At some point that day or the next, Esther was obligated to visit the office of an L.A. district attorney and submit to a polite but probing interrogation. She came dressed in black, with black-netted demigloves. Nervously, she smoked one cork-tipped cigarette after another. She had married Siegel eighteen years before, she told the investigators. They had been schoolmates, she explained, and stayed close through their teenage years until Siegel asked her, at seventeen, to marry him. “Benny was in the garage business then,” Esther offered.
Esther had never thought she’d seek a divorce, she declared. “I divorced him only because I was tired of being alone. His business interests kept him away all of the time. He was a wonderful husband, a good father to our two children and a good provider.” Asked about various gangsters with whom Siegel had done business, she denied knowing any of them. Nor, she added, had she ever heard of Virginia Hill. “I never knew or heard about Virginia Hill until I saw her name in the papers after the murder,” Esther declared.45
In a breach of Jewish tradition, Siegel’s body remained at the county morgue for three days. Finally on June 25, Maurice had his dead brother’s body brought to the Groman Mortuary at 830 West Washington Boulevard in L.A. Siegel was embalmed, a further breach of tradition, and by one newspaper account “clothed in a blue suit, white shirt, blue tie, with a white handkerchief tucked in his breast pocket.”46 Only the mortuary staff saw this choice of clothing, since Siegel’s mutilated body was then placed in a hermetically sealed $5,000 silver-plated casket.
The next day at 8:50 A.M., a limousine rolled up to the mortuary, where a gaggle of reporters and news photographers was waiting. Out came Esther, Millicent, and Barbara, along with Maurice, Allen Smiley, and one other of Ben’s siblings, his sister Bessie Soloway. Inside the chapel lay the casket flanked by white candelabra, with two amber spotlights fixed upon it. According to one published report, there were no flowers, no eulogy, only a hurried Twenty-Third Psalm and a short Hebrew prayer intoned by Rabbi Max Kert to four hundred empty seats.
“It was all over in five minutes, at 8:55 A.M,” the Examiner reported. “Smiley and the four women slipped through a casket room, went through a little-used door and down a rubbish-littered alley to a gate which was unlocked for them. They hurried to a waiting car a block away and were gone, neatly escaping the press. Dr. Siegel, hatless, walked quietly out the mortuary’s front door, unrecognized by photographers.”47
Without further ceremony, Siegel was interred at the local Beth Olam cemetery, the Jewish section of one hundred–acre Hollywood Forever Cemetery. The poor Jewish boy who had dreamed of becoming a star was now assured of the company of stars in perpetuity. Already, the cemetery included Rudolph Valentino and Douglas Fairbanks; soon these would be joined by Judy Garland, Marion Davies, Fay Wray, Peter Lorre, John Huston, and so many more.48
Back in New York, a plaque in Ben’s name was added to the memory wall at the Bialystoker synagogue at 7–11 Bialystoker Place, the old neighborhood from which Ben had so fiercely set himself free. Right above his plaque was the one for his father Max, put up just two months before. To the end, the relationship between father and son had been based on the pact that Max and Jennie never allude to the source of Ben’s largesse. The elephant remained in the room, but it allowed Ben to be the provider that his father had struggled and failed to be, and for his parents to live comfortable lives after working themselves to the bone. Almost certainly, Ben had paid for his father’s memorial plaque at the Bialystoker synagogue. Just as likely, Ben’s brother Maurice, the respected doctor, paid for Ben’s two months later.
Shortly after the funeral, Maurice petitioned to become administrator of his brother’s Nevada and California estates. Together, he found the estates worth all of $113,969, most of it in stock in the Flamingo, which was to say the Nevada Projects Corporation. Ben’s stock was worth a fraction of its face value, given his reckless choice to inflate the stock by selling the same shares again and again. Whether it had any worth at all would depend on how the Flamingo was run now.
Esther had hoped the estate story might be very different. Hadn’t her ex-husband vowed to pay her $600 a week in alimony for the rest of her life, and to support their daughters? Perhaps she should not have been surprised: here was only the latest and last example of Ben’s improvidence. As a practical matter, Esther sued the estate for $800,000, the money promised her for her life expectancy of forty more years from the time her ex-husband died. But that money, she came to realize, simply didn’t exist. Most of what remained went to creditors, the largest of which was the IRS: Siegel hadn’t paid his taxes for the last three years, and owed $22,000 plus interest.49
In the month of Siegel’s death, the Flamingo again turned a profit, albeit a modest one. Its investors were relieved, but in no mood to wait for the Flamingo to earn back its $6 million cost at the gaming tables. They wanted to be made whole, or at least mostly so. Two outside groups submitted proposals for running the place in alliance with the Syndicate. The winning group was led by Sandy Adler, owner of El Rancho. The Adler group reportedly paid $3.9 million for 49 percent of the Flamingo in early July, though Nevada tax records showed that Adler and his partners paid only $3 million.50 Billy Wilkerson was said to be one of the selling parties, but his son, Billy Wilkerson III, doubts that his father got anything out of the deal. “When Siegel was shot,” Wilkerson says, “the new owners flatly refused to honor any deals Siegel had done with anyone.”51
Wilkerson might be left high and dry, but Lansky and his fellow Syndicate backers could take comfort in the $3 or $4 million they’d netted from their newest partner. It was a sizable sum, enough to relieve their anxiety, and a clear indication that Ben Siegel’s folly had promise after all. Soon enough, the Flamingo would start pulling in $4 million a year, assuring the rise of modern Las Vegas.
Was Virginia Hill next on the Syndicate’s murder list that summer, given the rumors of Swiss bank accounts? To reporters who sought her out, she scoffed when asked if her life might be at risk. “I spoke to my lawyer in Los Angeles by transatlantic phone and he said I have nothing to worry about,” Hill declared in Paris. “I guess I’ll go ahead with my plans and stay two or three months in Europe.”52
Nevertheless, Hill checked out of the Hôtel Claridge in Paris on July 2, leaving no forwarding address. She drove to Monaco and spent time at the casino. The morning after a long night at the tables, she was found unconscious in her room, barely in time for doctors to save her life. For the second time, just months after her first serious overdose in Vegas, she had again nearly died from barbiturates. There was a third overdose at the Ritz in Paris, and then a fourth when Hill got to Miami to learn that her brother had married Jerri Mason.53
Hill had always nursed a violent temper: it was part of what had made her Ben Siegel’s alter ego. She flared like a brushfire; she plunged, for days after, into a deep despond. But the overdoses were new. At the least, they suggested growing anxiety in the last weeks of Ben Siegel’s life, and deep depression after his death. But was this not also, perhaps, a woman struggling under a burden of enormous guilt? A woman, perhaps, who knew when the love of her life would be killed, and who would do the deed?
Anyone who writes about Bugsy Siegel ends up nursing his own murder scenario. My own is based on simple logic. The Syndicate felt sure that Hill had begun skimming serious money into Swiss bank accounts. Whether or not she had begun skimming, the Syndicate thought she had. Why, then, would Frank Costello or Lucky Luciano not send shooters to Hill’s hotel in Europe, force her to cough up the money, and kill her once they did?
That the Syndicate bosses didn’t do that suggests a deal got made, weeks or months before Ben’s death. To keep the money she’d squirreled away, and to keep from being killed, Hill had to perform some duty that would allow her to keep those Swiss bank accounts. My guess is that Hill assigned Chick, her little brother, to orchestrate the killing by hiring a fellow U.S. infantryman with rifle expertise. He himself had just
been discharged from the military, where he had trained with a rifle. Hill then left for Paris to be an ocean away when the deed got done.
Chick was in the Linden Drive house the night of Siegel’s murder. He might easily have coordinated with a shooter to await the return of the group from dinner. For that, Chick had at least two motives. One was to keep his big sister from being physically assaulted any more by Ben: the two had fought more bitterly, and physically, of late.54 Another was to allow Hill to keep the money in the Swiss bank account, both for her benefit and his own. If Hill and her brother didn’t murder Ben Siegel, someone else would: his sentence was written. The only difference was that if someone else did the deed, Hill would still be on the hook for the money she’d skimmed. Ben’s death was in a sense his last gift to her. He just didn’t know it. The cost to Hill was that she had to live with the knowledge that she’d made her brother kill the love of her life. Certainly that would explain the four overdoses, and the ones that followed, and her tragic, spectacular decline.
One subscriber to that theory, or rather some variation of it, is mafia historian Nick Pileggi: he feels that Chick Hill was the shooter. Chick could easily have been motivated by the fights that Siegel and Hill were having, Pileggi theorizes, enough for Chick to kill his sister’s tormentor.55 The detail of the rifle was telling in another way. “I never recall anyone else ever shooting with a rifle,” Pileggi says, meaning hired hit men. “And if it was a wiseguy,” he says, meaning an experienced mobster, “they’re not going to shoot through the window. [Siegel] would have disappeared, you would have put him in the desert.”
For what it’s worth, Meyer Lansky suspected Chick Hill as well, or so he stated through a spokesman to the Los Angeles Examiner. He said he believed the “hot-headed southerner,” as he described Chick Hill, might have killed Siegel “because of Siegel mistreating [Virginia] Hill.”56 By then, the authorities had all but given up hoping to solve the murder. “We have the gambling angle, the love angle, the racing news syndicate angle, the narcotics angle—you can take your choice,” one investigator said. “Everyone tells us how much they loved him, but it’s a cinch somebody didn’t.”57
In the time that was left to her, Virginia Hill would try to kill Jerri Mason by pistol-whipping her. She would marry an Austrian ski instructor in Sun Valley, Idaho, give birth to a son, and make a memorably profane appearance before the Kefauver Commission hearings on organized crime in 1951. The money stream from Joe Epstein would finally dry up, leading to a government auction of all her possessions. She would end up in Klosters, Switzerland, skiing and drinking with a group that included legendary actress Greta Garbo and best-selling novelist Irwin Shaw. In March 1966, she drove to an Austrian mountain village called Koppl, walked into the woods with a vial of twenty-eight pills, and gulped them down with clear brook water. She succeeded at last, with this sixth or seventh overdose, in killing herself.58
The other women in Ben Siegel’s family circle fared only marginally better after Ben Siegel’s death. The Syndicate promised his widow Esther that it would protect her and her daughters, and help the daughters marry well. This pledge was made by Morris Rosen, the top Lansky man who with Gus Greenbaum and Moe Sedway had taken control of the Flamingo the night of Ben’s death. Morris was an odd one to make that pledge, since he almost certainly had something to do with Ben Siegel’s murder. But business was business, and Rosen was, according to his granddaughter Wendy, a key Syndicate businessman, as powerful as Lansky. “If Meyer needed money, he got it from my grandfather Morris,” Wendy recalls. “He was the financial backer for Murder Inc. My grandfather was a very wealthy man.” Also smart: almost nothing was ever written about him. “His hands were never dirty.”
Barbara, the younger of Ben’s daughters, chose not to take Morris Rosen up on his offer. As soon as she could, she ran away from home bound for the midwest. She got as far as Detroit, where she married a man who became successful in real estate. For the rest of her life, she had almost nothing to do with her sister and mother, and never mentioned her father to her midwestern friends.
Millicent, the older daughter, let her life be steered by the Syndicate. Barely eighteen, she married Morris Rosen’s son Jack. She had known him since birth: he had pushed her pram. The match was essentially arranged. It astonished Sandra Lansky, daughter of Meyer Lansky and childhood friend of Millicent. “How could Millicent marry into the family that so bloodily replaced her father, unless she hated her father, way beyond hatred?” So mused Sandra Lansky in her memoir.59 Wendy Rosen felt she knew exactly why her mother married Jack Rosen. “Having Millicent marry Jack was the best way to provide for her, and protect her.”60
Meyer Lansky, too, had committed to help Ben Siegel’s widow and daughters. He paid for Millicent’s wedding to Jack Rosen at the Waldorf Astoria. An eight-by-ten black-and-white photograph shows Millicent in a white wedding gown with a white lace veil, on her march into matrimony. Behind her walks a ghostlike Meyer Lansky. From his pained expression, one can easily imagine that he had something to do with the death of his childhood friend and is trying to atone by marching that friend’s daughter up the aisle.
The last of the women in Ben Siegel’s family circle was, of course, Esther, his long-suffering wife, who spent her last years alone in Manhattan. “She lived on East End Avenue, a tiny little apartment,” recalls Wendy Rosen, her granddaughter, who grew up nearby. “I would go there on Saturday, and she would make me tuna fish sandwiches in this tiny kitchen—I see it now. She had these portraits of my mother [Millicent] and my aunt Barbara in her living room.” The portraits were painted, ornately framed, and huge. “I can’t even describe how big they were.” Very likely, they had been displayed in the mansion on Delfern Drive. They were much too big for Esther’s tiny living room.
The apartment smelled of perfume, Wendy recalls, and it had a bedroom door that Esther kept closed. Wendy was too polite to push it open. One time, though, Esther forgot to close the door, and while she was making tuna sandwiches in the kitchen, Wendy got a good look in. “It wasn’t just a bedroom,” Wendy recalls. “It was like a shrine, filled with pictures of Ben. Framed pictures on the bureau and bedside tables, larger ones hanging on the walls.” That was when Wendy realized how much her grandmother still loved her husband. “She worshiped him.”
When Esther died in 1982, she left almost no money or assets, aside from the memorabilia Wendy had glimpsed, despite the Syndicate’s pledge of lifetime care and protection. She did have one request. She wanted to be interred at the Hollywood Forever cemetery, as close to Ben as possible. There she lies, in a crypt along the same corridor as Ben’s, though at a distance of perhaps one hundred feet, in death as in life not close enough, but as close as she could get.
Epilogue
OVER THE NEXT DECADE, the Syndicate would finance, or help finance, many of the Strip’s big casinos, from the Thunderbird, where Harry Belafonte helped break the city’s color barrier, to the Desert Inn, the Sands, the Sahara, the Riviera, the Dunes, the Stardust, the Tropicana, the Royal Nevada, and Caesars Palace, where Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., and the rest of the Rat Pack held court. Others would be built by gangsters from Chicago, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Detroit, Kansas City, or Milwaukee, often borrowing, for building capital, from the Teamsters Union’s retirement fund. Most of the builders in this new age of Vegas were Jewish; nearly all had shady pasts. Virtually none wore flashy suits and swaggered like Bugsy. They were businessmen. Moe Dalitz, for one, opened the Desert Inn in the late 1940s, but stayed a silent backer, never acknowledging his ties to organized crime. He liked to be known as a civic leader. When the local press dubbed him Mr. Las Vegas, he was pleased. Ben Siegel would have been horrified.
As ever more dazzling hotel-casinos arose, the Flamingo changed hands and slid into a state of desuetude. One chunk after another was replaced, though not with Siegel’s sense of style. Now it stands as a large but low-class casino, known for cheap food and rooms, surrounded by grander
resorts. Aside from its name, the Flamingo’s only commemoration of Ben Siegel is a trio of amateurish plaques, set rather high overhead as if to discourage passersby from reading them through.
And yet Ben Siegel’s imprint on Vegas grows with each next brand-new super resort. The Bellagio, the Wynn, the Venetian, the Mandalay, the MGM Grand—all in a sense pay homage to the man whose manic ambition got the Flamingo finished and showed what could be done. Would someone else have led the way? Would Vegas be the Vegas we know? Possibly a valley of cookie-cutter houses would have filled either side of the Strip before enough hotel-casinos got built to inspire the rest, and keep the houses at bay.
A few miles from today’s droopy Flamingo, in downtown Las Vegas, stands one more tribute to Ben Siegel and his colleagues in crime: the Mob Museum, opened in 2012 in the building used by U.S. Senator Estes Kefauver for his 1950 hearings on organized crime. The museum marks a sea change for Las Vegas: recognition, after decades of squeamishness from city officials, that mobsters helped shape its culture and history.
Along with accounts of Bugsy’s life and career, the museum includes two personal items: a tortoiseshell-framed pair of aviator sunglasses, donated by George Raft, and a long white silk scarf, monogrammed with large, art deco–style initials. Together, the glasses and scarf suggest a dashing figure, one who lived a glamorous, even recherché life, if also a deadly and unforgivable one, a boy from the immigrant slums of the Lower East Side who fought to have the life he wanted, whatever anyone else might say, and who had that life, just as he’d hoped, until the moment at about 10:45 P.M. on June 20, 1947, when in a split second, too fast for any pain or conscious thought, it stopped.
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