Wednesday 18 May 2022 03:25 PM Vegas mob experts reveal link between Lake Mead MOBSTERS IN THE BARREL and a ... trends now

Jeff Burbank is a content development specialist at The Mob Museum in Las Vegas. He is the author of Las Vegas Babylon: True Tales of Glitter, Glamour, and Greed. Geoff Schumacher is the museum's vice president of exhibits and programs and author of Sun, Sin & Suburbia: The History of Modern Las Vegas.

When mobsters bury their secrets, they expect them to stay hidden.

Usually, they're right.

But as Nevada's drought-ravaged Lake Mead recedes and sunlight shines on its muddy depths for the first time in decades, we may be getting a glimpse into the dark and sordid mob history of Las Vegas, which lies just 30 miles away.

On May 1st, the remains of a decomposed human body stuffed inside a corroded metal barrel were discovered stuck in Lake Mead's mud.

The grisly find has all the makings of a gangland hit.

Police say the victim was shot in the head, execution-style, and crammed into the drum – historically a mob method for disposing of bodies.

The killers transported the barrel by boat several hundred yards out into the lake and dumped it in what was then 100 feet of water.

There it sat at the bottom of the lake -- until now.

Already the dead man is talking – giving us clues of who he may have been, why he was killed and by whom.

Detectives confirmed that the corpse still had a shirt, belt and shoes clinging to the remains.

They determined the clothing was purchased in the mid- to late 1970s at a Kmart discount store – far from the choice attire of a high-rolling, fashion-conscious mobster.

The timing suggests the killing occurred between the 1970s and the early 1980s, coinciding with the most violent period in Las Vegas' past -- an era of unprecedented street crime and underworld killings.

Our research has found three possible victims who may be the body in the barrel.

The three men, each with links to the mob, disappeared at that time and their bodies were never found.

Most speculation has centered on George 'Jay' Vandermark, a gambling machine cheater trusted by the mob to oversee its slot machine operation at the Stardust casino on the Las Vegas Strip -- that is, before he double-crossed them.

The mob wanted him dead, but we doubt that it is him in Lake Mead.

There's William Crespo, a drug-runner who turned state's evidence after he got busted smuggling cocaine. He was set to testify against a former insider from a mob-controlled casino company but never made it to trial.

And our leading candidate for the man in the barrel is Johnny Pappas, a Chicago native and veteran Las Vegas casino host.

We can reasonably -- by virtue of his owning a boat at Lake Mead -- place him at the scene of the dumping grounds around the time the murder may have occurred.

The thread that strings these three men together is they were all linked to the most powerful Las Vegas mob operation of that time – Argent Corp., a front company for an organized crime operation that ran some of Las Vegas' top gambling operations.

And if that theory holds, it may also lead us to a likely killer. One of the most notorious enforcers in mob history, Tony Spilotro.

This ruthless murderer was brought back to life as the fictional Nicky Santoro, played by Joe Pesci, in the 1995 mob movie classic, Casino.

Spilotro was considered a suspect – as perpetrator or director — in almost 20 mob-related murders and disappearances from 1975 to 1977.

His weapon of choice was a .22-caliber pistol, equipped with a suppressor, and fired into the victim's head.

ARGENT CORP. AND THE LAS VEGAS BLOODBATH

Since the mob's arrival in Las Vegas in the 1940s, the city was regarded by America's crime bosses as an 'open city,' a place where crime families agreed not to fight over turf, as they often did in cities such as New York and Chicago.

The idea was that organized crime could share in an overflowing fountain of cash pouring from legitimate gambling operations.

By the 1970s, the Chicago Outfit, an organized crime syndicate based in Illinois that dated back to the days of Al Capone in the 1920s, established a major presence in the city after consolidating power for decades.

Argent Corp. had become a major player in Las Vegas – owning the Stardust, Hacienda and Marina hotel-casinos on the Strip, and the Fremont downtown.

Frank 'Lefty' Rosenthal, played by Robert De Niro in Casino, was hired to run the Stardust – the crown jewel in Argent's criminal empire.

The mob stole (or skimmed) a percentage of those revenues and delivered them to crime bosses in Chicago, Kansas City, Milwaukee and Cleveland.

'Skimming' works by hiding legitimate revenue from the federal government and thereby avoiding taxes.

But the mob's relative free rein in Las Vegas began to erode as state and federal law enforcement stepped up its scrutiny of casinos.

Corporate purchases of Strip resorts drove out many older crime figures with hidden holdings. With the mob losing its influence, petty crooks and lowlife hustlers who once feared the wrath of mobsters moved to town and even entered the casinos to operate.

The result was a wave of crime perpetrated by loan sharks, burglars, arsonists, gaming cheats, unlicensed bookmakers, shakedown artists, pimps, streetwalkers and drug dealers.

The mob, ignoring the conventional wisdom to avoid murdering people in the 'open city,' reacted violently and victims started disappearing without a trace.

In 1974, the Los Angeles Times

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