Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel (; February 28, 1906 – June 20, 1947) was an American mobster who was a driving force behind the development of the Las Vegas Strip. Along with his childhood friend and fellow gangster Meyer Lansky, Siegel was influential within the Jewish-American mob, the Italian-American Mafia, and the largely Italian-Jewish coalition known as the National Crime Syndicate. Described as "handsome" and "charismatic," Siegel became one of the first front-page celebrity gangsters.
Siegel was one of the founders and leaders of Murder, Inc. and became a bootlegger during American Prohibition. After the Twenty-first Amendment was passed in 1933 repealing Prohibition, he turned to illegal gambling. In 1936, Siegel left New York and moved to California. His time as a mobster during this period was mainly as a hitman and muscle, as he was noted for his prowess with guns and violence. In 1941, Siegel was tried for the murder of friend and fellow mobster Harry Greenberg, who had turned informant; he was acquitted in 1942.
Siegel traveled to Las Vegas, Nevada, where he handled and financed some of the city's original casinos. He assisted developer William R. Wilkerson's Flamingo Hotel after Wilkerson ran out of funds. Siegel assumed control of the project and managed the final stages of construction. The Flamingo's casino opened on December 26, 1946, in a three-day event that was well received but without a hotel to accompany the casino, the Flamingo struggled and was closed from February 6, 1947 until the hotel was finished and reopened on March 1, 1947. Siegel’s mob partners were convinced that an estimated US$1 million of the construction budget overrun had been skimmed by Siegel, his girlfriend Virginia Hill or by both of them. On June 20, 1947, Siegel was murdered at the age of 41 by a sniper through the window of Hill's Linden Drive mansion in Beverly Hills, California.
Benjamin Siegel was born on February 28, 1906, in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn in New York City, the second of five children of a poor Ashkenazi Jewish family that had emigrated to the U.S. from the Galicia region of what was then Austria-Hungary (now part of Poland and Ukraine). His parents, Jennie (Riechenthal) and Max Siegel, constantly worked for meager wages.
As a boy, Siegel dropped out of school and joined a gang on Lafayette Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, mainly committing acts of theft until he met Moe Sedway. Together with Sedway, Siegel developed a protection racket in which he threatened to incinerate pushcart owners' merchandise unless they paid him a dollar. He soon built up a lengthy criminal record, dating from his teenage years, that included armed robbery, rape and murder.
During adolescence, Siegel befriended Meyer Lansky, who applied a brilliant intellect to forming a small mob whose activities expanded to illegal gambling and car theft. Lansky, who had already had a run-in with Charles "Lucky" Luciano, saw a need for the Jewish boys of his Brooklyn neighborhood to organize in the same manner as the Italians and the Irish. The first person he recruited for his gang was Siegel.
Siegel became involved in bootlegging within several major East Coast cities. He also worked as a hitman whom Lansky hired out to other crime families. The two formed the Bugs and Meyer Mob, which handled hits for the various bootleg gangs operating in New York and New Jersey, doing so almost a decade before Murder, Inc. was formed. The gang kept themselves busy by hijacking the liquor cargoes of rival outfits, and were known to be responsible for the killing and removal of several rival gangland figures. Siegel's gang-mates included Abner "Longie" Zwillman, Louis "Lepke" Buchalter and Lansky's brother, Jake; Joseph "Doc" Stacher, another member of the Bugs and Meyer Mob, recalled to Lansky biographers that Siegel was fearless and saved his friends' lives as the mob moved into bootlegging:
"Bugsy never hesitated when danger threatened," Stacher told Uri Dan. "While we tried to figure out what the best move was, Bugsy was already shooting. When it came to action there was no one better. I've never known a man who had more guts."
Siegel was also a boyhood friend to Al Capone; when there was a warrant for Capone's arrest on a murder charge, Siegel allowed him to hide out with an aunt.
Siegel first smoked opium during his youth and was involved in the drug trade. By age 21, he was making enough money to purchase an apartment at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel and a Tudor home in Scarsdale, New York. He also wore flashy clothes and participated in New York City's night life.
From May 13 to 16, 1929, Lansky and Siegel attended the Atlantic City Conference, representing the Bugs and Meyer Mob. Luciano and former Chicago South Side Gang leader Johnny Torrio held the conference at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Atlantic City, New Jersey. At the conference, the two men discussed the future of organized crime and the future structure of the Mafia families: Siegel stated, "The yids and the dagos will no longer fight each other."
On January 28, 1929, Siegel married Esta Krakower, his childhood sweetheart. They had two daughters, Millicent Siegel (later Millicent Rosen) and Barbara Siegel (later Barbara Saperstein). Siegel had a reputation as a womanizer and the marriage ended in 1946.
While married, Siegel womanized with Ketti Gallian, Wendy Barrie (1942–1943), Marie "The Body" MacDonald, and Virginia Hill (1945–1947).
By the late 1920s, Lansky and Siegel had ties to Luciano and Frank Costello, future bosses of the Genovese crime family. Siegel, Albert Anastasia, Vito Genovese, and Joe Adonis allegedly were the four gunmen who shot New York mob boss Joe Masseria to death on Luciano's orders on April 15, 1931, ending the Castellammarese War. On September 10 of that year, Luciano hired four gunmen from the Bugs and Meyer Mob (some sources identify Siegel as one of them) to murder Salvatore Maranzano in his New York office, establishing Luciano's rise to the top of the Mafia and marking the beginning of modern American organized crime.
Following Maranzano's death, Luciano and Lansky formed the National Crime Syndicate, a loose organization of inter-ethnic crime families that brought order to the underworld. The Commission, the Italian Mafia's governing body, was established for dividing the families' territories and preventing future gang wars. With his associates, Siegel formed the National Crime Syndicate's enforcement wing: Murder, Inc. After he and Lansky moved on, control over Murder, Inc. was ceded to Buchalter and Anastasia, although Siegel continued working as a hitman. Siegel's only conviction was in Miami: on February 28, 1932, he was arrested for gambling and vagrancy, and from a roll of bills, he paid a $100 fine.
During this period, Siegel got into a dispute with the Fabrizzo brothers, associates of Waxey Gordon. Gordon had hired the brothers from prison after Lansky and Siegel gave the IRS information about Gordon's tax evasion, resulting in Gordon's imprisonment in 1933. Siegel hunted down and killed the Fabrizzos after they made an assassination attempt on him and Lansky by penetrating Siegel's heavily fortified suite at the Waldorf Astoria with a bomb. After the deaths of his two brothers, Tony Fabrizzo had begun to write a memoir and gave it to an attorney. One of the longest chapters was to be a section on the nationwide kill-for-hire squad led by Siegel. However, the mob discovered Tony's plans before he could carry them out. In 1932, after checking into a hospital to establish an alibi and later sneaking out, Siegel joined two accomplices in approaching Tony's house and, posing as detectives to lure him outside, gunned him down. In 1935, Siegel assisted in Luciano's alliance with Dutch Schultz and killed rival loan shark brothers Louis "Pretty" Amberg and Joseph Amberg.
Siegel had learned from his associates that he was in danger: his hospital alibi had become questionable and his enemies wanted him dead. In response, the Mafia sent Siegel to California and assigned him with developing syndicate-sanctioned gambling rackets with Los Angeles family boss Jack Dragna. Once in Los Angeles, Siegel recruited gangster Mickey Cohen as his chief lieutenant. Knowing Siegel's reputation for violence, and that he was backed by Lansky and Luciano—who, from prison, sent word to Dragna that it was "in [his] best interest to cooperate"—Dragna accepted a subordinate role. On tax returns, Siegel claimed to earn his living through legal gambling at Santa Anita Park. He soon took over Los Angeles's numbers racket and used money from the syndicate to help establish a drug trade route from Mexico and organized circuits with the Chicago Outfit's wire services.