Bugsy Siegel
Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel was an American mobster who was a driving force behind the development of the Las Vegas Strip. Siegel was influential within the Jewish-American mob, along with his childhood friend and fellow gangster Meyer Lansky, the Italian-American Mafia, and the largely Italian-Jewish National Crime Syndicate. Described as "handsome" and "charismatic," Siegel became one of the first front-page celebrity gangsters.
Siegel was one of the founders and leaders of Murder, Inc. and became a bootlegger during American Prohibition. After the Twenty-first Amendment was passed in 1933 repealing Prohibition, he turned to illegal gambling. In 1936, Siegel left New York and moved to California. His time as a mobster during this period was mainly as a hitman and muscle, as he was noted for his prowess with guns and violence. In 1941, Siegel was tried for the murder of friend and fellow mobster Harry Greenberg, who had turned informant; he was acquitted in 1942.
Siegel traveled to Las Vegas, Nevada, where he handled and financed some of the city's original casinos. He assisted developer William R. Wilkerson's Flamingo Hotel after Wilkerson ran out of funds. Siegel assumed control of the project and managed the final stages of construction. The Flamingo opened on December 26, 1946, in a three-day event that was well received. Without a hotel to accompany the casino, the Flamingo struggled and closed from February 6 until the hotel reopened March 1, 1947. Siegel’s mob partners were convinced that an estimated US$1 million of the construction budget overrun had been skimmed by Siegel, his girlfriend Virginia Hill or by both of them. On June 20, 1947, Siegel was shot dead at the age of 41 by a sniper through the window of Hill's Linden Drive mansion in Beverly Hills, California.
Early life
Benjamin Siegel was born on February 28, 1906, in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn in New York City, the second of five children of a poor Ashkenazi Jewish family that had emigrated to the U.S. from the Galicia region of what was then Austria-Hungary. His parents, Jennie and Max Siegel, constantly worked for meager wages.As a boy, Siegel dropped out of school and joined a gang on Lafayette Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, mainly committing acts of theft until he met Moe Sedway. Together with Sedway, Siegel developed a protection racket in which he threatened to incinerate pushcart owners' merchandise unless they paid him a dollar. He soon built up a lengthy criminal record, dating from his teenage years, that included armed robbery, rape and murder.
The Bugs and Meyer Mob
During adolescence, Siegel befriended Meyer Lansky, who applied a brilliant intellect to forming a small mob whose activities expanded to illegal gambling and car theft. Lansky, who had already had a run-in with Charles "Lucky" Luciano, saw a need for the Jewish boys of his Brooklyn neighborhood to organize in the same manner as the Italians and the Irish. The first person he recruited for his gang was Siegel.Siegel became involved in bootlegging within several major East Coast cities. He also worked as a hitman whom Lansky hired out to other crime families. The two formed the Bugs and Meyer Mob, which handled hits for the various bootleg gangs operating in New York and New Jersey, doing so almost a decade before Murder, Inc. was formed. The gang kept themselves busy by hijacking the liquor cargoes of rival outfits, and were known to be responsible for the killing and removal of several rival gangland figures. Siegel's gang-mates included Abner "Longie" Zwillman, Louis "Lepke" Buchalter and Lansky's brother, Jake; Joseph "Doc" Stacher, another member of the Bugs and Meyer Mob, recalled to Lansky biographers that Siegel was fearless and saved his friends' lives as the mob moved into bootlegging:
Siegel was also a boyhood friend to Al Capone; when there was a warrant for Capone's arrest on a murder charge, Siegel allowed him to hide out with an aunt.
Siegel first smoked opium during his youth and was involved in the drug trade. By age 21, he was making enough money to purchase an apartment at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel and a Tudor home in Scarsdale, New York. He also wore flashy clothes and participated in New York City's night life.
From May 13 to 16, 1929, Lansky and Siegel attended the Atlantic City Conference, representing the Bugs and Meyer Mob. Luciano and former Chicago South Side Gang leader Johnny Torrio held the conference at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Atlantic City, New Jersey. At the conference, the two men discussed the future of organized crime and the future structure of the Mafia families: Siegel stated, "The yids and the dagos will no longer fight each other."
Marriage and family
On January 28, 1929, Siegel married Esta Krakower, his childhood sweetheart. They had two daughters, Millicent Siegel and Barbara Siegel. Siegel had a reputation as a womanizer and the marriage ended in 1946.Affairs
While married, Siegel womanized with Ketti Gallian, Wendy Barrie, Marie "The Body" MacDonald, and Virginia Hill.Murder, Incorporated
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 allegedly were 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 to murder Salvatore Maranzano in his New York office, establishing Luciano's rise to the top of the Mafia and marking the beginning of modern American organized crime.Following Maranzano's death, Luciano and Lansky formed the National Crime Syndicate, an organization of crime families that brought order to the underworld. The Commission, the Mafia's governing body, was established for dividing the families' territories and preventing future gang wars. With his associates, Siegel formed Murder, Inc. After he and Lansky moved on, control over Murder, Inc. was ceded to Buchalter and Anastasia, although Siegel continued working as a hitman. Siegel's only conviction was in Miami: on February 28, 1932, he was arrested for gambling and vagrancy, and, from a roll of bills, paid a $100 fine.
During this period, Siegel got into a dispute with the Fabrizzo brothers, associates of Waxey Gordon. Gordon had hired the brothers from prison after Lansky and Siegel gave the IRS information about Gordon's tax evasion, resulting in Gordon's imprisonment in 1933. Siegel hunted down and killed the Fabrizzos after they made an assassination attempt on him and Lansky by penetrating Siegel's heavily fortified suite at the Waldorf Astoria with a bomb. After the deaths of his two brothers, Tony Fabrizzo had begun to write a memoir and gave it to an attorney. One of the longest chapters was to be a section on the nationwide kill-for-hire squad led by Siegel. However, the mob discovered Tony's plans before he could carry them out. In 1932, after checking into a hospital to establish an alibi and later sneaking out, Siegel joined two accomplices in approaching Tony's house and, posing as detectives to lure him outside, gunned him down. In 1935, Siegel assisted in Luciano's alliance with Dutch Schultz and killed rival loan shark brothers Louis "Pretty" Amberg and Joseph Amberg.
California
Siegel had learned from his associates that he was in danger: his hospital alibi had become questionable and his enemies wanted him dead. In response, the Mafia sent Siegel to California and assigned him with developing syndicate-sanctioned gambling rackets with Los Angeles family boss Jack Dragna. Once in Los Angeles, Siegel recruited gangster Mickey Cohen as his chief lieutenant. Knowing Siegel's reputation for violence, and that he was backed by Lansky and Lucianowho, from prison, sent word to Dragna that it was "in best interest to cooperate"Dragna accepted a subordinate role. On tax returns, Siegel claimed to earn his living through legal gambling at Santa Anita Park. He soon took over Los Angeles's numbers racket and used money from the syndicate to help establish a drug trade route from Mexico and organized circuits with the Chicago Outfit's wire services.By 1942, $500,000 a day was coming from the syndicate's bookmaking wire operations. In 1946, because of problems with Siegel, the Outfit took over the Continental Press and gave their percentage of the racing wire to Dragna, infuriating Siegel. Despite his complications with the wire services, Siegel controlled several offshore casinos and a major prostitution ring. He also maintained relationships with politicians, businessmen, attorneys, accountants and lobbyists who fronted for him.
Hollywood
In Hollywood, Siegel was welcomed in the highest circles and befriended movie stars. He was known to associate with George Raft, Clark Gable, Gary Cooper and Cary Grant, as well as studio executives Louis B. Mayer and Jack L. Warner. Actress Jean Harlow was a friend of Siegel and godmother to his daughter Millicent. Siegel purchased real estate and threw lavish parties at his Beverly Hills home. He gained admiration from young celebrities, including Tony Curtis, Phil Silvers and Frank Sinatra.Siegel had several relationships with prominent women, including socialite Countess Dorothy di Frasso. The alliance with the countess took Siegel to Italy in 1938, where he met Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, to whom Siegel tried to sell weapons. Siegel also met Nazi leaders Hermann Göring and Joseph Goebbels, to whom he took an instant dislike and later offered to kill. He only relented because of the countess's anxious pleas.
In Hollywood, Siegel worked with the syndicate to form illegal rackets. He devised a plan of extorting movie studios; he would take over local trade unions and stage strikes to force studios to pay him off so that the unions would start working again. Siegel borrowed money from celebrities and did not pay them back, knowing that they would never ask him for the money. During his first year in Hollywood, he received more than $400,000 in loans from movie stars.