The planned 50-million-dollar Las Vegas Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement, due to open in 2010, would be the first center to examine the complex role of Mafia families in American history and culture as well as the FBI agents who sought their demise.

It is expected to occupy the entire 42,000 square feet of a three-story neo-classical building in downtown Las Vegas which was the first federal courthouse in the county and then served as a post office.

Visitors will be allowed to have their mugshots taken, wiretap their friends and stand in mock police lineups, museum creative director Dennis Barrie said.

The building itself is already part of mob lore, having staged a 1950 hearing held by the Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce into organized crime spearheaded by Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver.

In 2000, the federal government deeded the decaying building to the city for one dollar on the promise that it would be restored and used for educational or museum purposes.

Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman, a former defense attorney who defended several Mafia figures in the 1970s and 1980s, hit upon the idea of commemorating this angle of history.

"I'm saying to myself, although my mother was a great artist, nobody?s going to come to downtown Las Vegas to look at paintings, they're not going to look at watercolors, they're not going to look at porcelain, they're not going to look at miniature trains," recalled Goodman.

"What will they look at? They'll look at something that's really embedded in history, that makes us unique and distinctive from any other city, that has a historical nexus, a keystone because of the Kefauver hearings, and I said, 'A mob museum!' And I think it’s a natural."

As simple as that sounds, the idea has had critics. The mayor acknowledged the Italian-American community was so alarmed by the idea when he first hit upon it in 2002 that he backed off at first with a quip that he had actually proposed a "mop museum."

To allay concerns of those who fear the museum will glorify criminals and their acts, Goodman recruited retired FBI Special Agent-in-Charge Ellen Knowlton to chair the museum?s non-profit board.

Knowlton convinced the FBI to loan a variety of pieces of evidence to the museum for display.

Among those may be the vice allegedly used by Tony Spilotro to squeeze a man's head to force the victim to yield information, said board member and prominent Las Vegas historian Bob Stoldal. Spilotro was a client of Mayor Goodman and was the basis for the character played by Joe Pesci in the film "Ca sino," a fictionalized account of the Las Vegas mob that includes a similar scene involving a vice. (The mayor appeared in the 1995 film as himself.)

While there will be a room devoted to pop culture portrayals of the mob, Barrie said his aim was to move beyond that glamorized understanding of organized crime.

"As a story, as a part of American culture, it is a legitimate part of our history," said Barrie, who also curated the International Spy Museum in Washington DC and the Rock N Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.

"Organized crime goes on today. It's a pretty worthwhile subject."

Still, there’s opposition. Attorney Donald Campbell, a former federal prosecutor who had a hand in breaking the mob's hold on Las Vegas in the 1980s, is a critic.

"It's a bad idea whether it's about the mob or about the current gangs," Campbell said. "Isn't that the logical extension of it? I don't think we should ever romanticize a criminal activity."

And Los Angeles Times blogger Richard Abowitz last month bemoaned the notion as being a contrary to the efforts Las Vegas have made to move past its seedy past.

"I will go on the record that I think the Mob museum is a horrible idea," Abowitz wrote. "In 2009, Vegas has reinvented itself in so many ways and so many times that a mob museum already sounds quaint and dated. Maybe the last time this may have been a good i dea was back when 'The Sopranos' was a hit television show. Otherwise, if you care about the mob in Vegas, rent the movie 'Casino.'"

The project, which had quietly been taking form for years, burst into the national prominence last month when Goodman included it on a list of local projects that he believed ought to receive money from the federal stimulus package.

Republican Minority Leader Senator Mitch McConnell spotlighted it in two national interviews as an example of the sort of pet projects that did not belong in a bill aimed at jumpstarting the flailing economy.

It was not included in the package that passed the US House and is not likely to be included in any stimulus efforts, but Goodman doesn’t mind the controversy.