Mob hit? Las Vegas police plan to release the ID of a man found in a barrel in Lake Mead

LAS VEGAS (AP) — Police in Las Vegas are poised to settle a mystery Thursday by publicly revealing the identity of a man whose body was found in a barrel in Lake Mead.

The discovery by boaters in 2022 sparked memories of the city’s mob era, which ended in the mid-1980s. Organized crime helped build up the city, and a body stuffed in a barrel was known as a signature mob hit.

Las Vegas police have scheduled an news conference for Thursday afternoon. Authorities have already said the man was shot, and they estimate he was killed between the mid-1970s and early 1980s, based on the type of shoes found with him.

The man had been wearing a button-down short-sleeve shirt, light blue jeans, a silver wristwatch and blue-and-white tennis shoes.

Lake Mead is at a historic low due to years of overuse, longstanding drought and increasing temperatures. The water level of the 90-year-old reservoir has continually dropped, exposing areas that were previously underwater and leading historians to predict more bodies will be found.

A few days after the barrel was discovered, a second barrel was found by a KLAS-TV news crew, not far from the first. It was empty. Shortly after that, paddleboarders discovered human remains on a newly surfaced sand bar, but officials found no evidence of foul play.

In August, more human remains were discovered and police again determined there was no evidence of foul play.

Lake Mead and the upstream Lake Powell are the largest human-made reservoirs in the U.S., part of a system that provides Colorado River water to more than 40 million people, tribes, agriculture and industry in Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico, Utah, Wyoming and across the southern border in Mexico.

In 2022, the dropping lake level exposed Las Vegas’ uppermost drinking water intake, forcing the regional water authority to switch to a deep-lake intake it completed in 2020 to keep serving the city’s 2.4 million residents and visitors, casinos and suburbs. Las Vegas attracts around 40 million tourists per year.