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Europe's crime museums delve into the fight against the mafia in Palermo, medieval torture devices in Rothenburg and forensic specimens in Athens. Las Vegas’ Mob Museum, the National Museum of Organized Crime and Law Enforcement, recounts the history of the US mafia through hundreds of artefacts and immersive storylines. It features interactive exhibits including a Crime Lab and Firearm Training Simulator - and has just added a newly redesigned section on ‘The Mob in Pop Culture’.
The exhibit features artefacts, costumes and images examining the influence of organised crime on American popular culture. The display includes two cast-worn costume suits from Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, a revolver used by Robert de Niro in The Godfather Part II and DEA Agent Steve Murphy’s copy of the script for the first episode of the Netflix series Narcos. The museum is also home to The Underground, a Prohibition history exhibition featuring a speakeasy and distillery.
If you can’t make it to the States for a dose of crime history, here’s where you can learn about mafia, mobs and misdemeanours in Europe. The No Mafia Memorial offer visitors a journey through the most important historical events in Italy’s fight against the mafia. It is housed in the historic Palazzo Gulì in the Sicilian city of Palermo - birthplace of judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino who were murdered by the mafia.
There is a photographic archive on the ground floor and a new multimedia exhibition on the second floor covering themes including rural and urban mafia, urban-entrepreneurial mafia and mafias and globalisation. Head further back in time to the Middle Ages with the Medieval Crime Museum in Rothenburg. Housed in the building of the German city's former St John's monastery, it is Europe’s largest legal museum.
Not for the fainthearted, the exhibits include torture devices such as original stretching benches, thumb screws and nail-studded chairs. You can also peruse medieval interrogation protocols including witch trials and legal texts and examine shame masks, used to punish those convicted of minor crimes. The Criminology Museum, part of the Medical School of the University of Athens in Greece, tells the stories of some of the most notorious crimes that took place during the 19th and early 20th centuries.
Forensic researchers can find a wealth of information in the human remains collection, with mummified and skeletal human remains and formalin-preserved specimens. The exhibit includes the embalmed severed heads of famous Greek outlaws of the early 20th century. Other collections include nooses and ligatures, wax models of wounds and injuries, medico-legal documents like crime scene photos and a toxicology section with drug use paraphernalia and plastic models of poisonous and edible mushrooms.
The True Crime Museum in the East Sussex city of Hastings explores lawbreakers from serial killers and gangsters to poisoners and stalkers. Exhibits include a lethal injection deathbed, the acid containers used by John George Haigh to dissolve his victims and the love letters written in prison by Richard Ramirez, a serial killer known as the Night Stalker. There is also a surround-sound Cinema Cave where you can listen to the chilling confessions of convicted criminals.
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