Benjamin Siegel does not sound nearly as interesting as Bugsy, which might be the reason for his moniker. Siegel was born in Brooklyn, New York in the early 1900s. He died in 1947 at the age of 41. Bugsy started off as a New York gangster before moving to Las Vegas to develop Sin City. He was the original developer of Las Vegas Gambling. Yet, he developed his US crime syndicate into California too. His death occurred in Beverly Hills, California.
Siegel started his illustrious career by extorting money from Jewish pushcart peddlers in New York. He teamed up with Meyer Lansky in 1918, which allowed him to get into car theft, bootlegging, and gambling throughout New York, New Jersey, and Philadelphia. Siegel and Lansky ran a murder for hire company called Murder, Inc. In 1931, he and three others executed Joe “the Boss” Masseria. By 1937, he had definitely made a name for himself, so he headed out to the West Coast to establish a coast to coast crime syndicate.
Bugsy Siegel was known as a handsome man, which might have helped his success in establishing gambling dens, ships, and narcotics smuggling. The gambling ships would go offshore for about 13 miles, which was a mile more than the 12 mile limit established by Californian law. He also set up blackmail and other enterprises. Hollywood was in full swing at the time too. He managed to cultivate a large business in California by hob- knobbing with Hollywood stars and celebrities.
In 1945, he developed a nationwide bookmakers’ wire service. It also meant he could start his dream in developing northeast Los Angeles into a gambling oasis. He went to Las Vegas, Nevada that year to build the Flamingo Hotel and Casino. The budget was supposed to be $1,500,000; however, he actually put $6,000,000 in to the hotel using syndicate funds from the East.
In order to make this happen Bugsy Siegel actually used “skimming.” He would take funds off the top of what he received, place it into European banks, and hide it from the syndicate. He used Virginia Hill, his girlfriend at the time, to hide the money. He would write bad cheques to cover the construction costs too. These actions eventually reached the East coast bosses like Lansky. All of the duplicity Siegel performed against the Mob led to his death. Two years after getting the Flamingo construction started, Bugsy Siegel was killed. It was a summer evening in late June. He was killed at his Beverly Hills home under a rainfall of bullets. These bullets entered through a window at the same time three of Lansky’s men walked into the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas to take it over.
His death was one of the largest organised kills of the crime syndicate. It took careful planning for Siegel not to get wind of his imminent death, as well as the impending attack on the Flamingo Hotel. It was such an infamous kill that Hollywood made a movie out of his life and death.