Bugsy Siegel's Fabulous Dream

Listen: A cold wind is blowing through the desert night. It is blowing from the western mountains beyond Las Vegas, blowing across the icy waters behind Hoover Dam, blowing down blind canyons, combing trees and chaparral. In this wind there is nothing of the warm, damp Pacific slopes, no verdant green, no salt off the vast sea. This wind is dry and lean and hard. It does not celebrate the human. But if you stand back from the neon and the traffic, if you find some barren patch beyond the action, you might hear the wind whisper the name of a man long gone.

A man named Ben Siegel.

A man nobody on earth ever called Bugsy except the cops and those tough old fakers who wrote for the tabloids.

In all the places touched by the desert wind, few have heard the name of Ben Siegel. In the great casinos, lit by a billion light bulbs, the tables are jammed with conventions of losers: crapshooters in polyester suits and old ladies with Dixie cups lumpy with quarters, tough dolls with rouged cheeks and pale boys on the lam from life. They never heard of Ben Siegel. Nor have the cowboys playing blackjack, the Frenchmen at the baccarat (continued on page 130) Bugsy Siegel (continued from page 104) tables, the bust-outs marking keno cards, the drawn, tense men staring at the roulette wheels or the flickering numbers of the sports book. There are thick, pink Germans in Bermuda shorts, hookers from London, Arabs plump with oil money, groups of Japanese men with grave, worried faces. Ben Siegel means nothing to any of them.

But Las Vegas is his truest monument. He invented the place. That garish skyline, those ten thousand blinking, popping, humming electric signs defying the night, defying time's passage, were imagined first by Ben Siegel. Today, the signs, the casinos, the millions of visitors are proof of the creed by which Siegel lived his short and dangerous life: Sin is more profitable than virtue.

More than four decades after his death, there is no monument to Ben Siegel on the Strip. In the schoolrooms of Las Vegas, nobody speaks his name. The present caretakers of his gaudy vision want to create the illusion of perpetual all-American respectability. They want you to believe that Las Vegas was the invention of cowboys and businessmen and Rotarians, not of Ben Siegel. Not some Jewish gangster the papers called Bugsy, for God's sake.

But the ghosts know. Ghosts of dead hoodlums. Ghosts of old losers. Ghosts of forgotten women. Ghosts of bootleggers and hit men, comedians and jugglers, crooners and horn players. They knew the real story. They knew Ben Siegel and would never forget him.

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After his vision of Las Vegas rose from the sand, Ben Siegel became the stuff of legend. After his brutally violent death, the legend of Bugsy was told in all the histories of the Mob and in movie after movie. Warren Beatty appears in the latest version of the tale, starring in a movie directed by Barry Levinson. I wrote my own fictional version of the dark and fabulous legend a few years ago in a three-hour television drama called The Neon Empire. But no writer, no film maker seems able to exhaust the subject. The reason is simple: The ballad of Bugsy Siegel deals with all the universal themes. It is punctuated with an almost operatic death, but it most certainly doesn't end there. It ends with a vision grandly realized after the visionary's death. It has everything--sex, money, violence and hubris.

With the legend looming so large, it is difficult to separate the facts of the man's life from the legend. We do know that Benjamin Siegel was born in New York City on February 28, 1906, and that he grew up in Williamsburg, a tough Brooklyn neighborhood of factories and tenements across the East River from downtown Manhattan. Almost every resident of Williamsburg had one goal: escape. And the quickest way out was across the Williamsburg Bridge, completed in 1903. This ugly span connected Brooklyn to the Jewish slums of the Lower East Side. Past those slums, across Manhattan and the Hudson, lay America.

When Siegel was a child, he was called Benjy. He was the second of five children born to parents who had arrived in America from eastern Europe in 1903. In many ways, they must have felt at home in Williamsburg, which was a kind of shtetl within the larger city. Outside their neighborhood, however, they were anything but welcome. Benjy must have known about bigotry close at hand from the Irish and Italian gangs in Williamsburg, the tough guys from Havemeyer Street, the hoods from Bridge Plaza. In school he heard the platitudes about America, but in the streets he learned quite a different lesson.

Many Jews accepted these conditions as unfortunate facts of life; they shrugged and went on living, hoping for better lives for their children. Others refused to accept. They read the Yiddish-language Forward or the Freiheit and embraced socialism or militant trade unionism. Some turned to crime. By 1910, the old image of the Jew as passive and docile was finished forever.

All of this must have affected young Ben Siegel. He was intelligent and quick and, as he grew into adolescence, he became a handsome man with dark hair and blue eyes. By all accounts, he had considerable charm. But he was also given to sudden anger and violent rage. This is not surprising. During my own childhood in the slums of Brooklyn, the angriest, most violent young men were also among the most intelligent. They saw injustice and hypocrisy more clearly than others, so their furies were more explosive; some of them later became gangsters. So did Ben Siegel.

He saw a world where only the oratory was splendid. The tenements were filled with rats and roaches. On summer nights, the poor slept on fire escapes while the foul stench of Newtown Creek stained the air. Horses died in the summer heat; their bodies soon swelled and bloated and kids used them as trampolines. In schools, children had their heads shaved to prevent ringworm and lice. Tuberculosis was everywhere. The centerpiece of most kitchens was a bathtub covered with a metal top. After he became famous, Ben Siegel was said to shower four times a day. But there are some things about poverty that can never be washed away.

Siegel was 11 when the United States entered World War One. The city boomed as the garment industry began manufacturing uniforms and tents and shipping them along with other war materiel through the great port. People like Siegel's parents made the clothing; tough guys made the money.

At some point during the war, young Siegel met two men who were to change American life. One was Charles "Lucky" Luciano, then a smart, hard teenager in Little Italy. The other was a man named Maier Suchowljansky. He was four years older than Siegel and had arrived at Ellis Island from Russia with his mother and younger brother in 1911. He became better known as Meyer Lansky.

Lansky was an A student in the grammar schools of Brownsville and the Lower East Side, a reader of books from the Educational Alliance, a gifted man with numbers. In a different era, he might have been successful in almost any business. But Lansky and his friend Siegel were unwilling to serve long apprenticeships or live humble lives of self-sacrifice. They were drawn instead to the rackets. Whatever America had to offer, Siegel and Lansky wanted it now. And in 1919, the prevailing American hypocrisy gave them their opportunity. That year, Congress passed the absurd 18th Amendment, prohibiting liquor sales. Americans thought they could legislate morals; instead, they created the Mob.

Siegel and Lansky didn't start at the top of their craft. As teenaged apprentices, they did small jobs, taking paydays where they could find them: burglaries, collecting for loan sharks, providing tough young muscle for booze smugglers. Lansky was smart and resourceful and understood the new technology of the day--automobile engines. He was soon operating out of a garage on Cannon Street on the Lower East Side with Ben Siegel as his partner. Lansky was not above (continued on page 150) Bugsy Siegel (continued from page 130) using violence in those days. But Siegel had a true gift for applied aggression. Any weapon would do: fists, feet, lead pipes or guns.

At one point, Siegel was a cabdriver, probably out of Lansky's garage, most likely as a cover for delivering rotgut to prized customers. He certainly wasn't driving a cab to make a living; one biographer claims that Siegel handed out business cards to the guzzlers.

But Prohibition wasn't simply a time for home delivery. In their campaign to escape from the ghetto, Lansky and Siegel had larger ambitions. They even had what is now called a role model: a suave gambler named Arnold Rothstein. Before the war, Rothstein had perfected the alliance between racket guys and politicians in the belief that crime was a business like any other. It followed one basic rule of capitalism: You had to spend money to make money. The more you spent on the corruption of politicians, cops and judges, the more you would make later. You followed the rules of the market, giving the customers what they wanted. Image was important: You dressed carefully, you had good manners, you kept your word, you recruited younger men in an intelligent way. Public violence should be avoided; it was bad for business.

By the time Rothstein was murdered in 1928, the gangster style had been set, and nobody personified it better than Siegel. As he and Lansky moved up from protecting cargo to running their own bootlegging network, the money rolled in. The boys moved uptown. Siegel began to dress elegantly. He moved through the rowdy nightside of New York with showgirls or fancy hookers on his arm and was greeted like a young prince in the speak-easies. He carried a thick roll of cash and moved into a suite in the Waldorf Astoria, a few floors below Charlie Lucky. Park Avenue, at last. No more roaches. No more bathtub in the kitchen. Ben Siegel had escaped from Williamsburg. He was never going back.

There were some minor detours. Siegel was arrested in Philadelphia for carrying a concealed pistol but jumped bail and never returned. Mysteriously, the cops in Philly sent his mug shot to New York but never asked for Siegel's extradition. In 1929, he was arrested again in New York. This time the charge was more serious: dealing heroin. But Siegel's luck held. The charge was dismissed, this time for lack of evidence.

Throughout his career, Siegel had a way of avoiding the jailhouse. As Boss Tweed once remarked, it's better to know the judge than to know the law.

The same year that he was arrested on the drug charge, Siegel married Estelle Krakower. Lansky also chose to marry, taking Anne Citron for his bride. The two friends decided to have a combined ceremony, with Ben and Meyer serving as best man for each other. Marriage was a big change in Siegel's life. He had to plan his moves beyond Saturday night. As always, Lansky led the way.

On May 13th, Lansky traveled to Atlantic City for a national convention of major hoodlums, usually considered the constitutional convention of the Mob. The hoods began to plan for the inevitable end of the noble experiment. Some even talked about setting up a fund for going legitimate. "After all," Luciano asked, "who knows more about the liquor business than us?"

Urged on by Lansky, who wanted his friend to settle into a less-flamboyant style, Siegel sought a piece of legitimacy himself. He bought a Tudor-style home in Scarsdale, the exclusive suburb just above New York City. When Wall Street laid its famous egg, some of Siegel's neighbors leaped out of windows in downtown Manhattan. But for a while, Siegel only got richer. Estelle soon gave birth to a daughter named Millicent, followed two years later by Barbara.

The mask of bourgeois respectability didn't even slip on April 15, 1931, when Siegel took part in one of the most significant murders in Mob history. That day, at the Nuovo Villa Tammaro in Coney Island, Luciano dined with Joe "the Boss" Masseria, the last of the old-time mustache Petes. At one point, Luciano excused himself and went to the men's room. In walked Siegel and three other men. They blasted Masseria into eternity. Outside, the driver of the getaway car froze in panic at the wheel. Siegel shoved him aside and drove the hit men back to Manhattan. He had plenty of time for dinner in Scarsdale.

Then on November 12, 1931, the cops raided a conference at the Hotel Franconia on West 72nd Street and, for the first time, Siegel's name appeared in a New York newspaper. He was in the company of eight men, including Louis "Lepke" Buchalter, Harry "Big Greenie" Greenberg, Jacob "Gurrah" Shapiro and Joseph "Doc" Stacher. These were some of the most murderous hoodlums in the history of the Mob. A few years later they would become famous as executives of Murder, Inc.

But on that evening in 1931, the cops had nothing on any of them. They were photographed in their overcoats and wide-brim hats and released at the station house. Siegel went into one of his patented rages. He hired a lawyer and insisted that his mug shots and fingerprints be erased. Again, a judge agreed. But the arrest demonstrated that Siegel was more than a charmer with baby-blue eyes; he was involved with some of the most ruthless killers in New York. Years later, Siegel admitted that he personally had murdered 12 men. "But don't worry," he said. "We only kill each other."

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Siegel went west in 1936. The reasons were complicated. Tom Dewey was now special prosecutor in New York (later district attorney). Urged on by New York's flamboyant mayor, Fiorello H. La Guardia, he was directing the toughest investigation of organized crime in the city's history. The heat, as they said, was on. Siegel wanted to get out of the way.

Another reason was economic. The city was bogged down in the Great Depression, and even the racket guys were beginning to feel the pinch. Of all the old bootleggers, only Siegel seemed to be without his own fiefdom. He couldn't shoot his way into personal power in New York; he didn't have the manpower and, besides, these were his friends. So when Dewey applied the big heat, Siegel--possibly at Lansky's suggestion--went to California. In 1936, that state was not the economic powerhouse it is today; in many ways it was provincial, underpopulated, isolated from the mainstream. But Siegel loved it. The hard desert colors, the palm trees bending in the breeze, the beaches spreading away to north and south, the glassy expanse of the Pacific: This was as far from the hard dark alleys of Williamsburg as a man could go. And it had Hollywood.

Ben Siegel acted as if he'd walked into a dream. Through Louis Lepke he had introductions to Willie Bioff and George Browne, two Chicago hoodlums who had muscled their way into the International Alliance of Theatrical and Stage Employees in Hollywood and were shaking down the studios. Siegel immediately understood that Bioff and Browne were imbeciles, but they were also rich; he then got his own union, the screen extras', and began collecting dues from the studios.

Instinctively, he understood that Hollywood loved a glossy front. He leased the $250,000 mansion of opera singer Lawrence Tibbett at 326 McCarthy Drive in Beverly Hills. He parked a new Cadillac and a new Buick in the driveway, later adding a Duesenberg. More important, he called on George Raft. The movie gangster had grown up Jewish among the Irish gangs of Hell's Kitchen. He dropped out of school at 13 and had become a prize fighter, a pool shark, a ballroom dancer and a gigolo. Siegel's kind of guy. They met in the gin joints of the Twenties, then lost touch when Raft went to California and became a movie star in Scarface. Now, in the Thirties, the real gangster came knocking on the movie gangster's door. They became friends.

"Benny took a personal interest in motion pictures," Raft told his biographer, Lewis Yablonsky. "He bought cameras, projectors and other equipment and often came to the studios to watch the technical processes. He asked me to photograph him one day and I took some footage of him with his camera in my dressing room, and he later showed the film at home. I had a hunch that, like a lot of people, he was a frustrated actor and secretly wanted a movie career; but he never quite had nerve enough to ask for a part in one of my pictures."

He did play a part in the life of Hollywood. Siegel brought his wife and two daughters to California. He gave his girls horseback-riding lessons and enrolled them in the best private schools. He joined the exclusive Hillcrest Country Club (formed as an alternative to the anti-Semitic clubs of the Los Angeles establishment). He played golf. He had his shirts, even his underwear, adorned with monograms. He had his thinning hair done at Drucker's barber shop in Beverly Hills. He was vain about his good looks and was said to use a variety of skin creams and to sleep wearing a chin strap. He dieted, drank very little, smoked one cigar a day and worked out at a gym. A perfect Hollywood man.

He was also a social creature. He went with Raft to Hollywood parties and such clubs as the Brown Derby, Ciro's and the Mocambo. His name made an occasional column, where he was described as a sportsman. If anybody knew about the bad old days in New York, it was never mentioned. And nobody called him Bugsy. Soon his friends included Gary Grant, Jimmy Durante, Georgie Jessel, Mark Hellinger, Jack Warner. While his wife Estelle stayed at home, Siegel went out with a series of starlets, usually bedding them at a private cottage in the Garden of Allah. He had brief flings with the British actress Wendy Barrie and the luscious Marie McDonald, and had a long affair with the Countess Dorothy Di Frasso. Class, he said. He wanted class.

The affair with Di Frasso was the most enduring. The countess was the former Dorothy Taylor, an American heiress who married an Italian count and who lived a life that was a combination of Henry James's and Hedda Hopper's. She was older than Siegel, a famous giver of parties, a character around the town. Their affair led to one of Siegel's more Runyonesque adventures and the end of his immunity from publicity. In September 1938, he sailed off with the countess on a schooner called the Metha Nelson, which had been used during the shooting of Mutiny on the Bounty. The destination was the Cocos Island, off Costa Rica, where $90,000,000 in pirate gold was supposed to be buried. The whole voyage swiftly turned loony. They reached the island all right, but for more than a week, the gangster, the countess and their various attendants foundered around in the sands, guided by a treasure map. All they found were some rusted shovels from an earlier expedition. Siegel finally took charge, ordering the captain, a naturalized German, to get him out of there.

Siegel was dropped off at Panama while the furious countess remained on board the ship of fools. The Metha Nelson then sailed right into a tropical storm and had to be towed by a passing Italian freighter to the port of Acapulco. Safe on shore, the German captain charged mutiny and the story made the newspapers back home. The Los Angeles Examiner dubbed it the Hell Ship, related the hilarious fiascos in Hearstian detail and finally broke the story that one of the voyagers was that notorious gangster from the East, Bugsy Siegel.

That was the beginning of Siegel's decline in Hollywood, though he didn't know it at the time. The Examiner wrote story after story about him, and even the intercession of so famous a newspaperman as Mark Hellinger didn't silence them. Soon the questions about Siegel's occupation were being answered. What did he do? He had the extras' union. He had a piece of a gambling ship called The Rex and of the race track at Agua Caliente, across the border from San Diego in Mexico. He had established himself as the Mob superior to Jack Dragna, the old boss of the L.A. rackets. The countess defended him: "Yes, Ben ... may have done some wicked things, but at heart, he is a good man."

Others disagreed. The board at Hill-crest forced him to give up his membership. The cops started paying attention. He was questioned about the whereabouts of his murderous pal Louis Lepke, then the quarry of a nationwide manhunt. They came to Siegel's house one day to investigate a tip that he had contraband Chanel No. 5 in his basement; all they found were canned figs. In 1938, Siegel went to Europe with the countess, staying at her Villa Madama in the suburbs of Rome. He didn't stay long.

Lepke had a contract out on Big Greenie Greenberg, who had threatened to turn stool pigeon if the boys from Murder, Inc. didn't send him $5000. He was tracked to Montreal by a killer named Allie "Tick Tock" Tannenbaum but slipped away. Then someone saw him on the street in L.A. and he was tracked to an apartment at 1804 Vista Del Mar. Siegel was asked to supervise the execution of the contract on Big Greenie. For reasons no longer knowable, he agreed.

So Ben Siegel stepped aside and Bugsy Siegel went back to his old trade. He did the job with his customary daring and efficiency. He enlisted a gunsel named Frankie Carbo, who was to become famous in the Fifties as the underworld's commissioner of boxing. He brought in his brother-in-law, Whitey Krakower. He was joined by Tick Tock Tannenbaum and finally by his old pal Champ Segal, a former Rothstein henchman. On the evening of November 22, 1939, they went to Big Greenie's house and waited in their cars. They watched as Big Greenie bought a newspaper and went to read it in his yellow Ford convertible. He was sitting there when he was shot to death. The gunmen calmly departed for another day of sun and fun.

But if the job was done with dispatch, the story didn't go away as fast. Siegel and others were repeatedly indicted for the murder of Big Greenie, managing to squirm free only with the help of a plague of death, disappearance and disallowal among key witnesses--and some high-profile payoffs to elected officials.

Although he was able to steer clear of a conviction, Siegel was no longer welcome in Hollywood society. It was time to move on, and this was as good a time as any to do so. The country was again preparing for war, and the Mob bosses once more had to plan for the future, as they had before the end of Prohibition. Most entered the lucrative black market or expanded their existing prostitution, gambling or drug rackets. Siegel looked east. But not very far.

Siegel's final incarnation was about to be born: Bugsy the visionary.

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Siegel first saw Las Vegas before the war. One story says that he was with another hoodlum named Moe Sedway. They went to Vegas together to try selling a racing wire to some casino operators. In those days, Las Vegas was a town of about 6000, most of them men who had come to work on Hoover Dam or descendants of early Mormon settlers. There was a notorious street of bordellos called Block 16 and a group of sawdust joints, where gambling was legal. There were some cheap hotels. On that first trip, Siegel failed to sell his racing wire; the established gamblers weren't interested in change, particularly not in change suggested by a New York Jew.

But he never forgot Las Vegas. Siegel looked at a scruffy desert town and saw a glittering future. He had in mind a hotel and casino that would serve as a pleasure palace for grownups. He would build it and others would follow, dozens, perhaps hundreds of them, all glittering in the desert town that would become the capital of the sin business.

Some say the idea wasn't his. Credit has gone to Sedway or to a man named Billy Wilkerson, who published the Hollywood Reporter and operated Ciro's. But Siegel certainly was the main man in the Mob to push for the development of Las Vegas. A new world was coming. The country would expand into the empty West. Jet airplanes would reduce travel time. Air conditioning, and the hydroelectric power that ran it, would make it possible to play in the desert, even in the dead bottom of August. By all accounts, Lansky was dubious. But Siegel grew more insistent.

Most believe he was driven in his ambition by a tough, beautiful woman named Virginia Hill. She lived an extraordinary life before she ever met Siegel and began the most famous romance in the history of the Mob. She was born on August 26, 1916, in Lipscomb, Alabama, and soon moved with her parents and five brothers and sisters to the steel town of Bessemer. She dropped out of school at 14 to marry, and quickly divorce, a local rich boy. It was her characteristic entree into the wide scary world.

By early 1941, she had married and divorced her way across the U.S. and Mexico, picking up plenty of influential friends along the route. At last, she arrived in her natural element: Hollywood. The big time. She lived at the Beverly Hills Hotel. She went out on dates with Victor Mature and Gene Krupa. She even had a movie contract. Mostly she partied.

And at some point during this period, she met Ben Siegel. Hill was moving back and forth across the border, carrying cash for the Mob, making contacts at high levels of the Mexican government. By 1942, she had two homes in Los Angeles. One was called the Falcon's Lair, at Two Bella Drive above the Pacific Coast Highway; it had once belonged to Rudolph Valentino. The other was at 810 North Linden Drive in Beverly Hills; it had once been owned by the comedian Georgie Jessel. Both houses were owned by a man named Juan Romero, one of the many contacts she had made in her journeys across the border. Hill was his tenant.

We don't know if the first encounter of Siegel and Virginia Hill was a case of "meet cute" in the Hollywood style or something more elaborate. But it must have been electric. Certainly, they were made for each other. Siegel was the epitome of the romantic gangster style; other gangsters recognized that Virginia Hill was a genuine female hoodlum, the highest compliment they could pay a woman. Ben and Virginia were soon inseparable.

"When I was with Ben," she said, "he bought me everything."

She wasn't exaggerating. There was $43,000 worth of gowns bought from the designer Howard Greer. She once walked out of a jewelry shop with a bracelet and ring worth $19,000. She moved through clubs picking up tabs. She hosted lavish parties. She spent $4800 on one such fiesta in Ciro's, $7500 on another night. Add another zero at the end of each of those numbers to get the current-day equivalents. The money was probably coming from the drug trade that had begun to flow through Mexico after the smuggling routes from Europe were disrupted by the war. And Siegel must have been involved, too.

The countess began to fade out of Siegel's life. So did his wife, who went to Reno and got a divorce. He sold the Holmby Hills mansion and was soon living with Virginia Hill at the Falcon's Lair. Meanwhile, he was beginning to operate in Las Vegas. He sold his wire service to some of the sawdust joints and bought into them for good measure. He persuaded Lansky to invest some money; Moe Sedway and a tough Phoenix gambler named Gus Greenbaum also went in on the deal. On their expeditions, they noted the congested traffic around the downtown railroad station and saw the steady flow of automobile traffic along Highway 91 to Los Angeles. Again, Siegel the visionary made the right decision. They would build their postwar pleasure palace on the highway. That was the beginning of the Strip.

In mid-1945, with the end of the war in sight, Siegel got serious. He arranged financing from Lansky and the other gangsters back East. Wilkerson invested, as did Sedway and Greenbaum, who also arranged loans from banks in Arizona. In December 1945, ground was broken. Siegel and Virginia Hill celebrated. And the vision started becoming a reality.

There were still wartime restrictions on building materials, shortages of lumber and plaster and marble, and very few available construction workers and craftsmen. Siegel enlisted Nevada Senator Pat McCarran to ease some of the shortages. Wilkerson sought help from the designers and craftsmen at the movie studios, who also helped supply material. Virginia Hill supplied the name: the Flamingo.

Almost from the beginning, things started going wrong. Unusual rains pounded down for one nine-day stretch. The precious materials were sometimes stolen during the night and then resold to the contractors the next day. In the penthouse, where Ben and Virginia were supposed to live happily ever after, a ceiling beam was found to be only five feet, eight inches above the floor and had to be replaced at a cost of $22,500. Bugsy decided that the aisles in the kitchen weren't wide enough; they were reconfigured at a cost of $30,000. The boiler room was too small, the plumbing was lousy and the curtains in the main rooms were flammable. Siegel insisted that the air conditioners in individual rooms were too loud; he fumed and raged and had them replaced. The construction budget ballooned from $1,500,000 to $6,000,000.

Siegel was losing control of the project. He raised additional cash from Lansky and the others, but those gentlemen grew increasingly dubious about the whole venture. Hill raised some money, too, and there were reports later that some of this was money from the heroin racket. But Siegel had sworn that he would open the Flamingo by the end of 1946. And as the pressure intensified--particularly from Mob investors--he went ahead and opened before the hotel was ready.

On opening night, December 26, 1946, Siegel expected glamour, excitement, hordes of excited movie stars. He got George Raft, whose career had faded. He got Charles Coburn and George Sanders, Vivian Blaine and Sonny Tufts. Hardly the A list. Jimmy Durante was the first act to play the main room, along with Xavier Cugat's orchestra; that night, the room wasn't full. With Siegel's arbitrary rules about class (no hats, white tie for dealers), most of the locals stayed away. The hotel rooms were not finished, so those who did come from L.A. returned almost immediately. Before the night was over, there were more dealers than customers. And Bugsy Siegel emerged from the darkness.

In the next two weeks, Bugsy beat up a dealer he thought was cheating. He had to be restrained from attacking columnist Westbrook Pegler, who pecked away at him relentlessly in print and was spotted playing the slot machines. Furious at bad publicity, he chased his press agent around the swimming pool, firing a pistol. He grew increasingly paranoid, for good reason. Silverware and food were being stolen from the kitchen. The hard-eyed professional gamblers from the downtown casinos arrived to play the tables and started busting the bank. Nothing worked, not fresh dice, new cards, the shifting of dealers from table to table. At the end of the first two weeks, the casino had done the impossible: It had lost $300,000. Hill suddenly announced that she had an allergy to cactus and moved back to the house on North Linden Drive. By the end of January, Siegel had to close the Flamingo so that construction work could be finished. He went back to Hill. His doom was approaching.

In December 1946--before the opening of the Flamingo--there was a Mob convention at the Hotel Nacional in Havana. Among those in attendance was Lansky. And a major point of discussion was Ben Siegel, who was not invited.

The charges against him were the gravest that could be made against a fellow gangster: He was cheating them. No minutes were kept of the Havana meeting, of course. But later tales indicate that the Mob's intelligence service had received disturbing reports. Siegel had taken $600,000 in cash out of the casino. Hill had traveled to Switzerland, depositing large sums in a Zurich bank, while also buying an apartment there.

According to The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano, by Martin A. Gosch and Richard Hammer, Luciano later remembered the discussion this way: "There was no doubt in Meyer's mind that Bugsy had skimmed this dough from his buildin' budget, and he was sure that Siegel was preparin' to skip as well as skim, in case the roof was gonna fall in on him. Everybody listened very close while Lansky explained it. When he got through, somebody asked, 'What do you think we ought to do, Meyer?' Lansky said, 'There's only one thing to do with a thief who steals from his friends. Benny's got to be hit.' "

Siegel's behavior was getting more erratic and violent. His checks were bouncing, including one for $50,000 to Del Webb, one of the Flamingo contractors. Virginia Hill came back and got into a drunken fight with Siegel. She drew Siegel's blood by smashing him in the head with a high-heeled shoe. He punched her in the stomach. She returned to L.A. and within a few days was ready to leave for Europe. Former beau Joe Epstein re-entered her life, providing money and words of consolation--and perhaps of warning. She left by ship on June 10.

On June 20, 1947, Siegel was staying in Hill's house at 810 North Linden Drive. In the morning he went to Drucker's barber shop. He visited with Raft. He had meetings with an attorney and a Flamingo publicist. Virginia's brother, 21-year-old Chick Hill, was staying at the house with his girlfriend, Jerri Mason. He remembered a telephone call during which an angry Siegel said, "You son of a bitch. Over my dead body, you will. You haven't got the guts."

That evening, Siegel took Chick Hill, Mason and a gambler friend named Allen Smiley to dinner. They went to Jack's Restaurant in Ocean Park. They dined well. Siegel paid. On the way out, Siegel was given a complimentary copy of the early edition of the Los Angeles Times. They all went home to North Linden Drive. Hill and Mason went upstairs. Smiley sat at one end of the couch. Siegel sat at the opposite end, beside a lamp, and started reading the newspaper. It carried a sticker that said: Good Night. Sleep Well, with the Compliments of Jack's. The drapes were open, the night dark beyond the French windows.

At about 10:30, someone in the darkness of the adjoining driveway fired nine rounds through the windows with a .30/30 carbine. One bullet went through Smiley's sleeve. Six others smashed into Siegel. One destroyed his teeth. Another blew his right eye across the room.

Twenty minutes after the shooting, Gus Greenbaum, Moe Sedway and two other men walked into the Flamingo and said that they were the new bosses.

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Listen: The wind moans. It tells of daughters crossing a country by train to bury their father. It tells of the discarded wife standing bitterly beside a burial plot in Beth Olam Cemetery. It tells of Virginia Hill at a Paris ball, hearing the news, then racing to Nice, where she tries to kill herself. Years later, she finally succeeds. Joining Ben. Joining Bugsy.

Listen, for the ghosts remember Williamsburg, too, and thrilling nights running rum with Meyer. And they tell of Meyer Lansky old and wizened, his small body shriveled, walking his dog in the Florida sun, driving a blue Plymouth to the deli while the feds watch. Sometimes the old man must think of his lost friend, who was 41 forever. You can hear them all in the desert wind, as it blows steadily through the neon metropolis that lives because of Ben Siegel's fabulous dreams.

"The ballad of Bugsy Siegel deals with all the universal themes, punctuated by an almost operatic death."