A casino executive mysteriously disappears. Hikers find a body in the desert. An ignition key sets off a car bomb.     

Fortunately, these are stories from Las Vegas’ past, not its present. But mob-related murders—some solved, others enduring mysteries—still loom large. 

“There’s a lot of mythology surrounding organized crime,” says Geoff Schumacher, vice president of exhibits and programs at the Mob Museum in Downtown Las Vegas. “One of the reasons for that is it can be hard to know exactly what happened; the mob was not very good at keeping notes. … A lot of things transpired behind closed doors or in this underworld of crime.”

In this package, the Weekly looks back at some of our city’s most infamous and mysterious murder cases.

Unsolved: Gus Greenbaum, 1893-1958 

Did the casino executive, who was found murdered with his wife in Phoenix, skim from the skimmers?

The December 4, 1958, Arizona Republic front-page headline reads, “Phoenix Couple Murdered: Greenbaums Gang Victims?”

A photo shows Bess Greenbaum’s body, facedown on the couch with her hands tied behind her back. Though it’s black and white, the image is disturbing. Viewers can see the bottoms of her dress shoes and just make out the butcher knife that cut her and her husband Gus’ throats. (Both also suffered head trauma.) A plastic bag, likely used by the killer, is left at her feet.

The newspaper describes how housekeeper Pearl Ray found Bess’ body when arriving for work in the morning. Ray told the Republic she ran to the neighbors upon discovering the scene. The quick departure spared her from the sight of Gus’ corpse in the bedroom, “clad in beige silk pajamas” and “almost decapitated,” according to the article. Ray was briefly hospitalized due to shock.

From the first reports, the double homicide was controversial. Was it mob-related? In that first article, Arizona Republic journalist Gene McLain wrote, “Despite the unwillingness of Phoenix police immediately to blame gangland vengeance, and Las Vegas officers’ disclaimer of it, there were these trademarks: There was no break-in, the killers apparently having the site and time well-planned.”

Later, McLain shared one of the few tangible clues: “Two men, perhaps hired killers, are believed to have done the job. Police found shoeprints and cigarette ashes in an areaway beside the garage, where the killers may have waited.”

UNLV history professor Michael Green says the messiness of the murder scene points away from the mob. “If the mob is going to kill you, they have a pro. It isn’t amateur hour, and it looks kind of amateurish.”

Then again, the way the killers got away points to the mob’s ability to cover its tracks, Green posits, as does the very fact that the murder took place in Phoenix. “There was an old saying that they would never take somebody out here,” Green says. “They didn’t want the Las Vegas dateline on a mob murder.”

So who could have done it, and why? By many definitions, Gus Greenbaum was a paragon of Vegas success. Nicknamed the “Mayor of Paradise,” the business whiz helped lead the El Cortez; he made the Flamingo profitable after Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel’s death; and he was called in from retirement to save the Riviera from debt.

“Greenbaum understood the usefulness of the showroom. … He understood gaming,” says Vegas author John L. Smith, “but the flaws of his character really took over.” As time went on, Greenbaum’s problems with opioid addiction, heavy drinking, gambling and womanizing became an issue. Smith says that in today’s world, a character like Greenbaum would never have been given a gaming license. “But of course, back then, they didn’t look too closely at people’s backgrounds,” he says.

Greenbaum’s personal issues made him erratic, and thus a threat to the mob. He also upset the mob by hiring onetime mob rat Willie Bioff to lead entertainment (Bioff would himself be murdered in 1955). And rumor had it Greenbaum was taking money from the hotel to fund his lifestyle.

“It would make sense that the mob would want to discourage that,” Green says. “It’s OK to skim for the mob. It’s not OK to skim from the mob.”

As to whom might have ordered or carried out the Greenbaum hit … there was a suspicious meeting of mob bosses in Tucson five days before the double murder. There are rumors that some known thieves could have done it, and others involving the Miami mob. But ultimately, nothing was ever proven and no one was ever charged.

“That’s an unsolved murder,” Smith says, “but as Frank Rosenthal said after he got blown up and survived, it wasn’t the Boy Scouts, right?”

Further reading: bit.ly/3ca3HOU.

Unsolved: Bill Coulthard, 1916-1972

Former FBI agent bombed in a Downtown Vegas parking garage

Gaming attorney and board chair of the Mob Museum Jeffrey Silver had his own brush with Las Vegas mob history on the afternoon of July 25, 1972.

“I was working across the street at the Clark County Courthouse,” Silver recalls by email. “I was leaving the building to go to my car when I heard a loud BOOM! Smoke then came billowing out of the third floor of [the] garage facing Bridger Street. I figured that it was a car fire that blew up the gas tank of a car, but learned later it was an explosive device that had detonated, killing [Bill] Coulthard.”

Coulthard had been a pillar of Las Vegas law enforcement. He was the first to head the FBI’s local office and went on to become a respected attorney. He was a popular figure in the Democratic Party and a resident of the exclusive Rancho Circle neighborhood. “The idea that he would be blown up so audaciously—in a bank garage in Downtown—stunned the whole community,” author John L. Smith says.

The brazen murder went against the mob’s preference for preserving the appearance of safety in Las Vegas. So who did it, and why? A prevailing theory points to a dispute between casino magnate Benny Binion and Coulthard. Through family connections, the attorney owned the land beneath Binion’s Horseshoe Casino. The lease was up for renewal and Coulthard was playing hardball. After he died, a 100-year lease was signed.

“It was hotter than an oven. You turned to water when you walked up the ramp to where the explosion took place. It was a terrible, horrible scene,” retired homicide detective Beecher Avants told the Las Vegas Sun in 2000 of his experience responding to the explosion. The article discussed a new lead that promised to solve the cold case.

But 21 years later, it remains unsolved. Many believe bomb-loving mob hit men Tom Hanley and his son Gramby were the perpetrators, hired by Binion.

“It’s interesting that America’s great law enforcement investigators were unable to investigate the murder of one of their own people,” Smith says.

Solved: Al Bramlet, 1917-1977

Head of the Culinary Union found buried in the desert

A flamboyant dresser and bon vivant, Elmer “Al” Bramlet was the old Vegas kind of labor leader. When a restaurant refused to unionize, legend has it, the Culinary Union secretary-treasurer simply had them bombed.

“It was pretty well known that Bramlet took the curves on the accelerator instead of the brake,” says UNLV history professor Michael Green.

The story goes, Bramlet hired union organizer and muscle Tom Hanley (and possibly his son Gramby) to hit a string of non-union Las Vegas spots—Alpine Village Restaurant, David’s Place, the Village Pub and Starboard Tack—and when bombs didn’t go off at the latter two locations, Bramlet refused to pay the Hanleys $10,000.

“Bramlet may have suffered from something that frankly a lot of mobsters suffer from, that a lot of politicians suffer from … they’re convinced of their invulnerability,” Green says. “I think Bramlet trusted [the Hanleys] to stick with him. They picked him up at the airport, and I don’t know that he went unwillingly.”

As they were driving out of McCarran on February 24, 1977, the elder Hanley proposed that they go for a ride. “I don’t think it was hard for Al to figure out they were not there to hang out and look at the scenery,” Green says.

The controversial labor leader was missing for three weeks before a pair of hikers stumbled upon his corpse buried under some rocks near Mount Potosi, about 30 miles southwest of Las Vegas. It was a striking, high-profile death.

“There were plenty of people who didn’t like Al Bramlet,” Green says. “But the Hanleys were the ones who [confessed]. It wasn’t even a matter of even really investigating.”

Father and son Hanley both received life sentences. The elder died in prison in 1979.

Unsolved: Bugsy Siegel, 1906-1947

Who ordered the hit on Las Vegas’ most famous mobster?

Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel—Prohibition-era bootlegger-turned-co-founder of Murder Inc.-turned-casino manager—benefits from the most gruesome sort of fame: The handsome man was violently murdered at a (relatively) young age (41).

He’s buried at the Hollywood Forever cemetery, he’s been the subject of books and movies, and he’s still getting attention. Siegel’s hooded eyes stare out from the letter ‘E’ in the Arts District’s “Greetings From Las Vegas” postcard mural, painted only last December.

Who’d want to shoot the gangster in the head while he sat in the Beverly Hills home of his girlfriend Virginia Hill? “That’s the $24,000 question,” says University of Missouri history professor Larry D. Gragg, author of the 2015 book Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel: The Gangster, the Flamingo and the Making of Modern Las Vegas. “There are so many possible explanations. It’s like watching a complex murder mystery where the author identifies a dozen possible culprits.”

Possible reasons for his hit: conflict over the race wire, a pre-internet method of facilitating sports betting; LA-based mafia don Jack Dragna might have wanted him dead; Las Vegas mob/casino boss Moe Dalitz could have ordered the hit because Siegel was abusing his ex-girlfriend Hill; the list goes on. Gragg says that the most likely explanation is that organized crime wanted to eliminate Siegel because it was believed he was mismanaging or skimming money from the Flamingo.

Nearly 75 years later, the case remains open, which, ironically, might be preventing sleuths from helping to solve it. “We would know a lot more if researchers could look at the investigation file in the Beverly Hills Police Department archives,” Gragg says. “I’ve tried two different police chiefs to get access, and they’ve both rejected my request, saying that they don’t let anyone look at the files of open cases.”

Unsolved(?): Sonny Liston, 1932-1970

Was the boxing great actually killed by the mob?

According to the Clark County Coroner’s Office, former heavyweight boxing champion Sonny Liston died of natural causes. Did the strapping athlete—who was past his prime but still a world-ranked boxer—simply drop dead due to lung congestion and heart failure? Or was it something more sinister?

Some say the man who famously feared needles died of a heroin overdose. Others say that he was murdered by way of purposeful overdose. The Paradise Palms home where he was found days dead and decomposing by his wife, Geraldine, offered conflicting clues.

Liston rose from an impoverished upbringing to become a boxing champion, but he never quite escaped his past. The mob managed Liston’s boxing career. And as that wound down, he lived a life of danger: dealing and using drugs, womanizing, collecting for loan sharks. “He was a hoodlum,” says author John L. Smith.

Did the underworld finally come for him? The world might never know, but everybody has a theory. In 2019, the BBC even called Liston’s cause of death “one of sport’s most enduring mysteries.”

Because his death was never ruled a homicide, “leads surfaced that haven’t been followed, suspects died with their secrets and stories haven’t been told,” Shaun Assael wrote in his 2016 book, The Murder of Sonny Liston: Las Vegas, Heroin, and Heavyweights.

“This was a death that was sped into the shadows by local officials who did not want the scrutiny on boxing,” Smith says. “Did the mob kill him? It certainly could have.”

Friends and sparring partners, including Vegas boxing gym namesake Johnny Tocco, felt he was murdered. “All of them had a certain amount of information that led them to believe,” Smith says.

“The mob, that’s who did it,” Ben “Big Ben” Skelton, a Summerlin-based sparring partner of Liston’s, told the Las Vegas Sun in 2008. “They shot him up. He owned those people a lot of money.”

Frank Cullotta, 1938-2020

The mob never killed him … but COVID-19 did

 If anybody was destined for a life of crime, it was Frank Cullotta. Born in Chicago to a getaway driver, Cullotta was childhood friends with Tony “the Ant” Spilotro, who would grow up to be an infamous Las Vegas mob boss.

Indeed, Cullotta went on to become a convicted burglar, an admitted murderer, a member of Las Vegas’ infamous “Hole in the Wall Gang” and later, an FBI informant. Yet through it all, Cullotta somehow managed to avoid getting killed.

“Frank was very perceptive,” says Dennis Griffin, a law enforcement officer-turned-true crime author who co-wrote several books with Cullotta. “What Cullotta lacked in formal education, he made up for in street smarts. He could sense danger; he could read people; he could figure motivations; and he was very savvy. He knew that if he got whacked, it would be by somebody he knew.”

Over time, he matured. “He did evolve over the years, substantially from what he was back in the mob days,” Griffin says. Cullotta found God and made peace with his past. He co-wrote books, went on TV, did speaking appearances, served as a tour guide and, in the final year of his life, created a “Coffee With Cullotta” YouTube channel.

“He became a better person,” author John L. Smith says. “It’s weird. It’s like Frank Cullotta gets to be happy, gets to have a life. There were people in his life who really cared for him, and they weren’t guys who owed him money and they weren’t guys who were afraid he might kill them.”

Cullotta might have outlived his enemies, but he couldn’t escape the hand of time. On August 20, 2020, Cullotta died of COVID-19 at age 81. His last book, Frank Cullotta’s Greatest (Kitchen) Hits, was co-written with Griffin and published posthumously.

“We became not just a business relationship, we became close friends,” Griffin says. “When he passed away last August, he was one of my closest friends … if not the closest friend.”

Buried in the desert: fact or fiction? 

Legend has it that mobsters buried their victims in the desert. The phrase “86’d” is said to refer to dumping a body 8 miles out of town and 6 feet under. But how often did it really happen?

Geoff Schumacher, the Mob Museum’s vice president of exhibits and programs, says the practice occurs more often in movies than it actually did throughout history. “When you look at actual cases of mob murders or missing persons related to the mob, you don’t find that many bodies buried out in the desert,” Schumacher says. While there were certainly instances of desert burials, Schumacher says the mob purposefully avoided doing its dirty work in and around Las Vegas.

“They didn’t want to hurt the golden goose,” Schumacher says. “If there were the kind of mob murders that you would see in New York or Chicago going on in Las Vegas, it might scare [tourists] away.”

That’s why famous Vegas mobsters were murdered elsewhere. Tony “The Ant” Spilotro and his brother were killed in Illinois. Riviera casino manager Gus Greenbaum and his associate Willie Bioff were assassinated, on separate occasions, in Arizona. And Bugsy Siegel was shot in Beverly Hills. The list also likely includes anonymous mob underlings who simply disappeared.

On the other hand, the desert is “a pretty convenient place to throw someone,” says author John L. Smith. “That was always a good threat, an ominous threat: ‘I’m gonna throw you down a mine shaft.’”

Smith points to one gruesome tale as an example: The disembodied head of Las Vegas mobster and nightclub entrepreneur Tony Albanese was found in the desert near Needles, California, in June 1981.

Then again, desert burials might just be a thing when you live in … a desert. “I think the idea of burying people in the desert predates the mob,” says UNLV history professor Michael Green. “There are stories of fur trappers who left some people to die.”

The Mob Museum, a vital resource

As cities go, Las Vegas keeps more secrets than most—from simple “what happens here, stays here” infidelities to unsolved murders. But we also have a not-so-secret weapon in the search for truth: the National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement, aka Downtown’s Mob Museum.

“Really, in the entire United States, there’s really only one place that is a repository for the entire nation’s history of organized crime and law enforcement,” says Geoff Schumacher, the Mob Museum’s vice president of exhibits and programs.

The museum opened in 2012, so it’s relatively new as institutions go, but it arrived preloaded with some mob history of its own: The building hosted the 1950-51 Kefauver Hearings on organized crime.

Schumacher says the museum is still growing and actively seeking artifacts of both Old Vegas and the mob, so if you have something in your attic, reach out. “We want this material to help tell these stories at the Mob Museum, where 400,000 people a year from all walks of life can see it,” Schumacher says.

300 Stewart Ave., 702-229-2734, themobmuseum.org. Daily 10 a.m.-8 p.m., $17+.