Las Vegas was still a stop-over in the desert until casinos opened along the highway from Los Angels and the area became known as the Las Vegas Strip. That happened after Bugsy Siegel came to town.Prior to the 1940's, Las Vegas casinos were centered in downtown, but the Mob already had a grip on the casinos there by the mid-40's.

Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel was born in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, New York on Feb.


28, 1906. He had a tough up-bringing and spent most of his time ditching school and hanging out on the street. He wasn't a likable kid. He was skinny, tough, and uneducated, but he was learning all the time. Learning to roll drunks, learning to steal from merchant's carts, and learning who to trust.

Siegel ran with a gang of street-kids through the boroughs and took the occasional beating, but by the time he was 12 it was the newly-named "Bugsy" who usually administered the beatings. He didn't care about his enemies, he only cared about himself and a few crooks he hung with.

At 14, Bugsy had progressed to burglary and extortion, and was happy to spend his money on nice clothes, taxi-rides, and gambling. While pushing his way into a street-corner craps game a fight broke out and Siegel found himself fighting over a gun with a fellow gang-member named Meyer Lansky. They knew each other, maybe respected each other, but this was the big time: a gun!

Meyer was the older of the two, and while Bugsy implored "I need that gun," as they ran from police whistles, Lansky held-tight to the firearm.

The two kids stayed together, and grew to manhood as members of their own all-Jewish group eventually dubbed the Bugs and Meyer Mob..

It was the Roaring '20's, and boy did the partners roar. They made book, they stole and sold booze, and they took their women whenever they could. Meyer was more reserved, Siegel a growing ladies man, and when his charms and fine clothes weren't enough, his threats and intimidation were. Eventually their reputation grew past Brooklyn to New York City, where the real mobsters were.

Siegel and Lansky worked for Arnold Rothstein's men, then with Frank Costello and Charlie "Lucky" Luciano. The money they made with smuggled booze was insane. So was Bugsy. As a true sociopath, Siegel always got the job done, even if it took a gun. His reputation was so good that he was "loaned-out" to former Brooklyn native Al Capone in Chicago. When he was back in New York, his talents were put to use too.

Frank Costello (future boss of the Genovese Family) directed Lansky to kill current Mob boss Joe Masseria, Meyer took the order and sent Joey Adonis, Albert Anastasia,Vito Genovese and Bugsy to handle the heavy work. They did, no problem.

Bugsy was eventually involved in more than a dozen Mob hits, and pushed his way into any business he thought was worth the effort. Gambling (especially slot machines) and drugs seemed to be where the money was after the repeal of Prohibition, and with a growing reputation with the police and the FBI, the New York Mob sent Siegel out west, without his wife Esta, who stayed in Scarsdale, NY.

On the coast, Bugsy mingled with Hollywood big-shots, extorted $100,000 from studio heads with a threat and a pat on the back for loans he never repaid, and bought the Santa Anita horse race track. He also negotiated drug-trafficking with the Chicago Outfit and Mexican Nationals, busted every bookie joint he could find and demanded a hefty share of their profits.

Las Vegas Booms

Bugsy didn't even like Las Vegas. It was too small, too hot, and too far from the real action of Hollywood and Beverly Hills, but it did have plenty of small casinos. When Siegel took-over the Trans-Union race wire through Chicago he needed every California bookie and Nevada casino to pay for his services (the wire gave early forecasts and official results for horse races and sporting events across the country).

Eventually the Trans-Union was netting him more than $25,000 a week, and he moved into ownership of the Las Vegas Club and then the El Cortez casino in the downtown area. He also took a piece of the Golden Nugget, setting up an office to run the race book.By that time the FBI was listening to everything he said, with wires in several places, including his offices at the Las Vegas Club and his suites at the Last Frontier, where he and Moe Sedway had muscled their way into.

Siegel shared a portion of what he considered his Las Vegas with Meyer Lansky and the bosses back home in New York, but he never really thought they controlled him. He made his own decisions and lived the way he wanted. By the mid-1940's he was getting divorced, living with Virginia Hill, and beating anyone that stood in his way.

The Las Vegas Strip

The money in Las Vegas was good, but the town still didn't have the glamor of Hollywood, and the locals weren't the kind of people Bugsy Siegel wanted to hang out with, but he was happy to take money from the occasional high-roller, like Los Angeles Hollywood Reporter owner Billy Wilkerson, who lost more than $100,000 to the clubs downtown in a two-year period (when a new car was $900 and a small house in town was $3,000.

According to Vegas and the Mob, Wilkerson figured the only way to beat-'em was to join-'em, so he leased the casino at the Last Frontier for six months and tried to be an owner instead of a player. It didn't go according to plan, but he did figure maybe he should build his own Hollywood-style hotel right on the Los Angeles Highway by the Last Frontier and the El Rancho Vegas.

He talked people like Howard Hughes into investing money in his venture,but Wilkerson wasn't a builder or contractor, and his dreams almost crashed before Bugsy Siegel offered to partner-up with him. By that time, strangely enough, Wilkerson had managed to lose more than $300,000 at the craps tables down at the El Cortez. Were the dice loaded?

It was 1945 and materials were hard to come by for building, but Siegel had the right friends, like Nevada's US Senator Pat McCarran, who arranged priority lists to allow the coming Flamingo hotel to get whatever it needed.

Unfortunately, while Siegel was a demanding task-manager and scared everyone from local residents to his building contractor Del Webb, he wasn't a great businessman. While he signed for supplies and promised payment as the trucks rolled-in at 6am, some of the same materials rolled out the back before being signed for again the next day.

The building was supposed to run a slightly-expensive $1.5 million, but when it hit $3 million, Bugsy pushed his partner Wilkerson for a new deal, a stock-partnership with new investors, who late found they had virtually no say in how the money was being spent, or in running the property. By mid-year 1946 the Flamingo was a financial disaster, unfinished, and at least a million dollars short. Siegel secured more funds from the Mob in New York, pushing his luck as the dollars mounted, and also secured additional loans from several investment firms.

The opening was set for New Year's Eve 1946, but the rooms weren't finished. While the casino and restaurant did manage to open on December 26, Bugsy had little luck getting his Hollywood friends to fly into Vegas when a winter storm grounded his fleet of Constellations on the tarmac in Los Angeles.

Hollywood star George Raft did make it, and so did the showroom's opening act of Jimmy Durante, the Xavier Cugat Band, and "Baby" Rosemarie. The club was half-empty through the first, but managed to loose $300,000. The dealers and Pit Bosses weren't necessarily on Bugsy's side, as money seemed to find cracks in every floorboard. After the horrible opening, the club was closed so the rest of the property could be finished. Frank Costello in New York wasn't happy. Neither was Meyer Lansky, the Mob's financial genius, he knew the issues: money going to workers, money going to false billing, and money going to Switzerland in Virginia Hill's suitcases!

The hotel was eventually finished and reopened, but while Siegel's underground casinos in Los Angeles made money and his clubs in downtown Vegas were booking big winners, the Flamingo couldn't seem to make a profit. Siegel found himself nearly half-a-million in debt and no way to dig his way out, especially with Chicago saying he was through as the operator of the Trans-Union race wire.

Siegel wrote several rubber checks, knowing his contractors would have to give him more time, but the clock was ticking. The Mob didn't have the patience the contractors did, and at a meeting in Cuba, Mob Don Lucky Luciano told Meyer Lansky that time had run out. Two weeks later the end came for Bugsy Siegel.

While sitting on a couch and reading a newspaper at Virginia Hills home in Beverly Hills, a gunman (most likely Frankie Carbo) pumped a half-dozen shots through the window an caught the once handsome Siegel in the chest and head. The impact left one of his eyeballs across the living room by the fireplace.

Minutes later, after the hit was confirmed, Gus Greenbaum, Davie Berman and Morris Rosen strolled into the Flamingo and took-over operations. Nobody said a word in the casino.Eventually the club began to generate enough income to allow a healthy skim of the profits to make their way through Meyer Lanksy to bosses in New York, Chicago, Kansas City and Miami.

Strangely enough, while Las Vegas has gone through several transformations and casinos and owners have come and gone, the three properties controlled by Siegel still stand:the Flamingo, the El Cortez and the Las Vegas Club!