The Mob Museum, Las Vegas
Everyone knows the line. “I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse,” the powerful mob boss Don Vito Corleone (played by Marlon Brando) says in the celebrated 1972 movie “The Godfather” about intimidating a Hollywood studio executive. Soon, the executive finds the severed head of his prized race horse next to him in bed, and acquiesces.
I’ve been thinking about those scenes as I read multiple news accounts about how President Donald J. Trump is raising money for a future presidential library/museum. His m.o.: Using clearly flimsy lawsuits, his new power from gaining a second term and implied threats to extract large cash settlements from large media companies, and perhaps others, for his future baby.
You see, the New to Las Vegas world headquarters is just a few miles from the National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement. The 13-year-old edifice in downtown Las Vegas is better known simply as the Mob Museum. I’ve toured the facility, which has terrific exhibits. In my view some of the material therein has described activities not all that far off from what Trump has been doing. His choice of fundraising tools is extortion, racketeering, or at least, in my view, something pretty close to that.
Any honest accounting in a museum of Trump’s full life would have to include the fact that our 45th and 47th president is a convicted felon (a status that even Don Corleone cleverly avoided in the movie and the underlying book of the same name by Mario Puzo), a prodigious liar and a cheat. Over the years Trump has done business with organized crime while speaking favorably of mobsters. “I have met on occasion a few of those people,” he told David Letterman in 2013. “They happen to be very nice people.”
So Trump might become the first person I know of to help fund what amounts to a personal monument using mob-like shakedown techniques.
Let’s look at the recent record.
–In January, Meta, the parent of Facebook and Instagram, agreed to pay $25 million to settle a clearly worthless lawsuit that Trump brought in 2021 after he was barred from the social media platform following the January 6 invasion of the U.S. Capitol. Some $22 million of that was earmarked for the future Trump library, which, if structured like other presidential libraries, would have a museum element. As a private company, Meta obviously had the right to pick and choose among its clients. But The Wall Street Journal reported that Meta agreed to cave after Trump told Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg at a November dinner the case had to be settled before Meta could be “brought into the tent” and presumably given any consideration from the Federal Government. An offer Zuck couldn’t refuse.
–In December, ABC News agreed to give $15 million to the Trump monument to settle Trump’s lawsuit claiming he was defamed when “Good Morning American” anchor George Stephanopoulos claimed several times during a broadcast that Trump had been adjudged culpable of raping writer E. Jean Carroll. Technically, the civil jury found Trump liable for sexual assault, rather than rape, although the federal judge presiding over the trial wrote the verdict meant the same. It’s pretty clear under the existing law of public figure defamation that is a distinction without a difference. Also, since Trump won the 2024 election, it’s hard to see how he was damaged, a required element in a defamation claim. He is currently appealing the decision.
–A number of once-liberal Big Law firms agreed to provide more than $200 million in free legal services to nonprofit causes favored by Trump after he threatened them with clearly unconstitutional restrictions, such as being barred from entering federal courthouses to represent clients. It’s not unreasonable to assume those causes might include the Trump library.
The Mob Museum in Las Vegas, itself the site of a famous 1950 U.S. Senate committee hearing into organized crime, contains a number of authentic artifacts. They include the actual wall in front of which seven mobsters were murdered in the 1927 St. Valentine’s Day Massacre in Chicago; actual wiretap recordings used to convict organized crime figures, and New York Mafia boss Joseph Bonanno’s 12-gauge sawed-off shotgun.
But that’s nothin’ compared to what could be exhibited in a Trump mob-style-funded multimedia museum:
–The original checks that Trump himself signed starting in 2017 to pay off porn star Stormy Daniels, who nevertheless later went public with her account of a one-night stand with Trump at a Nevada hotel in 2006. This led to Trump’s conviction in a New York state court on 34 counts of falsifying business records in New York, currently under appeal.
–An archive box that actually held classified documents which Trump illegally took upon leaving office in 2021 and stored in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom. This led to a federal indictment dismissed after Trump won re-election in 2024 and a U.S. Supreme Court ruling made it difficult to prosecute presidents for actions while in office. The documents were later returned to the Federal Government.
–A repeating loop of Trump’s famous speech on the Ellipse on January 6, 2021, urging supporters to march to Capitol Hill. This led to the violent storming of the U.S. Capitol building by his supporters and another indictment of Trump, eventually dismissed for the same reasons.
–Another repeating loop of Trump asking a Georgia election official in 2020 to find 11,780 votes so he could carry the state. This led to a state racketeering indictment against Trump, currently tied up in procedural challenges.
–Yet another repeating loop of the Access Hollywood video, in which Trump could be seen and heard in 2005 admitting to criminal conduct explaining how he sexually assaulted women. The tape was played at the E. Jean Carroll trial.
–Another repeating loop of Trump asking a Georgia election official in 2020 to find 11,780 votes so he could carry the state. This led to a state racketeering indictment against Trump, still pending but tied up in procedural disputes.
And for a little levity:
–The official 2019 Hurricane Dorian projection map that Trump allegedly doctored with his trademark Sharpie marker to support his previous false statement that the storm was a threat to Alabama. The incident became known as Sharpie-gate.
–Yet another repeating loop of Trump impersonating fake P.R. man John Barron on a telephone call to former Forbes reporter Jonathan Greenberg lying his way to remaining on the Forbes 400 list in 2004.
I’m barely scratching the surface here. The exhibit space in a Trump library/museum would have to be pretty large to do its subject full justice. The cost of the presidential museum that ex-president Barack Obama is building in Chicago may top $1 billion. Surely Trump doesn’t want to lag behind his long-time nemesis. So he may need to make a lot more fundraising “offers.”