By Guy Adams, The Independent
In the reception area, under a glass screen, you can see a collection of bow ties which belonged to Meyer Lansky, the legendary underworld figure known as "the Mob's accountant". On a flickering screen next door, they're showing home movies shot by Tony "The Ant" Spilotro, a feared Mafia enforcer who liked to tie his victims to a chair and torture them with an icepick.
When Spilotro, played by Joe Pesci in the film Casino, wasn't busy killing people, he was quite the family man. You can see vintage footage of him dressed as Santa Claus, handing out presents at Christmas, and posing with his children alongside Donald Duck at Disneyland. Like all good Catholic boys, Tony appears to have been very kind to his mother.
The intimate and somewhat bizarre artefacts are among 1,000 items of personal memorabilia belonging to a generation of the most famous gangsters in America's 20th-century history. They are under lock and key in a heavily guarded warehouse, on a discreet side-street a mile from the Las Vegas Strip.
More...
