Slain Vegas casino kingpin was a notorious mob boss
JUNE 20, 1947
The Jewish and Italian mobs agreed to co-operate
YOU may not think it as you feed the slots or queue to see Celine Dion.
But the man largely responsible for making Las Vegas such a hot ticket was a merciless gangster who also formed Murder, Inc.
This was the “enforcement arm” of the notorious National Crime Syndicate that carried out up to 1000 contract killings.
And the man in question was one Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, the handsome and charismatic hoodlum who became one of the first front-page celebrity mobsters.
One of the most feared hoods, Siegel served as a hitman and hired muscle noted for his prowess with guns and violence, but graduated to running his own operations before being gunned down on June 20, 1947, aged just 41.
As a teen, Siegel was already running his own protection racket before being recruited by Meyer Lansky who’d seen a need for the Jewish boys of their Brooklyn neighbourhood to organise themselves in the same manner as the Italian and Irish gangs.
They moved into bootlegging and the “Bugs and Meyer Mob” became known for hijacking rival outfits’ liquor consignments and ruthlessly getting rid of rivals.
Lansky knew notorious Sicilian mobster “Lucky” Luciano of old, while Siegel was a boyhood friend of Al Capone, and these links helped them set up the 1929 Atlantic City Conference which set out the future of organised crime.
It was agreed the Jewish and Italian mobs would co-operate rather than feud, an agreement that would soon lead to the National Syndicate and Siegel’s killers-for-hire squad.
But Bugsy’s activities on the East Coast earned him enemies, and it was decided he’d move to California where he’d be safer and could develop lucrative gambling rackets.
So he moved his wife and two daughters to LA where he started to live the high life.
Siegel was seen out and about with Clark Gable, Gary Cooper and Cary Grant while Jean Harlow was godmother to one of his girls, and he threw lavish parties at his Beverly Hills home which Tony Curtis and Frank Sinatra would attend.
In 1942, the mobster beat a murder rap after the death of two state witnesses, but he decided to become a legitimate businessman and turned his eyes to Vegas.
There, he took over the Flamingo Hotel and set the pattern for all future casino moguls.
But he overspent wildly fitting out the Flamingo, and the anticipated high-rollers stayed away while the thousands of ordinary vacationers Siegel thought would come to the Strip were still a few years off. The casino closed with huge debts.
Six months later, Siegel was shot several times sitting in a girlfriend’s home.