What will be on Mob Museum’s cutting room floor?

When the Mob Museum opens in mid-2011, I'll be looking for what is omitted.

Will it include the roughest period of U.S. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's life, when mobsters dubbed him "Cleanface"?

Will it include graphic photos of Anthony Spilotro's brutal murder, when his family still lives in Las Vegas?

Will it be a paean to Las Vegas Mayor Oscar Goodman, the longtime mob mouthpiece? Or will he be a bit player, despite taking the lead to create the museum and preserve the old courthouse/post office?

The museum's creative director, Dennis Barrie, doesn't have all the answers yet. He doesn't know whether "Cleanface" will be part of the museum or how Spilotro's murder will be portrayed, although he assured me Frank Rosenthal will be included. Of course, it would be really odd if Rosenthal (a Goodman client) wasn't featured, since he and Spilotro were our city's leading mob figures in the '70s and '80s.

Barrie discussed three of the exhibits that are firming up. Mob Mayhem focuses on the violence. The Skim is a how-to about stealing from casinos and will feature a wall of our favorite green stuff -- money. Bringing Down the Mob spotlights wiretapping, one of the ways law enforcement officials investigated and prosecuted mobsters in Las Vegas and across the country.

As one of a handful of still gainfully employed Las Vegas journalists who covered those days and wrote about Cleanface, the skim and those intriguing wiretaps, I'll be looking at the museum from the perspective of whether it's honest and accurate as well as entertaining. There are plenty of us still around who remember the good ol', bad ol' days.

Barrie is no novice to balancing interactive fun with a historical tale. He co-created the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C., which draws about 750,000 visitors a year, and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum in Cleveland, which draws 500,000.

Goodman insisted that even using a lowball number of 250,000 instead of the high-end estimate of 800,000 visitors a year, the $42 million mob museum will make money, create jobs and help revitalize downtown.

Some family members of mob figures are cooperating with the museum's efforts, including relatives of John Gotti and Moe Dalitz. "I've not heard from the Spilotro family," Barrie said.

When the final decisions on what's in and what's out are made in April, I bet the Spilotro photos are in, and Cleanface is out.

Reid has said many times that the period in the late 1970s, when he was receiving death threats and was suspected of corruption, was the worst time of his life. In 1979, wiretaps were released of an eight-hour secret meeting in a Kansas City basement where Sicilian mobster Joe Agosto told Kansas City mobsters about the skimming at Las Vegas hotels and gossiped about local notables. Nicknames were used and there were references to Cleanface and Mr. Clean. "I gotta Cleanface in my pocket," Agosto said.

Reid, the chairman of the Nevada Gaming Commission, was Cleanface. But was he corrupt? Nevada gaming officials hired outside investigators, who, after a five-month investigation, concluded Agosto was bragging. But the moniker stuck. Google Cleanface and one of the first items up references Harry Reid.

A video of a Gaming Commission meeting in which Rosenthal screams at Reid and claims Reid somehow betrayed him exists, but I doubt that ends up in the museum either.

Based on Barrie's successes with spying and the rockin' and rollin', I'm confident, even if he doesn't include much about Harry Reid, the Mob Museum will be well crafted.

After all, Nicholas Pileggi's 1995 nonfiction book "Casino" tells the Rosenthal/Spilotro story without mentioning Harry Reid's name, which I always thought was peculiar but telling.

Jane Ann Morrison's column appears Monday, Thursday and Saturday. E-mail her at Jane@reviewjournal.com or call (702) 383-0275. She also blogs at lvrj.com/blogs/morrison.