Bugsy Siegel

by Michael Shnayerson

  With his house on Delfern Drive sold, Siegel was living with his sister Bessie and her husband, Sollie Soloway. He could hardly bring Virginia Hill there. He made do with a series of trysting places. One was the Chateau Marmont apartment hotel, as it was called then, where the couple took a penthouse as Mr. and Mrs. James Hill. Virginia would check in first and bathe her body with Chanel No. 5 in anticipation of Siegel’s visit. Chick, still a teenager, would be paid to go for a leisurely walk when his sister’s new boyfriend arrived. Even so, he could sense, and sometimes hear, just how passionate their encounters were. Aspiring screenwriter Edward Anhalt lived for a while in a room across from “Mr. and Mrs. James Hill” at the Chateau Marmont and heard not just lovemaking but fierce arguments that sometimes came to blows. Bea Sedway, wife of Bugsy’s longtime gambling manager Moe Sedway, confirmed the two often fought, and that Hill would hurl objects at her lover. But Hill assured Bea Sedway these arguments always led to marvelous bouts of makeup sex.15

  Despite the hotel assignations, Hill kept an L.A. home of her own. She needed space for her hundreds of pairs of shoes, her four mink coats and half dozen mink stoles, her English bone china, crystal glassware, and sterling silver service for twelve. As she moved from one large rental home to the next, she carted her treasures herself in her latest Cadillac convertible, a new model every year.16

  Siegel added to this trove with the occasional diamond necklace or earrings, but his greatest gifts were tips at the track. Once when they were in Chicago, Hill shook her brother Chick out of a nap and put $12,000 in his hand. “Ben just called me,” she said. “The race starts in fifteen minutes. Go!” Chick drove at high speeds to the nearest bookie joint and put the $12,000 on the horse Siegel had named. He came back to the hotel with $30,000. At some point in the romance, Siegel also made a down payment for Hill on a house for her in Miami: about $30,000, as she recalled years later before the Kefauver Commission, though she couldn’t be sure. “I think it cost $49,000, I don’t know.”17

  That was romance, at least for Hill and Siegel. When they weren’t buying jewels and quaffing Champagne, they loved to read aloud from a fantasy novella called Forever, published in 1938 by a popular writer of the time, Mildred Cram. The story’s lovers were doomed to die, but passionately believed they would be reborn, to spend eternity together. Chick kept his sister’s copy, and later showed Jennings a passage Virginia had underscored. “Julie: If you should go first . . . And then what if I could never find you again? Or you me?” Colin: “We’ll find each other. Somewhere. Somehow. You’ll be born knowing about me. Wanting me. And some day we’ll come back here.”18

  The star-crossed lovers of Forever captivated film star Judy Garland, too. According to her biographer Gerald Clarke, she could recite its sixty pages by heart.

  Not long after Pearl Harbor, Lucky Luciano was quietly recruited by the U.S. military to help protect New York’s waterfront from German saboteurs. Luciano was obviously motivated by self-interest: his help might get him released from Dannemora prison. But he was, in his way, a fierce patriot, proud to help his adopted country and horrified by emerging news of the Holocaust. Lansky felt the same way: he had gone so far as to try to enlist in the U.S. Army, only to be rejected for his age (forty) and height (five-foot-four). And then there was Siegel.

  If Ben Siegel played any part in the war effort, it was never made known. Aside from his rather theatrical and ineffectual brush in Italy with one of Hitler’s top officials, Siegel appeared to be spending the war positioning himself to take advantage of a postwar surge in the casino business. He had his race wire deal with Continental Press, earning weekly fees from every casino that took the wire, which most of them did by now, and a slice from their nightly gaming, too. He couldn’t build his own hotel-casino, not for the million or more dollars that such a venture would take. But as a test run, he could talk Meyer Lansky into backing the purchase of one of the town’s existing hotel-casinos and show he could squeeze a profit from it.

  Siegel never did get Tom Hull to sell him the El Rancho. By chance, however, the town’s other big hotel-casino came up for sale. Just four years after its debut, the El Cortez sold on March 28, 1945, for a little more than $600,000. The buyer was Moe Sedway, Siegel’s front man. The seller was unaware Sedway and Siegel were in a group of ten silent investors, headed up by Meyer Lansky.19

  For such a lover of gambling and the lucre it brought, Meyer Lansky had only a modest interest in Vegas. He had made his own real estate investments in Florida, using front men to build or buy up casinos, clubs, and racetracks in and around Miami.20 He had invested heavily, too, in Cuba. Vegas was a cowboy town, set in the desert, a climate Lansky abhorred as much as Siegel did. But with the Syndicate in need of new investments—it had too much cash in hand—Lansky had let Siegel talk him into the El Cortez deal. In little more than a year, Siegel on the Syndicate’s behalf sold the El Cortez for $766,000, kicking back a modest but cheering profit to each of the ten partners on their respective $60,000 investments. Now they were in a more positive frame to hear Siegel’s pitch for another, very different kind of casino deal. Buying and selling an existing casino was a fairly easy deal to manage. What Siegel wanted now was to build a brand-new casino from the ground up, and make it, in the process, the most elegant hotel-casino America had yet seen. And for that, he had just the place in mind.

  8

  Bugsy Takes Charge

  WHO FIRST NOTICED the scruffy, thirty-three-acre lot with weather-beaten shacks south of Las Vegas on Highway 91 sometime in the first half of 1945? That’s a story with at least three versions.

  Siegel gets credit in the first version. It was he, so he said, who took Moe Sedway to the site a few miles south of the city’s last humble settlements, where the desert resumed and two-lane Route 91 wove its lonely way to L.A. Siegel was in the driver’s seat, Sedway in the passenger seat. “Here it is, Moe,” Siegel supposedly said.1

  Sedway saw a few ramshackle outbuildings, one with a faded sign that read “Cottages.” “For God’s sake, Ben,” Sedway said, “what is it?”

  “Thirty three acres, Moe,” Bugsy chortled. “Thirty three acres for a few nickels and dimes.”

  In this version, taken up by actor Warren Beatty for his 1991 film Bugsy, Siegel rhapsodized about the potential of these acres to give rise to “the god damnedest biggest hotel and casino you ever saw.”

  “But for Christ’s sake Ben,” Sedway retorted, “miles out of town. Not a tree in sight, nothing but bugs and coyotes and heat.”

  Siegel admitted that the kind of place he had in mind might cost as much as $2 million to build. But Vegas was about to ­explode—Siegel could feel it. The highway from L.A. was better paved, the drive time shorter. For long-distance gamblers, commercial aviation now offered direct flights from New York and other far-flung venues: no more stopovers, and half the flying time. Within the casinos lay another great comfort: cool air. Until 1945, the casinos of Vegas had had to rely on “swamp coolers,” modestly effective in public spaces, but of no help in guest bedrooms. That year the Carrier Corporation brought out in-room units that cooled, humidified, and dehumidified. Now all Vegas needed was an end to the war, so that homecoming soldiers could get their share of the fun.

  Version 2 put Lansky in the driver’s seat, with Siegel beside him and Sedway nowhere to be seen. Years later, Lansky told his trio of Israeli biographers it was he, not Siegel, who first noticed the thirty-three-acre lot for sale south of Vegas and took Siegel to it. Siegel was “too busy being a Hollywood playboy,” Lansky scoffed. “What I had in mind was to build the greatest, most luxurious hotel casino in the world.”2 In Version 2, Lansky was the visionary, bringing to bear his years of building clubs, casinos, and tracks on the Florida Gold Coast. Siegel had no idea how to build a hotel, much less a hotel-casino. He would just be the front man, making Lansky’s dream come true.

  Then there was Version 3, in which none of the aforementioned was in the car at all. That’s the version the facts su
pport.

  In Version 3, the visionary was one Billy Wilkerson, a nightclub owner and publishing magnate who took note of the For Sale sign on his way to the Las Vegas airport, homebound to L.A. after a ruinous stretch at the gaming tables. He saw it in January 1945, long before Siegel, Sedway, and Lansky claimed to have seen it. The story of how Wilkerson got to that point, and where his fate then led him, is told by the entrepreneur’s son W. R. Wilkerson III, in The Man Who Invented Las Vegas, which has key documents and canceled checks to make its case.3

  The dapper Wilkerson had sailed through the 1920s with a series of New York–based movie jobs, and decided in the fall of 1929 to drive his family to Hollywood, where the opportunities seemed greater. When a friend told him to play the market at rock bottom, he had done just that, only to learn how low rock bottom could go.4 He went west anyway, all but broke, and took charge of a trade magazine catering to the only legitimate business making money at that time: Hollywood. Soon his Hollywood Reporter was a powerhouse, intimidating studio heads to advertise or face having their movies panned or, worse yet ignored.

  Blessed with a flair for style, Wilkerson went on to establish nightclubs and restaurants that defined L.A. in the thirties: the Trocadero, Ciro’s, LaRue, Vendome, and L’Aiglon. He dressed the part, cultivating a waxed mustache and wearing white tails.5 Siegel frequented those haunts and surely had a back-slapping friendship with the dapper club owner; when Siegel was being catered to in jail in the fall of 1940, his dinners were sent from Ciro’s. Wilkerson’s own meals tended to consist of canned sardines on toast and deviled-egg sandwiches.6 Some bettors had lucky rabbits’ feet; Wilkerson had his strangely Spartan cuisine, his own superstition to help him win at the gaming tables.

  Unfortunately, Wilkerson was more than a run-of-the-mill gambler. He was a compulsive, hour-after-hour gambling addict, capable of winning, but more often of losing, tens of thousands of dollars at private gaming tables in southern California. He went daily, as well, to one of the horse tracks: Santa Anita, Hollywood Park, or the new Del Mar, opened in 1937. He and Siegel probably met at the track, too. The difference between them was that Siegel’s race tips were usually better.

  Wilkerson often staggered away from the gaming tables trailing handwritten IOUs, some on toilet paper, that the Holly­wood Reporter and his nightclubs had to pay, to the detriment of his employees’ paychecks.7 When Earl Warren as state attorney general cracked down on offshore gambling ships, Wilkerson took to flying to Las Vegas for its rustic—and legal—casinos. Like Siegel and Lansky, he hated the desert. But that was where the casinos were. He couldn’t live without them.

  Wilkerson’s losses only deepened, until the dark year of 1944, when he lost even more: $1 million. The notion of owning his own casino came from one of Wilkerson’s friends. It was a perfect solution for a gambling addict. The money lost would be like play money, reimbursed by the house. All Wilkerson had to do was stay out of other casinos.8

  By the time he stopped beside that stretch of desert in January 1945, Wilkerson had begun dreaming up a “mammoth” hotel-casino complex. He had Monte Carlo in mind: a lavish and exclusive resort that would pull in the high rollers yet also appeal to the hoi polloi. He figured the cost to buy the land and build might be as much as $1.2 million.9

  On that fateful day, Wilkerson walked a bit of the property, and his black mood began to lift. By his own account, Wilkerson negotiated with the property’s owner, Margaret M. Folsom, a former brothel keeper in Hawaii. He agreed to give her a check for $9,500 for ten of the thirty-three acres. He waited a month to buy the rest of the land until his lawyer, Greg Bautzer, a future high-profile Hollywood litigator, returned from active duty in the U.S. Navy to finalize the deal.10

  Apparently, Folsom came to appreciate the value of her remaining acreage to Wilkerson. Bautzer negotiated as best he could, but ended up buying the land on Wilkerson’s behalf for a hefty $84,000.11 The deed for those remaining twenty-three acres would not change hands until September 15, 1945, however. Wilkerson needed to raise capital for the balance of that purchase price, and for the architectural plans.

  Wilkerson knew nothing about how to run a hotel-casino complex, so he enlisted two local casino operators, Moe Sedway and Gus Greenbaum, apparently unaware, as yet, that both were backed by Meyer Lansky and Bugsy Siegel. He suggested that Sedway and Greenbaum run the place in exchange for a share of the profits. The two were happy to oblige.12

  Wilkerson felt sure he could raise the capital he needed at the gaming tables of nearby casinos. Instead, in April, he lost more than $200,000 in short order. To his new partners, he wrote a candid letter steeped in despair. “I have become convinced that Las Vegas is too dangerous for me. I like gambling too much, like to shoot craps and drive myself nuts and the only way I can defeat it is to keep away from any place that has it.”13

  Though it tore him up, Wilkerson decided to sell the deed to his partners, “an act of self-abnegation” as his lawyer and friend Bautzer put it. They promised to make him a co-owner, and give him a fair share of the spoils. Accordingly, on September 15, 1945, Sedway and Greenbaum bought the deed from Wilkerson. Two months later, possibly after a stretch of sobriety, Wilkerson declared he wanted to buy the deed back. The war was over, and he felt a new sense of excitement about what that would bring. Sedway and Greenbaum agreed, suggesting that neither they nor Lansky was yet sold on the prospect of building a mammoth hotel-casino. Better, they felt, to spend $250,000 sprucing up the newly acquired El Cortez.14 The deed was returned to Wilkerson for some amount of money on November 21.

  Back in charge, Wilkerson bulldozed the shacks on the old Folsom place in December 1945 and oversaw plans for a compound he had taken to calling the Hotel Wilkerson. It had six buildings, including stores, a beauty parlor, and a health club. The casino itself would be the hub of the compound: better to snare gamblers from all directions. It would have no clocks, Wilkerson decreed, and no windows. Chronic gambler that he was, Wilkerson knew the value of keeping gamblers in a fevered state, oblivious to the passage of time. Whether the casino and its neighboring structures would be connected or separate would soon be a matter of great significance.15

  The more Wilkerson schemed, the more splendid his vision became. The Hotel Wilkerson would have a nine-hole golf course, stables for forty-five horses, squash courts, a health club, a gym, and a humongous pool. It would have private bungalows, as at the Beverly Hills Hotel, and 250 rooms, and it would be five stories higher than any other in Las Vegas. All this would cost . . . a lot. By the start of 1946, Wilkerson landed a bank loan for $600,000, and aviation entrepreneur Howard Hughes contributed another $200,000 in exchange for a year’s worth of advertising in the Hollywood Reporter for his RKO film projects. Wilkerson figured he could earn the rest at Las Vegas’ gaming tables.16

  Again he was wrong. After another cold stretch at the tables in January 1946, Wilkerson needed another investor, this one very deep-pocketed. He found one through the boys, as he called Sedway and Greenbaum. G. Harry Rothberg was a former bootlegger who, with his brother Sam, had gone legit after Prohibition and formed the American Distilling Company. But the Rothbergs were open to doing some profitable business by fronting for Meyer Lansky.17

  Rothberg, with no mention of Lansky, made a remarkable offer. He would give Wilkerson $1 million in exchange for a two-thirds interest in the Hotel Wilkerson. All creative decisions would be Wilkerson’s. And when the hotel-casino opened, in March 1947, Wilkerson would be the front man and sole operator, charming guests and nurturing the press. Rothberg, Sedway, and Greenbaum would stay in the shadows as silent backers, with Lansky even more obscured. Wilkerson agreed, as long as all parties understood the land would stay his own. He wasn’t selling the site to anyone, under any circumstances. The deal was struck in late February 1946, and Rothberg wrote Wilkerson a check for $1 million.18

  Wilkerson’s son suggests that his father was the one who changed the name of the Hotel Wilkerson to the Flamingo. “He . . . had a
particular liking for exotic birds and even named some of his projects after them, like his restaurant L’Aiglon in Beverly Hills. It was no coincidence that one of his favorite nightspots was the Stork Club in New York City.”19

  More likely, the man who changed the Hotel Wilkerson to the Flamingo was the one who made a surprise visit to the construction site in March 1946, accompanied by Sedway, Greenbaum, and Rothberg. With his slicked-back hair and double-breasted, pinstriped suit, he needed no introduction, at least not to Wilkerson. Ben Siegel had just come forward as the project’s latest backer.20

  Siegel was in a jovial, almost euphoric frame of mind, and why not? He was about to sell the El Cortez, turning a profit for the Syndicate in the mere year or so since he had bought it. The money from its sale—$766,000—was probably the capital Siegel had just persuaded Lansky to invest in the Hotel Wilkerson.

  That day, Siegel heaped praise upon his new and somewhat wary partner. Wilkerson was his idol, he declared. He loved Ciro’s and Trocadero and L’Aiglon. These were the joints that made L.A. what it was. All he wanted was to be of help, in whatever small way he could. To help and to learn from the master. Later, a business partner of Wilkerson’s, Tom Seward, put it more succinctly. “Siegel did not want to be like Billy,” Seward recalled of Siegel and Wilkerson. “He literally wanted to be Billy.”21

  Though he might be a hindrance, Siegel did have contacts that could be of help in rounding up scarce postwar construction materials. He made calls to Hollywood heavyweights and got them to part with stage set supplies. Other sources brought in cement, steel girders, copper tubing, and Italian marble. Apparently he had help from Nevada senator Pat McCarran, who “reprioritized” the state’s building needs to accommodate construction of what was now being called the Flamingo Hotel.22

  Virginia Hill’s long, flamingo-like legs were said by some to be the inspiration for the Hotel Wilkerson’s new name. With alcohol, especially tequila, Hill was said to blush dramatically, another flamingo connection. Yet another explanation had nothing to do with Hill at all. Siegel made frequent trips to Miami to do business with Lansky, and the two men liked to sit out at the Hialeah track, watching flocks of pink flamingos in the infield. “Not only was the flamingo a beautiful and exotic bird,” suggests Stephen Birmingham in The Rest of Us, his epic narrative of immigrant eastern Europeans, “but, it was said, the Seminole Indians believed the flamingo was a symbol of good luck, and that to kill a flamingo was to invite misfortune. What better name for the ultimate gambling palace?”23 Whatever the reason, the project’s new name was a first indication that Wilkerson’s backers had plans of their own, plans that might not square with his.