Bugsy Siegel

Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel (February 28, 1906 – June 20, 1947) was an American mobster who played a key role in shaping the Las Vegas Strip. Alongside his childhood friend Meyer Lansky, Siegel held sway in the Jewish-American mob, the Italian-American Mafia, and the National Crime Syndicate, a coalition of mostly Italian and Jewish gangsters. Often called "handsome" and "charismatic," he was among the first mobsters to become a celebrity in the press. Siegel helped found and lead Murder, Inc., and ran bootlegging operations during Prohibition.

After the Twenty-first Amendment ended Prohibition in 1933, he shifted to illegal gambling. In 1936, he moved from New York to California, where he worked mainly as a hitman and enforcer, known for his skill with guns and violence. In 1941, he was tried for murdering his friend and fellow mobster Harry Greenberg, who had become an informant; he was acquitted in 1942.

Flamingo Hotel

Siegel later went to Las Vegas, Nevada, where he helped finance and manage some of the city’s first casinos. He took over the Flamingo Hotel project from developer William R. Wilkerson after Wilkerson ran out of money, overseeing its final construction. The Flamingo’s casino opened on December 26, 1946, with a three-day event that was well received, but without a hotel attached, it struggled. It closed on February 6, 1947, and reopened on March 1, 1947, once the hotel was finished.

Early life

Siegel’s mob partners believed that about US$1 million of the construction budget had been stolen by Siegel, his girlfriend Virginia Hill, or both. On June 20, 1947, at age 41, Siegel was killed by a sniper who shot through a window of Hill’s mansion on Linden Drive in Beverly Hills, California. Benjamin Siegel was born on February 28, 1906, in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York City. He was the second of five children in a poor Ashkenazi Jewish family that had emigrated from the Galicia region of Austria-Hungary (now part of Poland and Ukraine).

His parents, Jennie (née Riechenthal) and Max Siegel, worked constantly for low wages. As a boy, Siegel quit school and joined a gang on Lafayette Street on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, mostly committing thefts until he met Moe Sedway. Together, they ran a protection racket: Siegel threatened to burn pushcart owners’ merchandise unless they paid him a dollar. He soon built a long criminal record starting in his teens, including armed robbery, rape, and murder.

The Bugs and Meyer Mob

As a teenager, Siegel became friends with Meyer Lansky, who used his sharp mind to form a small mob that expanded into illegal gambling and car theft. Lansky, who had already clashed with Charles "Lucky" Luciano, saw that Jewish boys in his Brooklyn neighborhood needed to organize like the Italians and Irish did. His first recruit was Siegel.

Siegel got into bootlegging in several major East Coast cities and worked as a hitman that Lansky rented out to other crime families. The two created the Bugs and Meyer Mob, which carried out hits for various bootleg gangs in New York and New Jersey, nearly a decade before Murder, Inc. was formed. The gang hijacked liquor from rival outfits and killed several gangland figures. Members included Abner "Longie" Zwillman, Louis "Lepke" Buchalter, and Lansky’s brother Jake.

Joseph "Doc" Stacher, another member, later recalled to Lansky’s biographers that Siegel was fearless and saved friends’ lives as the mob moved into bootlegging: "Bugsy never hesitated when danger threatened," Stacher said. "While we tried to figure out what the best move was, Bugsy was already shooting. When it came to action there was no one better. I've never known a man who had more guts." Siegel was also a childhood friend of Al Capone; when Capone had a murder warrant out for him, Siegel let him hide with an aunt. Siegel first smoked opium as a youth and was involved in the drug trade.

By age 21, he earned enough to buy an apartment at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel and a Tudor home in Scarsdale, New York. He wore flashy clothes and enjoyed New York City nightlife. From May 13 to 16, 1929, Lansky and Siegel attended the Atlantic City Conference at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel, representing the Bugs and Meyer Mob. There, Luciano and former Chicago South Side Gang leader Johnny Torrio discussed the future of organized crime and Mafia families.

Marriage and family

Siegel stated, "The yids and the dagos will no longer fight each other." On January 28, 1929, Siegel married his childhood sweetheart, Esta Krakower. They had two daughters: Millicent (later Millicent Rosen) and Barbara (later Barbara Saperstein). Siegel was known as a womanizer, and the marriage ended in 1946.

While married, Siegel had affairs with Ketti Gallian, Wendy Barrie (1942–1943), Marie "The Body" MacDonald, and Virginia Hill (1945–1947). By the late 1920s, Lansky and Siegel had ties to Luciano and Frank Costello, future bosses of the Genovese crime family. Siegel, Albert Anastasia, Vito Genovese, and Joe Adonis were allegedly the four gunmen who shot New York mob boss Joe Masseria to death on Luciano’s orders on April 15, 1931, ending the Castellammarese War. On September 10 of that year, Luciano hired four gunmen from the Bugs and Meyer Mob (some sources say) to carry out other hits.