2022-07-04 07:00:00
(Las Vegas) The crooks who are sent to sleep with the fish rarely resurface. But the mafia is neither hot nor cold to climate change, and the chronic drought affecting the Las Vegas area has begun to reveal its darkest secrets.
The level of Lake Mead, very close to the capital of the game and very popular with boaters, has dropped to recently reach record levels, revealing a heap of waste hitherto submerged but also corpses.
One of these bodies in particular has caught the attention of underworld experts: the skeleton of a man who was shot in the head, stuffed into a barrel and thrown to the bottom of the lake some 40 years ago.
“The underworld tended to put people in canisters, whether to dunk them in the lake or throw them in a field,” says Geoff Schumacher, vice president of the Mob Museum, literally the “Museum of the Underworld,” from Vegas.
“That’s the first thing. Second, the person was shot in the head, typical of the style of banditry. And third, we know it happened in the late 1970s or early 1980s, when the underworld was very prominent in Las Vegas,” he explains.
Oasis
A very improbable oasis made up of hotels, casinos and places of perdition developed in the last century in the Nevada desert.
Las Vegas was founded in 1905 but its population only really exploded in the 1930s, when work began on the titanic Hoover Dam located nearby.
The influx of workers living away from home for extended periods created a great demand for entertainment, a void quickly filled by shows, prostitution and gambling.
But where there is sex, casinos and alcohol, organized crime is never far away.
“The underworld played a pretty big role in the development of Las Vegas between the 1940s and the 1980s,” says Schumacher.
“There were a lot of hidden activities that allowed banditry to control the management of casinos but also to build and develop them, often using money from the truck drivers’ union,” he adds.
Taking advantage of post-war economic prosperity, Las Vegas grew considerably richer thanks to its casinos. And out of every dollar left on the green carpet by the booze-misted tourist, a mob boss from Cleveland, Chicago or New York took his cut.
These “levies” have certainly cost the city millions of dollars in lost tax revenue, but they have also established its sulphurous reputation, attracting ever more visitors.
“People wanted to come to Las Vegas, thinking: Maybe if I sit at the bar, there will be a mobster next to me”, explains Geoff Schumacher.
“Killers”
But “the reality is that these guys were killers, thieves. If you were looking to double-cross the underworld in any way, there were bound to be consequences…”
Las Vegas police are still investigating the body found on a dried-up shore of Lake Mead.
But Mr. Schumacher already has ideas regarding the identity of the victim.
It might be Jay Vandermark, who worked at the StarDust Hotel, managed at the time on behalf of the Chicago mob by Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal.
Rosenthal, played by Robert DeNiro in the film Casinowas diverting some of the proceeds to his organization, until he caught the attention of the authorities.
Vandermark disappeared soon following.
The man in the can might also be a certain Harry Pappas, also linked to the Chicago mafia, who was in charge of organizing boat rides on Lake Mead for the wealthy clients of the StarDust.
“Just before his disappearance, he told his wife that he was going to have lunch with someone interested in buying his boat. We never saw Harry Pappas once more,” says Geoff Schumacher.
Lake Mead is currently only a quarter full, the result of a long drought exacerbated by global warming.
The trend doesn’t seem set to stabilize anytime soon, and lower water levels may reveal new mafia-related mysteries.
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