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Courthouse restoration will tell story of organized crime in Las Vegas
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Photos by Jeff Scheid/Las Vegas Review-Journal
Robert Chattel has spent years restoring the former U.S. Post Office and Courthouse at 300 E. Stewart Ave. for its conversion into the Mob Museum. The courtroom is where U.S. Sen. Estes Kefauver conducted a 1950 inquiry into organized crime in Las Vegas and elsewhere. » Buy this photo
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Original post boxes in the lobby.
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An original safe.
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Light fixture in the original courtroom.
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Jeff Scheid/Las Vegas Review-Journal
Vintage light fixtures hang in the lobby of the Mob Museum, at 300 Stewart Ave., which was a post office until 2005 and courthouse and all-purpose federal building until 1965. » Buy this photo
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LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL
Updated: Oct. 2, 2011 | 8:08 a.m.
In 1950, U.S. Sen. Estes Kefauver's traveling anti-crime roadshow spent less than a day in Las Vegas before heading to larger cities that promised more attention to aid the politician's mob fighting crusade and national political ambitions.
The Tennessean's short Las Vegas visit left a lasting mark, though probably not the one he intended.
The hearing in the U.S. Post Office and Courthouse at 300 E. Stewart Ave., and similar events in 12 other cities, are credited with sparking a boom in legalized gambling and organized crime investment in Las Vegas that survived for decades and turned downtown and the Strip into a global attraction.
Now preservation architect Robert Chattel is supervising finishing touches to a restoration project he says is "the ultimate artifact" for the $42 million Mob Museum that uses the old courthouse as a setting for the story of organized crime in America.
"When people say, 'If these walls could talk,' these are the walls," Chattel said during a Wednesday tour of the federal building, which was dedicated in 1933.
COURTROOM IS CENTER STAGE
During the tour, Chattel freezes in the middle of the second-floor courtroom where Kefauver grilled witnesses and where cases involving mob figures such as Meyer Lansky and major Las Vegas casinos were argued.
He describes how guides will explain the stories to Mob Museum visitors before leading them to the darkened room where they will sit on the court's original wooden benches.
"The lights will go up and you will realize you are in the room where it occurred," Chattel said. "It gives me goose bumps just saying it."
The museum isn't scheduled to open until February, and the exhibits are still under construction at another location.
Chattel's work is to meticulously restore the building in a way that preserves the historic architecture, shows visitors what it was like in 1950 and adds modern amenities such as air conditioning, fire safety features and handicapped accessibility without crowding out the old-time vibe.
The setting means visitors will learn how the tentacles of organized crime stretched coast-to-coast from a place, Las Vegas, where mob factions from across America coalesced around the gambling industry.
What's more, the history will become more tangible in a building where key figures from the mob and law enforcement clashed.
The courtroom, for example, has been restored with cork flooring, repainted features sculpted in the moulding, re-created plaster light fixtures and tables and benches that were present when Kefauver's Senate Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce visited Nevada.
"There was a distinct smell in that courtroom, a combination of leather and, I don't want to call it cigar smoke, it was a real earthy smell," said John Mowbray, 60, of Las Vegas.
His father, former Nevada Supreme Court Justice John C. Mowbray, once worked in the building as a bankruptcy referee. "What I remember, too, was how high the ceiling was in proportion to the room. To me, it was a very special place."
Mowbray is on the board of directors of 300 Stewart Ave. Corp., the nonprofit that will run the museum, which was paid for with city, state and federal tax dollars.
He says placing the exhibits in the former federal building not only makes the history feel more immediate, it also puts the mobsters' stories on the good guys' turf.
"When you walk out of it, you will have a sense that at the end of the day law enforcement prevailed," Mowbray said.
THE RESTORATION
It has taken several years and millions of dollars for Chattel, president of Chattel Architecture Planning & Preservation Inc. of Sherman Oaks, Calif., to re-create the building.
Some features required extraordinary lengths to complete. The prominent, green exterior window frames, for example, were shipped to Denver for restoration, then returned and reinstalled.
Chattel said the deep green color was a matter of practicality, not taste.
"The closest paint store for the federal government was Hoover Dam," Chattel said of the massive dam under construction near Boulder City from 1931 to 1935. "And they had a lot of 'safety green.' "
Because old photos of the interior were shot in black and white, restorers had to use microscopic analysis of paint flecks to make the colors true to the period the museum highlights.
Imitation travertine columns were cut open to install fire and electrical systems and resealed to the original condition.
And to re-create the plaster light fixtures in the courtroom, restorers tracked down similar fixtures in a government building in Duluth, Minn., and had one removed to use as a template before returning it to its original location.
"It is amazing that the building survives, especially in a city where so little survives," Chattel said of the structure, which was a post office from dedication until 2005 and courthouse until 1965, in addition to being an all-purpose federal building.
In 1982 it was listed as "locally significant" on the National Register of Historic Places, in part for having "stylistic elements common to late 19th and early 20th century Neoclassicism favored by the Treasury Department for federal architecture."
In 2005 the listing was upgraded to one of "national significance" based on research done during the development of the Mob Museum.
That's because researchers were able to demonstrate that the Kefauver hearings helped drive organized crime deeper underground in many places, except Las Vegas.
MOB HEARINGS DROVE NEVADA
The presence of legalized gambling, combined with the glare of the Kefauver spotlight, prompted gangsters to pull up stakes and move to Nevada.
"They were just glad to be able to operate their business in the light of day and not out of some back room in Omaha, Neb., or Steubenville, Ohio," Mowbray said.
Later hearings in other states were also televised and attracted an estimated audience of 20 million to 30 million viewers, nearly 20 percent of the entire U.S. population at the time.
Although the Las Vegas proceedings weren't among those televised, the others provided plenty of dramatic testimony about money, power, the infiltration of businesses and institutions by organized crime and gambling.
The new buzz combined with more mob migration to Las Vegas resulted in more tourism and drove hundreds of millions of dollars of investment by organized crime in the casino industry.
The mob eventually was driven out of the legitimate gambling business, but not before planting the seeds that resulted in a multibillion-dollar industry on the Strip and a regulatory framework mimicked by countless other jurisdictions where legal gambling boomed from the late 1970s through today.
"Las Vegas is, historically speaking, a great central point from which to look at this broader national and international history," said Michael Green, a historian and College of Southern Nevada professor who contributed to the museum research.
"Kefauver's unintended consequence was he had an impact around the country and helped Las Vegas."
Contact reporter Benjamin Spillman at bspillman@reviewjournal.com or 702-229-6435.
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The whole mob theme is so overdone and so uninteresting. Very few people really care about the mob of yesteryear anymore. The story has been told over and over and over and countless movies have been made about it. How about a musuem where you can actually learn something useful like the Museum of Natural History in NYC? Why can't we have a museum like that. I'm not going to this stupid museum.
....us taxpayers SHOULD NOT have been made to foot the bill for this ridiculous mob museum which i too predict will be a dismal failure.....the "history" of Las Vegas will always have been and will be known regardless of this stupid stupid waste of taxpayer money, this "museum" is totally unneccesary and is promoted under the guise of preserving and showing the criminal history as if its somethig to behold.....it is what it is without having to venture into this debacle and collosal waste of money touting what is already known by anybody who makes a minimal effort looking into the history.
The 'mob museum' will be a complete flop. No one will go to it. Such a waste of time and money...
Why pay taxes for ancient history when you have Reid, Titus and Berkley with their union pals living it right in front of your face everyday?
And they have the nerve to ask for more taxes! If you give it to them, they will waste it.
All that is fine and dandy but is the $42 million+ going to be paid back to the taxpayers that funded this? That was the original pricetag...what is the final cost after all the changeorders and cost overruns?? It might make you mad if you knew the truth...well it will most likely never be repaid as we all know how good a track record that the guys who estimate visitors do....look at neonopolis, the monorail, and other projects, they all fell WAAAAYYYYYY short of the estimates, and this pet project will too. Wait and see. The new organized crime has just lifted 42 million from your wallet.
This museum is about a major part of History of Las Vegas, like it or not. There are millions of people that will get excited seeing what created this great city. Think about it, overwhelmingly MOST in this city elected the greatest Mob Attorney of all time as their Mayor. There will always be a handful of haters posting here no matter what the subject matter is but bottom line is many long time Las Vegan's know this history and don't have a problem with this project.
Since I am involved in the research and planning for this museum, I realize that any comments may be seen as self-serving; so be it. But, mrnyc, why do you think a museum called the Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement will glorify mobsters? To put it another way, does the Holocaust Museum glorify Nazis? Of course not. It tells, or tries to tell, what happened. So, I hope you will come to the museum and decide for yourself whether it glorifies organized crime figures. Similarly, Irma, while I certainly agree that Las Vegas is lacking in a lot of things, what you are saying is the equivalent of saying that the South shouldn't tell the history of slavery: it is a blot on that region's history, just as organized crime has been a blot on ours; but it also is a complex story, not simply or easily told.
Glad there is no more organized crime in Vegas.
Who are the bigger mobstess? Those who lived and built Las Vegas in the past, and that everyone remembers as "the Good Ole Days", or the phonies, con artists and flash in the pan gaming moguls who have turned Vegas into a shameful rip off and side show mecha where prices are outrageous and food, service and hospitality are third rate?