The bodies of Lake Mead, which surface, recall the time of the crowd in Las Vegas

LAS VEGAS – After that, Las Vegas is full of knowledge about organized crime a second set of human remains appeared within a week from the depths of the drought-stricken Colorado Reservoir just a 30-minute drive from the famous Strip crowd-founded crowd.

“We can’t say we’ll find it in Lake Mead,” former Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman said Monday. “It’s a good place to drop your body.”

Goodman, as a lawyer, represented figures of the crowd, including the infamous Anthony “Ant Tony” Spilatro, before serving three terms as mayor, playing the martini, speaking in public with a girl on each arm.

He declined to name who could end up in the huge reservoir formed by the Hoover Dam between Nevada and Arizona.

“I’m relatively sure it wasn’t Jimmy Hoff,” he laughed. But he added that many of his former clients seem to be interested in “climate control” – the crowd speaks in favor of maintaining lake and body levels in their water graves.

Instead, the world is now experiencing climate change, and the surface of Lake Mead has fallen more than 170 feet since 1983.

The lake, which quenches the thirst of 40 million people in the cities, farms and tribes of seven southwestern states, has shrunk to about 30% capacity.

“If the lake goes much further, it’s possible that very interesting things will come to the surface,” said Michael Green, a Las Vegas history professor at the University of Nevada whose father spent decades playing blackjack at casinos including Stardust and Showbot.

“I wouldn’t bet on the mortgage we’re going to decide who killed Bugsy Siegel,” Green said, referring to the infamous gangster who discovered Flamingo in 1944 on what would become the Strip. Siegel was shot dead in 1947 in Beverly Hills, California. His killer has never been identified.

“But I’m willing to bet there will be a few more bodies,” Green said.

First, the lowering of the lake opened the top drinking water intake in Las Vegas on April 25, forcing the regional water administration to move to a deep-water intake, which it completed in 2020, to continue to provide casinos, suburbs and 2.4 million residents and 40 million tourists. per year.

The following weekend, boatmen noticed a decomposed human body in a rusty barrel trapped in the mud of a recently discovered shoreline.

The body was not identified, but Las Vegas police say he was shot, probably between the mid-1970s and early 1980s, according to shoes found near him. Death is investigated as murder.

A few days later the second barrel was found by Fr. CLASS TV news crew, near the first. It was empty.

On Saturday, two sisters from the suburbs of Henderson, who were riding on a board on a lake near a former marina, noticed bones on a newly surfaced sand spit.

Lindsay Melvin, who photographed their find, said they first thought it was a skeleton of a big-horned ram that hails from the region. A close examination revealed a human jaw with teeth. They called park rangers, and the National Parks Service confirmed in a statement that the bones were human.

Las Vegas police said Monday that there was no direct evidence of the rough game and they are not investigating. An investigation into the murder will be launched when the Clark County Coroner admits the death was suspicious, the department said in a statement.

More bodies will be found, predicted Jeff Schumacher, vice president of the Mafia Museum, a renovated historic post office in downtown Las Vegas and the federal building that opened in 2012 as the National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement.

“I think many of these people were probably victims of drowning,” Schumacher said, referring to boatmen and swimmers who were never found. “But on the barrel there is a signature of a mob strike. Stuffing the body into the barrel. Sometimes they threw it into the water. “

He and Green referred to the death of John “Beautiful Johnny” Roselle, a Las Vegas thug in the mid-1950s who disappeared in 1976 a few days before his body was found in a 55-gallon steel drum floating off the coast. Miami.

David Colmayer, a former police officer who now hosts a podcast in Las Vegas and a new TV show called The Problem Solving Show, said Monday that after last week he offered a $ 5,000 reward for skilled divers to find barrels in the lake, he heard from people in San Diego and Florida who wanted to try.

But representatives of the National Park Service said it was banned and that there were hundreds of barrels in the depths, some dating back to the construction of the Hoover Dam in the 1930s.

Colmayer said he had also heard from the families of missing people and about cases such as a man suspected of killing his mother and brother in 1987, a hotel employee who disappeared in 1992, and a father from Utah who disappeared in 1980s.

“You’ll probably find remains all over Lake Mead,” said Colmayer, including Indians who were the earliest residents of the area.

Green said the revelations make people talk not only about mob attacks, but also about bringing relief and closing down grieving families. Not to mention the ever-growing white minerals on the steep walls of the lake, showing where the water used to be.

“People will talk about it for the right reasons and the wrong reasons,” the professor said. “They will think we will uncover every murder of the crowd. In fact, we can see some.

“But also keep in mind that the crowd didn’t like the killings happening in the Las Vegas area because they didn’t like the bad publicity on the date in Las Vegas.”

The right reason, Green said, is clear evidence that the West has a serious water problem. “The bath ring around the lake is getting bigger and getting bigger,” he said.

Whatever the story of the body in the barrel, Goodman predicted that it would complement the knowledge of the city, which with the water of the lake grew out of a desert covered with creosote bushes, and became a mecca of gambling.

“When I was mayor, every time I went to bookmark the land, I started shivering for fear that someone I might have encountered over the years would be exposed,” he said.

“We have a very interesting story,” Goodman added. “It certainly adds to the mystique of Las Vegas.”