"There were times when I thought I would die in that desert," notorious Las Vegas mobster Meyer Lansky is quoted as saying in The Money and the Power, but he wasn't talking about the Mojave equivalent of concrete boots in the Hudson. No, Lanksy was just observing that "Vegas was a horrible place," where the wires melted in their Cadillac when he and Bugsy Siegel drove out from Los Angeles in 115 degrees.
Still, while Lanksy may not have been worried about ending up buried in the desert before his time, "mob burial site" is a cliche that the barren landscape surrounding Las Vegas has never shaken, not least because of speeches like Joe Pesci's in Casino, where his "Nicky Santoro"/Tony Spilotro character observes, "A lot of holes in the desert, and a lot of problems are 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, with the combination of the 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." Plus, 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" didn't even feel the need to go to that much trouble -- he was not averse to leaving his victims' bodies in their homes or on their driveways, right where he shot them. It made for a more effective statement than a subtle "disappearance," too.
If there was a need to make sure a body disappeared and stayed that way, we figure most Mob disposal experts were smart enough to make it happen, for fear that next time it would be their turn. That's what happened to John Ferracota, who was gunned down on a North Side Chicago street three months later, reportedly for botching the burial of the Spilotro brothers.
That's not to say there aren't a lot of skeletons out there, both the victims of Mafia hits and of other homicides, or of accidental deaths that have occurred when a hiker fell or a car broke down and someone thought they could beat the elements, as happened to a young woman last summer.
Back in 2009, for example, Sheriff's officials in California's San Bernardino County identified skeletal remains found off the I-15 near Primm as belonging to Carlos Leon-Martinez, 52, a heavy gambler who frequented the Monte Carlo and other casinos in Las Vegas and Primm. A survey crew found the remains about a mile west of the highway between Las Vegas and Southern California.
On the surface, it sounded like a suspicious death, but we answered a previous QoD on this very subject (11/09/09) and spoke with a sergeant involved with the case, who confirmed that there was no evidence of foul play, although the fact that Martinez' body had been in the desert for at least a year, and possibly two, made it difficult for those investigating the circumstances surrounding the death, since there was no remaining evidence aside from the deceased's bones.
Not so with the case of real estate millionaire Ron Rudin, who disappeared from his home in Las Vegas on Dec. 18, 1994. In Jan. 1995, his skull and some charred bones were found in the desert near Lake Mohave, about 45 miles from Las Vegas. After a two-year investigation, his wife Margaret Rudin was fingered as the main suspect, but she went on the run for two years. Margaret was eventually arrested in Massachusetts and brought back to Las Vegas, where she stood trial for murder. The jury came back with a guilty verdict and Rudin was sentenced to a minimum 20-year sentence.
While "bones" cases are not that uncommon, with the coroner's office handling a dozen or so cases each year, the majority of those bodies that are identified tend to be the result of a domestic situation, 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 home), or else when human remains do surface, 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, which included a call to Huntington Press' famed expert "Mob" author Dennis Griffin, who's written extensively of the Mob Years in titles including Cullotta (we have autograhed copies remaining!) and The Battle for Las Vegas: The Law vs. The Mob, we only came up with two bona fide instances of a suspected Mob hit showing up unintentionally after the fact.
The first occurred in the late '70s, as A. D. Hopkins writes in The First 100: Portraits of the Men and Women Who Shaped Las Vegas:
"In February 1977 Al Bramlet, the most powerful labor leader in Nevada, arrived at McCarran Airport after a business trip to Reno. He telephoned his daughter from the airport, telling her he had just arrived and would be home shortly.
"Shortly afterward, Sid Wyman, an executive at the Dunes Hotel, received a telephone call from Bramlet, asking him to send $10,000 to Benny Binion, operator of the Horseshoe. The cash would be used for a personal matter, Bramlet said.
"His car was still parked at the airport when police began looking for the boss of Culinary Workers Local 226.
"Three weeks later a couple hiking in the desert west of Mount Potosi found his body."
Bramlet had apparently made regular use of a father-and-son contract bomb-planting team to express his displeasure toward non-union restaurants. When two of the bombs he'd ordered failed to go off, however, Bramlet initially balked at paying Tom and Gramby Hanley, much to their chagrin. After being tipped off by police that the pair was out to get him, Bramlet agreed to meet them and pay up -- hence the $10,000 loan -- and was told he would not be murdered. Contrary to this assurance, Bramlet was handcuffed and gagged with duct tape, driven out into the dessert, and then shot six times, including a bullet in each ear. His body was found in a wash, 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. It had been partially eaten by coyotes. Albanese had apparently been in talks with his neighbor, the now notorious Rick Rizzolo, owner at that time of the adjacent Speakeasy Italian restaurant, about opening a spa next door to the strip club. The slaying and its motive remain unsolved today.
