updated May 30, 2023
"Mob burial site" is a cliché that the barren landscape surrounding Las Vegas has never shaken, not least because of speeches like Joe Pesci's in the movie Casino: "Lot of holes in the desert and lot of problems buried in those holes. But you gotta do it right. I mean, you gotta have the hole already dug before you show up with a package in the trunk. Otherwise, you're talking about a half-hour to forty-five minutes worth of digging. And who knows who's gonna come along in that time? Pretty soon, you gotta dig a few more holes. You could be there all f****n' night."
And that's actually a valid point, given the combination of climate, caliche, coyotes, and other challenges (that probably begin in "c") making Las Vegas a less-than-hospitable place to attempt to secretly dispose of a large "package."
Conversely, when the Mob was ostentatiously running the town, there seems to have been a sense of untouchability that perhaps meant people like Tony "the Ant" Spilotro (whom Pesci's character is based on) didn't even feel the need to go to that much trouble. Spilotro wasn't averse to leaving his victims' bodies in their homes or on their driveways, right where he had them shot. Besides, it made for a more effective statement than a subtle disappearance.
That's not to say there aren't a lot of skeletons out there, including the victims of Mafia hits and other homicides or accidental deaths that occurred when a hiker fell or a car broke down and someone thought he or she could beat the elements.
Back in 2009, for example, a survey crew found skeletal remains off I-15 near Primm, later identified as belonging to Carlos Leon-Martinez, 52, a heavy gambler who frequented the casinos in Las Vegas and Primm. The remains were about a mile west of the highway. On the surface, it looked like a suspicious death, but there was no evidence of foul play.
Not so with the case of real-estate millionaire Ron Rudin, who disappeared from his home in Las Vegas in December 1994. In January 1995, his skull and some charred bones were found in the desert near Lake Mohave, about 45 miles south of the city. His wife Margaret Rudin was convicted of the murder and sentenced to a minimum of 20 years.
While "bones" cases are not that uncommon, with the coroner's office handling a dozen or so each year, the majority of bodies that are identified tend to be the result of domestic situations, as in the case of Ron Rudin, or one-off murders when a business partnership turned sour or a drug deal went wrong, or suicides, or accidental deaths.
Much as the bloodshed of the Mob years and the subsequent unexpected mushrooming of suburban Las Vegas would lead you to expect a bunch of bodies would turn up during construction. Either it just doesn't happen or when it does, it's kept quiet for the sake of image (presumably, not everyone wants to know that a dead body was found under their new house) or else when human remains do show up, there's insufficient evidence to identify who the victim might be, especially considering the decades that have elapsed since the Mob was at its height, coupled with the harshness of the desert environment.
Hence, with all the metaphorical digging we did to answer this question, we came up with only two bona fide instances of a suspected Mob hit showing up unintentionally after the fact.
The first occurred in the late '70s. Al Bramlet, the most powerful labor leader in Nevada, was murdered over a $10,000 debt. His body was found by a couple hiking in the desert in a wash near Mount Potosi, west of Las Vegas, half-buried by rocks and weeds.
The other case we heard of took place in 1981, when the severed head of Tony Albanese, suspected of being a hidden partner in the Crazy Horse Saloon topless joint, then owned by one-time mob-connected lawyer Joseph Monteiro, was found in the desert near Needles, California. The slaying and its motive remain unsolved today.
Meanwhile, the water level in Lake Mead has been dropping low enough to unsubmerge all kinds of stuff, including bodies, one famous one in a 55-gallon drum. So it's not just the desert that hides homicidal secrets.