Bugsy Siegel

by Michael Shnayerson

  Siegel asked Green to keep the case while he did a little business in L.A. The very idea made Green nervous. Money like this had a way of getting its owner killed. “Don’t worry, no one else in Vegas knows about it,” Siegel assured him.

  Days later, after Siegel was dead and buried, Fat Irish reportedly handed over the still-locked case to Meyer Lansky. By one report, even Lansky was astounded when he forced the case open. He had known nothing about a secret case of money, or of anyone holding it for him. And yet there it was: tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars in small, unmarked bills.16 Deeply touched, he declared that Fat Irish Green could live the rest of his life rent-free as a guest of the El Cortez hotel. And so he did.

  Neither of the authoritative Meyer Lansky biographies includes the Fat Irish Green story, but Dean Jennings’s early Bugsy biography does. “For the past nineteen years,” Jennings wrote in 1967, “Green has been living at the El Cortez in Las Vegas. He has never had a bill for room and board, and he gets small cash handouts now and then to pay for drinks and the other needs of life.”17 The story of Fat Irish and his suitcase of cash, living happily ever after, may be embellished. It may not be true. But it is a good story.

  Either way, Siegel flew down to L.A. on the night of June 19 with his friend Swifty Morgan, a racetrack tout notorious for always needing money, sometimes selling hot jewels in nightclubs to pay off his gambling debts. They reached L.A. at about 2:30 A.M. and took a taxi to Linden Drive. Chick Hill was there to greet them, but Siegel went right to one of the upstairs bedrooms, after putting Morgan in another. The next morning, Virginia Hill’s Chinese cook served them breakfast. Later, Chick would remember the calls coming in, a few at first, then more, with more insistence.18

  First Siegel called his ex-wife to check on the girls. Esther was putting Millicent, sixteen, and Barbara, fourteen, on the Super Chief sleeper train from New York’s Penn Central Station to Los Angeles, with the promise of summer fun with their father. The girls had never traveled so far alone before. They were thrilled to have their own sleeping coach.

  There were business calls to be made, so Siegel repaired to one of the Linden Drive bedrooms and closed the door. When he reappeared, his mood had darkened. Allen Smiley had come by in the meantime. He was the partner who had been arrested with Siegel for bookmaking in the Sunset Towers, back in 1944; he was the Russian Jew who had arranged for Siegel to meet with Israeli activist Reuven Dafni. Siegel had a full day of meetings, almost certainly in order to scrounge for more operating funds for the Flamingo. “Let’s go,” he said tersely to Smiley.

  The two drove to Mickey Cohen’s house in Brentwood. Siegel got out of the car and told Smiley to take a walk, while he went in to confer with Cohen. Years later, Cohen would say that Siegel in the meeting said he might need a shooter, asking Cohen who was in town.19

  From there, Siegel and Smiley drove over to George Raft’s place in Coldwater Canyon. Raft later said that Siegel looked pale, “with jerky speech and movements.” Raft told him to take a few days off. “I’m tired, Georgie,” Siegel admitted.20 But he was buoyed by the prospect of seeing his daughters and taking them to Lake Louise in Canada.

  On the last day of his life, Siegel indulged himself with a stop at Harry Drucker’s hair salon. Siegel had his usual that day: haircut, shave, manicure, neck and shoulder massage, and his shoes shined to a high gloss.21

  A visit to his L.A. lawyer’s office rounded out Siegel’s afternoon. At one point the lawyer passed over an unreimbursed receipt—for thirty-five bucks. Siegel’s temper flared, and the lawyer felt a stab of fear. Muttering, Siegel pulled out his wallet, counted three hundred-dollar bills, and stuffed them into the lawyer’s hand. “Now you’re not busted,” he said.22

  Back at the Linden Drive house, Siegel had an odd exchange with Chick Hill. Up in the bedroom that Hill and Mason had been sharing was a gun on a bureau. Siegel asked Chick to put the gun in the room’s wall safe. Chick spun the dials, opened the door, and put the gun beside a heaping mound of jewelry. “You know that’s all Virginia’s stuff,” Chick said. Much of it had been given to her by Siegel. Shouldn’t he insure it, Chick asked? Or put it in a bank safety box?

  “That’s your sister’s worry, kid,” Siegel retorted. “I got enough on my mind.” Anyway, he added, Chick shouldn’t worry. “You’re in Beverly Hills,” Siegel said with a laugh. “Cops come along this block every half hour.”23

  Perhaps the full treatment from Drucker’s had put Siegel into a better mood. He had no bodyguards that day, and when Allen Smiley came back over, Siegel seemed cheerful again. He didn’t even close the draperies of the living room’s plate-glass windows—the windows that looked directly on to Linden Drive.

  The four headed out for dinner in Smiley’s new powder-blue, slope-backed Cadillac coupe: Siegel, Chick Hill, and Jerri Mason, with Smiley at the wheel. Their destination was Jack’s, a new restaurant overlooking the sea in the Ocean Park neighborhood of Santa Monica. Chick Hill recalled that they stayed about ninety minutes. The older men joked with Chick and Jerri about their romance getting serious, and Siegel picked up the tab. As they waited for a valet to bring them their car, a restaurant worker handed Siegel a copy of the next morning’s Los Angeles Times. On the front page was stamped “Good Night Sleep Well, with the compliments of Jack’s.”24

  Back at the house, Siegel slid out the passenger side of the big car and strode up to the front door, reaching in his pocket for the gold key Hill had given him. As he switched on the living room lights, a strong smell of flowers stopped him in his tracks. When Siegel called their attention to it, Chick recalled a saying of his mother’s, down in Bessemer, Alabama. “When someone smells flowers and there aren’t any in the house, it means they’re going to die.”25 In fact, the scent was from the late-blooming jasmine outside a window. A window that was open, through which nine shots were about to be fired.26

  At about 10:45 P.M., Siegel and Smiley sat in the living room, each with an open section of the Los Angeles Times on his lap. Siegel was on the chintz davenport in front of the plate-glass windows, the draperies still open. Smiley was on an adjacent sofa. Chick and Jerri had gone upstairs.

  Outside, an unseen figure set his .30-.30 carbine on the rose trellis dividing the Linden Drive mansion from its neighbor. By one report, the rifle was fourteen feet from its target; by another, it was fifteen. Either way, the shooter could hardly miss from such close range, and didn’t. A first bullet tore directly into Siegel’s head and out the other side, propelling his right eye fifteen feet across the room into the opposite wall. A second bullet found its mark, too, pushing through Siegel’s brain and neck. Two more bullets passed through his chest, another through another part of his body. In all, he was hit by five bullets, killing him instantly. One of the other bullets grazed the sleeve of Allen Smiley’s coat.27

  To Smiley, the first bullets sounded like fireworks. “For a second, I thought it might be a gag,” Smiley told investigators. “But I looked up at Siegel’s face and saw blood all over it so I instinctively fell on the floor for my own protection.”28 Smiley started screaming, “Shut the lights, shut the lights!” By the time someone did, the firing had stopped. In the darkness, Jerri called the police and screamed into the receiver that someone was firing a gun into the house. Chick was more rational. He went into the upstairs wall safe, pocketed the gun, and dumped his sister’s jewelry into the partially filled laundry chute.29

  The police were at the house within minutes. Once they had determined the shooter was gone, a police photographer took gruesome pictures of Siegel’s blood-covered body, sprawled on the sofa. These are some of the grisliest photographs ever taken in the annals of organized crime.

  The first journalist to arrive at the scene was Florabel Muir, the syndicated columnist. Hours before, Siegel had called her to thank her for a favorable review of a Flamingo floor show. Now she coolly lifted the blood-spattered newspaper on Siegel’s lap to see what he had been reading. She measured the distance be
tween Siegel’s corpse and the eye that had hit the opposite wall. Then, she recalled, she picked up the sliver of flesh from which his long eyelashes extended.30

  Up in Vegas that evening, shortly before Siegel’s shooting, a strange scene had unfolded at the Flamingo’s floor show. Eight large, broad-shouldered men had sat together in silence as singer and guitarist Tito Guizar, the Mexican Roy Rogers, performed. Toward the end of the show, another man went around the table, whispering in their ears. With that, the men left the room and took up posts around the casino, apparently guarding the premises.

  Within minutes of the L.A. murder, Moe Sedway and Gus Greenbaum appeared in the lobby of the Flamingo. Sedway hadn’t dared show his face at the casino after his summary banishment, but here he was now, with his old partner Greenbaum and another casino executive, Morris Rosen, who worked for Meyer Lansky. They announced to the crowd that Ben Siegel had died, and that there had been a change of management. They were the Flamingo’s owners now.31 With that, their roles grew to legend. Mario Puzo in his 1969 novel The Godfather named his Vegas casino owner Moe Greene, an amalgam of Moe Sedway and Gus Greenbaum. Both in the novel and the epic 1972 movie that followed, Moe Greene was clearly based on Siegel as well. Like Siegel, Greene was a hot-headed casino owner who refused to sell out to the Syndicate. Like Siegel, Greene was killed by a bullet through the eye—in Greene’s case while getting a massage.

  Within an hour of his death, Siegel’s body was driven to the Los Angeles County morgue and put on a sliding slab in crypt 6. His personal effects, duly recorded, were a platinum wristwatch, a gold ring with an amber stone, a Mexican gold coin made into a money clip, a set of diamond-and-platinum cuff links, an alligator billfold containing about $400, a gold cigar punch, and six keys, two of them gold plated. The next day, the Los Angeles Herald-Express published a front-page picture of Siegel’s right foot, with a toe label that read “homicide.”32

  The murder suspects were legion. As the last person who saw Siegel alive, Allen Smiley briefly topped the detectives’ list. He could have set up the kill and positioned Siegel right in front of the plate-glass windows. Except that Smiley had been Siegel’s loyal friend and fixer for nearly a decade, and there was, in any event, no evidence of his complicity.

  The investigators also questioned Chick Hill and Jerri Mason. Both said they had been in their upstairs bedroom when the shots were fired. Jerri had called the police as soon as the shooting ended. It was a short interrogation.

  The likeliest suspects, directly or indirectly, were Siegel’s lifelong associates: the Syndicate leaders who, according to Doc Stacher, had approved Siegel’s execution at the Havana Conference the previous December. Stacher had no doubt that Lucky Luciano had followed through on his warning. Luciano had made clear that Siegel would have to die. If the job was too personal for Lansky, Luciano would get it done for him. In fact, Stacher said later, Lansky had hired Mickey Cohen to guard Siegel, and warned Cohen of the consequences if Siegel was killed. As a result, Stacher theorized, “Bugsy’s death must have involved Lucky Luciano because Meyer had told Mickey Cohen to stay close to Bugsy, and yet he hadn’t been there with Bugsy at the end. That could only have meant that Luciano pulled Mickey off the case.”33

  Still, there were pieces that just didn’t fit. Why, if the order had been handed down the previous December, couldn’t the Syndicate have gotten the job done within days or weeks? And why, if the fix was in, did Meyer Lansky keep visiting his oldest and dearest friend at the Flamingo? Why did he help underwrite the cost of finishing the hotel, and talk Frank Costello, among others, into investing with him? Why visit Siegel at the Flamingo just days before his death?34 Most bafflingly, why kill Siegel when the Flamingo was generating money at last? Didn’t it make more sense to put personal feelings aside, and partake of the profits?

  These queries bolstered the odds of a race wire shooter, possibly Russell Brophy. The race wire grumblers had just lost serious future income, and killing Siegel might undo the damage, or at least satisfy the need for revenge.35

  Beverly Hills Police Chief Clinton Anderson had another suspect in mind: Moe Sedway. Over the years, Sedway had done all he could to buff Siegel’s image, steer the race wire his way, and fend off his rivals. Yet Siegel had banished him. Sedway seethed with resentment, and his appearance at the Flamingo the night of Siegel’s shooting, alongside Gus Greenbaum, seemed to suggest he had played a role.

  Sedway could hardly be accused of the Beverly Hills shooting himself when he was three hundred miles away in Vegas. But he certainly could have ordered the hit, or found the right man to do it. Chief Anderson had a hunch that Sedway might hustle back down to L.A. to clean up any of the dead man’s unfinished business. The chief was right. When his men brought Sedway in, he was trembling and struggling for breath. He asked if he could postpone the interview until the next day. The police chief had no evidence on which to hold him and so, reluctantly, he agreed. The next morning, the chief learned that Sedway had been rushed to a hospital in Hollywood. When Anderson’s men came by, they found their suspect in a private room marked “No admittance, Oxygen.” They entered anyway. Again, Sedway pleaded for time. That night, the casino manager took a late-night train to Vegas, putting himself outside the Beverly Hills police department’s jurisdiction. “I never had a chance to talk to him,” Anderson said later, “but I was convinced, and still am, that he had a hand in the Siegel killing. He knew who did it.”36

  Gus Greenbaum, another of the three men who took over the Flamingo that fateful night, was just as likely to have known who killed Siegel. He never said a word about it, and no evidence of his complicity ever emerged. A decade or so later, after managing the Flamingo to great profitability, he would let gambling and drugs slide him into skimming. The punishment for skimming was always especially violent, as Siegel’s story had underscored. Greenbaum and his wife were found dead in their Arizona home, their throats cut so brutally that their heads were nearly severed.37

  There was another, equally plausible suspect in Siegel’s murder. What if the love of Siegel’s life had had something to do with his death—if not caused it, then allowed it to happen?

  Virginia Hill had never traveled to Europe before. Yet she crossed the Atlantic on June 16 for an extended stay. How unlikely was it that Joe Epstein might have warned her Siegel was about to die, and advised a long vacation in a faraway place?

  Perhaps, if she did get wind of the shooting to come, Hill could have tipped off Siegel and fled with him to some South Sea island. But that was a course Siegel would never have taken. As Doc Stacher said of Siegel, “he knew there was no point in running away. He was never a coward. He would stay in the United States and face whatever was coming to him.”38

  Hill, for her part, said she first heard the news of Siegel’s death at a party outside Paris—perhaps the early evening of June 21, likely on the Feuillattes’ houseboat near Fontainebleau, where Hill was sharing a bedroom with Nicolas’s mother. “We got to talking about calisthenics,” Hill recounted, “and I told another American girl, ‘I know a fellow who loves calisthenics and does them very well—Ben Siegel.’ She looked at me strangely and replied. ‘Why, he’s dead. Didn’t you know?’ ”39

  Shortly after, a Paris-based reporter tracked Hill down to the Claridge, her hotel near the Champs Élysées. During a brief interview, Hill cried more than once. She said her last quarrel with Siegel was over whether he should wear a sport shirt to a dinner he was attending. “I told him he could not go to dinner with all those people in a dirty white sports shirt. I can’t believe who shot him, or why.” As she talked, Hill kept nervously crossing her legs, and the reporter noticed several bruises on them. They came, Hill said, from horseback riding in the Fontainebleau forest.40

  Chick Hill said that his big sister called him from the Claridge, hoarse with grief. As they talked on the phone, cars filled with gawkers inched along past the Beverly Hills house. According to Chick’s later account of that night, Hill asked Chick who h
ad done it; Chick said he had no idea.41

  “What about my stuff in the safe?”

  Chick said he had it all.

  “Take my things and ship them to Florida,” Hill commanded, meaning the house in Miami that Siegel had helped her buy. “I’ll meet you there.”

  There was a lot more to pack than jewelry. Over the next day or two, Chick and Jerri packed silverware, dishes, linens, Hill’s wardrobe, and more. At Hill’s instruction, they called Joe Epstein in Chicago for cash: a packet with several thousand dollars arrived. They then set out in Chick’s new car for Hill’s house in Miami. Chick Hill was never questioned again about the murder. Two decades later, Bugsy biographer Dean Jennings would get him to sit for hours of interviews, studded with fascinating details about his time with Siegel and Hill. Chick’s openness seemed to underscore his innocence in the affair. Or did it?

  Millicent and Barbara were still on their cross-country train trip the morning of June 22. “I know we stopped in Chicago, but we didn’t see the newspaper,” Millicent said decades later. “We were kids.”42 The Super Chief sleeper chugged westward, until something very odd happened. The train came to a full stop at a depot one hundred miles from Los Angeles, and a big black Packard rolled up.

  As Millicent later described, Allen Smiley was in the car. So was Dr. Maurice Siegel, Ben’s younger brother. And so, to their amazement, was their mother. Esther had flown out from New York as soon as she heard the news. From the L.A. railroad terminal, she had been driven north to this meeting point, where her daughters could disembark without being mobbed by the flashbulb-popping press awaiting them in L.A.43

  Millicent recalled that the car ride proceeded in grim silence to Maurice’s house. “That’s where they told us,” she said. She felt grateful, at least, that she and Barbara had not found out from the headlines while the train was en route, forcing them to absorb the news without their mother. “I don’t know what the two us would have done,” she said. “It was a shock.”44