The mafia and its mobsters may not be bankrupt, but the well-guarded Tropicana's Las Vegas museum exhibit is, with many of its rare collectable formerly mob-owned items now listed as assets, as reported by the Wall Street Journal and other news sites.
Along the Las Vegas Strip, inside the Tropicana hotel, the interactive attraction that allowed visitors face-to-face time with legendary mobsters, filed for Chapter 11 this October.
After a partial shutdown of the Las Vegas Mob Experience, visitors, albeit no more than about 150 per day, still have an opportunity to walk through the museum though their patronage is "barely sufficient to allow (the museum) to cover its immediate critical operating expenses" per owner, Murder Inc. LLC.
The museum had only opened this past spring. Visitors were treated to the world's largest number of crime artifacts amassed from notable gangsters - Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel, Anthony "The Ant" Spilotro, Charles "Lucky" Luciano and Sam "Mooney" Giancana - that included their weapons, letters, photographs, jewelry and furniture.
The museum's collection is guarded 24 hours a day by security.
A purchase offer, made by JVLV Holdings LLC, promises to exchange a payment of $2 million - to pay off some of the museum's creditors - for ownership.
The filing states millions are owed to secured lenders and approximately $5.8 million to contractors that were responsible for building the attraction. The owner contends that the museum's artifacts and interactive experience is still " a viable operation" while renegotiating its lease with Tropicana, asking creditors to reduce its debt, and save the interactive exhibits.
The company said, "While the initial projections of income and debt obligations were flawed, the (museum) can be restructured so that its revenues exceed its operating expenses while providing some repayment to its creditors."
Jay Bloom, the developer of the project, is currently facing investor and contractor lawsuits for fraud.
Murder Inc.'s bankruptcy case claims that Bloom is being accused of inflating the number of guests he expected to visit the attraction and, making personal car and credit card payments with money from Murder Inc.
The new buyer of the museum would be able to disassociate from Bloom's lawsuits.
Another mob museum - the Las Vegas Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement, sponsored by the city and will be housed in a federal courthouse downtown - isn't considered a threat to the Vegas Mob Experience.
JVLV Holdings believes the town is big enough for two mob museums. The former in the strip's Tropicana and the latter, in the same courthouse that mob hearings were held in the 1950s, will show the other side of the story - law enforcement officers have approximately 700 artifacts of their own that will be on display.
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