Vegas mob lore floats to the surface along with bodies at Lake Mead
The skeletal remains found in a barrel at Lake Mead earlier this month have captivated and horrified two distinct groups that typically do not have much in common: mob historians and climate scientists.
Less than a week after the unidentified body was found in a barrel, paddleboarders found another set of skeletal remains at Lake Mead National Recreation Area in Nevada. Authorities are not surprised that more bodies are seeing the light of day as Lake Mead writhes in a prolonged drought gripping the
West.
The barrel found at
Lake Mead on May 1 portends a great calamity on the horizon for the climate, but also tells a story about Las Vegas. Homicide investigators believe the victim was shot to death and placed in the barrel 40 to 45 years ago, based on the shoes found in the barrel. Lt.
Ray Spencer with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department told the Los Angeles Times earlier this month that 40 years ago, the current shoreline would have been under 100 feet of water.
The person in the barrel would have been shot right around the time mob organization was dying out in Sin City.
“The late ‘70s, early
‘80s, was sort of the start of the end really of the mobs in Las Vegas,” Geoff Schumacher, vice president of the Mob Museum in Las Vegas, said.
Schumacher recalls a few instances when barrels featured prominently in mob stories, including the killing of Johnny Roselli, who testified before Congress in 1976. Roselli went missing shortly after he testified to the conspiracy to assassinate President John F. Kennedy and was found in a fuel drum floating in a bay near Miami.
But mob hits in Las Vegas typically ended with desert burials, Schumacher said. It’s not impossible to think there will be more mob victims at the bottom of the lake. But it’s just as likely that drowning victims and other remnants of the past will be revealed as the waters recede, Schumacher said.
“This is just as top of mind, for a lot of people here,” Schumacher said. “It’s really a story that has captured people’s imagination about, you know, what else might be lurking in the depths of Lake Mead.”
For climate scientists, the writing is on the wall as dead bodies surface at one of the nation’s largest reservoirs that serves water to roughly 20 million people.
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