Digging for Gangsters

Digging for Gangsters

written by
Alan Green

Part I

I own my own business. Corey's Day Trips. I'm Corey. I take people into the desert around Las Vegas to dig for buried gangsters. You know. Starting with Bugsy Siegel and his crew, through the fifties and sixties, and maybe some of the seventies, gangsters ran Vegas, pissed each other off, killed one another, and buried the bodies in the desert.

Back then it was the glory days for the mob. They lived like kings. Nobody messed with them. They had it all. But, they had short fuses and spouted off at the mouth, and that got them into a lot of trouble, fast. A bunch of them would be out at a bar or restaurant, having a good time, spending money like it grew on trees, boasting about this thing or that, one upping each other, and, sure as hell, before long, somebody would say something somebody else found offensive. It could be anything. Something dumb about a girlfriend, someone's shoes, the color of someone's new car, not knowing someone had bought a new car, what someone was drinking, the suggestion that one baseball team was better than another. You name it. And, the next thing you know there's an argument. Whoever was right or wrong, it was always the guy who had less clout that apologized. It was expected. The pecking order had to be respected. If not, then things escalated. And if it got past a certain point there was no turning back.

And, it didn't have to be a rude comment either. Not what you or I would call rude, at least. Not in that crowd. A guy could say anything that rubbed the wrong guy the wrong way and the next thing he knows he wakes up in the trunk of a Cadillac with a lump on his head, tied up and gagged, being driven away from the city in the middle of the night. He was 'a package', and was on his way to be whacked. Offed. Taken care of. Whatever. Call it what you want.

When they got to the location, the boys would dig the hole if it wasn't already dug, get the guy out of the trunk, put him next to the hole on his knees so there wasn't any doubt as to what was going to happen. (Not that there could have been. I mean, you weren't riding in the trunk because there wasn't enough room in the car). Then, the guy that had been offended would deliver a speech that made it clear he had won the encounter, was the better man, and how all this would have been unnecessary had an apology been offered (seeing how he's so understanding and forgiving) then kick the guy into the hole. Two shots in the chest, one in the head (more, several on occasion, if the guy was still pissed off, which was the case a lot of the time, though that was considered poor form. I mean, how many times do you got to shoot a guy in the head?) Then, they'd cover the poor sap up, go home, have breakfast, bullshit like nothing had happened, then go to bed.

Most of the guys buried in the desert are mobsters, but some worked in construction, restaurant supply, hotel supply, casino supply, were regular joes that had racked up too much debt, a bartender who didn't remember a guy's favorite drink, a waiter that fucked up an order, politicians who wouldn't play ball (or decided to stop playing ball), cops who wouldn't take payola, cops who did take payola but didn't deliver, any poor schlub who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Whatever. Any guy that pissed off the wrong guy got taken care of. The desert is filled with them.

The good thing though, at least for me, is most of these guys are buried between thirty and fifty miles outside Vegas. See. The plan was, always, to drive at least a hundred miles into the desert to do the thing but, these guys, they all had real short attention spans, were real impatient (it was a hallmark trait of being a mobster), and once they had driven maybe half an hour or forty-five minutes in a straight line through blackness and the featureless landscape they were bored to tears and had to pull off the road. They couldn't take it anymore so they planted the guy right there, instead of a hundred miles out.

The other good thing was the guys doing the digging were in terrible shape. There were soft as dough. They smoked, drank, ate too much pasta with too much meat sauce and too much bread dipped in olive oil. They hadn't exercised in decades. Hell, they didn't know the meaning of the word. So digging wasn't exactly a thing they looked forward to, or were capable of doing too much of. They'd get maybe three, three-and-a-half feet and they were drenched in sweat. They'd be short of breath and couldn't hardly see straight anymore, like they were having a heart attack or something. So, they'd look at the hole, look at each other, ask whether it was deep enough, nod, then get the guy out of the trunk. Also, a lot of times, they didn't get out there until real late and the sun would start coming up right in the middle of planting a guy. So, these graves tended to be real shallow. Six feet, hell. Some of those bodies were barely covered.

That pretty much sets the scene. You figure five or ten bodies a week for, what, ten or twenty years from the 50s and 60s, and maybe some of the 70s. That's a lot of problems buried in a lot of holes, all about three feet deep, all in a strip of desert about ten miles wide, in a circle with a radius of about fifty miles around Las Vegas. A giant O of buried thugs. All you got to do is find them.

And that's where I come in. That's what people do when they go out with me on Corey's Day Trips. They search for buried gangsters (wise guys, made men, soldiers, goodfellas, whatever, call them what you want) in the desert.




Part II will go up soon. (I promise)