The project
Before the neon.
The Las Vegas Mob Experience opened at the Tropicana in March 2011. A 27,000 square foot interactive exhibit that chronicled the rise and fall of organized crime in Las Vegas. Cinematic set design, live character actors, and 3D holographic performances from James Caan, Mickey Rourke, Frank Vincent, and Tony Sirico, set inside an environment built to feel like walking into the mob's actual Las Vegas. The exhibit housed more than 1,000 authentic artifacts sourced directly from the families of the era's most notorious figures. Meyer Lansky's diary. The only existing video footage of Bugsy Siegel. Personal letters from Lucky Luciano. Tony Spilotro's guns. Visitors were assigned character identities at the door and guided through scenarios where their choices determined whether they got made, arrested, or whacked.
The original venture was rebranded in March 2012 as Mob Attraction Las Vegas following a change in ownership, and operated at the Tropicana through November 2013. We stayed with the project across both phases, across ownership teams, across the repositioning, and across the expansion into group sales and event bookings. We produced the logo and visual identity, hotel keys, print collateral, advertising, billboard campaigns, and the digital artifact screens that delivered the contextual information for every object in the exhibit. We also handled sales, marketing, and corporate event coordination for the full run. Seventy hours a week across categories most studios split between four different teams.
The Tropicana itself was imploded in October 2024 to make room for the Oakland Athletics' new stadium. The last true mob building on the Strip is rubble now. What LVMA proves about our studio is range, and the specific kind of range that comes from being embedded in one project deeply enough to be useful at every layer of it. Identity, hospitality collateral, outdoor advertising, museum-grade interactive screens, sales strategy, event execution. Our co-founder Crystal ran all of it. A utility player inside a business that needed one.
The logo and visual identity. The hotel keys. The billboards. The print collateral. The advertising. The digital artifact screens that delivered the contextual story for every object in the exhibit. Group sales strategy and execution. Marketing for the full run. Corporate event coordination. We were embedded at a level most design studios do not offer and most clients do not ask for, across both ownership teams and across the rebrand. One person, one studio, across every layer of a major Las Vegas attraction.