Mob Museum

Look to your left as you pass Stewart Avenue. A couple of blocks off the Boulevard, that dignified neoclassical building with the columns is a former federal courthouse from 1933 — and today it's the Mob Museum, the official story of the gangsters who are honestly the co-authors of this whole city. You've spent an hour driving past their hotels; here's where the receipts are kept.

The building earned the job. Back in November of 1950, this very courthouse hosted one of the Kefauver hearings — the U.S. Senate's televised investigation into organized crime — so the mob was interrogated in the same rooms that now display its history. And when the museum opened, they picked the date with a wink: the fourteenth of February, 2012. Valentine's Day.

That's not a random choice, because of the artifact at the heart of the collection. Inside is the actual brick wall from Chicago's St. Valentine's Day Massacre of 1929 — the real bricks, bullet holes and all, shipped out to the desert and rebuilt.

And here's a little bridge for anyone who's toured with us before: if you've taken our Chicago river tour, you have stood barely a mile from where those bricks originally came from. Two cities, one wall — the mob connected them long before we did.

Keep heading north on Las Vegas Boulevard. On your right, at 770 North, watch for the next stop — and it's a special one, because it's where the dead signs of this entire tour go to live. It's the Neon Museum, and if you have time, it's one you can actually get out and walk.