On the evening of June 20, 1947, Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel was reading the Los Angeles Times in the living room of his girlfriend’s Beverly Hills mansion. The curtains were open and the lights were on. Through the window, someone was watching.
At 10:46 p.m., nine rounds from a .30 caliber M1 military carbine tore through the glass. The first bullet hit the bridge of Siegel’s nose. The second punched through his right cheek and exited the back of his neck. Two more slammed through the sofa and perforated both lungs. The overpressure from the head shot blew his left eyeball out of its socket. It was found 15 feet away on the dining room floor.
The shooter had rested the carbine on a trellis just outside the window, no more than 14 feet from the couch. He vanished into the rose bushes. He was never found. The gun was never recovered. The Beverly Hills Police Department still lists the case as open.
Siegel was not just another wise guy clipped in an alley. He was the co-founder of the Bugs and Meyer mob, a man who had personally carried out murders for Murder Incorporated. He dined with Clark Gable, partied with Cary Grant, and had Hollywood studios on speed dial. He had just built a casino in the Nevada desert that would change the world.
Twenty minutes after Siegel’s body hit the floor, 280 miles away in Las Vegas, three men walked into the Flamingo Hotel and announced they were taking over. They weren’t surprised. They were counting down the clock.
Siegel was born Benjamin Siegelbaum on February 28, 1906, in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. His father worked in a garment factory. By his teens, he had dropped out of school and joined a street gang on the Lower East Side. He started with petty theft, shaking down pushcart vendors for a dollar at a time. He was fast, fearless, and completely unhinged when provoked. That is where the nickname came from. Bugsy. As in crazy.
Then he met Meyer Lansky. Small, quiet, and brilliant, Lansky was calculation and patience. Siegel was muscle and fury. Together, they formed the Bugs and Meyer mob in the early 1920s, a crew of Jewish gangsters who ran bootlegging, hijacking, and contract killings across New York and New Jersey. When Lucky Luciano needed someone eliminated, he called Lansky. Lansky called Siegel.
By the early 1930s, Siegel and Lansky were founding members of the National Crime Syndicate. Siegel sat at the same table as Luciano, Frank Costello, and Albert Anastasia. He was a full partner in the most powerful criminal organization in the Western Hemisphere. Despite a rap sheet that included armed robbery, multiple murders, and bootlegging, he kept beating the charges. Witnesses disappeared. Evidence vanished.
In the mid-1930s, Lansky sent Siegel west to Los Angeles. The assignment was to take control of the West Coast rackets and manage the wire services that transmitted horse racing results to bookmakers across the country. Siegel transformed himself in Hollywood. He bought tailored suits, got a suntan, and became friends with actor George Raft. Through Raft, he gained access to studio executives, producers, and movie stars. The Hollywood press loved him.
Within a few years, Siegel had the West Coast wire service locked down. He was running gambling operations across Southern California. He was making enormous amounts of money. But he wanted something bigger. He wanted to build something.
In 1945, publisher William Wilkerson had an idea for a luxury hotel and casino in Las Vegas, where gambling was legal. He called it the Flamingo. He started construction, ran out of money, and Siegel stepped in. First as a partner, then as the boss. Wilkerson was squeezed out entirely. Siegel brought in mob money from the syndicate. Lansky, Costello, Luciano, and Joe Adonis all invested. The original budget was $1.2 million.
The trouble started quickly. Materials were scarce and labor costs were skyrocketing. Siegel’s girlfriend, Virginia Hill, was appointed as a project overseer. Hill was no ordinary girlfriend. She had been a Chicago Outfit courier since the mid-1930s, carrying messages and money between crime families. The FBI called her a central clearinghouse for organized crime intelligence.
Putting her in charge of construction oversight was a disaster. Contractors realized they were dealing with people who didn’t know building codes from bar tabs. They double billed for materials. They ordered supplies, sold them on the black market, then ordered them again. By October 1946, the Flamingo’s costs had blown past $4 million. By the time it was done, the total exceeded $6 million.
The mob was furious. They suspected Siegel and Hill were skimming. The rumor was that Hill had been wiring money to Swiss bank accounts. Approximately $1 million of the overrun, the bosses believed, had been stolen. In the mob, suspicion is enough.
On December 20, 1946, the most powerful crime figures in America gathered at the Hotel Nacional in Havana, Cuba. The official agenda covered narcotics and territories, but the real headline was the Siegel situation. The bosses wanted Siegel dead. The contract was assigned to Chicago Outfit consigliere Charles “Trigger Happy” Fischetti.
At the last moment, Meyer Lansky stood up and made an argument. The Flamingo was scheduled to open December 26. Let’s see how it does. If it makes money, the investment is saved. If it doesn’t, you can do what you want. The bosses agreed. Siegel had a reprieve, but it came with a clock.
The Flamingo opened on December 26, 1946. The three-night event drew large crowds. Columnist Walter Winchell reported 28,000 people attended over those first three nights. Jimmy Durante headlined the floor show. George Raft was there. Virginia Hill appeared all three nights, changing her hair color each evening.
But without hotel rooms ready, the big winners walked out and gambled elsewhere. The casino lost $300,000 in its first week. Nick the Greek Dandolos alone won nearly half a million in four nights in January. Siegel shut the casino down on February 6, 1947, and didn’t reopen until March 1, when the hotel rooms were finally completed.
By May of 1947, the Flamingo actually turned a profit of $250,000. Lansky pointed to the number as proof that Siegel’s vision was correct. But it was too late. The bosses had lost patience. $6 million invested, months of losses, and the persistent suspicion of theft. Once the commission decides, the clock starts ticking.
Four days before the shooting, Virginia Hill boarded an unscheduled flight to Paris. She and Siegel had been fighting constantly. Some believe the trip was just another dramatic breakup. Others believe she was warned to get out of town. Whatever the reason, she wasn’t in that house on June 20. That was no coincidence.
On the night of the murder, at 8:30 p.m. during the floor show at the Flamingo, eight men sitting at a table suddenly stood up. They spread out to eight strategic positions. Two went to the front door. Two went to the hotel registration desk. Two went to the security desk. Two went to the cashier’s cage. They were securing the casino two hours before the trigger was even pulled.
In Beverly Hills, Siegel was having dinner with Allen Smiley, Virginia Hill’s brother Chick, and Chick’s girlfriend. They returned to the house around 10:30. Siegel sat down on the sofa and picked up the newspaper. Allen Smiley sat beside him. At 10:46, nine rounds came through the window. Four hit Siegel. He died instantly.
Within minutes, FBI agent Curtis Lynum received a phone call from a confidential informant calling from a payphone outside the Flamingo in Las Vegas. The informant told him, “Ben Siegel has been shot and killed in Beverly Hills.” Historian Larry Gragg is certain that informant was Moe Sedway, Siegel’s own former partner.
Minutes after that call, Moe Sedway walked into the Flamingo alongside Gus Greenbaum and Morris Rosen. They announced to the staff that Siegel was dead and that they were now in charge. The takeover was complete before the police in Beverly Hills had even finished processing the crime scene.
So who pulled the trigger? The suspects read like a mob all-star roster. Frankie Carbo, a Lucchese family soldier and boxing promoter, was the leading suspect for decades. Former Philadelphia boss Ralph Natali later claimed that Carbo did it on orders from Meyer Lansky.
In 1987, Eddie Canizarro, a former associate of Los Angeles boss Jack Dragna, made a deathbed confession, claiming he was the shooter. But the Beverly Hills police required substantiation, and his confession couldn’t be corroborated. Another theory points to Tony Brancato and Tony Trombino, hired by Joe Adonis. There is even a theory that the shooter was a man named Matthew “Moose” Penza.
What is documented is that the Beverly Hills Police Department still considers this an open case. The mob wanted Siegel dead. The hit was coordinated across hundreds of miles. Someone made sure Virginia Hill wasn’t in the house. And within 20 minutes, new management was running the Flamingo.
After the murder, photographs of Siegel’s bullet-riddled body appeared in newspapers across the country. It was the most graphic crime scene photo most Americans had ever seen. It put Las Vegas on the front page of every paper in the nation. In death, Bugsy Siegel did more to advertise Las Vegas than he ever could have alive.
Under Gus Greenbaum’s management, the Flamingo became wildly profitable. It became the model for every luxury casino hotel that followed. The Sands, the Sahara, the Desert Inn. All of them followed the Flamingo blueprint. Siegel’s vision of a gambling paradise in the desert turned out to be exactly right. He just didn’t live to see it.
The endings for those around him were brutal. Gus Greenbaum was found murdered alongside his wife on December 3, 1958. Both had their throats cut. Virginia Hill fled to Europe after being called to testify before the Kefauver Committee in 1951. On March 24, 1966, she was found dead near Salzburg, Austria. She was 49 years old. An overdose of sleeping pills was officially ruled a suicide.
Moe Sedway died of natural causes in 1952. He was one of the few people connected to this story who died in his own bed. Meyer Lansky never spoke publicly about Siegel’s murder. He died on January 15, 1983, in Miami Beach. His net worth at the time of death was officially listed at about $300,000. Federal authorities believed his hidden fortune ran into the hundreds of millions.
The Flamingo still stands on the Las Vegas Strip today, though nothing of the original structure remains. Benjamin Siegel spent his entire life chasing a version of greatness that the legitimate world would never give him. He saw what nobody else could see. A city of lights in the middle of nothing.
He just forgot the most important rule of all. In the mob, you don’t get to keep what you build. You don’t get to overspend and explain later. You don’t get to skim from men who kill for a living. Bugsy Siegel saw the future. He was right about everything except the one thing that mattered most. The men who funded his dream were not investors. They were executioners who hadn’t decided on the date yet.