Lake Mead Body in Barrel Could Be Casino Veteran, Say Mob Experts

The dead body inwards a barrelful found inwards the mud of a fadeout Lake Margaret Mead several weeks agone could follow that of a Las Vegas gambling casino veteran soldier named Johnny Pappas, according to II Mob experts.

Writing inward The Daily Mail Wednesday, Jeff Burbank and Geoff Schumacher of Las Vegas’ Mob Museum, said the grisly breakthrough tire all the hallmarks of a Mob hit.

Investigators say the physical structure was likely placed in the gun barrel inwards the mid-to-late 1970s, based on the victim’s clothing and shoes. The dupe was slam inward the head, execution-style, maybe on the orders of vicious Mob enforcer Susan Brownell Anthony “Tony the Ant” Spilotro, who oversaw casino trading operations for the Windy City Outfit at the time.

Joe Pesci’s graphic symbol inwards the film Casino was based on Spilotro.

The Case for Johnny Pappas

Pappas was a Windy City aborigine with Mob connections who worked his path upwards inward the casino manufacture with stints at the Las Vegas Hilton and Caesars Palace casinos. At the clip of his disappearance, inward Aug 1976, he managed Lake Mead’s Echo Bay Resort, according to stager Las Vegas journalist John the Divine L. Smith.

Echo Bay was a hotel on the Lake that was owned past the Argent Corporation, which also had Little Joe casinos on the Strip and was a breast for the Mob.

Not only when did Pappas put to work on Lake Mead, but he also owned a boat that was docked on the lake. On the twenty-four hour period of his disappearance, he told his married woman he was going to receive someone who was interested in buying his boat. He was never seen again.

“Did the Outfit dread that Pappas mightiness experience something to reveal nearly the then-unfolding inside information near skimming at the Argent casinos? If so, they had a motive to rub him out,” Burbank and Schumacher speculate. “… After he was theoretically killed and shoved into a barrel, it wouldn’t make taken a great deal to rubbish dump his body, perhaps using his possess vessel.”

Jay Vandermark and William Crespo

Another candidate is George V ‘Jay’ Vandermark, a former slot machine cheater who was hired to manage the expansion slot skimming surgical process at the Argent-controlled Stardust. Vandemark double-crossed the Mob and went on the run.

But according to the testimony of former Mafia hitman turned government informant Nick Calabrese, the Mob caught upward with Vandermark at a hotel inward capital of Arizona in 1976 and his body is interred inwards the Arizona desert.

Then there’s William Crespo, a dose blue runner who was caught quick into Las Vegas with $400,000 worth of cocaine and in agreement(p) to go a government witness. Crespo vanished shortly before he was due to take the stand against VII individuals with alleged golf links to unionised crime, including former Argent executive director Victor Greger.

But the escort of Crespo’s disappearance, in June 1983, makes it to a lesser extent potential that he’s the piece inward the barrel.

More Secrets inward Lake Mead?

Las Vegas police said in too soon May they were working to describe the victim, and the William Clark County Coroner’s Office would urinate a statement in due course.

Thanks to mood change, the pull down of the lake has receded dramatically over the past 15 years. Whoever threw the bbl inwards the lake potential dumped it hundreds of yards from the shore, unaware it would ace solar day be exposed.

Metropolitan Police Homicide Lieutenant Ray Spencer said inward a push group discussion May 3 he expected to encounter more bodies as the irrigate stratum recedes farther and the lake yields to a greater extent mysteries.