A mob museum slated to open soon in Las Vegas will trace Hollywood's portrayal of mobsters from the birth of the silver screen in a violence-fraught exhibit that organizers said is not intended for children.
Screenwriter Nicholas Pileggi, who wrote the book "Wiseguy" and then adapted it into the Martin Scorsese film "Goodfellas," said he will help usher in the exhibit when the National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement opens in Las Vegas in mid-February. Pileggi will appear in a five-minute documentary on the mob and pop culture that will be shown near the end of the museum tour.
The film will attempt to explain why so many people are fascinated with organized crime.
"Just because you are depicting something ugly, it doesn't mean you are honoring it," Pileggi said. "I don't know too many gangster movies where the gangster wins in the end. These are tales of morality, and that is the key to them."
The downtown Las Vegas museum will open at a former courthouse where a famous mob hearing that helped expose organized crime to ordinary Americans was held in 1950. It is expected to feature gangster artifacts, including the wall from Chicago's St. Valentine's Day massacre, the only gun recovered at the mass shooting and the barber chair where hit man Albert Anastasia's life came to an end in 1957.
Dennis Barrie, the museum's director, said he wants museumgoers to explore whether popular movies glamorize mob culture, or get it right.
"I don't think it's a kids museum," Barrie said. "This is a pretty brutal world, and it comes across in the museum."
Pileggi, whose parents were Italian immigrants, said he was attracted to mob stories as a young man because he wanted to know why some people in his neighborhood were drawn to organized crime, while others shunned it.
Pileggi received an Oscar nomination for "Goodfellas" and teamed up with Scorsese again for the Las Vegas crime-opus "Casino" in 1995.
Pileggi said former Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman asked him to get involved with the museum. Goodman, a former mob lawyer who came up with the idea of the museum, provided Pileggi with facts and insight when he was writing "Casino" and had a brief cameo in the movie.
"Who knows it better than Nick Pileggi?" Goodman said. "When you have his stamp of approval on these kinds of exhibits, it takes on a certain sense of reality as well as legitimacy."
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