ItsGangsterismOut: Lake Mead body in a barrel

Barbara Brock believes the body in the barrel is her brother, Bobbi Eugene Shaw. Cops say the remains match his description and have taken DNA samples. Robert E. Shaw was arrested in 1976 during a strike on the Strip by the Culinary Union. This conjures Culinary Union boss Al Bramlet, who met his end in the desert in 1977 after refusing to pay a hitman for a series of bombings.

Robert Shaw had extensive mob connections and has been missing since 1977.

A missing father of a San Francisco man has been identified as one of the bodies that emerged from Lake Mead.

Twenty years ago Tom Erndt, then 10 years old, was on a nighttime family boating excursion on the Colorado River reservoir on Aug. 2, 2002 when his father, Thomas Erndt, playfully jumped into the water. Known for being a jokester, the family thought he was playing a prank when he began to struggle. "At first it was like, 'Oh, I'm drowning hahaha,' kind of thing, right?" Tom Erndt said. "And it turned into screaming and yelling, and 'I need help!'.

Thomas Erndt disappeared below the surface and he wasn't found until a month ago.

Latest to emerge from Lake Mead is a WWII Higgins landing craft. It was used to survey the Colorado River decades ago before sinking.

Human remains were found a week after the body in the barrel.

Shoes on the man were sold at Kmart in the mid 70s.

Boaters on depleted Lake Mead spotted an old rusty barrel. Inside were bones from a man killed sometime between the mid-1970s and the early 1980s. He had been shot to death and was likely dropped from a boat far from shore. There is still no DNA evidence of his identity.

The grisly find has all the makings of a gangland hit. Cops say the victim was shot in the head and crammed into the drum. The killers transported the barrel by boat several hundred yards out into the lake and dumped it in what was then 100 feet of water. The corpse still had a shirt, belt and shoes. Clothing was purchased in the mid to late 1970s at a Kmart. Three possible mob victims may be the body in the barrel. George 'Jay' Vandermark was a gambling machine cheater who robbed the mob's slot machine operation at the Stardust casino. William Crespo was a drug-runner who turned state's evidence after he got busted smuggling cocaine. He was set to testify against a mob-controlled casino company but was never seen again.

Leading candidate for the man in the barrel is Johnny Pappas, a man who owned a boat on Lake Mead and was a Las Vegas casino host. The three men together were all linked to the most powerful Las Vegas mob operation of that time – Argent Corp., a front company that ran some of Las Vegas' top gambling operations. Argent Corp. had become a major player in Las Vegas – owning the Stardust, Hacienda and Marina hotel-casinos on the Strip, and the Fremont downtown. That leads to a likely killer. One of the most notorious enforcers in mob history, Tony Spilotro. He was involved in at least 20 mob-related murders from 1975 to 1977. Each of his victims died from a shared method — one or more point-blank shots to the head from a .22 handgun, favored because the slugs enter the skull without blowing back blood and brain matter. DNA testing may take a year.

Lake Mead and Lake Powell upstream provide water to more than 40 million people. The lake’s level has dropped so much that the uppermost water intake at Lake Mead became visible.