Oscar Goodman is a Las Vegas institution. This summer, the former mafia defense attorney and city mayor will lend his voice to "A Mob Story." The show will be held at The Plaza hotel-casino showroom, starting July 11.
Goodman will serve as a narrator to "A Mob Story" when Michael Franzese, the show's main narrator, can't perform. Yes, Oscar Goodman will be an understudy. But as always, he has bigger plans for himself.
"What I am going to do is I'm going to be one of the producers, and when Michael Franzese has another engagement, I'm going to go up, I'm going to tell my stories. Which are different than his stories, and I think the people will like my stories better than his," says Goodman.
Franzese is a former mobster with the Colombo crime family. He eventually renounced organized crime, turning to a life of faith and motivational speaking.
"Listen if you had told me 20 years ago that I'd be sitting alongside Oscar doing a show like this I would've said you're crazy," says Franzese.
What's not crazy, is the friendship the two have developed through a love of Las Vegas. Both provide a unique perspective on the mafia's overwhelming influence on the city in its earliest years.
"It's amazing how a friendship has grown as quickly as ours has," says Goodman. "We're going to have fun, we're going to educate people and they're going to leave here knowing more about the mob than they ever dreamed of."
