I didn't set out to do a recommendation for the Mob Museum, but we have thoroughly enjoyed several visits to the Museum and I wanted to share this amazing space with you!
At least for now, but who knows what might come along!
We are not home yet. We are at our son's for the weekend, then heading home. We try to plan our drives so that we can spend the weekends with our son while he is off work (he's a professor) and avoid the higher weekend hotel rates.
If we are going to a tourist destination - like Las Vegas - we try to arrive on Monday and leave on Friday, when the crowds swell along with the room rates. It has worked well for us, and it does mean that the sites we want to visit are less crowded, even if only marginally.
One of our destinations, as I mentioned last week, was the Mob Museum in Las Vegas. I can highly recommend it for anyone wanting to find out about organized crime and crime busting over the last decade.
This image from the Museum website shows the beautiful neoclassical architecture of the historical building.
The building itself is full of history, even before it became a museum. Built in the early 1930s and opened in 1933, it was originally a Federal Courthouse and Post Office. The Kefauver hearings - a traveling series of Congressional hearings in the 1950s - held hearings in a courtroom which has been preserved and is used as a theater.
Starting on the 3rd floor, the exhibits trace the history of organized crime from the turn of the last century, through Prohibition, gambling and a wide variety of vices, into current-day drug trafficking and cybercrime as you work your way down through the 2nd and 1st floors.
On the first floor are several interactive special exhibits (at an extra charge) including a hands-on crime lab simulation, and a gift shop where I could have dropped an obscene amount of money on research books.
The final level is the basement, which houses a speakeasy and distillery where the Museum actually makes their own moonshine!
There is a wealth of information in the Museum, a fascinating dive into a piece of history that reached into every community in one way or another.
The building is packed with tidbits like this. I took a bunch of pictures of the displays and saved the hassle of scribbling notes for later use.
There is much more to report about the research we did, the meetings we had with other writers and editors, and the plans we're making for the coming months.
One other note - somewhere a few weeks back we passed the second anniversary of this channel. It went past without fanfare, basically I didn't even realize we had made it through another year! So let me take this opportunity to thank you all for your continued support. I truly appreciate all of you!