Bugsy Siegel

by Michael Shnayerson

  The opening of Siegel’s home on Delfern Drive in 1938 brought Siegel’s glamorous life to a new level. He and Esther began giving grand parties. In came the stars, intrigued by the mansion and its mysterious host. Cary Grant was among them, as were Clark Gable and Gary Cooper. George Raft was a ­regular, of course. So was Jimmy Durante. And so was Frank Sinatra, who knew more of Siegel’s story through his own mob friends than most other guests. Comic actor Phil Silvers’s wife, Jo-Carroll Dennison, said her husband and his pals were enthralled. “They would brag about Bugsy, what he’d done and how many people he’d killed. Sometimes they’d argue about whether Bugsy preferred to shoot his victims or simply chop them up with axes.” Dennison never forgot “the awe Frank had in his voice when he talked about him. He wanted to emulate Bugsy.”13

  “He was one of the most fabulous characters ever to take part in the social activities of the city where fabulous characters gather like bees on clusters of sweet grapes,” wrote columnist Florabel Muir. “He was the storybook gangster to the romantic, emotional, almost childlike adults who populate the movie colony. He bowled them over with his suave manner, his immaculate hand-tailored shirts, his two-hundred-dollar suits, his twenty-five dollar ties. For women, especially, he had a strange fascination. Perhaps it was the imagined menace that shadowed his handsome face or the quick boyish grin he flashed for those he liked. Some of them who would never have dared date him enjoyed a delicious tingle along their spines at the thought of doing so.”14

  The holdout was Jimmy Stewart. Appalled by Siegel’s burgeoning notoriety, the earnest actor tried to talk his fellow stars out of seeing Siegel at all. Cary Grant replied, rather winningly, “Look, Jim, the guy’s best pal is George Raft, and George says if Benny wants you to be his friend, you be his friend.” That was a bit disingenuous, Stewart’s wife, Gloria, felt. Stars liked even bigger stars; for them, she said, “the only people who could be remotely more glamorous were royalty and big-time gangsters.”15

  Stewart did more than lecture his friends in private. He came right up to Siegel in public and denounced him to his face. The gangster’s famous temper flared, and George Raft feared the worst. “Let me talk to Benny,” he told Stewart. “Try and calm him down.”

  “If Siegel wants to try his luck with me,” Stewart seethed, “let him take his best shot.”

  “If he takes his best shot,” Raft said, “it’ll be the last shot you hear.”

  Gloria Stewart had her own theory for why Stewart didn’t take a bullet from Siegel. “I think it’s just possible that it was Jim’s belligerence that kept him safe.”16

  Socializing and snooping weren’t the only reasons Siegel’s Hollywood stars came to dine. Siegel ran his own floating craps game at the house on Delfern Drive. He was a gracious host, quick with a quip and a laugh. One by one, though, the stars noticed something disconcerting about him. He asked them all for loans. Individually, the loans weren’t that large: a thousand dollars here and there, pocket money for a Hollywood star. But they added up. Later, a record book found in one of Siegel’s secret compartments at the Delfern Drive house would tote hundreds of thousands of dollars in loans from the Hollywood set to their elegant host.17

  The loans were never repaid. Siegel was so charming that his friends felt it somehow beneath them to ask for their money back, and Siegel always had some promising investment he was about to make with their cash: a new nightclub in which he might get them a piece, a new horse about to win at the track. But then, too, there were those stories from back east, of Siegel as a bootlegger, handy with a gun. No doubt the stories were exaggerations, and yet . . .

  As another way to gamble, Siegel took an interest in the SS Rex, a casino ship rigged up by a gangster named Tony Cornero, who had made a first fortune robbing bootleggers. Cornero took the Rex three miles off Santa Monica, just beyond the reach of the law, and shuttled guests back and forth in high-speed water taxis twenty-four hours a day. Soon a dozen other gambling ships were anchored offshore, a veritable navy for the nabobs of southern California.

  Whether Siegel invested his own money in the Rex is unclear. He did ask George Raft to lend him $20,000, a wad of cash that would buy the two of them a share of the boat’s profits, he said. Raft said he was between films and didn’t have the money. “So get it,” Siegel told him. The next day, Raft drove 140 miles to a summer resort southeast of Hollywood where producer Myron Selznick was staying. With an arched brow, Selznick wrote him a check against future fees for a film Raft owed him.18

  In its first six months, the SS Rex sat profitably at anchor off the coast, earning $236,940, of which a chunk went to Siegel.19 This may have been the most lucrative period of Siegel’s career. Along with his various nightclub investments, the gambling dens and dog tracks, Siegel may have been taking in as much as $500,000 a year, ten times the amount he claimed to the IRS.20 In today’s dollars, that would be more like $9 million. But change was in the air—and sea. Earl Warren, the newly elected, reform-minded California attorney general, made it his mission to stop the gambling boats. He started by pushing federal authorities to expand the limit of international waters from three miles to twelve. When that failed to drive the Rex and its ilk out of business, the future U.S. Supreme Court justice sent authorities to dump $100,000 worth of slot machines and other gambling equipment into the ocean. That was it for the gambling boats—and, for George Raft, most of the $20,000 he’d lent his good friend. Records showed Siegel repaid Raft just $2,000, plus checks for $500 “here and there,” as Raft put it. With Siegel, the cost of friendship ran high.21

  Another offshore adventure at that time showed just how far Siegel would go in pursuit of easy money. Dorothy di ­Frasso told him of a talk she had had in New York with a man who rolled out a hand-drawn map and told her of a great buried treasure, worth $90 million, on Cocos Island, some miles off the coast of Costa Rica. The hard-boiled Siegel thrilled to the very mention of it.22

  Days later, a most peculiar entourage left Santa Monica on the Metha Nelson, a three-masted schooner. Along with a hired captain and crew, it consisted of Siegel, Dorothy di Frasso, and, among others, the late Jean Harlow’s mobbed-up stepfather, Mario Bello, and a young, attractive nurse whom Bello married three days out of port.23

  Siegel, recalled one of the passengers, showed a flair for leadership, and kept his famous temper in check. He had brought dynamite for blasting, gas-powered rock drills, and spades and shovels for all. Expectations diminished after an obligatory stop in Puntarenas, where the Costa Rican government claimed a third of any treasure that might be found. Siegel was daunted, but not for long. After all, he declared, “We’ll still have sixty million left.”24

  Cocos Island, it turned out, was uninhabited for good reason. It was a rock outcropping, tropically hot. With Siegel urging them on, the group spent ten days blowing up promising sites and digging rocky soil before abandoning the dream. Later, Dorothy di Frasso waved off the rumors of romance on the trip with Siegel. “Ben is one of my closest friends,” she told one reporter. “But as for romance, it’s absurd. He has a wife and I have a husband, and any other interpretation is ridiculous.”25

  Sunburned and blistered, the group headed back north, stopping first in Panama, where Siegel abandoned the passengers and crew, including di Frasso, and flew home on his own. When the ship at last reached Santa Monica, after weathering a typhoon, FBI agents pounced, investigating rumors of drug trafficking and the possibility that Lepke Buchalter, the world’s most wanted man, was onboard. The questioning led nowhere, but Siegel’s name was linked to the story, and an enterprising editor of the Los Angeles Examiner began researching just what kind of sportsman Ben Siegel was. Remarkably, not one Los Angeles reporter had yet published a story that linked Ben Siegel with bootlegging or illegal gambling, let alone contract killing. After getting his image removed from that group shot of 1931 at New York’s Franconia Hotel, Siegel had gone seven years without having his past exposed, beyond the mentions in social columns of “sports
man” Ben Siegel. All that was about to change.

  Siegel had been gone many weeks on a boat, with a woman not his wife, through the fall of 1938. He returned to a family confused and depressed, but still going through the rituals of upper-class life in one of America’s most fabled milieus. He and Esther had joined the Hillcrest Country Club, an exclusively Jewish enclave, and made new friends. Millicent and Barbara had been enrolled in a fashionable girls’ school. They took daily lessons at the DuBrock Riding Academy, where one of their riding mates was Elizabeth Taylor. They took piano lessons at home. When a grown-up gave her father a violin, Millicent recalled, she had to learn to play it, too.26

  Decades later, Millicent told one interviewer that Siegel as a father had been both strict and indulgent. He wanted his daughters to be well mannered, well groomed, and capable of speaking on issues of the day.27 At dinner they had to discuss the news of the day. Siegel’s insistence that his family conform to these social strictures said more about him than it did them. How could he head off on a pirate adventure while leaving them on their own, and still expect them to be happy when he came back home? Perhaps because of his own dichotomous role growing up—the breadwinner and the ne’er do well in one odd package—Siegel saw nothing strange about acting in such contradictory ways as husband and father. He was still the provider, but on his own terms, as he was with his parents and siblings. As soon as he got home, the family fun began, with Siegel at the center of it, splashing the girls in the pool as his wife held the movie camera. Decades later, Millicent would view the fading footage, trying to make sense of the father who laughed and engaged in horseplay, only to vanish again.

  Deep down, Siegel may have realized he couldn’t have his family and his freedom, any more than he could live as a gangster and gain social acceptance from a public appalled by his crimes. Only here, in his dream house on Delfern Drive, could all the incongruities of his life come together. Only here, within its walls mounted by surveillance cameras, could he feel safe and at ease. He would have been shocked to know that a journalist was in the house, watching his family’s every move.

  William Bradford Huie was an ambitious reporter who would go on to pioneering civil rights coverage, prying loose the confession of Emmett Till’s killers among other coups. At twenty-eight, as a freelancer newly arrived in L.A., he was intrigued to pick up a copy of the Los Angeles Examiner on December 16, 1938, and see a feature about the ill-fated voyage of the Metha Nelson. Sniffing an even better story in Bugsy Siegel’s rise from poverty, he drove over to 250 Delfern Drive and knocked at the service door with an armload of magazines, presenting himself as a subscription salesman. As Huie later recalled in a long report in the American Mercury, the cook invited him in and soon related that the lady of the house was in desperate need of a butler: her father was arriving from New York for a Christmas visit, with her in-laws—Max and Jennie Siegel—already in residence. Huie went to the employment agency the Siegels used and presented himself as a fancy butler just in from the South.

  Huie interviewed the next morning with Esther, who surprised him. “She wasn’t the movie version of the big-shot gangster’s wife,” he related. “She was a serious, not unattractive blonde in her early thirties. . . . Now she was working hard at making like a rich woman, but I sensed that she was lonely. . . . She was almost pathetically glad to see me. She hired me much too quickly.”

  Huie assumed that Esther’s husband would be in residence, too, but as he later wrote, “Bugsy had double-crossed me.” Huie had assumed the Metha Nelson would be docked by now, and that Siegel would be home for Christmas. Apparently he was still making his way. Huie found himself tending the rest of the family: making breakfast for Esther, waxing the floors and cleaning the Venetian blinds, taking Millicent and Barbara for their horse riding lessons, and chauffeuring Esther nightly to a local bar where she drank quite a bit with other young Hollywood wives.

  Huie was particularly struck by Siegel’s father, Max, a “portly, mustachioed old gentleman who had worked hard peddling suits all his life.” Apparently, Siegel’s parents had come to live with him at last—or so suggests the 1940 U.S. census, in which Max would note he was no longer working for pay. But life at 250 Delfern was no less lonely for Max than for the others. As Huie put it, “He had great difficulty passing the time. He liked to talk with me, and on afternoons when Mrs. Siegel went shopping he’d come into the pantry and help me polish the silver. But he’d be careful to run and pick up a newspaper at her approach.”

  With Siegel still gone on Christmas Eve, Huie filled in. “I carved the turkey and served dinner in the rumpus room for twelve; I changed into a Santa Claus suit, parked my reindeer on the roof, bounded back into the rumpus room, and was a solid hit as St. Nick.” As the Christmas tree indicated, Siegel appeared to be farther than ever from his Judaic roots. “They were really a forlorn family, living there in that big house that Christmas. . . . Mrs. Siegel was the loneliest of all. Each night, after the others had gone to bed, she’d either go with me or send me after the papers. Then she’d trudge wearily up to her room to read about Bugsy and his voyage on the Metha Nelson.”

  With Siegel not yet home, Huie made late-night visits to the gangster’s study, and managed to pry open his file cabinet, in search of incriminating documents. “It was nervous work,” as he put it, because the floor was carpeted and Huie wouldn’t hear a family member approaching until it was too late. He came away with what seemed only some of Siegel’s papers—but enough. “They clearly indicated his connections and activities; and they contained more than enough evidence for legal action.”

  On December 30, without warning, Siegel returned. “I went to answer the front doorbell and there he was—the sportsman himself in a two-hundred-dollar tweed suit, snap-brim hat, and plaid tie,” Huie wrote. Siegel gave Huie a cool, appraising look and swept in, followed by two beefy bodyguards. He had bagsful of Christmas presents for Millicent and Barbara, but soon repaired to his office, where he began making rapid-fire calls. Lawyers and accountants went in and out; amid their murmuring, Siegel’s harsh laughter dominated. The man of the house was home.

  That evening, Huie served the family dinner in the ornate living room. He felt Siegel’s eyes on him. “I kept telling myself that he wouldn’t be as easily deceived as his family. A successful racketeer suspects everyone.” But Siegel seemed distracted by his wife and daughters.

  That night, when his family had gone to bed, a big meeting convened in Siegel’s office. Despite his fear, according to Huie, he went through the kitchen and pantry to listen in through the drawing room. He was about fifty feet from the office door, close enough to see cigar smoke rolling out, but too far to hear what was being said. All he could tell for sure was that Siegel was mad, and that a rough edge had come into his voice. “He had reverted to his old gang argot,” Huie wrote.

  Determined to hear details, Huie tried a new approach. He went out back from the kitchen, where two large and menacing dogs lurked; fortunately they recognized the butler. The drawing room’s windows were cloaked by Venetian blinds, but days before, Huie had stretched two of the lower slats far enough apart to get a narrow view on his knees. The windows were closed, but Huie could hear much of what was being said, particularly Siegel’s voice. Through the slats, he saw the brightly buffed shoes of the gangsters, and their raffishly patterned socks. He would be safe unless Bugsy grew suspicious and flicked the switch on his desk, floodlighting his entire grounds.”

  Bugsy’s visitors, Huie knew, “were his hoods, the muscle, the force by which a front man like Bugsy ‘moves in’ on the gambling at Redondo Beach, or ‘cuts himself a piece’ of the foreign book at Caliente, or ‘muscles in’ on Las Vegas or ‘takes over a territory’ for bookmaking or distributing heroin. They were the collections agents, the intimidators.”

  When the meeting broke up, Huie recalled creeping to his bedroom and sneaking a look out the window. There below was Siegel, talking to the dogs and seeming to sniff the air himself. He
came back inside, and started up the staircase by the garage that led to the staff quarters. “I was baffled,” Huie wrote. “If he suspected the truth he wouldn’t be coming after me this way; he’d call me and ask me to drive him somewhere. But neither would he be paying me a friendly visit at 3 A.M.”

  Huie wrote that he heard the footsteps coming closer. He flattened himself against the wall by the door, a gun in hand. “If he opened the door I’d have no choice; I’d have to shoot him.” Huie heard Siegel’s steps outside the door. “I heard him switch on the light in my bathroom; then he went back downstairs and reentered the house.” Apparently, Siegel was just the proud homeowner, surveying his gracious domain.

  Not long after that, Huie found Siegel playing with his daughters, only to be waved over. “ ‘They tell me you been taking them to their riding lessons, Robert,’ ” Siegel said, using Huie’s borrowed name. “ ‘How they doing?’ ”

  Huie said they were doing just swell. Why, he added politely, didn’t Siegel go riding with them one afternoon.

  “ ‘Me? Hell, I can’t ride. When I was a kid I didn’t ride nothing but the subway.’ ”

  By January 4, 1939, Huie wrote, he began to feel seriously endangered. He took a moment when Esther was in the kitchen and Siegel was up in his bedroom to tell Esther a plausible story. Huie’s mother had had a stroke in Arizona, the journalist improvised. He had to go home right away. Esther was disappointed, but gracious: she made him take a full month’s pay of $115 rather than the three weeks he’d earned since his arrival. With that, Huie called a taxi, then dashed over to his bedroom and grabbed his luggage. “I felt certain that while I was with the kids, Mrs. Siegel had told Bugsy. A light might flash on for him.”