Downtown Las Vegas partnership: El Cortez and The Mob Museum celebrate ‘1940s syndicate ownership’

May 31, 2019 12:25 PM
  • Buck Wargo, CDC Gaming Reports
May 31, 2019 12:25 PM
  • Buck Wargo, CDC Gaming Reports

As El Cortez Hotel & Casino in downtown Las Vegas continues its renovation, the property announced a partnership with The Mob Museum that’s befitting of the hotel’s history with syndicate ownership in the 1940s.

Story continues below

The hotel and museum already have existing ties with El Cortez selling tickets to the attraction, which in turns hands out coupons for free play and food at the neighboring casino.

El Cortez owner Kenny Epstein

This summer, El Cortez plans to launch an offer for people to stay in the suite of gaming icon Jackie Gaughan, the former owner who bought the property in 1963 and lived in the 15th floor until he died in 2014. A VIP package will include a stay in the suite, which is used primarily for parties and special events, a special tour of the hotel’s vintage rooms, and a behind-the-scenes of The Mob Museum as well.

Geoff Schumacher, senior director of content for The Mob Museum, said it’s fitting to have a tie-in with El Cortez because the hotel, built in 1941 by Marion Hicks and J.C. Grayson, became so successful that syndicate members Bugsy Siegel, Meyer Lansky, Gus Greenbaum and Moe Sedway acquired the property in 1945. They sold El Cortez a year later for a profit and used the proceeds for building the Flamingo Hotel.

Schumacher recounted the history to a crowd gathered at the suite for a party kicking off the partnership.

Siegel, who immortalized in the movie “Bugsy,” starring Warren Beatty, was assassinated in 1947 in the Beverly Hills home of his girlfriend, Virginia Hill, portrayed in the film by Annette Bening.

“Historians in Las Vegas are reaching a consensus when you are talking about the mob coming to Las Vegas it started in 1945 when the syndicate bought the El Cortez,” Schumacher said.

El Cortez owner Kenny Epstein, who acquired the property in 2008, said hotel’s mob history with its ownership by Siegel and the syndicate made for it appropriate to celebrate with The Mob Museum.

There’s nothing left of Siegel’s original Flamingo, but the front part of the El Cortez on Fremont Street is the original building. There’s fewer than 50 vintage rooms above the space that are being remodeling at a cost between $700,000 to $800,000, Epstein said.

That work began May 1st and the vintage rooms will have suites named after Hill, Siegel and the other gangsters, Epstein said.

The hotel has a restaurant called Siegel’s 1941 that features pictures of Siegel, his family and Hill. There’s even a letter Siegel wrote to his wife about their daughter Millicent who contributed the memorabilia.

“We have a history and we are playing off it and showing that this is how Las Vegas used to be,” Epstein said. “We are not the Wynn, the Bellagio the Paris or Venetian. We are like old Vegas, and we’re keeping that up.”

El Cortez’s Assistant General Manager Adam Wiesberg agreed that The Mob Museum is the perfect partnership for hotel given its history.

“The partnership with The Mob Museum makes so much sense because we both preserve and educate people on the history of the city and downtown, both Las Vegas history and mob history,” Wiesberg said.

Wiesberg said millennials like the vintage theme of the hotel because it’s authentic. The casino has 200 coin-operated slots and offers 3:2 single-deck blackjack and 10 times the odds-on craps.

“Each year it becomes more valuable, and this story and history becomes more important to the community and customers,” Wiesberg said.

El Cortez tower, which was built in 1980, is renovating of four of its floors at a cost of $6 million. A $7 million renovation of five floors is complete.