Valentine's Day is a day of love and kisses and chocolate and roses

Except on Feb. 14, 1929 in Chicago, which featured Tommy gun bursts, shotgun blasts, pistol shots and headlines the next day of the slaughter of seven gangsters and their associates in a South Side garage.

The St. Valentine's Day massacre is the most famous day of the Prohibition mob wars in a Chicago dominated by gangster Al Capone. The bloody slaughter shocked even a Chicago jaded by gangland violence.

Today, the wall peppered with bullet and buckshot holes is the centerpiece of the new Las Vegas National Museum of Organized Crime & Law Enforcement. Nobody calls it that. It's just the Vegas Mob Museum. It open's its doors on Feb. 14, the 82nd anniversary of the imfamous mass murder in Chicago.

The Register visited Las Vegas the day after the Super Bowl for a sneak peak of the museum, housed in a former federal courthouse where mob trials and hearings were held.

The exhibit includes a briefcase once owned by former Mayor Oscar Goodman, who defended alleged mob figures in the building. He became a leading force in getting the museum finished before the end of his final term earlier this year.

"We're the only American city that springs from the mob," Goodman said in a barstool interview at his swanky new restaurant in the nearby Plaza Hotel. "We want to tell that story."

Goodman's old briefcase is part of the display. He took it on trips rom Las Vegas to the East Coast to see his client's business associates.

"If was full when I left Las Vegas and empty when I came back."

Goodman said his clients had a code of honor lost in today's crime world

"My mother used to say that Oscar's clients don't want to hurt my boy, they just want to hurt each other."

Jonathan Ullman, the museum's executive director, said he and his staff are trying to walk a fine line between glorifying the mobsters and presenting a sanctimonious presentation of the mob's decline and fall in Las Vegas as a corporate era eclipsed mob rule. 

"We hope what we're doing is telling the truth as best we can," Ullman said.

(The Register will have a full report on Las Vegas, the mob and the new museum next week in the Feb. 19 Travel section. For now, enjoy a sneak peak)

Contact the writer: travel@ocregister.com