Bugsy Siegel was dead before the ambulance arrived. Nine shots, two to the head, fired through the living room window of his Beverly Hills home on June 20, 1947. The shooter, or shooters, stood in the garden outside, the light inside was on, and the professional ferocity of the hit was made visceral by one detail: the gun was found 15 feet from his body, a measure of how sudden his death was. The investigation, from the first hours, ran into a wall that was all too familiar in that era.
Mob associates were on the scene within 20 minutes, a physical impossibility if they had traveled from Las Vegas after hearing the news. It was a planned, organized, commission-sanctioned execution, not a freelance act of violence. Bugsy had been a genuinely terrifying figure in the American underworld. He was brilliant, a man who remembered your name, your wife’s name, and your kids’ names, but when he lost his temper, the transition was so sudden and complete that witnesses described it as watching a different person appear inside the same body.
He had walked straight into the heart of Hollywood, charming Clark Gable, Cary Grant, and Jean Harlow, and he had the vision to imagine something no one else could: a luxury hotel in the Nevada desert, the Flamingo, named after Virginia Hill. The concept was simple and radical, luxury rooms, gourmet restaurants, a world-class showroom, a swimming pool, instead of sawdust floor gambling halls. But Bugsy had never built anything in his life, and he was trying to manage a massive construction project with no experience. The mob had invested heavily, but costs spiraled out of control.
The original budget was $1. 5 million, but by the end, it was between $5 and $6 million. Two explanations are usually given for the hole, and both are probably partially true. First, Bugsy was an incompetent construction manager who made wildly expensive decisions, like insisting on a separate drainage system for each bathroom, an unnecessary indulgence that any contractor would have told him was insane.
Second, there is the suspicion that he was skimming, with Virginia Hill’s regular trips to Zurich cited as evidence. If true, it was an extraordinary act of either courage or stupidity. The syndicate, led by Lucky Luciano, had run out of patience, and the vote on Bugsy’s life was not particularly close. Meyer Lansky, his closest friend, didn’t save him.
At the end, when Bugsy’s life was on the table, Lansky did nothing. He later refused to discuss the murder in anything but the vaguest terms. Some accounts suggest Lansky believed Bugsy was genuinely stealing, and if so, he felt betrayed. Or maybe Lansky simply did the math.
The Flamingo was losing money, between $100,000 and $300,000 in its first two weeks of operation. Bugsy needed to generate revenue before the mob’s patience expired entirely. He never got the chance. The mob moved on his life’s work before his body was cold.
Virginia Hill heard the news in Paris. She cried, then never spoke about it publicly again. Bugsy had met her while he was technically still married to his wife, Esta, and she had moved in mob circles at the highest levels. The irony is that Bugsy Siegel never saw the Flamingo turn a real profit.
Six months after it opened, he was dead. The strip that generates tens of billions of dollars every year still runs through the corridor he first imagined. They never built him a statue or named a street after him. The Flamingo, the only hotel from the original strip era still standing on its original site, has a small garden memorial, a modest plaque, and some flamingo sculptures tucked in a corner that most tourists walk right past.
It’s exactly how the mob wanted it. His family were the only ones there.