Edward having been divorced from the mother of Butch) then married Frank Nitti, successor to Capone.

Edward O'Hare's son Butch O'Hare (from, I believe the marriage that ended with a divorce) was a naval aviator and shot down a number of Japanese bombers and fighters. His plane was damaged in one engagement and went down and was never found. In 1949, the Chicago Depot airport was named for Butch O'Hare. 

Jack Ruby, seventh image (Ruby firing the gun at Oswald), gets a pretty good amount of space in the museum also - including the 'Wall of Shame' featuring 50 or so of the most famous mobsters. Ruby had numerous gang affiliations, some casual, some business.  

This has led to several theories of the 'Mob killed Kennedy' variety (one of which is given a video display at the museum).  These theories are, IMO, problematic because if a 'hit' on Kennedy had been ordered by the Mob, many mobsters would have had to know about it. These putative mobsters would then stand to make money, get favorable incarceration treatment, obtain better new identities or buy reduced sentences from giving up this knowledge and no such information has come forth in the many decades since the putative 'hit'.