Goodman defends museum

No matter what you think of Oscar Goodman, you've got to admit that the Las Vegas mayor is pretty good at being indignant.

He got to serve up a double shot of ire Thursday, beating up on the news media, one of his favorite targets, while defending his beloved Mob Museum from supposedly unjustly slung arrows.

It was a news story from a Chicago television station that got him worked up. One of the exhibits for the planned museum is part of the wall from the infamous St. Valentine's Day Massacre in the Windy City, and the report questioned whether the city had as much of the wall as was represented.

The story also reported that a photo of the wall was actually a mock-up, but that was an error caused by a miscommunication between the city's public relations staff and the reporter.

Goodman initially said he hadn't seen the story, then let loose about it anyway.

"We never said we're buying it all!" Goodman shouted at his Thursday morning news conference. "That's what's wrong with members of the media who aren't honest. They put out a very untrue message.

"First of all, he called Senator Bryan the senator from Arizona, this moron. And then he said ... what we busted into was not the St. Valentine's Day wall. We never pretended that it was."

That would be Richard Bryan, the former Nevada senator and governor who's on the museum's board of directors. At a ceremony marking the start of the final stage of construction, he and Goodman pretended to knock down a fake brick wall that was actually a set of doors leading into the museum building. That fake wall was the mock-up that was confused with a picture of the real wall.

The museum will be housed in the old federal courthouse downtown, which is undergoing the final stages of construction and renovation. A breakdown released Thursday pegged the budget through the museum's 2011 opening at $41.9 million, coming from a mix of city, state and federal funds.

Despite being worked up, Goodman was glad for any attention paid to the museum, which officially is the Las Vegas Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement, and the famous bricks that will be on display.

"It's very significant," he said of the wall, which came to symbolize mob violence in the Al Capone era. "It represents one of the gory moments of the mob.

"That's part of what the mob's all about. These were not nice people. They engaged in activity which wasn't nice. I wouldn't want to be shot at in a garage."

The Chicago reporter, Chuck Goudie, took the shots from Goodman in stride, saying that in his three decades covering Chicago he'd been called much worse than "moron."

He also said Chicagoans have a much more critical attitude about a Mob Museum than the boosters here, meaning he and Goodman may agree on one thing: They're both glad the Mob Museum will be in Las Vegas.

Contact reporter Alan Choate at achoate@reviewjournal.com or 702-229-6435.