There was a time when everything and anything was done in pursuit of the perfect crime news story.

The News of the World is closing amid a major scandal over phone hacking and alleged payments to police officers, but once upon a time journalists went even further to get the ultimate story, 
There was a time when everything and anything was done in pursuit of the perfect crime news story.

The allegations being made about dubious journalistic practices at the News of the World are shocking and immoral if proven to be true.

But the current row takes us back to the 1940s and 1950s when hacks on that very same tabloid and other papers were just as clandestine in their methods, and with even fewer legal restrictions.

In the years after World War II, the print media's response to the horrific crimes of three of the most infamous killers in the annals of British crime whipped up an almost identical furore.

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Postwar murderers

John Christie: Landlord who gassed eight people and sexually interfered with their corpses. Hanged in 1949
John Haigh: Claimed to have drunk the blood of the six victims he disposed of in vats of acid. Although he tried to plead insanity, Haigh was convicted and hanged in 1949
Neville Heath: Brutally murdered two women in London. He was executed in 1946
The three serial killers Neville Heath, a "charmer" who murdered two or possibly three women; John George Haigh, who murdered at least six people and disposed of their bodies in acid; and John Christie, the monster of Rillington Place who killed seven or eight people and watched Timothy Evans hang for one of those murders.

These dangerous men were made into macabre pin-ups by the popular press of the time, the immediately post-war world where London and other cities were cratered and scarred by Hitler's bombs.

The practices of two legendary Fleet Street crime reporters - Norman "Jock" Rae of the News of the World and Harry Procter of the Mail and later the Sunday Pictorial - stand out from the rest of their peers.

With the chequebooks of their editors in hand, these hardened and tenacious hacks chased down the stories of these murderers, and tried to get them at any cost.

These were the days when the News of the World sold more than 8 million copies every Sunday, and every effort was made to get a crime scoop, the more grisly the better.

Rae and Procter were highly regarded by their editors, as their crime stories produced great spikes in circulation. When a rival paper bought a helicopter to get to stories faster in the late 1940s, Procter's editor said: "They may have a helicopter, but we've got a Harry Procter."


Public appetite for stories about killers like Haigh was intense
Fleet Street's crime reporters were star journalists then, and became known as the Murder Gang, with incredible contacts amongst the police, judiciary and legal system.

Payments were made without a second thought, and papers such as the News of the World and the Sunday Pictorial got the best inside morsels of information, as the Sunday papers paid more than the dailies.

Incredibly, these hacks got the full inside stories on Heath, Haigh and Christie, and in return paid their legal defence costs - in two cases, they made substantial payments to the families of two of the killers after they were executed.

Sunday's crime confession scoops were always tomorrow's fish and chip paper, but copies were sold on the day, and that was all that was important. Today laws and media regulations prevent criminals profiting from their crimes, but in 1946-53, there were no such restrictions (although one rival editor did go to prison for contempt of court).

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George Orwell on murder coverage

"The wife is already asleep in the armchair, and the children have been sent out for a nice long walk," wrote George Orwell. "You put your feet up on the sofa, settle your spectacles on your nose, and open the News of the World."

And what will you read? "Naturally, about a murder."

Orwell described Sunday afternoons spent devouring reports of heinous slayings as "blissful". But in his 1946 essay Decline of the English Murder, he feared that lurid crime reporting had passed its peak.

He lamented the demise of the "perfect" murder, which had been so common in the pre-war days. This would involve a "little man of the professional class" who risks losing his social standing by "cherishing a guilty passion for his secretary or the wife of a rival professional man".

Such crimes - Dr Crippen's is held up as a prime example - "excite pity for both victim and murderer".

But Orwell complained that wartime and postwar murders were tawdry by comparison, reflecting an age of "dance-halls, movie-palaces, cheap perfume, false names and stolen cars".

Procter met Neville Heath on at least two occasions before Heath committed his first murder, and had face-to-face interviews with John George Haigh and John Christie before either was arrested or charged.

Even murkier was the fact that Rae arranged to secretly meet with Christie to get his inside story for the News of the World while the serial killer was on the run - a time when every police force in Britain was on the lookout for him.

This was an era when the disarray on the city streets, heavy rationing and the heavy hangover of the war was matched by the immoral practices of tabloid hacks driven to get results for their newspaper, and to do so at any cost.

The current allegations surrounding the News of the World of phone-hacking and reporters' investigations into the families of murder and terrorism victims and slain soldiers can be seen in the light of the actions of hacks from 60 years ago.

The world of dark celebrity, which Rae and the rest of the Murder Gang helped build, truly was the seed of the tabloid crime coverage we see around us today.

The immense pressure on tabloid journalists to "push the envelope" and use every method necessary to get their scoop has not changed, as the current scandal shows.

From the time that Rae and Procter were operating, and most probably long before, tabloid hacks have had to be flexible to the point of immorality to get the type of stories that made their paper fly off the stands.


Reporters like Rae and Procter were the superstars of Fleet Street
But the News of the World has not been the only culprit, and these are practices which have undoubtedly been systemic in the British tabloid world generally for decades.

The drug bust in 1967 involving the Rolling Stones had tabloid media on the scene as fast as the police, prompting later suggestions of collusion.

William Rees-Mogg wrote in his Times leader of the Rolling Stones drug bust: "Why break a butterfly on a wheel?"

The situation now at the News of the World seems to be the straw that finally broke the tabloid camel's back.

 

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The Las Vegas Mob Experience is located at the Tropicana Hotel, 3801 Las Vegas Blvd. S

You've always come here for experiences: at the gaming tables and buffet tables, in the lounges and showrooms, or just gawking at surreal replicas of world landmarks in the middle of the desert.

Now, when you come here, you can also get rubbed out by Soprano-style bad guys with thick necks, Brooklyn accents and automatic weapons — virtually, of course.

IF YOU GO

The Las Vegas Mob Experience is located at the Tropicana Hotel, 3801 Las Vegas Blvd. S, on the Strip. General admission is $39.95.
Information: www.lvme.com, 702-739-2662.
The Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement is located at 300 Stewart Ave. downtown and will open next February.
Information: www.themobmuseum.org, 702-229-6581.
The Tropicana Hotel launched the Las Vegas Mob Experience this spring: part museum, part theme park, with nifty interactive special effects designed by Disney "imagineers."

The visitor becomes a character in the story, and has choices to make. The wrong one could get you whacked. The right one — per the underworld code of morality — you get "made."

There's a T-shirt for either outcome in the gift shop.

The Tropicana "experience" is the first of two installations charting the rise and fall of Mafia involvement in Las Vegas.

Miami Beach mob boss Meyer Lansky and his top lieutenant, Hollywood's Vincent "Jimmy Blue Eyes" Alo were in on it from the start as associates of Lucky Luciano and Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel in turning the Flamingo Hotel into first casino resort in 1946.

Not yet up and running: the city's official "mob museum" — formally the Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement. The $42 million project, housed in a 1933 downtown post office/federal courthouse, is set to open on Feb. 14, 2012. The date is deliberate, since one of its marquee attractions will be a section of the Chicago garage wall in front of which seven Prohibition-era hoods met their demise on Feb. 14, 1929, in the notoriously bloody St. Valentine's Day Massacre. Look for the original machine gun-slug pock marks.

The facility also snagged the barber chair in which New York crime boss Albert Anastasia died amid a hail of bullets, and an audiotape from an actual "made man" induction.

The Tropicana's Mob Experience is part of an overall, $200 million hotel renovation by the South Florida-based Nikki Beach Club entertainment group.

What you get for $39.95 and about an hour at the Mob Experience is a chance to role-play actual wiseguys, also Mafia-flick actors like James Caan and Mickey Rourke as holographic narrators, and an impressive collection of memorabilia, in a 26,000-square-foot display.

The flashiest find: Bugsy's 1933 Packard limo, impeccably restored. But some might be more entranced by Lansky's handwritten diaries, in which he muses about his destiny. Visitors can turn the pages electronically, and read a transcript.

"My role wasn't assigned to me," Lansky wrote. "I chose my role the same way as any businessman chose his role. I listened, and read a lot about men in all kinds of endeavors. The men who mostly went to the top were men with integrity. Whatever business I decided to be in would never change my principles."

Jay Bloom, managing partner of the Mob Experience, calls the diaries — acquired from Lansky's granddaughter, Cynthia Duncan of Miami — one of the attraction's "Holy Grails."

He said he cold-called Duncan, who ultimately offered a trove of photos and artifacts and consulted on the project.


The Alo artifacts came from his niece, Carole Russo, also of Miami.

All the major Vegas-related characters are represented, including Luciano, enforcer Tony "The Ant" Spilotro, Hank Greenspun (the Flamingo publicist who later ran the Las Vegas Sun newspaper), Frank "Lefty" Rosenthal, Frank Costello, Sam Giancana, casino owner Allan Sachs, tycoon Howard Hughes, and entertainers Frank Sinatra and Eddie Fisher.

Some artifacts Bloom said he politely declined, including Louisiana crime boss Carlo Marcello's teeth.

Some vocal critics, including academics, have panned the project for romanticizing organized crime and glossing over the violence and corruption which, as much as the block and plaster, built Sin City. But Bloom defends the premise.

"The families did not see these men as psychotic killers," Bloom said during a walkthrough days before the March 29 grand opening. "Yes, they killed, but they were also religious. They stole, but they were generous, and they tried to shield their families from their business.

"The families were discouraged with the way Hollywood portrayed them."

So, because every gangster needs a moniker, that's what you get first thing in the door, along with a bar-coded badge that will trigger various activities in your native language as you proceed through the exhibits.

If a guide gets you to give up your cellphone number, you'll get an extra dimension of interaction when you least expect it: a phone call from an actual "made man." And he'll know your name.

I become Peanuts, an amusing coincidence for one who is vertically challenged.

The exhibit begins with the Italian immigrants who came through Ellis Island and planted the seeds of La Cosa Nostra on New York's Lower East Side that ultimately sprouted in the Midwest, New England, California and, by the 1940s, Nevada.

One of the holographic narrators — Caan, who played Sonny Corleone in the "Godfather" films — in a sharksin suit and silver tie, explains the mob's involvement in bootlegging. Then he tells you to go down the alley and knock on the last door on the left.

A slot opens. A guy in a loose tie with a cigar hands you an envelope. You are now a "bag man."

"Give it to Big Leo," he says. "And watch your back."

A pair of guidos lead us to a guy draped in gold jewelry, including the requisite giant pinkie ring, relaxing with a bottle of red wine at a cafe table.


"Treat Big Leo wit' due respect," one of them warns. "If da cops pick you up, I'll help you in da jail."

"We're very big in Miami," Big Leo says, having been cued by my badge.

The room devoted to Lansky and Alo all but brings them to life through talking holograms, home movies, audiotape, family snapshots and personal effects: Meyer's iconic white shoes, hat and light-blue sportcoat in a glass case. His bow tie collection and leatherbound library. His Social Security card, silver cigarette case, his glasses and their case from Sutton Optical, 1660 Meridian Ave., Miami Beach.

His Dade County "declaration of domicile:" 5255 Collins Ave., apartment 2-A; his love letters to his wife, Teddy — "keep your legs crossed and go to sleep" — and his written pleas to the president of Israel seeking asylum, as the federal government pursued him near the end of his life.

A front page of the old Miami News on Jan. 15, 1983, announces his death at age 80.

There's nearly as much on Alo, Lansky's tight-lipped advisor, who helped run mob operations in Vegas, Florida and Cuba.

An avid golfer, he's pictured on a golf course mid-swing, riding a burro in Cuba, and outside his house in Hollywood, Fla., with his wife, Florence.

He died of natural causes in 2001, a widower just shy of his 97th birthday.

"Alo took on near-mythical status in the world of organized crime," a plaque reads. "To the average foot soldier in the mob, it was unfathomable that Lansky (who was Jewish), could be one of the biggest bosses in the world of organized crime and have an Italian (Alo) as his right-hand man. Surely, they thought, Lansky had to be working for Alo, not the other way around."

While the Mob Experience is long on flash, the Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement promises a more sober look at the same era, roughly the post-war 1940s to the mid-1980s, when the casinos went legit, with greater emphasis on the crime fighters who drove the mob out than on the gangsters themselves. In fact, Sen. Estes Kefauver's Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce held hearings in the building's main courtroom in 1950 and '51.

His aim was to shut the casinos down. Precisely the opposite happened, making Las Vegas the center of the gambling universe.

The museum is the brainchild of Oscar Goodman, Las Vegas mayor from 1999 until his wife replaced him in June. The former mob lawyer doesn't see the Tropicana project as competition, and can barely tolerate the mention of its name.

He had a sentimental feeling about the building that will house the city's museum, because it's where he tried his first federal case. The city bought it from the feds for $1, with the proviso that any renovation had to meet national landmark guidelines.

"We will have a museum second to none!" Goodman declared.

He explained that in the end, the racketeers ran themselves out of business because "they got greedy and sloppy, and didn't realize about the government wiretaps."


He said the museum would be "an educational experience. This is really America's story."

The 43,000-square-foot space spans three floors and a basement, and will retain original windows, oak flooring, hardware, marble, brass post-office boxes, heavy safe doors and other architectural features.

Working off original blueprints, designers were able to recreate just about everything they couldn't find or salvage, from chandeliers to leatherette doors.

Kathy and Dennis Barrie, who created the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C., were hired to do the same in the old Vegas post office. With most of the construction work finished, they began installing exhibits in mid-June.

"We collected from a number of people in the FBI or their children," Dennis Barrie said. "We also are working with a couple of major collectors of organized crime material."

There will be a car from "a recently deceased mobster," 3-D projections in the courtroom, federal-agent weapons training and wiretapping exhibits, and a feature that "lets you trace mob activity in your own community," Barrie said.

There's material from South Florida and from Tampa, which had an active underworld.

"We'll have a lot of interactivity, but no live actors," he said. "That's pretty hokey."

They do, however, have audio and video of John Gotti, some of the Dapper Don's clothing, and "a whole exhibit on mob hits."

"We want to show the interconnectivity of the mob, politicians, judges, labor leaders and famous celebrities," Barrie said. "These people are not cartoons, and you can't exclude talking about the really bad things these guys did."

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