JUNE 20, 1947
BEVERLY HILLS, CALIFORNIA
10:45 P.M.
Bugsy Siegel is finally able to relax.
It has been a grueling Friday and the charismatic Jewish mobster is looking forward to a weekend of peace and quiet. “Ben,” as he likes to be called by his friends, flew in from Las Vegas just after midnight—then spent the day in meetings. He had dinner with film producer Allen Smiley at a fish restaurant south of Santa Monica. Now the married Siegel, whose wife has just filed for divorce in Nevada, sits on the couch in his mistress’s rented Beverly Hills mansion, reading the Los Angeles Times’ early edition. That mistress, the volatile redheaded Virginia “Ginny” Hill, flew to Paris several days ago. A few months back Siegel hit the thirty-year-old Alabama native so hard she required plastic surgery. Their relationship has not been the same since.
Siegel believes Virginia Hill has traveled to France to select wines for his new casino. But that is not the case. For years, Ginny Hill has played the role of a courtesan for the Chicago Mob, unbeknownst to Siegel. A couple of weeks ago, a Chicago mobster “suggested” she get out of Los Angeles for a while.
Hill left immediately.
Also in the house with Bugsy Siegel and Allen Smiley are Ginny’s brother, Chuck, and his girlfriend, Jerri Mason. The two later testify that Bugsy seemed to be in “good spirits” while enjoying the rented pink, seven-bedroom, Moorish-style mansion.
Troubles with his mistress and wife notwithstanding, life is finally settling down for the forty-one-year-old Siegel. His tremendous wealth and fondness for publicity have made the handsome, blue-eyed, nattily attired mobster a regular fixture in New York and Los Angeles gossip columns. Taking the bold risk of developing the high-class Flamingo Hotel has only heightened Siegel’s image as a charismatic gangster playboy. His appearance and mannerisms have become so recognizable to the American public that the Warner Bros. movie studio recently released a Looney Tunes cartoon in which Bugs Bunny briefly impersonates a mobster who looks and acts like Siegel.1
But the truth about Bugsy Siegel is much darker than a cartoon. He is prone to arrogance and streaks of rage. Born of poor Austro-Hungarian immigrants, Siegel began roaming the streets of New York as a child. He made his reputation in the youth gangs of Brooklyn, forming an alliance with Meyer Lansky at the age of twelve. A hair-trigger temper and penchant for violence earned young Benjamin Siegel the name he would carry the rest of his life, that of Bugs—as in “crazy as a bedbug.”
It is a name Siegel loathes, thus ensuring that no one calls him Bugs to his face.
Together, Siegel and Lansky became the Bugs and Meyer Gang, extorting pushcart vendors for protection money and otherwise competing with the Italian and Irish gangs for control of the street action. But those rivalries subsided as the two men grew older, and by their mid-twenties both were working in alliance with Lucky Luciano and the more powerful Italian families.
In time, Bugsy Siegel establishes himself as a hit man, engaging in several famous murders. Although Siegel’s actual number of hits is in question, it is known that he worked alongside killers like Albert Anastasia, Vito Genovese, and Luciano himself in the brutal world of Murder, Incorporated. While developing the Flamingo, he even startles his construction supervisor by making a joke about Mafia killings. When Del Webb blanches at the comment, Siegel calms him by stating, “Relax. We only murder our own.”
Though the Bugs and Meyer Gang prospers enough for Siegel to own an apartment in Manhattan’s Waldorf Astoria hotel, his notoriety soon brings FBI scrutiny. So, in 1936, at the suggestion of Meyer Lansky, Siegel moves to Los Angeles. The Mob is expanding from its traditional bases in New York, Chicago, and Cleveland, and Siegel quickly acts to take control of West Coast Mafia activity.
Working in conjunction with Mickey Cohen, a five-foot, five-inch former featherweight boxer and onetime enforcer for Al Capone in Chicago, Siegel oversees gambling, prostitution, off-track betting, and narcotics in California. A close friendship with famous actor George Raft, a fellow son of Jewish immigrant parents, allows Siegel to cultivate Hollywood. He soon pals around with actors Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, and Cary Grant.
Siegel’s fondness for excitement leads him to a number of ill-fated schemes—including one that would have sold arms to Italian dictator Benito Mussolini.
But now, far-fetched scenarios are put aside. Bugsy Siegel’s entire fortune hangs on the Flamingo Hotel.
Casinos and hotels already existed in Las Vegas, beginning soon after the state legalized gaming in 1931. Among the first was a gambling-only joint called the Pair-O-Dice Club. This was soon followed by accommodations like El Rancho Vegas and Last Frontier Hotel. Soon, the roadway connecting them became known as the Las Vegas Strip. And it was here that Bugsy Siegel envisioned his gambling mecca. He soon begins spending time in Las Vegas, dining with local politicians in order to curry favor.
But Siegel’s criminal past is too well known. His attempt to purchase a ramshackle casino named the El Cortez is denied by city officials. Then Bugsy hears that a casino development led by Billy Wilkerson, founder of the Hollywood Reporter magazine, is just outside the city limits but running short of funds. Masquerading as a potential investor, Siegel purchases a two-thirds stake in what will eventually become the Flamingo. Within a short period of time, he takes complete control.
Bugsy Siegel names his newly acquired resort after girlfriend Virginia Hill, whose shapely legs remind him of those pink, long-limbed Florida birds.
But be careful what you wish for. Years of construction woes take a heavy toll on Siegel, straining his relationship with longtime allies Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky, with whom he often becomes irritable and short-tempered. Siegel does not know about the Havana Conference or how close he is to losing his life because of the Flamingo’s cost overruns. He is also unaware that Meyer Lansky has temporarily saved him—buying time for Siegel to pay back the Mafia investment.
Lansky’s plan does indeed save his friend’s life. The Flamingo reopens in mid-March. By June, it is turning a profit, bringing in millions each month. Siegel has begun paying back the Mafia loans, instantly cashing out anyone who requests immediate reimbursement. The casino is packed each night, the spa is getting rave reviews, and most of the 105 rooms are booked. In addition, the showroom has become a Las Vegas entertainment centerpiece.
So Bugsy Siegel is now comfortable spending time away from the resort, enjoying a quiet evening of dinner and light reading. He knows the FBI is watching him and that his international narcotics empire with dealers in Mexico is attracting the attention of Harry Anslinger and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. Yet he seems unconcerned because success is what Bugsy Siegel is all about.
In his whole life, Siegel has never been convicted of a major crime or been held accountable in any way for his violent behavior. He is wealthier and more famous than John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd, and Baby Face Nelson combined. In fact, if any mobster’s life can be considered charmed, it is that of Bugsy Siegel.
Or so he thinks.
A man needs to be careful around Virginia Hill.
Beautiful, voluptuous, and bipolar, the daughter of a backcountry southern mule trader first learned the power of her body when she became sexually active at the young age of twelve. By fourteen the future “Queen of the Mob” is married to a man named George Rogers, whose fate is lost to history. By seventeen she is living in Chicago, working as a waitress at the San Carlo Italian Village during the World’s Fair. There, she catches the eye of mobster Joe Epstein. The bookmaker is gay but sees Hill’s good looks and southern drawl as a potential asset to the Outfit. “Once that girl is under your skin it’s like a cancer. It’s incurable,” Epstein later confides to Meyer Lansky.
Virginia Hill quickly becomes the sexual plaything of the Chicago Mob, passed from Mafioso to Mafioso. At a Christmas party in 1936, she shocks onlookers by performing oral sex on at least a half dozen gangsters.
By age twenty, Virginia Hill is Joe Epstein’s personal spy. Dressed in jewels and furs, she flies back and forth from Chicago to New York to gather information about the East Coast crime business. She sleeps with Joey Adonis during that period but is soon distracted by the man with whom she will have a torrid decade-long romance: Bugsy Siegel.
Ginny Hill is not completely faithful to Siegel during their time together, at one point marrying and divorcing Mexican rumba dancer Carlos Gonzalez and then nineteen-year-old college football player Ossie Griffith, all the while funding her lavish lifestyle by accepting money from Epstein. She dabbles in running her own Mexican narcotics outfit, but her specialty continues to be performing sexual favors to gain privileged information.
And silence. Chicago mobster Jack Dragna once comments that Hill is “the only woman who can be trusted to keep her mouth shut.”
Virginia Hill considers Bugsy Siegel her main lover, even though the gangster often beats her so hard she bruises. During one fight in 1944 he punches, then rapes her when she refuses sex. Hill later attempts suicide, swallowing a bottle of sleeping pills, her life barely saved when Siegel rushes her to a Las Vegas hospital to have her stomach pumped.
Siegel and Hill often argue violently, dreadful bouts of screaming and swearing easily overheard by neighbors during otherwise quiet Beverly Hills nights. Yet she loves Siegel enough to risk her life for him, flying to Switzerland with the money he has skimmed from the Flamingo, then depositing the hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash into a private, unmarked Swiss bank account. Siegel talks to her about one day leaving the United States to enjoy all of the money in Europe—and she believes him.
Still, Ginny breaks up with Bugsy time and again and swears that she despises Las Vegas—even punching a Flamingo cigarette girl in the face when she catches Siegel flirting, sending blond Betty Dexter to Clark County Hospital with two broken vertebra. All the while, Hill listens carefully to each word Siegel says, then reports back to Joe Epstein.
On June 8, 1947, Epstein orders Virginia Hill to immediately catch a plane to Chicago. She will later tell authorities she left Los Angeles due to “a lover’s quarrel.” From Chicago, Hill flies to Paris, leaving the seven-thousand-square-foot rented home at 810 North Linden Drive in Beverly Hills available should Bugsy Siegel wish to take a weekend break from Las Vegas and the Flamingo.
Twelve days later, Siegel takes her up on the offer.
Now, the living-room window just four feet to his right, Siegel throws his left arm over the back of the couch as he reads the Times. A terra-cotta statue of Bacchus, the Roman god of intoxication, stands atop a nearby grand piano. An oil portrait of a nude woman holding a wineglass hangs on the wall.
The curtains are open. A reading lamp illuminates Bugsy Siegel’s face.
At that very moment, mobsters Moe Sedway and Gus Greenbaum of the New York Mafia have just arrived in Las Vegas. They have orders from Meyer Lansky and the Luciano Family to enter the Flamingo’s offices and take control of the operation.
In Chicago, Virginia Hill’s puppet master, Joe Epstein, is just hours away from catching a morning flight to Las Vegas to assist in the Flamingo’s “reorganization.”
In Paris, Virginia Hill has plans to party into the morning hours on board a luxury houseboat on the river Seine.
Back in Beverly Hills, the night is almost pitch-black, illuminated by the thinnest of crescent moons. Outside the living-room window, a shooter stands on the neighbor’s driveway, steadying his .30-caliber military-style M1 carbine against a latticework fence covered in roses. The nearest streetlight is a hundred yards away, ensuring the assassin works in complete concealment.
The gunman is fewer than ten feet from Bugsy Siegel as he pulls the trigger.
Nine times.
Siegel is dead before he can feel the agony of steel-jacketed bullets tearing into his skull.
Of the nine shots fired, one goes through the fabric of Allen Smiley’s suit jacket. Instantly, the producer drops to the floor and cowers.
Four other shots miss, destroying the statue of Bacchus and piercing the nude portrait on the wall. These shots are intentionally errant, keeping Smiley pinned to the floor long after the assassin makes his getaway.
Two bullets strike Siegel in the torso. These are not fatal.
Nor is the round that enters Bugsy’s right cheek and exits through the left side of his neck.
However, the slug penetrating Siegel’s face at the base of his nose then entering his brain with such force that his left eye is popped from its socket immediately kills the gangster.
The bullet casings found outside are two inches long. Given that the shots are taken from such close range, there is little chance the assassin could have missed. Los Angeles police will later conclude that the killer is a marksman, leading some to believe that Virginia Hill’s brother, a marine based an hour south at Camp Pendleton, is the shooter.
Others will say the New York Mafia is tired of Siegel’s behavior and is finally completing the hit Meyer Lansky successfully argued against in Havana six months ago.
To this day, no one knows who exactly killed Bugsy Siegel. However, shortly after the assassination, Meyer Lansky expanded his operations, eventually becoming the most powerful force in the Vegas gambling world.
As for Virginia Hill, she soon married a ski instructor and moved to Sun Valley, Idaho. However, that didn’t last long and Miss Hill eventually returned to Europe.
But even though she was trying to escape the Mafia world, Virginia Hill could not bring herself to separate from the Mob.
And the consequences would be staggering.