Bugsy Siegel

by Michael Shnayerson

  Wherever the Siegels lived in those first few years, their new home was easy to describe: a three-room apartment up a narrow, dark stairway with no running water or indoor plumbing, the only light provided by kerosene lamps. Many if not most of the apartments were family-run sweatshops, where piecework from the nearby factories would be finished into garments, by the dozens a day, the family members gathered at their sewing machines by the light of their street-front windows. For the Siegels, as for so many others, Yiddish was the only language spoken at home. Neither parent had any formal schooling. Their marriage in 1903 was a triumph of hope for Max at twenty-three, Jennie at twenty-two.10 Though perhaps Jennie Siegel hedged her bets in a sense: decades later, on her application for social security, she would identify herself as Jennie Riechenthal, with Max Siegel her spouse.

  A first child, Esther, was born in 1905. Benjamin was born the next year. By then, the Siegels were clearly living on the Lower East Side: Ben’s New York state birth certificate put them at 88 Cannon Street. The Siegels’ secondborn was Nick, named Berish, or Little Bear, a tribute to Max Siegel, whose Hebrew name was Dov Ber—Bear in English—though the Little Bear would soon go by Ben, or Bennie. The state certificate noted his birthdate as March 4, 1906, but the U.S. census reports of 1910, 1920, and others would all list his birth date as February 28. According to the 1910 census, two more daughters, Bessie and Ethel, were born soon after Ben. The fifth and last sibling, Morris or Maurice—the good son—would be born in 1916.

  In the humble hierarchy of Lower East Side streets, Cannon was among the humblest, a short, dreary side street that ran north-south, just up from the East River, dead-ending at the Williamsburg Bridge. Tenements of five and six stories lined much of either side. Life was hard, but after much legal jousting, tenement landlords had been forced to provide running water—cold water, but water just the same—and indoor plumbing, to a degree. Four families on each floor now shared two toilets: ten or more people per toilet. Gaslight was also installed, alleviating the gloom.

  Conditions were grim, but family ties were tight. All day, a tenement mother tended the kitchen coal stove, making meals and doing the laundry; once a week she bathed her children, also in the kitchen, in a wooden barrel, the water heated by the coal stove. Four or more family members slept in the bedroom, with more in the parlor if need be. The Siegels took in two boarders to help pay the rent. The 1910 census duly noted that the Siegels’ apartment count included Rose Stolla, age eighteen, and Lillie Persel, seventeen. They, too, slept in the bedroom, often on eight-hour shifts. The floor’s two communal toilets, adjacent to each other, were situated down the hall.

  This was the classic tenement. “In winter, fumes from coal stoves, gas from lamps, and vapors from boilers plagued residents,” observes Laurence Bergreen in As Thousands Cheer: The Life of Irving Berlin, “and in the summer, the smell of decomposing garbage and human and animal waste were inescapable.” So squalid were these slums, so desperately poor its residents, that some immigrants eventually went back to their old country.11 And yet in this shtetl were all the touchstones of Jewish culture: synagogues, Orthodox services, kosher food from peddlers’ carts, and the soothing prevalence of Yiddish.

  For Ben Siegel, one indelible memory of childhood was the ceaseless, metallic thrum of trolley and subway traffic on the Williamsburg Bridge. The streetcars creaked slowly up each rising side, suspended high over the river, then paused before gathering speed down the other side. Ben would have played with his pals within the bridge’s shadows and bars of light, and walked along the East River, watching the barges float by.

  Cruising the nearest streets as a boy, Ben took in curious signs. He had no idea why women with too much makeup flounced up and down the commercial streets, but he sensed the crowd’s disapproval of them. In fact, most of the Lower East Side’s prostitutes were Jewish, catering to immigrants whose wives remained an ocean away: a vast and lonely clientele. He saw boys no older than he picking pockets, rolling drunks, and getting in fights. Socially prominent Jews—Schiffs, Loebs, Mayers—blamed overcrowding, and said it led to disease, vice, and crime. One young and typical delinquent was future entertainer Eddie Cantor, who recounted “wandering the streets all night with older children, singing popular songs, making noise and getting into trouble.” Before long the future comedian, singer, and actor was stealing food from pushcarts and helping stage burglaries, since he was the “skinniest and most agile of the younger boys . . . employed to crawl through narrow bars and fanlights to open doors and secret passages for the marauders.” At sixteen, he tried his luck as a performer at Miner’s Bowery Theatre. That got him into vaudeville, and out of a future in crime.12

  Long before Ben became Bugsy, he somehow acquired a middle name he loathed. Hymen was a common boy’s name bestowed upon the children of first-generation Jewish immigrants. It was a simplified version of “L’Chaim,” the Jewish toast to life.13 But for the Americanized boys who bore it, Hymen was an embarrassment. It sounded Jewish, not American, and of course it had another connotation. The taunts were as obvious as they were inevitable, and in Ben’s case may have inspired his first street fights. No one was going to call him a virgin.

  Like all Lower East Side boys, Ben played outside as much as he could. The paved streets were perfect for marbles and rolling hoops. There was stickball, stoopball, and a similar version of street baseball called “one o’ cat,” in which a batter gave a homemade wooden “ball” enough of a tap to put it in play. “The wood would rise a few feet off the ground from such a tap.”14

  Jennie Riechenthal Siegel must have chosen Cannon Street in part because it had a large new lovely school: PS 10, later renamed PS 110. It was a five-story, white-stone building surprisingly ornate for a public school, with neo-Gothic towers. It served the middle grades; next door was an old Baptist church, given new use as the primary school. Both buildings stand today, both still there as PS 110, on Cannon’s southeast side. The tenements of Cannon’s north side, where the Siegels lived, have long since been replaced by a red-bricked housing project.

  Ben attended PS 110 until the seventh or eighth grade. Possibly he recalled the day in about 1915 that classes were cut short by gunfire. Monk Eastman, a Lower East Side gangster at the peak of his prowess who lived just down Cannon Street, had decided to use the school’s high, wide-paned windows as target practice. “Bullets rained through the schoolrooms, and the children were in panic,” recalled Miss Adeline E. Simpson, the principal, in a later publication honoring the school. “Without stopping to think that he might transfer his attentions to me, I ran out and remonstrated with him, telling him that his own children were being endangered. He looked at me a moment, pistol in hand, and then said, ‘yer all right. Yer a good sport for not calling the cops.’ And he did as I asked him.”15 If Ben was indeed in school that day—and at eight or nine years old he probably would have been—Monk Eastman’s fusillade must have seemed like a trumpet blast from a world he longed to join.

  The Siegels were Orthodox Jews, so they naturally joined the Bialystoker, an Orthodox synagogue two blocks away. Its name honored the northeastern Polish city of Bialystok, from which most of its congregation had come. It too still stands, at 7–11 Bialystoker Place, a late-Federal building in fieldstone. Originally a Methodist Episcopal church, it was purchased in 1905 by its new congregation. Today it stakes claim as the oldest synagogue in use in New York City. Inside are scores of memorial plaques. One is for Max Siegel, died April 17, 1947. Directly below it is a plaque for Benjamin Siegel, his fiery death coming two months later, on June 20. Here in this once bustling neighborhood—with its school, its synagogue, its peddler-filled sidewalks, and the Williamsburg Bridge above—are the echoes of a painful relationship between poor Max Siegel and his ambitious son, marked by Max’s disapproval of the life Ben chose to lead and, on Ben’s side, by resentment that his parents failed to appreciate all he did for them. A story shared among today’s congregation is that the contract hit on Ben “Bugsy�
� Siegel was delayed that spring of 1947 to let the son mourn his father after all those difficult years.

  By the age of twelve, Siegel was essentially spending his days as he pleased—but what he pleased to do, more than play games, was embark on petty crime.

  Ben learned to hit up pushcart peddlers for protection; those who declined to pay a weekly fee might find their pushcarts torched. He learned that the drivers of horse-drawn carriages could be threatened as well: without protection, their horses might be poisoned. Arson and poisoning were crimes of choice for street urchins: “property crimes” easy to do without guns.16

  For a boy Ben’s age, the gangs were irresistible. “It was the exceptional, almost abnormal boy who did not join the gang,” recalled one veteran gang member. “The gang was romance, adventure, [and] had the zest of banditry, the thrill of camp life, and the lure of hero worship.”17 Lincoln Steffens, the famous muckraker, saw those children up close. “We would pass a synagogue where a score or more of boys were sitting hatless in their old clothes, smoking cigarettes on the steps outside, and their fathers, all dressed in black, with their high hats, uncut beards and temple curls, were going into the synagogue, tearing their hair and rending their garments. . . . Their sons were rebels against the law of Moses; they were lost souls, lost to God, the family, and to Israel of old.”18

  What separated Siegel from his fellow urchins was an utter absence of fear. He loved the adrenaline rush of breaking rules and taking risks. Siegel became known as a chaye—a beast. He scared even his mother. “I never sent Maurice to talk sense into Benjamin,” Jennie was quoted as saying years later, “because I was afraid for my younger son, my baby. Benjamin’s temper, I knew. He would have probably beaten him up. So I sent the girls after him. But it did no good. Benjamin wouldn’t listen. He told the girls that he was a man and that he wanted to lead his own life.”19 Some years later, Ben would pay for Maurice to go to college and medical school, but that would remain a family secret, to Ben’s enduring hurt. Maurice, as a niece observed, felt shame for taking the money, and may not have forgotten the pummeling he took from his older brother when both were young.

  In the early years of the twentieth century, a whole generation of immigrant boys took to the streets. “Unsupervised, the boys of the Lower East Side spent much of their time in front of the pool rooms and salons which dotted the neighborhood,” notes Lower East Side historian Jenna Joselit, “hoping to be called upon to perform an errand for one of the regulars.” Underworld characters became their role models, taking the place of sad-sack fathers. “The underworld characters were so fascinating because on top of everything else they exemplified the cynical truth behind the American dream,” notes Albert Fried in The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Gangster in America. It was “the incontrovertible fact that vice and crime were escape routes to freedom and that all the preaching at home and in school and in the press were so many lies and deceptions. Success taught its own lessons.”20

  Later, Siegel recounted his first actual crime, robbing a loan company. “I had to run like hell for about ten blocks, carrying two bags full of small change, before the guy chasing us ran out of breath and quit. It might have been better if they’d caught me because after that I was game for anything.”21 Already, the lineaments of a violent character were emerging. Ben was gleefully daring, impulsive, always ready for a fight. At the same time, he was willing to learn.

  Siegel’s lifelong friendship with Meyer Lansky began with another close call. At sixteen, Lansky stumbled upon a street fight and saw that a gun had slipped from one of the fighters’ hands. A boy, not quite a teenager, was reaching for it as a police posse rounded the corner. “Drop the gun,” Lansky ordered him. The boy looked up, saw the police, and took Lansky’s advice. When the two were safely away, the young Ben Siegel asked, “Why didn’t you let me kill that bastard?”

  “If you’d been caught with the gun you’d be in deep trouble,” Lansky told him. “Only a schlimazel would shoot with the cops in sight. Use your head.”22

  Lansky was born in Grodno, Russia. His was the classic immigrant’s story, with a father who came to America first and saved enough to bring over his family. When Meyer reached Ellis Island at age ten, the authorities changed his surname from Suchowljansky to Lansky.

  Meyer was an excellent student, picking up English on his own, reading avidly, and discovering a love for mathematics. But he was beguiled by gambling, beginning with street games of chance that he mastered by learning how the dealer and shill worked together to cheat a hapless mark. Like Ben, too, he was a scrappy fighter, despite his Lilliputian height of about five-foot-four. Sensing a kindred spirit that day he met him—and a boy, at five-foot-ten, big enough to protect him—Meyer asked Ben to join him in a gang he was forming, a gang for self-defense.

  The threats came from either side of the Lower East Side’s Jewish enclave: Irish on one side, Italians on the other. Constantly exposed to antisemitism, young Jews felt lucky to hand over their nickels with only a light beating from one or another of the roving gangs. Back in Grodno, Meyer had seen Jewish families terrorized by Russians, but he would always remember a night at his grandfather’s house when a fiery activist had addressed the local farmers. “Jews,” he shouted. “Why do you just stand around like stupid sheep and let them come and kill you, steal your money, kill your sons and rape your daughters? Aren’t you ashamed? You must stand up and fight.”23

  To Meyer, Ben resembled that activist. “He was young but very brave,” Lansky later said of Siegel to a troika of Israeli biographers. “He liked guns. His big problem was that he was always ready to rush in first and shoot. No one reacted faster than Benny.”24 In the Russian pogroms, no one had been able to fight. In America, the young Jewish gang members could stand up to any threat.

  Robert Rockaway, in an article in American Jewish History, recounts how the call would go out in Newark, New Jersey, when Irish thugs swept in. The streets would resound with “Ruff der Langer”: Call the Tall One! In a flash, future New Jersey crime boss Abner “Longy” Zwillman, nicknamed for his height, would martial his Happy Ramblers to drive out the intruders. “As a result,” notes Rockaway, “Longy acquired a reputation for assisting Jews that stayed with him his whole life.”25

  Siegel won some of that acclaim, too, and it resonated. When Ben’s daughter Millicent Siegel died in 2017 at eighty-six and Las Vegas residents objected to having a daughter of Bugsy Siegel buried in their cemetery, Rabbi Mendy Harlig, a Chabad-Lubavitcher, pushed back. “You don’t know what he and his friends did for the Jewish people on the Lower East Side,” he told his congregation. “The Italians and the Irish were horrible to the Jews.” Ben Siegel had protected those people.26 Millicent Siegel was buried in Harlig’s Chabad of Henderson after all, and because she died with almost no money, Harlig’s Chabad paid for the burial.

  Sometimes in these ethnic battles, a standoff between rival gangs led to mutual respect. An Italian gang led by one Salvatore Luciana cornered Meyer Lansky and demanded the usual tribute. “Go fuck yourself,” Lansky spat out. Lansky was shorter than Luciana and completely outmanned. Luciana was amazed by the teenager’s courage. “We both had a kind of instant understanding,” Luciana later explained. “It was something that never left us.” Luciana would come to be known as Charles “Lucky Luciano,” and he, Lansky, and Siegel, among others, would form the multiethnic group known as the Syndicate.27

  Along with stealing and small-time racketeering—forcing vendors to pay up or else—Siegel and Lansky held mundane day jobs. By the late 1910s, Ben was working for a trucking company, while Meyer was at a tool-and-die shop, fabricating parts for cars. They had money, but they were small fries, still living at home, destined to be caught for one crime or another and thrown into jail. Or worse, to sink into workaday lives like their fathers, both, as it happened, named Max. Siegel and Lansky dreaded the thought. “I’d have done anything not to be poor,” Rockaway recalls Lansky saying decades later.28

  Meyer’s
chance, and Ben’s, came on January 17, 1920, with the start of Prohibition. With it came their graduation from urchins to farbrekhers—Yiddish for criminals—and almost unimaginable wealth.

  “The transformative power of Prohibition cannot be overstated,” says mafia historian and screenwriter Nick Pileggi. “These guys went from being stickup men and thugs and tough guys who didn’t want to work for a living like their fathers into seeing a whole new way to make money.” A way not only to get rich but to rub shoulders with bankers, lawyers, even the president. “Harding had his own bootlegger,” Pileggi notes. “Frank Costello was invited to FDR’s inaugural.”29

  At the start, there were choices to be made. Should aspiring bootleggers import booze from beyond the U.S. border? Set up distilleries and make their own? Or hijack other bootleggers’ hauls? Siegel and Lansky needed a mentor. They found one in Arnold “The Brain” Rothstein, the first gangster to jump into bootlegging on an international scale.

  It was all the most amazing serendipity. Lansky met Rothstein at a bar mitzvah in Brooklyn, and the older man—all of thirty-two—was impressed enough to invite the eighteen-year-old to dinner at the new Park Central Hotel, a few blocks south of Central Park, where he lived. They talked for hours, Rothstein eventually laying out his plan to bring liquor by ship from England.30 Not the cheap stuff. From his years of running high-class gambling joints in Manhattan, Rothstein knew his customer. Wealthy social imbibers wanted the best, and Rothstein would get it for them. The beauty of trafficking booze from England, or Canada for that matter, was that it was legal until it crossed the U.S. border. What Rothstein needed was a network of operatives who could get it from there to warehouses and speakeasies. Specifically, he needed dozens of drivers, musclemen, ships’ crewmen, warehouse owners, middlemen, and gun-­wielding guards. Rothstein liked what he saw in Meyer Lansky, and said so. It was the most thrilling moment of Lansky’s life to date. He told Rothstein he would happily be a driver, getting shipments from ports to warehouses. He had another driver Rothstein could trust too, he said: Benjamin Siegel.