Bugsy Siegel

by Michael Shnayerson

  Di Frasso was, by one report, known for “her black hair, blue eyes and seductive figure.”29 In her youth she had been quite beautiful, but two decades of cigarettes and cocktails had taken their toll. Now in her late forties, she was somewhat heavier, and quite the older woman to Siegel, who had just turned thirty. Di Frasso may have charmed Siegel into bed, but the two probably settled into a friendship that served them both. Di Frasso got a handsome walker in Siegel, who gave off a tantalizing aroma of danger. Siegel got entrée into Hollywood’s best homes, including Pickfair, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks’s mansion.

  Between George Raft and Dorothy di Frasso, Siegel came to know most of Hollywood’s swells. “Practically everyone had met Bugsy through Dorothy,” Louella Parsons wrote in 1944. Or as screenwriter Charles Bennett noted, “Bugsy was so smooth, so charming, he was accepted in Beverly Hills society.”30

  Gambling was Bugsy’s most lucrative line, but as the house on Delfern Drive approached completion, he made serious efforts to build a Hollywood racket. A couple of Chicago-based gangsters, Willie Bioff and Johnny Roselli, had shown that Hollywood could be fleeced as easily as the garment industry. They paid a call to the Chicago-based Balaban and Katz Theater Corporation, or B&K, whose founders had made their fortunes not by making films but by building the ornate theaters in which those films were shown, including the first to be air-conditioned. The mobsters demanded that all of B&K’s theaters have two projectionists at all times, not one. The projectionists’ union would strike if the owners failed to comply. The shake-up created jobs, but all the union projectionists, new and old, had to pay hefty union dues, a sizable fraction of which went to the gangsters as a “war fund” in case of a strike.

  Bioff and Roselli were spotted in Hollywood, riding fancy cars and squiring classy women. They had bigger ambitions now. They took over the ten thousand–strong stagehands union and threatened the studio heads with a strike if payoffs weren’t forthcoming. Each of the big studios wrote a check for $50,000, while the smaller ones paid $25,000 each.31

  Siegel was furious at not being cut in to that action, but the Syndicate was firm. It was getting its share of Bioff and Roselli’s operation; it had no need for Siegel to intervene. Siegel responded by starting his own racket, in league with the Syndicate, of course. He zeroed in on the stage extras union. Extras were humble workaday actors, but no film production could do without them, any more than it could without stagehands. Where would a street scene be without its bystanders? Or a crowd scene without its crowd? After winning the union’s blessing to speak for it, Siegel began making social visits to the studio heads, asking them for sums to assure that those extras would show up for work. Sidney Kent, then president of the board of directors of Twentieth Century–Fox, told FBI agents that Siegel came in more than once to muscle him, and the studio did hand over a loan or two: paperwork to that effect was later found in Siegel’s home vault. But the amounts were modest, and no strike was called.32

  If the touch was light, there was a reason. Siegel wanted something else from these studio heads. He wanted to be an actor. He even had footage of himself acting, if the studio heads cared to look.

  The footage came courtesy of George Raft. On set, while Raft was making a film with Marlene Dietrich, Siegel sat rapt in the shadows. When the director called “Break!” he opened a briefcase to reveal his own 16-millimeter camera. He then turned to actor Mack Gray, another gangster-turned-star. “Okay, Killer,” Siegel told Gray, using the nickname Carole Lombard had come up with for him. “I’m going to do this bit and you shoot it for me.”33

  To Raft’s astonishment, and Gray’s, Siegel reenacted Raft’s part in the scene he’d just witnessed. He had not only memorized the lines, Raft later recalled, but used Raft’s gestures.34 Siegel was pretty good, Raft had to admit, but if the footage went any further than Siegel’s home projector, Raft never heard about it. As much as Siegel wanted to be on the silver screen, he was far too hot-tempered to prostrate himself before some studio head.35 An audition might have ended in bloodshed.

  If Siegel couldn’t be an actor, he could at least look and act like one. He was not just a fitness fanatic but a health nut, weighing just 160 pounds with a frame a tad under five-foot-ten. He neither smoked nor drank, aside from a celebratory cigar or an occasional snifter of brandy. He did like candy, however, and usually had some with him. Candy was a throwback to his youth, one of the only pleasures he could afford in those desperate years. For the 1930 U.S. census, he had called himself a candy salesman. He carried candy with him like a charm.

  Almost daily, Siegel went to Drucker’s, one of Hollywood’s top barbershops, usually for the works: a haircut, shave, manicure, shoulder massage, and shoe shine. Drucker had started at the Waldorf Astoria in New York, and come west with his well-known clients. Siegel was one of them, but when the gangster went back east, which he often did, other barbershops stood ready to serve. One was Benny Newman’s in Newark, New Jersey, where Siegel often went to meet with Longy Zwillman. Siegel was observed there, on at least one hot summer day, sitting jaybird naked in a barber’s chair. When Newman was done administering to him, Siegel stood in front of a long mirror, admiring his coif and buffed body. Only then did he put on his clothes.36

  Shaved and trimmed in L.A., Siegel would sail out on his rounds in one of his $200 Louis Roth suits. He would be wearing one of his $25 silk monogrammed shirts, and a flashy tie, and handmade, pointed shoes. Every day, he chose his wardrobe from the lighted glass cabinet in his dressing room, where his clothes were hung like museum pieces.37

  No less important was Siegel’s nighttime regimen. He started by rubbing cream over his face to keep his skin smooth. Then he fitted himself with an elastic chinstrap to keep his jowls from sagging, and slipped between the covers with a copy of Reader’s Digest. He especially liked the section “It Pays to Increase Your Word Power,” and practiced the new words he saw. When he felt himself dozing off, he turned out the bedside light and covered his eyes with a sleep shade. Raft would say later that Siegel obsessed over his thinning hair, and feared he might one day lose it all.38

  All this was vanity, but not just vanity. Siegel sensed the power he radiated with his picture-perfect physique, his vulpine good looks, and his visible grooming. No one he met with on his rounds wanted to see even the hint of a scowl cross those features.

  How many people Siegel actually killed in his L.A. “sportsman” days is, of course, unknown. As yet, his record in California remained clean, his name unsullied. An October night in 1937, however, brought the brutal demise of a gangster with whom Siegel had just had harsh words. Siegel stood to be implicated in the murder.

  George “Les” Bruneman had started as a West Coast bootlegger, then moved, after Prohibition, into gambling and bookmaking. Siegel was a partner in Bruneman’s Redondo Beach gambling joint, and the two men worked with fellow gangsters Jack Dragna and Johnny Roselli. But Bruneman apparently got greedy. He started encroaching on his partners’ gambling turf and skimming the proceeds. And when Siegel decreed that all independent operators like Bruneman kick back 10 percent of their profits to the Syndicate, Bruneman declined. Bruneman was even said to be muscling in on the screen extras racket, Siegel’s own latest caper.

  The end for Bruneman came in two acts. One July night, the bald and bespectacled criminal was promenading outside his Redondo Beach Surf Club with one of his “hostesses” when he took three bullets in the back. Bruneman survived, and in fine gangland style, declined to name his assailants. He was still recovering on October 25, when he went with his nurse for a late-night dinner at the Roost Café, one of L.A.’s most notorious gangland hangouts. Two men burst in with automatic rifles and fired more than a dozen shots, killing Bruneman and wounding his nurse. A waiter was also killed when he ran outside to get the license number of the getaway car.39

  Given Siegel’s close ties with Dragna, and the anger both felt at Bruneman’s infringements on their turf, the chances seemed high that Siegel at
least knew about the hit in advance.40 Still, he kept his name out of the papers, and a low-level bank robber, Peter Pianezzi, was charged with the crime. For the next several decades, Pianezzi would deny any role in the Bruneman killing. In 1981, he was exonerated by Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr., who found the case for his innocence compelling. Whether Siegel had been one of the shooters or just advised from afar, he appears to have doomed a low-level hood to a near-lifetime behind bars for a murder he hadn’t committed. Soon another gangland killing would hit the tabloids, one in which Siegel played a direct and all but indisputable part, changing the course of his life.

  4

  The Masterminds of Murder Inc.

  BACK EAST, Thomas Dewey had moved on from Dutch Schultz to a new target: Lucky Luciano. This was a matter of no small concern to Siegel, Lansky, and the rest of the Syndicate.

  Compared to Dutch Schultz, Luciano seemed a model citizen, and Dewey struggled to pin major crimes on him. As a fallback, in July 1936, he indicted Luciano on a dubious charge of engaging in forced prostitution.1

  Luciano had never consorted with prostitutes, he protested, much less acted as their pimp. Dewey knew this. He knew that Luciano’s underlings were the ones who had managed prostitutes and set up a network of brothels. But Dewey argued in court that Luciano was liable for all activities under his management, including prostitution. When Luciano took the stand, the prosecutor made a fool of him, getting him to mutter malapropisms in his broken English. What had he been doing when stopped with two shotguns among other street guns? “Shooting birds,” Luciano replied. What kind of birds? “Peasants,” Luciano said, and watched the courtroom erupt in laughter.2 To the Syndicate’s indignation, Luciano was found guilty on 558 counts, and sentenced to thirty to fifty years. For Siegel and Lansky, the verdict was like a death in the family.

  Dewey’s next targets were two more of Siegel’s and Lansky’s closest associates. Both Lepke Buchalter and Gurrah Shapiro had come a long way since their bootlegging days with Rothstein, but of the two, Lepke had come farther. The quiet king of racketeering in the New York garment industry, he was said to take in the current-day equivalent of $18 million a year from rackets in industries ranging from leather goods to shoes to millinery and handbags, from trucking to rabbit furs. He and Shapiro oversaw a small army of 250 men, ready to break up a union protest or sweep through a garment factory, breaking arms and legs. As he grew rich from the rackets, Lepke made contributions to his mother’s synagogue, attended High Holy Day services, and helped support his brother, a rabbi.3

  In the fall of 1936, Dewey charged Lepke and Gurrah with racketeering in the rabbit fur industry. The racketeers knew their sentence for that crime would be relatively light—two years or so—but they feared Dewey wouldn’t stop there. They knew how many men they had killed, and how many garment businesses they had torched. What they feared, above all, was their own men: gangsters who might betray them, giving Dewey the goods for a trial that would put them in the electric chair.

  To the astonishment of all, Gurrah jumped bail and vanished. Overnight, he became one of America’s most-wanted men, tracked by an army of detectives led by the relentless Dewey, with a $25,000 reward for his capture. He surrendered after less than a year, lonely and depressed, and spent the rest of his life in prison. By then, Lepke had skipped bail, too.

  From the moment he vanished in 1937, Lepke became the object of the largest international manhunt in the FBI’s history. He may have moved from one hideaway to the next, as the agency theorized, but he may have stayed right in Brooklyn: one account had two of the Syndicate’s most trusted killers, Albert “The Mad Hatter” Anastasia and Abe “Kid Twist” Reles, guarding Lepke in Brooklyn for the whole two years he was pursued, from an apartment above the Oriental Palace dancehall in Coney Island to various apartments nearby.4 Word of his whereabouts must have traveled to lower echelons of the Syndicate, yet none ratted for the sizable reward.

  Lepke had an odd way of thanking his hoodlums for their discretion. Unable even to venture outside, he became deeply paranoid, brooding over which of his henchmen he could trust. Eventually he embarked on an audacious campaign to kill anyone who might incriminate him for murder. For that, he recruited the newly formed Murder Inc., essentially Ben Siegel and Meyer Lansky. This was the Syndicate’s enforcement arm, the former Bug and Meyer mob, renamed and amped up. In their new guise, Siegel and Lansky took kill orders directly from Lepke, Frank Costello, “Joe Adonis” Doto, and the imprisoned Lucky Luciano. Most of the kills were done by a far-flung cadre of murderers on retainer. By the late 1930s, Murder Inc. would be said to have killed close to one thousand men. Even if the low estimate of four hundred was closer to the mark, that was still a shocking and unprecedented run.5

  The execution plans were usually elaborate, involving an out-of-state killer unknown to the victim. One minute the victim was alive, the next he was dead. “If you can believe it,” a detective later said, “Bugsy preferred to do the job himself. He wasn’t content just to give the orders and collect the fees. He enjoyed doing the blasting personally. It gave him a sense of power. He got his kicks out of seeing his victims suffering, groaning and dying.”6 Was the perpetrator of these atrocities a sociopath? A megalomaniac? Or just a sportsman of sadism? Surrounded as he was by gun-toting antagonists, Siegel may simply have felt that the terror these stories generated was an insurance policy to keep the next target from eliminating him first.

  In Tough Jews, Rich Cohen describes what made Murder Inc. so effective—and terrifying. “A stranger arrives, kills, is gone. The local cops are left with nothing . . .” By the mid-1930s, Cohen adds, “the contract killer had become a national character like the frontiersman or logger, who embodies aspects of the American personality. To some he was kind of an existential cowboy, riding the line between being and not, the mysterious stranger of Mark Twain who carries death in his pocket.”7

  For the two years Lepke was on the lam, Murder Inc. became more than a killing machine of second- or third-tier gangsters. It became a business, countrywide. If the pay was good enough, Murder Inc. would kill pretty much anyone, and not just on the streets of New York or L.A. Siegel himself featured in one of the most chilling stories, in which a millionaire businessman was allegedly dispatched to a watery grave in northern Minnesota.8

  Herbert H. Bigelow had founded a company in the 1920s that printed playing cards and pinup calendars. He had done well, but on principle declined to pay federal income tax and landed a three-year term in Leavenworth prison. In an adjacent cell languished one Charlie Ward, a rough character who volunteered to protect Bigelow from other prisoners.

  After serving eight months, Bigelow was pardoned by President Calvin Coolidge. When Charlie Ward was released, Bigelow not only hired him as his corporate heir apparent: he ­bequeathed him $1 million of his $3 million fortune.

  Bigelow was in one of three large canoes on Minnesota’s Basswood Lake in 1934 when conditions turned rough and his canoe overturned, drowning him and a companion. Investi­gators noticed perforations in the canoe that appeared to be bullet holes, shot from a rifle on shore. But there was nothing more to go by—except two letters that would turn up in Ben Siegel’s vault when detectives searched his mansion in August 1940. The letters were sent by Ward’s lawyer, referencing a payment of $100,000 due to Ben Siegel.

  Ward had a fascinating explanation when tracked down by the press. He said he and Siegel had met when Ward was visiting Hollywood. So charmed was Ward by Siegel that the Minnesotan had lent him $100,000 for “a dog track or something.” But as the letters made clear, Ward hadn’t lent Siegel anything. Ward owed Siegel $100,000 for some service rendered.9 Given the $1 million inheritance hanging in the balance for Ward, the service seemed all too clear.

  Just how many channels of cash seeped in to Siegel’s business network by the late thirties was impossible to know. “Bugsy is said to control almost everything for the mob on the west coast,” an informant later told the FBI. “But he doesn
’t get directly involved because he wants to stay in good standing in California. Siegel is the only Jew who has built a record of high accord among his colleagues.”10

  “He is attempting to enjoy a good reputation there,” another FBI informant noted. “He prides himself on the fact that he has never been convicted of a criminal offense of a major nature.”

  According to the FBI, Siegel was said to have a 25 percent interest in a gambling setup at Redondo Beach, the one co-owned by the ill-fated Les Bruneman, whose greed at not sharing gambling proceeds had contributed to his untimely death. Siegel owned 5 percent of the Agua Caliente racetrack, 5 percent of the dog track in Tijuana, and a piece of the Culver City dog racing track. He was said to oversee one of the biggest numbers game in southern California. From his bootlegging days, he was said to get a kickback—still—from all sales of certain brands of Scotch. Along with his share of the Clover Club, he was reputed to own part of the Beverly Wilshire hotel, and a nightclub called the Chi Chi. By now, too, suggests Lansky biographer Robert Lacey, Siegel was “running floating crap games in the private homes of the famous movie moguls, ferocious bettors to a man.”11

  The biggest business by far was the race wire. Siegel would have liked to start his own wire, but he and his fellow southern California vice lords, Jack Dragna and Guy McAfee, were up against the kingpin of the business. Moses Moe Annenberg was a Prussian-born, Chicago-based, up-from-the-bootstraps newspaper publisher who early on had become William Randolph Hearst’s general in the bloody newspaper circulation wars of the day. Annenberg had bought a modest publication called the Daily Racing Form, which supplied customers with key facts for the day’s races. Then came the ingenious move: hitching the Racing Form with the telegraph wire to relay the results. By the mid-1930s, Annenberg’s Nationwide News wire service was used by most of the fifteen thousand bookie joints in 223 cities across America.12 Annenberg himself was one of the country’s richest and most powerful men, closely allied with the Chicago mob. Siegel and his cronies would have to content themselves with betting on Annenberg’s wire until the millionaire somehow tripped up.