Bugsy Siegel

by Michael Shnayerson

  As Huie made for the waiting taxi, he heard the kitchen door slam, and a voice cry out “Robert!” He felt sure that Bugsy was about to appear from behind the wall, gun in hand. But no: it was Ben’s father, Max. “The old man was rushing to tell me goodbye, to express his sympathy, and to offer to lend me money. Had he not called to me I might have killed him.”

  Huie managed to hurl himself into the taxi before Bugsy appeared. He was safe—just barely. Three days later, after Huie had tipped off the authorities that Siegel had incriminating documents in his home, a raid was enacted at 250 Delfern Drive. Siegel was standing in the doorway to welcome the officers. He flashed them a big grin. “Why didn’t you bring Huie along?” No incriminating documents were found.28

  An abridged version of Huie’s adventures in the Siegel household was published in early January 1939 in the Los Angeles Examiner. It helped stir buzz all over town about Siegel’s bizarre voyage, with accompanying stories about his gangster life back east. The details were enough to prompt Ben and Esther Siegels’ expulsion from the Hillcrest Country Club. At school, one of Millicent’s classmates, the son of Edward G. Robinson, asked whether Millicent realized her father was a gangster. Millicent was too hurt to be struck by the irony that her classmate’s father had become a star by emulating thugs.29

  Dorothy di Frasso, apparently reconciled with Siegel after his abandonment of her in Panama, drove up to the hilltop castle of San Simeon to dissuade its owner William Randolph Hearst from running stories on her dear friend in his newspapers. In one version, Hearst heard her out and laughed: this was exactly the kind of story he wanted his papers to run, he said. In another, Hearst declined to open the gates at the bottom of the hill when she announced herself and her reason for coming.30

  Siegel cared about his public image, but he had bigger concerns. Lepke remained a fugitive from Thomas E. Dewey’s tireless pursuit into the summer of 1939, with serious implications for Siegel’s longevity. Increasingly paranoid, Lepke kept adding possible traitors to his list, and the hired guns of Murder Inc. kept killing them off. Not happily, though: even his top men were getting sick of the murders. Singlehandedly, Lepke was destroying the Syndicate.

  Enough was enough, agreed Siegel, Lansky, and the imprisoned Luciano. Together, they drew up the deal that brought Lepke in from the cold.31 Essentially they deceived him, persuading him that he would only have to face the racketeering case he’d skipped and serve a maximum sentence of two years. He wouldn’t face Dewey and a stack of other charges, including drug smuggling and murder. In just two years he would be a free man, running the rackets again.

  All but broken by his long sequester, Lepke agreed to the deal. There was just one issue that troubled him, one loose-lipped traitor who stood ready to tell the whole Syndicate story and who had to be stopped: Harry “Big Greenie” Greenberg. On two recent occasions, contract killers had tracked him down, only to have him squirm away. Lepke wanted no more failures in finding the weasel. He wanted the best, most reliable hit man he knew: Ben Siegel.

  The problem was that Siegel was in Italy with Dorothy di Frasso, and wasn’t easy to reach.

  Di Frasso and Siegel had let a new scheme captivate them. Somehow, di Frasso had been made aware of a new explosive called Atomite that detonated without sound or flash.32 With her Italian connections, di Frasso had pitched Atomite to Mussolini. The Italian leader was so interested in it that he advanced $40,000 to di Frasso to have the scientists with whom she was dealing scale it up. In the spring of 1939, di Frasso and Siegel sailed over to Rome with a large cache of Atomite in their possession. The trip was also a chance for di Frasso to show Siegel her husband’s Roman compound, Villa Madama.

  Unfortunately, the Atomite failed to explode and a furious Mussolini demanded his money back. Di Frasso was evicted from her husband’s villa by the dictator, who announced that he had important guests to install there. One was Hermann Göring, head of the German Luftwaffe and creator of the Gestapo. A second may have been Paul Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda. Bugsy biographer Larry Gragg suggests the mention of Goebbels might have been fanciful, but that Göring did seem to arrive while Siegel and di Frasso were there. Gragg found a note to that effect in the personal journal kept by Mussolini’s son-in-law, Count Galeazzo Ciano.

  “Dentice di Frasso has given us information about an astonishing American invention of a very powerful smokeless, colorless, and flashless gunpowder,” Ciano wrote. “Dentice vouches for this claim, but I am skeptical about such inventions.” The note was recorded in January 1939, plausibly dated some months before Siegel and di Frasso’s late spring trip to Italy. It was Ciano who noted that Göring had arrived in April and stayed at the Villa Madama. But the diary has no mention of Goebbels.33

  Even with only one top Nazi in shooting range, Siegel still felt his adrenaline pumping. He started casting about for the best vantage point for a clean shot—or two. Hitler had just invaded Czechoslovakia, violating the Treaty of Munich, and Jews in America would have rejoiced if Siegel had managed to kill even one of the Führer’s right-hand men.

  Dorothy di Frasso put a quick end to the scheme. Did Siegel realize, she exclaimed, what a position the shooting would put them both in? Di Frasso would lose her villa or worse; her husband could be imprisoned. For that matter, they could be imprisoned, too, if not tortured and killed. Reluctantly, Siegel let the idea go. But for the rest of his life he would regret not having taken those shots. Lansky would have done it, he knew. Already, his old friend was doing his part to take on the Nazis.

  One of the fondest chapters of Meyer Lansky’s life, unfolding even as Siegel and di Frasso tested Atomite, had begun with a call from a New York judge asking Lansky to help counteract the Nazi Bund rallies cropping up in and around New York’s Germantown. The judge would pay Lansky for mobilizing his men. He just wanted Lansky’s word that no one would be killed. Lansky refused the money, and agreed not to leave anyone dead.

  Years later, Lansky recounted his first attack on a Bund rally to his trio of Israeli biographers. “We got there in the evening, and found several hundred people dressed in their brown shirts. . . . The stage was decorated with a swastika and pictures of Hitler. The speakers started ranting. There were only fifteen of us, but we went into action. We attacked them in the hall and threw some of them out of the windows. There were fistfights all over the place. Most of the Nazis panicked and ran out. We chased them and beat them up, and some of them were out of action for months. We wanted to show them that Jews would not always sit back and accept insults.”34

  Rich Cohen says Lansky and Siegel understood, more than most law-abiding Jews, the threat the Nazis represented. “They knew what men are capable of, how far someone like Hitler would go, and they knew it could not be fought with reason or treaties or sanctions. The gangsters, who cared mostly about getting rich, knew some things were not just about money.” Mafia historian Robert Rockaway wonders whether a need to atone was also a motive, at least for Lansky. “Perhaps this was his way of compensating for his other, less heroic life.”35

  Siegel came home with di Frasso, the world’s list of hideous Nazis undiminished, to learn that Lepke was looking for him. He had a pretty good idea of what Lepke wanted, and even now, for all the trouble the crime boss had stirred, Siegel would do all he could to help.

  5

  Going After Big Greenie

  DAYS BEFORE HIS surrender, Lepke sat holed up in a little apartment on Foster Avenue in East Flatbush, Brooklyn. That was where Siegel came to pay his respects and take a last job that might keep the terrified murderer from the electric chair.

  Harry “Big Greenie” Greenberg had been a Syndicate killer for years, and a friend to all, none more so than Siegel. But Big Greenie had made the very serious mistake of threatening to talk if he wasn’t advanced a $5,000 loan. Lepke had sent a pair of killers to Montreal, where Greenberg had gone into hiding, only to have him give them the slip. The killers had picked up his trail in Detroit, yet fail
ed again to nab him. Now Lepke had word that Greenberg was living incognito in Los Angeles.

  “Don’t worry,” Siegel told Lepke. “If he’s in L.A., he’ll never leave.”1 No more failed hits, Siegel added. He would take on the job himself.

  One of those at the meeting was Doc Stacher, Meyer Lansky’s right-hand man. Decades later, he would recount the scene to Lansky’s Israeli biographers. “We all begged Bugsy to keep out of the shooting,” Stacher recalled. “He was too big a man by this time to become personally involved. But Bugsy wouldn’t listen. He wouldn’t even listen to Lansky the way he used to.” Stacher could only protest so much. As he later put it, “Greenberg was a menace to all of us, and if the cops grabbed him he could tell the whole story of our outfit back to the 1920s.”2

  It was Lepke’s last kill order. Days later, he came out of hiding to surrender.3 The handover, on August 24, 1939, was the stuff of great drama. Walter Winchell had won the gangsters’ trust with his nightly radio shows and was drafted by the FBI to help bring Lepke in. Following instructions from an anonymous caller, Winchell drove out first to Yonkers. The gangsters just wanted to be sure no G-men were tailing him. Winchell was then instructed to drive to a certain street in Chelsea, on the West Side of Manhattan. Like clockwork, Lepke emerged from a big black Packard and slid into the passenger seat of Winchell’s car. Winchell then drove Lepke down another West Side street to the FBI director’s idling limousine. His hands shaking, Winchell rolled up beside the car and nodded to the figure in back. “Mr. Hoover, this is Lepke,” Winchell said.

  “How do you do?” Hoover asked drily.

  “Glad to meet you,” Lepke said, and climbed into the back seat of Hoover’s car, beside the FBI director. “Let’s go.”4

  The pledge of one trial, and one trial only, lasted about as long as it took for Lepke to be driven to prison. The Syndicate’s bosses had double-crossed him. Lepke would be tried first for racketeering, then for murder, the latter by none other than Thomas E. Dewey. Still, if Siegel could take out Big Greenie, Lepke might avoid the chair, and the Syndicate’s other killers might sleep more easily, too, including Ben Siegel.

  Harry Greenberg was a rumpled, heavyset immigrant from Poland who had been deported from the United States once already. Nothing if not resourceful, he had jumped ship as Le Havre came into view, and managed to stow his way back to America. For years he had worked for the Syndicate as a loyal contract killer, but he had let his financial straits, and a tendency to gab, get the better of him. Now he was using all his wiles to stay alive, with a pair of killers on his trail.5

  Big Greenie and his wife, Ida, had rented a modest apartment in Hollywood, close to the Hollywood Freeway, living as Mr. and Mrs. George Schacter. When not working as a part-time chauffeur, Greenberg stayed in the apartment, except at about 11 P.M., when he made a quick run in his yellow Ford convertible to the drugstore at Hollywood and Vine for the next day’s newspapers. Somehow Siegel tracked him there, and began planning the hit to the last detail, with a perverse sense of fun.6

  At Siegel’s direction, an East Coast hit man named Albert “Allie Tick Tock” Tannenbaum, one of the killers originally assigned to get Big Greenie, went to the Newark, New Jersey, airport, where Longy Zwillman gave him a package containing two guns, along with $250 in cash for his plane fare to Los Angeles. Why Tannenbaum couldn’t have flown to California first and then picked up guns there was one of those details he knew not to question, not when Siegel was doing the planning.

  A gangly, gregarious fellow, Tannenbaum had come to the business in atypical fashion: his parents bought land in upstate New York and started a family-run summer camp popular among Jewish mobsters. “In much of the old world, Jews were forbidden to own property,” Rich Cohen notes, “so for many of them, land became a kind of grail, a dream, something worth fighting for.”7 Gangsters especially loved upstate resorts: they could congregate in peace. By age sixteen, Tannenbaum was on a first-name basis with almost every figure in New York organized crime.

  The former camp counselor was met in L.A. by Frank Carbo, another hit man recruited for the job. They went to meet Siegel at a Hollywood apartment. “We met several times planning the job,” Tannenbaum later testified, “spotting ‘Big Greenie’s’ house and making arrangements for a getaway.”8

  The plan was rife with Siegel’s signature details. As Greenberg returned from his evening newspaper run, two idling cars would emerge from the shadows. The lead car would be driven by Tannenbaum, with Carbo in the passenger seat. Siegel would be in the following car, his own new 1939 Buick convertible. When Big Greenie walked from his car to his front door, Carbo would run up to him and blast away. Meanwhile, Siegel and Tannenbaum would switch cars, with Siegel now in the lead car, and Tannenbaum following in Siegel’s Buick. If any car tried to follow the little motorcade, Tannenbaum would crash into it, giving the killers in the lead car the time they needed to make their getaway.

  To any veteran of drive-by shootings, the plan seemed absurd. Why use Siegel’s new Buick as the follow-on crash car, running the risk of demolishing it, and having its papers identify it as Siegel’s? But this was classic Siegel, an extra wrinkle in the plan. Siegel was willing to sacrifice a new car for the perception that he couldn’t have been part of the shooting posse because his own car would have been the lead getaway car, not the crash car.

  Peculiar as it was, the plan came off without a hitch. “We got set and after a while, ‘Big Greenie’ drove around the corner,” Tannenbaum testified. “Carbo was already out of the car and standing in the dark. He stepped over to ‘Big Greenie’s’ automobile and let ‘Greenie’ have it five times. Then he got in the car with Siegel and they drove away, with me following.”9

  If Siegel and Lepke thought killing Big Greenie would plug the last Syndicate leak, they were grievously mistaken. Early in the new year of 1940, one of their most trusted men and top enforcers, Abe “Kid Twist” Reles, astonished the crime world by telling the whole decade-long story of Murder Inc., corroborating everything Big Greenie might have said.

  What had led Reles to spill? His wife, Rose, who was pregnant, begged her husband to talk in the hope that their child might grow up with two parents.10 Reles had committed many of these killings himself, and knew his chances of dying in the electric chair were high. He made a deal with Assistant District Attorney Burton Turkus, later a coauthor of the classic 1951 book on the Syndicate, Murder, Inc.11 Reles would recount all the crimes of the Syndicate’s contract killers in return for having no charges brought against him. Turkus himself would become the subject of a 1960 movie, Murder, Inc., portrayed by actor Henry Morgan; Reles would be played by Peter Falk.

  Reles’s confessions filled twenty-five stenographers’ notebooks, and either solved outright or gave clues to what he claimed to be one thousand murders during a ten-year period. To the Syndicate’s horror, Allie “Tick Tock” Tannenbaum chose to squeal as well. This was not a good development for Lepke, whose charges were soon bumped up from racketeering to murder. For Siegel, still unindicted, it was a potentially life-ending one.

  In an unmistakable warning to stool pigeons, a low-level gangster associated with Big Greenie’s murder was shot dead August 1, 1940, on New York’s Delancey Street. Whitey Krakower, who had provided the stolen lead car used for the rubout, now was said to be gabbing. Curiously, Siegel chose just that week to come to New York. After Krakower was gunned down, Siegel’s lawyer provided a receipt for several nights’ stay in early August by Ben and Esther Siegel in a Newark hotel, as if a forty-minute drive could serve as an alibi for murder on a Manhattan street.12 Siegel was never charged with the murder, nor was anyone else.

  Shortly after Krakower’s shooting, a grand jury in L.A. began deliberating in the matter of Big Greenie’s murder. To help the jury in its investigation, the city’s district attorney decided to see what a search warrant of Siegel’s home might reveal. Early on the morning of August 16, 1940, four carloads of detectives showed up at the front door of 250 Del
fern Drive. None would ever forget what they found inside.13

  A black butler answered the door—this was nearly two years after William Bradford Huie’s undercover stint as a butler for the Siegel family—and glowered at the group until a search warrant was presented. The detectives then asked to see Ben Siegel.

  “He’s not home,” the butler said.

  The detectives politely replied that they would determine that for themselves. Guns drawn, they went up the sweeping staircase to the master bedroom. The bed was empty, its top sheet and coverlet pushed aside. One of the detectives put his hand on the mattress. “Still warm,” he said. Another noted the leather bedroom slippers askew on the plush carpet.

  One of the detectives opened the bedroom clothes closet to find hanging suits and pants, but no Ben Siegel. Then, on a low shelf, the detective saw a footprint on linen. Above was a closed trapdoor to the attic. The detective climbed up and saw a hand on one side of the brick chimney. “Hey, Ben,” the detective said, “we want to talk to you.”

  A sheepish Siegel appeared, wrapped in a silk robe, his hair unkempt.

  “What are you doing up here?” the detective said.

  “I’m going to the barber shop,” Siegel said.

  The detectives found that hilarious. “That’s doing it the hard way,” one of them said.

  Siegel asked why the detectives had come.

  “Big Greenie,” one said.