LAS VEGAS - Wendy Mazaros' life has enough troubling tales to fill a book. "Vegas Rag Doll" recounts her shocking experiences with the mob in 1970's Las Vegas.
"A lot of nightmares," she said. "A friend of mine passed me off on to an older gentleman who was a hitman and a union racketeer for the Teamsters and the Culinary Union."
That older gentleman was Tom Hanley, a mob hitman who was 39 years older than Mazaros. His son Gramby was also a mob hitman. Together, this assassination duo is suspected to have killed 20 people over three decades. Their most notable target was powerful Culinary Union boss Al Bramlet in 1977.
"That was one of them. He killed a lot of union leaders," Mazaros said.
Bramlet hired the Hanleys to bomb Las Vegas restaurants that wouldn't play ball with the union, but the Hanleys turned on him when Bramlet didn't pay them. Bramlet was kidnapped, driven to the desert and buried.
Mazaros recounts the scary and sadistic crimes in intriguing times.
"The movie 'Casino' was fictionalized, and I was in the middle of all those people, right smack in the middle of them," she said. "They glamorized 'Casino.' It was not like that at all."
Mazaros' daughter Amy Hanley also grew up in this infamous underworld.
"It is shameful at times, because you don't want people to know this is what my father does," she said.
Mother and daughter now freely speak about being immersed in mob life, coming to terms with a tumultuous time in southern Nevada.
"It was very painful, dark, and like I said, it was the circle of terror," Mazaros said.
While Wendy never witnessed any bloodshed first-hand, she says she feared she would end up dead in a mine shaft in the desert. She has since been diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and Stockholm Syndrome.
Wendy Mazaros
