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Strategies & Market Trends : 2026 TeoTwawKi ... 2032 Darkest Interregnum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: carranza2 who wrote (45389)	1/16/2009 11:42:27 PM
From: average joe	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 217830

Mayor of Las Vegas Oscar Goodman plans museum to the Mob Last year it was the “Bridge to Nowhere” that outraged America. This year it’s the “Mob Museum”. The Mayor of Las Vegas has a plan to save his city. Unfortunately, the rest of the country does not share his vision. In fact, Oscar Goodman’s proposal to use up to $55 million of federal stimulus funds to build a museum celebrating the Mafia’s influence over Sin City — part of it will presumably be dedicated to the Mayor himself who, in a previous career as a defence lawyer, represented many of the city’s most notorious gangsters — has become something of a national joke. Mr Goodman, 69, a Democrat from Philadelphia, is known fondly in Las Vegas as an extrovert who put his face on casino chips and told a classroom of nine and ten-year-olds that if he had to choose what to take to a desert island, it would be “a showgirl and a bottle of Bombay Sapphire Gin” (he has a long-running sponsorship deal with the gin company). He certainly knows plenty about the Mob: he has represented the likes of Herbert “Fat Herbie” Blitzstein, Nicky Scarfo, and the ex-Starbust boss Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal. In Casino — the 1995 Martin Scorsese movie of Rosenthal’s life — Goodman had a cameo playing himself. When a local reporter wrote a book about Goodman, he entitled it: Of Rats and Men: Oscar Goodman’s Life from Mob Mouthpiece to Mayor of Las Vegas. Describing how he came up with the idea for Mob Museum — due to open in 2010 — Mr Goodman told a local newspaper: “Nobody’s going to come to downtown Las Vegas to look at paintings, they’re not going to look at porcelain, they’re not going to look at miniature trains. What will they look at? They’ll look at something that’s really embedded in history, that makes us unique and distinctive from any other city, that has a historical nexus. And I said [to myself], ‘A mob museum! I think it’s a natural’.” It is a particularly shameless example, say critics, of how Barack Obama’s proposed $800 billion economic rescue package will be abused to fund “pet projects” that reward politically connected contractors while doing zero for the country’s economic health. The President-elect made a thinly veiled attack on the project during a recent interview on the political television show This Week. “We don’t want this [timulus package] to be a Christmas tree loaded up with a whole bunch of pet projects that people have for their local communities,” he said. Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader and a Nevadan, said that he supported the idea of the Mob Museum but insisted that it would not be funded with stimulus money. “The stimulus plan will have no earmarks in it, there will be none,” he said. The proposed site of the museum is where Senator Estes Kefauver arrived in 1950 for a hearing about the Mob’s alleged control of Sin City. The hearing lasted only a day and was considered by many to be a publicity stunt. Goodman — who is also trying to stimulate the beleaguered Las Vegas economy by building himself a new $250 million City Hall (a move that has drawn fierce objections from the city’s powerful culinary union)— remained defiant this week. “Apparently folks take issue with the Mob Museum,” he said at a press conference, “but I’m not going to apologise for it. So some senator from Kentucky who nobody knows takes a cheap shot? I don’t need it.” timesonline.co.uk