«I would be willing to bet there are going to be a few more bodies,» a UNLV history professor said after the discovery of two sets of human remains.
Las Vegas is being flooded with lore about organized crime after a emerged within a week from the depths of a drought-stricken Colorado River reservoir just a 30-minute drive from the notoriously mob-founded Strip. «There’s no telling what we’ll find in Lake Mead,» former Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman said Monday. «It’s not a bad place to dump a body.» Goodman, as a lawyer, represented mob figures including the ill-fated before serving three terms as a martini-toting mayor making public appearances with a showgirl on each arm. He declined to name names about who might turn up in the vast reservoir formed by Hoover Dam between Nevada and Arizona. «I’m relatively sure it was not Jimmy Hoffa,» he laughed. But he added that a lot of his former clients seemed interested in «climate control» — mob speak for keeping the lake level up and bodies down in their watery graves. Instead, the world now has, and the surface of Lake Mead has dropped more than 170 feet since 1983. The lake that slakes the thirst of 40 million people in cities, farms and tribes across seven Southwestern states is down to about 30% of capacity. «If the lake goes down much farther, it’s very possible we’re going to have some very interesting things surface,» observed Michael Green, a University of Nevada, Las Vegas history professor whose father dealt blackjack for decades at casinos including the Stardust and the Showboat. «I wouldn’t bet the mortgage that we’re going to solve who killed Bugsy Siegel,» Green said, referring to the infamous gangster who opened the Flamingo in 1946 on what would become the Strip. Siegel was shot dead in 1947 in Beverly Hills, California. His assassin has never been identified. «But I would be willing to bet there are going to be a few more bodies,» Green said. First, the dropping lake level exposed Las Vegas’ uppermost drinking water intake on April 25, forcing the regional water authority to switch to a deep-lake intake it completed in 2020 to continue to supply casinos, suburbs and 2.
