The appearance of human remains for the second time in a week in a reservoir half an hour’s drive from Las Vegas generates all kinds of speculation in this city founded by the mafia.
“There’s no telling what we’re going to find in Lake Mead,” Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman said Monday. “Not a bad place to dump a body.”
Goodman is a lawyer who represented various underworld figures, including Anthony Spilotro, (Tony the Ant), before serving three terms as mayor, appearing at events with a Martini in hand and showgirls on each arm. .
He did not want to speculate regarding who might have ended up in the enormous reservoir created by the Hoover Dam between Nevada and Arizona, whose waters are lowering at an accelerated pace due to global warming and exposing coastal sectors.
“I’m pretty sure Jimmy Hoffa isn’t here,” he laughed. But he added that several of his former clients were interested in “climate control,” a term used by the mob to refer to their desire to keep the water level high and the corpses still in their underwater graves.
In this era of climate change, however, Lake Mead’s surface has receded by more than 170 feet (52 meters) since 1983.
The lake, which quenches the thirst of 40 million people in cities, farms and tribes in seven southwestern states, is at 30% capacity.
“If it keeps leaking water, very interesting things might come to the surface,” said Michael Green, a history professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, whose father dealt blackjack cards for decades at casinos like Stardust and Showboat.
“I wouldn’t bet my paycheck that we’re going to find out who killed Bugsy Siegel,” Green said, referring to the notorious gangster who opened the Flamingo in 1946, on what would become the famed Las Vegas Strip. Siegel was shot to death in 1947 in Beverly Hills, California. His killer was never identified.
“But I would bet there are more bodies in there,” Green added.
As the water level dropped, authorities had to resort to deeper pipelines to continue supplying casinos, suburbs and 2.4 million residents, as well as 40 million tourists a year.
A few days later, the decomposed corpse of an individual was found in a half-buried barrel on the coast, which had been exposed.
The body was not identified, but police said he had been shot, probably between the mid-1970s and early 1980s, judging by the shoes he was wearing. The death was classified as a homicide and is being investigated.
A few days later, a second barrel appeared, albeit empty, according to KLAS-TV reporters.
On Saturday, two sisters from suburban Henderson paddling on the lake near an old hotel spotted bones on an exposed beach more than 9 miles (14.5 kilometers) from the barrels.
Lindsey Melvin, who took photos of the find, said they thought it was the skeleton of a mouflon (wild sheep), typical of the area. Up close, they noticed that it had a human chin, with teeth. Rangers were called and the National Park Service confirmed that it was human remains.
There is no initial indication that it was a murder, Las Vegas police said Monday, and the death is not being investigated.
Geoff Schumacher, vice president of The Mob Museum, predicted more bodies will turn up.
“I suspect that many of these individuals drowned,” Schumacher said, referring to missing swimmers and boaters. “But the barrels are typical of a mob execution. They put the body in a barrel. And sometimes they throw them in the water.”
Both Schumacher and Green recalled the death of John “Handsome Johnny” Roselli, a 1950s Las Vegas mobster who disappeared in 1976 and whose body was found in a 55-gallon (208-liter) cylinder floating off the coast of Miami.
David Kohlmeier, a former police officer who now works on a Las Vegas podcast and a television show called “The Problem Solver Show,” said Monday that following offering a $5,000 reward for divers who find barrels in the lake, he heard of people in San Diego and Florida who were willing to do it.
Officials with the National Park Service, however, said that is not allowed and that there are hundreds of barrels in the depths of the lake, some from the time Hoover Dam was built in the 1930s.
Kohlmeier said he, too, has heard of missing persons and cases like a man who allegedly killed his mother and brother in 1987, a hotel employee who disappeared in 1992 and a Utah man with children who disappeared in 80’s years.
“Remains are likely to be found all over Lake Mead,” Kohlmeier said. Including indigenous people, the first inhabitants of the area.
Green said people talk not only regarding mob killings, but also regarding the relief that bodies turn up for their relatives.
“People are going to think that we are going to solve all the mafia murders,” the academic commented. “But maybe we’ll see some.”
“It is worth remembering that the mob did not like the murders in Las Vegas. They didn’t want bad publicity,” he noted.
Goodman predicted that the stories that emerge, whatever they are, will increase the legend of Las Vegas, a city that emerged from nowhere in the middle of the desert that became a gambling capital.
“We have an interesting story,” he said. The findings “certainly add to the Las Vegas mystique.”
