Bugsy Siegel

by Michael Shnayerson

  Charming and collegial as this interlude seemed, Siegel and Lansky had come very close to killing a man just months before—using him, as they later put it, for target practice. Racketeering was becoming as big a business as bootlegging, and as gangsters who had started by threatening to torch peddlers’ pushcarts, Siegel and Lansky brought the same concept to the garment industry: pay for protection, or else. The most feared racketeers were Louis “Lepke” Buchalter and Jacob “Gurrah” Shapiro, friends of Lansky and Siegel from the early days of Prohibition, when all had worked for Rothstein. Lepke and Gurrah ruled the garment industry and often hired Siegel and Lansky as enforcers. The gangsters got paid by garment company owners to break up union strikes, then hired out to the unions for acts of revenge, breaking owners’ legs or burning their factories.

  Despite their tactics, Lepke and Gurrah were almost rabbinical in manner. “Lepke avoided all flamboyance and displays of bravado,” notes Albert Fried. “He was reserved in speech, manner and dress, and while he occasionally gambled, drank and womanized, he was rarely seen in the popular haunts. And Gurrah lived quietly with his family in the predominantly Jewish Flatbush section of Brooklyn.”12

  The near-homicide was the result of a routine job involving pricey furs from a Bronx wholesaler, a job that took a bad turn when Lansky and Siegel realized they were several furs short. Under questioning, a low-ranking hood named John Barrett admitted he had taken the furs. He felt that Siegel and Lansky’s share of the take on jobs like these was unfairly high.

  That night, Lansky and Siegel took Barrett on a ride out of town. With them was Red Levine, an Orthodox Jewish contract killer who tried not to kill on the Sabbath—but if the job had to be done, kissed his mezuzah, said his prayers draped in a tallit, and wore a skullcap under his hat as he headed out.

  “Even the most violent of the gangsters saw themselves as good Jews, people of the Book,” suggests Rich Cohen in Tough Jews. “They went to temple on High Holy Days, thought of God when things went bad, had their sons circumcised and bar mitzvahed. Being a Jew was not something they were thinking of all the time, but they were aware of themselves as Jews, as players in a larger story—the Temple, the Exodus. How did they square their criminal life with the life of the Bible? Well, like most people, they made a distinction: This is the life of the soul; this is the life of the body. Next year in Jerusalem. But this is how I live in the Diaspora.”13

  Barrett felt sure he was about to be killed. With nothing to lose, he jumped out of the moving car in a rural area. The gangsters screeched to a stop and piled out to open fire on Barrett’s zigzagging figure. Barrett was “a hell of a runner,” another gangster recalled with awe, but he did get hit four times.14 Somehow he managed to flag down a taxi and get to the Lower East Side’s Gouverneur Hospital.

  Over breakfast the next morning at Ratner’s, the Delancey Street deli where Siegel and Lansky often met with pals for long, schmoozy breakfasts, Lansky announced to a new arrival, “You really missed the party!” He meant the shooting-target practice that Barrett had provided. Over their bagels and coffee, the boys decided to finish off Barrett by sending a poisoned chicken to his hospital room: the hospital was barely a block away. Barrett, no fool, winged the chicken out the window.15

  All this was highly amusing to Siegel, who despite his penchant for violence retained a childlike sense of mischief. From atop buildings in Brooklyn, he would drop water balloons onto policemen below. “When one dripping cop stormed into Siegel’s hotel looking for the villain,” reports Dean Jennings, Siegel’s first biographer and in some ways his best, fellow Rothstein bootlegger Albert Anastasia snarled, “ ‘For Christ’s sake, Ben, why in hell you keep pulling this kid stuff?’ ”

  “ ‘Because I get a kick out of it,’ ” Siegel replied.16

  Soon Siegel was dropping those water balloons from a suite at the Waldorf Astoria, having moved his family from Brooklyn to the city’s largest first-class hotel when his first daughter, Millicent, was born January 14, 1931. Instead of Ratner’s, he started his day at the Waldorf’s Norse Grill, or in one of his fellow gangsters’ suites. Frank Costello, a longtime racketeering pal, had a suite at the Waldorf, too. So did Siegel’s and Lansky’s close friend Salvatore Lucania, who had earned his nickname “Lucky” in 1929 after being taken for a ride by rival gangsters, beaten, cut, and left for dead at the side of a road. Some good Samaritan had taken Lucania to a hospital, and he had survived. He emerged from the ordeal with a deep, long, menacing knife scar down one side of his face—and a new name.17

  The Waldorf’s plush grandeur appealed to the gangsters, and the security was good. Lansky was a frequent breakfast guest. “We sort of met there mornings,” Lansky recalled. “I spoke often about gambling to Frank, Charlie and Ben.”18

  For Siegel and Lansky, the American dream had come true, even if their version of it required bootlegging, racketeering, and the occasional contract killing. And how young they were! Lansky was twenty-nine years old in 1931, Siegel just twenty-five. Now, however, they found themselves caught in the crossfire of two mafia clans.

  Mussolini, of all people, had managed in 1926 to banish Joseph “The Boss” Masseria from Italy and Salvatore Maranzano from Sicily, along with each man’s murderous army. In the New York turf war that followed, as many as fifty underlings died. Masseria recruited Lucky Luciano as an enforcer. Luciano, in turn, hired Lansky and Siegel.19

  With the gang war still red-hot in early 1931, Luciano got word from one of Masseria’s top lieutenants, Joe Adonis, that Luciano was no longer in favor: too big for his britches, Masseria had decided. He wanted Luciano killed. He wanted Lansky and Siegel killed, too. He didn’t much like working with Jews.20

  Quietly, Luciano switched his allegiance to Maranzano and suggested to his new boss that he lure Masseria into a trap. Luciano asked Masseria to lunch on April 15, 1931, at a Coney Island restaurant, and the two talked for some time. Legend has it that Masseria, a huge man, wolfed down a massive plate of spaghetti, but as Bugsy biographer Larry Gragg notes, Masseria’s stomach, when pumped the next day, showed little or no food consumed.21 True to legend, though, Luciano did excuse himself to go to the bathroom, and a large sedan did appear outside the restaurant, with gun-toting gangsters piling out to blow Masseria to smithereens.

  Whether Siegel was among them is a matter of dispute. Gragg finds no firm evidence he was. Mafia historian Robert Rockaway puts Siegel in the car along with Albert Anastasia, Vito Genovese, and Joe Adonis. Meyer Lansky’s trio of Israeli biographers goes so far as to suggest Siegel led the vengeful posse. Job done, they report, “the four gunmen ran for their car. Their driver stalled out the vehicle twice. Bugsy Siegel punched him and shoved him aside, then took the wheel himself and calmly drove off at high speed.” This version is also credited by Thomas Reppetto in his American Mafia. The hapless driver, he suggests, was one Ciro Terranova, the Artichoke King.22

  With Masseria dead, Maranzano convened a meeting of all the top gangsters and formally recognized their families and bosses. Luciano was one of them, in recognition of his role in eliminating Masseria. Maranzano made just one mistake: he put himself above all others, as boss of bosses.

  Siegel, Lansky, and Luciano heard the grumbling. They also knew that Maranzano had drawn up a kill list, and that ­Luciano was on it. For that matter, Lansky and Siegel were on it, too. Together the three came up with a plan to be carried out at the heavily guarded midtown offices that Maranzano had just taken for himself at 230 Park Avenue.

  The plan was that a handful of putative Internal Revenue Service agents would knock on Maranzano’s front office door, there to check for evidence of tax evasion. None of the agents would be Italian: that might raise the suspicions of Maranzano’s bodyguards. They would, instead, be Jewish contract killers, mostly brought in from distant states.

  The plan came off without a hitch. On September 10, 1931, the uniformed faux agents flashed their badges and showed their inspection documents. Once inside the front offic
e, they drew their guns and lined the bodyguards against a wall, warning them to stay silent. Then they burst into Maranzano’s private office. The Jewish killer Red Levine, the one who tried not to kill on the Sabbath, stabbed Maranzano six times. (It was a Thursday.) Others riddled his bleeding body with bullets. The killers then fled down the back stairs to a waiting car. Some versions put Siegel at the wheel of the getaway car; true or not, he could take gleeful credit, with Lansky and Luciano, for the plan.23

  With that, Lucky Luciano became the unchallenged ruler of gangland, flanked by Siegel and Lansky. Wisely, he claimed no such title. There would still be five families, as Maranzano had decreed, but they would be free to do whatever business they pleased. “There’s no such thing as good money or bad money,” he reportedly said. “There’s just money.”24 Luciano reiterated the credo first aired in Atlantic City. Italians, Irish, and Jews would work together, both to minimize bloodshed and to maximize profits; all hits would have to be sanctioned by the family heads of what would now be known officially as the Syndicate. Along with Luciano, Lansky, and Siegel, the Syndicate’s top members included Frank Costello and Giuseppe “Joe Adonis” Doto. They would be the ones sitting in judgment, meting out shootings as needed.

  To hash out how racketeering would be handled in this new day, nine nattily dressed gangsters convened on November 12, 1931, at New York’s Franconia Hotel on West 72nd Street. Among them were Lepke Buchalter and Gurrah Shapiro, terrors of the garment industry. There, too, was Ben Siegel. A tipoff to the police led to a roust, as gangsters put it: all nine men were brought in for fingerprints and mug shots. The cops lined them up for a group shot as well. It was quite a picture: all nine men dapper-hatted, with snappy ties protruding from their elegant overcoats. That was the picture that made the newspapers the next day: the public’s first image of Ben Siegel.25

  Siegel was furious. The cops had no charges to slap on any of the gangsters. They were just rousting for the sport of it. Siegel argued that his arrest was a breach of his privacy. So was publication of that group photograph. Since he had no previous record in New York, he prevailed. He had his fingerprints and mug shots returned to him, and got the police to snip him out of the group photograph. Ben Siegel was determined to be a gangster and a member in good standing of Café Society.26

  Despite Luciano’s stern new edict that no killings should occur without permission, gangsters had a way of taking matters into their own hands. Waxey Gordon had nursed a grievance against Siegel and Lansky for years, ever since “Bug and Meyer” had hijacked one of his booze trucks. To Waxey’s greater indignation, Lansky and his brother Jake then provided evidence of tax evasion on Gordon’s part to United States Attorney Thomas E. Dewey. Waxey had made himself an obvious target: in 1930, he had earned roughly $1.5 million and paid taxes of exactly $10.76.27 Now Waxey was indicted, and would soon be serving a ten-year jail term, in large part thanks to the Lanskys. He was livid, and intent on revenge.

  One day in the fall of 1932, Siegel got a call from one of Waxey Gordon’s lieutenants, Charles “Chink” Sherman, asking for a meeting at Broadway and 34th Street. Sherman had left the Waxey Gordon mob, he said, and wanted to throw in his lot with Siegel and Lansky. Whatever Sherman said, it was enough for Siegel to head uptown from the headquarters he and Lansky kept on Grand Street on the Lower East Side with one or two bodyguards in a bulletproof sedan. As they reached 34th Street, another car drew up alongside, and its passengers raked Siegel’s car with machine-gun fire. One of Siegel’s men was shot in the rear; the rest were unhurt.

  Back on Grand Street, a seething Siegel convened a war meeting. That was when the second attack came. One of Gordon’s henchmen had lowered a bomb down the room’s chimney, and he managed to detonate it. He just hadn’t realized that the chimney made a ninety-degree turn, and then another, above the fireplace. The bomb, as a result, went off in the chimney, not in the fireplace. Still, Siegel was hit in the head by a flying piece of brick and rushed to a nearby hospital.28

  Siegel felt sure that a Gordon mobster named Tony Fabrazzo had planted the bomb. There was bad blood between him and Siegel, since Siegel had had something to do with killing one or both of Fabrazzo’s brothers, one of them reportedly in a phone booth. On the high-speed drive to the hospital, Siegel’s mobsters swore they caught a glimpse of Fabrazzo in a chase car, angling for an open shot.

  In his private hospital room, Siegel came up with a plan. On his second or third night of recuperation, he donned a suit, plumped up pillows under the covers to resemble his sleeping form, and sneaked out of the hospital. Whisked into his bullet-pocked armored car, Siegel rode out to Fort Hamilton, Brooklyn. His pals parked up the street from the house of Tony Fabrazzo’s father, where the last of his three sons was staying, and rang the doorbell. The father opened the door to what he thought were three police detectives, dutifully flashing their badges. Called down by his father, Tony Fabrazzo came to the doorway and was promptly shot with three bullets in the head. Siegel and his pals fled back to the hospital, where Siegel crawled into his private-room bed, thrilled with his perfect alibi.

  The year that Prohibition ended—1933—Siegel moved his family from the Waldorf Astoria to a five-bedroom, Tudor-style house in Scarsdale, New York, at 46 Bretton Road. His second daughter, Barbara, had just been born, and Siegel wanted what everyone who moved to Scarsdale wanted: an upscale Westchester County suburb with good public schools. For a homeowner who worried that he might get shot, the house was perfectly situated at the intersection of three streets—three escape routes, that is. For a boy from the Lower East Side, Scarsdale was country: on a U.S. census report, Siegel would say that he and his family lived on a farm.29

  Still, Scarsdale was an odd choice for a Jew at that time. As a social history of the town makes clear, Jews were not welcome. “Realtors, normally eager for clients, tried to discourage Jewish couples from buying property in Scarsdale,” writes Carol A. O’Connor. “If dissuasion failed, the realtors had an agreement whereby they refused to show Jews the houses in certain areas.” Ultimately, wealthy Jews managed to buy homes in the most affluent neighborhoods: money prevailed, as it often did in real estate. One notable resident at the time Ben bought his house was Sidney Weinberg, of the investment firm Goldman, Sachs. Another was entertainer Al Jolson, quite possibly the Broadway acquaintance who inspired Siegel to move to Scarsdale in the first place. But as O’Connor writes, social acceptance rarely followed. “The small number of Jews who moved into the village discovered that non-Jews refused to associate with them socially. Although they could join the local civic organizations, they were not admitted to the Scarsdale Golf Club.”30 Siegel could hardly have been unaware of the antisemitism. He may have felt he could tough it out in Scarsdale, and charm his way into his neighbors’ social circles. Anyone who declined to receive him, after all, might find himself taking a ride in the back of a Packard, down a long dark country road.

  This sylvan suburban scene was marred by the news that a new and progressive New York mayor, Fiorella La Guardia, had embarked on an all-out campaign to rid the city of organized crime. His sidekick was Thomas E. Dewey, the mayor’s specially appointed prosecutor, who had just won his first case—against Waxey Gordon, thanks to the Lansky brothers.31 Now Dewey was vowing to break the rackets, starting with Lepke Buchalter and Gurrah Shapiro. The Bug and Meyer mob could hardly be far down Dewey’s list. Perhaps it was time for Siegel to make himself scarce.

  Siegel had another incentive to lie low. His alibi for the killing of Tony Fabrazzo was looking less than perfect; the authorities were asking around. Lansky had a suggestion. The Syndicate had awarded Lansky and Siegel the rights to any and all gambling operations outside of New York. Cuba was promising; so were the Bahamas. And so was Las Vegas. But clearly the hottest opportunities lay in and around Los Angeles, now that Prohibition was ending and booze would no longer be the Syndicate’s top source of income. Lansky wanted Siegel to explore how the Syndicate might muscle in on L.A. gambling oper
ations, make book at the Santa Anita track, squeeze racketeering proceeds from the movie industry—and maybe bring in narcotics, including heroin, from south of the border. Handsome and suave, with a still-clean record in the eyes of the law but a fearsome reputation in the underworld, Ben Siegel was the perfect advance man, sure to command the respect of shady gangsters in that sunny clime. As for Siegel, he loved the prospect of fun amid stars and starlets while his wife stayed back in Scarsdale, watching over their daughters. Hollywood! It was, in retrospect, a perfect marriage of the man and the moment, a move Ben Siegel was born to make.

  3

  Sportsman in Paradise

  ON HIS FIRST TRIP to L.A., in 1933, Ben Siegel stayed at the towering Ambassador Hotel, famous for its Cocoanut Grove nightclub.1 His first call was almost certainly to George Raft: fellow gangster, Broadway dancer, old friend, and rising movie star. Raft was Bugsy’s entrée to Hollywood.

  Raft had grown up in a cold-water flat in Hell’s Kitchen and, like Siegel, had become a scrappy fighter with a volatile temper, adroit enough with a knife to be called The Snake. His gang boss, Owney Madden, had a yen for entertainment: he started the Cotton Club, where jazz greats from Cab Calloway to Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, and Louis Armstrong performed. It was Madden who first noticed Raft’s gift for dancing and encouraged him to work the midtown dancehalls, where lonely women paid to be whirled around the floor. Later, Fred Astaire described Raft as “the neatest, fastest Charleston dancer ever. . . . He practically floored me with his footwork.”2