Even without the risk of air locks, a quick engine restart was no sure thing—especially under the pressure of time and an impeding belly landing in the Pacific.
They were descending through four thousand feet when Kirk launched the restart process. He didn’t hesitate. He was out of time and options. Bergeron was already bracing himself in anticipation of a hard landing, but he was reassured by Kirk’s outward confidence.
The restart involved several steps—pushing one lever, then another, flicking an overhead switch once . . . twice . . . three times, and then punching and holding a red starter button. It might take multiple tries. But when Kirk kept pressure on that red button, the response was immediate: a shudder, smoke billowing from the first engine, and a roar.2
Moments later, with the second engine also back online and relief sweeping the cockpit, Kirk brought the plane up to its former cruising altitude. Now he faced the troubling mystery: Why did the spare tank run out of fuel so much sooner than expected?
Back on autopilot, Kirk stepped away from the controls to inspect his rack of spare tanks for the first time since he supervised loading and fueling on the ground. With the plane now flying level, he saw the problem almost immediately. During fueling, while parked on the tarmac, the C-47 fuselage had rested at a pronounced downward slant toward the tail. The spare tanks were tilted so that fuel would overflow their open caps before full capacity was reached. Unfortunately, that meant all the spare tanks were a few inches short of filled to the brim.
A quick inventory revised Kirk’s estimate of onboard fuel. It was substantially less than he expected. Bergeron watched him pencil out fresh calculations, the twenty-nine-year-old pilot’s intent expression giving away nothing. The radioman couldn’t tell if the captain’s numbers were reassuring or alarming. He still wasn’t sure as Kirk calmly delivered his verdict.
“We gotta lose weight,” Kirk said, directing Bergeron to open the cargo door and start tossing out everything—“everything that’s not bolted down”—everything, except that yellow rubber life raft. Bergeron rushed from the cockpit.
Kirk eased up on the power and set his controls for maximum fuel economy. By his math, there was no spare fuel. Reaching San Francisco was in doubt. He was focused on how to squeeze every minute of flight time out of what was left in his tanks. Of course, there was also what Kirk called his “back door” or Plan B—the yellow dinghy.
In the back of the plane, Bergeron and the passengers were finding lots of loose items to pitch out the cargo door. Wrenches and tool kits, suitcases, fire gear, empty gas tanks, and dismantled racks—all of it hurled out into the slipstream. Some of the jetsam rattled against the plane as it spilled out.
Up front, Kirk was startled by a sudden lurch. Something heavy—maybe a rack or an empty gas tank—had smashed into the plane’s vertical stabilizer. The tail fin was still intact. He figured it must have been slightly bent. Again Kirk adjusted the C-47 trim, holding the plane just above its minimum speed to maintain level flight.
Making matters worse, in the scramble to avoid storms and restart the engines, they had strayed about a hundred miles off course. The uncertainty only grew. Time and progress crawled by, giving Kirk time to ponder his situation. It was all too familiar—Scotland all over again.
With the sun setting behind them, they were flying into an onrushing black sky. No signs of city lights loomed on the horizon, and they were still beyond radio range of San Francisco’s airport tower. Bergeron, who had never thought to update his Morse code distress message, kept trying to make voice contact.
They were a couple of hours off the coast when radio static gave way to the sound of a voice at air traffic control in San Francisco. Kirk calmly reported low fuel and requested priority landing upon arrival. The tower dispatched a pair of Coast Guard planes to escort them in.
At the Kerkorian house in Los Angeles, the lights were on. It was dinnertime but no one was hungry. Lily had finally forced her family to explain, “What’s going on here?” She was remarkably sanguine. Kirk’s mother seemed to be the only one in the room with confidence that her son would survive.
Jerry Williams was still at the house, too. He offered to make some calls, hoping for news following an afternoon without an iota of information. He finally reached the San Francisco airport tower. Kirk’s gambling companion had the happy privilege of telling his family that their boy was not in the drink. Kirk had radioed in. He was still flying.
Shortly before eight o’clock that night all inbound flights to San Francisco’s Mills Field were diverted into holding patterns. All runways were cleared. Fire and rescue trucks rolled into position. Kirk was coming in out of the west. His Coast Guard escorts were missing, having been unable to find the C-47 in the darkness offshore.
When his plane appeared to traffic controllers, it was coming in low over the coastal hills. It banked hard over the Bay into its final approach and moments later touched down to the sweet squeal of rubber on runway—more than sixteen hours out of Honolulu.
Press accounts recorded the arrival in headlines: “4 Pacific Fliers Beat Death in Race to Mills.” Witnesses described Kirk’s prized surplus plane as a “crippled . . . beat up DC-3.” To a reporter from the San Mateo Times Kirk acknowledged: “I thought we’d have to ditch.”3
Before heading off to answer inquiries from aviation safety regulators, he shrugged off questions about high drama over the high seas. There was no going back, he explained with typical understatement, “so (we) just kept going, expecting to exhaust our fuel supply at any moment.”
Kirk went on to deliver most of his surplus acquisitions personally—and without drama. His partnership with a Brazilian flier in Rio added to his international reputation as an aircraft trader. That is, until Kirk flew down to visit his money. Most of it had disappeared without proper accounting.
It was a hard lesson to learn about sloppy accounting and partnerships with strangers—and the drawbacks of conducting business by the seat of his pants. There wasn’t enough cash left over in Brazil to fight about. Kirk walked out. “Take it and shove it,” he said and returned to California where he went into business with his best friend—his sister, Rose Pechuls. She had recently divorced, ending a marriage in which her husband chafed at feeling inadequate compared to Rose’s high regard for her brother Kirk.
When a small charter airline at Los Angeles Municipal Airport went on the market in 1947, Kirk and Rose bought it—a three-plane fleet with a DC-3, a twin-engine Cessna, and a single-engine Beechcraft. Kirk put up most of the $60,000 purchase price after borrowing $15,000 from the Montebello branch of Bank of America. Rose invested an additional $5,000 and managed the office.
They filed for a business license with the City of Los Angeles, calling themselves “Kirk Kerkorian and Rose Pechuls doing business as Los Angeles Air Service.” The airline flew charters all over the West, but much of the business was to Las Vegas. To avoid another Rio fiasco, he also hired an accountant.
Kirk’s new bookkeeper, Arnold McGraw, would introduce him to the tax benefits of lease deals and depreciation and capital gain profits. Both his used plane brokerage and his charter service were making money. He wasn’t rich, but the entire Kerkorian clan was sharing in his growing financial security.
For a time Kirk kept track of the C-47 that started him in the used plane business, the “crippled . . . beat up DC-3” that barely got him to San Francisco. He sold it to Howard Hughes’s aide Glenn Odekirk, who fixed the dents and its bent vertical stabilizer and had it completely refurbished by the Hughes Aircraft Company. Once outfitted as a luxury private plane, it flew Hollywood celebrities around the country, including Tyrone Power and Cesar Romero.
Before turning over the plane to Odekirk, however, Kirk had retrieved the yellow life raft—for old times’ sake. It was uncharacteristic of a man who was seldom sentimental about possessions, things, any kind of stuff. But the yellow raft had once represented something more than a rubber flotation device when the stoic Kir
k was wrestling with dark fears of ditching in the Pacific. It was hope, potential salvation.
When beach weather returned to Southern California the next summer in 1947, Kirk took the raft to Santa Monica Bay for a day in the water. It inflated moments after he activated the compressed gas canister. But then, with a great hiss, it just as quickly deflated. The rubber was old and cracked. The yellow raft could not have saved him and his crew.
Once again, Kirk had to accept the fact: sometimes he was lucky.
6
Bugsy Siegel’s Last Flight
June 1947
Aboard the Bamboo Bomber
The mobster didn’t talk much. He just needed a quick lift to Las Vegas and back. He had a meeting. Kirk at the flight controls wasn’t big on small talk. And he knew better than to ask any questions. Mr. Siegel was a familiar customer.1
Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel was the closest thing to royalty in postwar Las Vegas, a giant among the new breed of out-of-state gambling racketeers flocking to the sanctuary of legal gaming in Nevada. He had gangster cachet for his links to Al Capone’s gambling operations. He had Hollywood good looks, was generous with his cash, and despite his notorious reputation—or, perhaps, because of it—he was usually surrounded by an entourage of celebrities. He was also a regular passenger of the Los Angeles Air Service flights, shuttling between his girlfriend’s home in Beverly Hills and his lavish casino project on the Strip.
On this summer night he had dropped into the LAAS offices just before closing and without a reservation. The last-minute timing was unusual.
Kirk could have delegated the late charter to another pilot. He had only recently brought in extra hands to ease his own workload. Business was very good. He was starting to run junkets for the New Frontier casino, opening a whole new revenue stream. Besides, he was tired of trying to do it all—from flying passengers to handling their baggage, from collecting fares to collecting cabin trash. Throw in some travel to buy or sell a plane and Kirk was away from home a lot and seeing less and less of wife Peggy. They still had no children. It was a disappointment to both of them.2
One of his first hires had been Barney Aguer, a pipe-smoking pilot friend from their prewar days as flight instructors at King City and Blythe. Barney offered to flip a coin, to let luck pick the pilot. But Kirk insisted that he would take the flight himself.
All they knew was that Bugsy—“Mr. Siegel” to his face—had a meeting. Whatever it was couldn’t be handled on a telephone call. Besides, Kirk was trying to sell Mr. Siegel one of his planes.
Weeks earlier Kirk had been gambling at Siegel’s fancy new casino when his friend Jerry Williams introduced him to the owner. There was a bit of small talk about airplanes and Bugsy said he was in the market to buy one. Kirk immediately drove him to the airfield to inspect the twin-engine Beechcraft he was using that day.
“I like it. I’m going to buy it,” he told Kirk.
But this was unrelated. The unplanned evening charter would have to use a different plane—Kirk’s personal favorite. He called the Cessna Bobcat his “Bamboo Bomber.” It was neither a bomber nor was there so much as a splinter of bamboo anywhere in the airframe. Its lightweight wings, however, were constructed with plywood ribs and laminated spruce spar beams. It was fast and could make the 250-mile flight in ninety minutes or less. It was perfect for the occasion.
The five-seat bamboo bomber took off that night with just one passenger and a minor mystery: What was so urgent about getting to Las Vegas and back that night? Of course, Kirk wasn’t about to ask any questions.
What everyone in Las Vegas knew already was that Bugsy was the money and the brains and the class behind the Flamingo, the newest, most exciting hotel and casino development in town. It was an opulent third addition to the Strip and a striking departure from the traditional Old West style common around old Las Vegas.
The Flamingo began as the brainchild of Hollywood nightclub impresario Billy Wilkerson, whose stylish venues included Café Trocadero and Ciro’s on Sunset Strip. He was also founder and publisher of the Hollywood Reporter. But wartime material shortages and high costs jeopardized his Vegas plans until Siegel stepped in with financing provided by East Coast gambling racketeers, including Charles “Lucky” Luciano and Meyer Lansky. The investors had already tested the new Vegas market by turning a quick profit buying and selling the downtown El Cortez Hotel-Casino.
Wilkerson retained a nominal share of the ownership, but Bugsy took over the project late in 1945. Right away he gave it the name it would take into history, inspired by his girlfriend, Virginia Hill. She was a redhead with long legs nicknamed “the Flamingo.”
The project, however, was no love affair. Delays and cost overruns led to rumors of investor unhappiness. The big grand opening celebration on the day after Christmas in 1946 was rushed. The hotel construction wasn’t finished. Guests had to be put up at other hotels. Bugsy’s best friend in the Hollywood crowd, actor George Raft, ended up at the New Frontier. His celebrity opening acts stayed at the El Rancho Vegas. It turned out to be a publicity bust.
By all accounts, headliner Jimmy Durante was a big hit with the crowd that showed up. Opening night also included Xavier Cugat and his band and singer-actor-comedienne Rose Marie, whose gangster father once ran with Al Capone. But when the casino lost $300,000 over the next two weeks, Bugsy pulled the plug—shutting it down until the hotel portion was ready for guests.
What was supposed to be the country’s “first million-dollar casino” had already cost the gangster investors at least five times that amount. And now it was closed. Bugsy scrambled to borrow money from friends, including Raft. Two months later, on March 1, 1947, he reopened a completed hotel-casino with a new name for luck—the Fabulous Flamingo.
It appeared to outsiders that the Flamingo was soon doing decent business. And appearances were correct. By May, the casino was showing a $300,000 profit. Behind the scenes, however, Bugsy was dealing with impatient investors and ominous suspicions. There were suggestions that some of the cost overruns were skim that went directly into Bugsy’s pocket—or into a Swiss bank account. He flew to Cuba for a face-to-face with Luciano and Lansky to straighten things out. It didn’t go well. Bottom line: they wanted their money back . . . now.
Bugsy was a naturally paranoid person in the best of times. His fourth-floor suite at the Fabulous Flamingo had bulletproof windows, steel plates in the walls, and secret ladders leading to secret escape tunnels.
But if Bugsy was under pressure that night or felt vulnerable, he wasn’t showing it. Kirk remembered nothing unusual or otherwise remarkable about his passenger’s demeanor.
Alamo Field south of town (the future McCarran International Airport) was little more than a patch of sand off the Las Vegas–Los Angeles Highway in 1947, but at night its runway lights blazed against the black desert landscape. A limousine was waiting for Kirk’s passenger. Bugsy didn’t expect to be gone long. He asked Kirk to stay with the plane, and then he walked to the car and disappeared into the night.
There would be no time to hit the casinos on this trip, no time for Kirk to meet with friends. The field was so far out of town that he couldn’t even see the distant neon.
Kirk was gambling pretty heavily in those days. He loved it. Some might have called him obsessed with it. When he wasn’t at the craps table, he liked to play the dollar slot machines. He sometimes hired a caddy, of sorts, to tote his heavy bag of silver dollars while making the rounds of casino floors looking for the hot slots.3
He would eventually have lines of credit at all the top casinos—Benny Binion’s Las Vegas Club and later the Horseshoe, Beldon Katleman’s El Rancho, Bill Miller’s New Frontier—and more. His reputation as a player was spreading. Kirk didn’t have the financial resources to be “a whale,” one of those superrich high rollers, but he had enough that he could also afford to lose. And he relished taking big gambles, reined in only by the house limit.
Binion, a recent immigrant from Texas, didn’t have much
use for any man who never rolled the dice. He considered Kirk a real man, “a brave man.” And Kirk always paid his gambling debts. “He’d get down ten, fifteen thousand and say, ‘gimme a few days,’ and he’d go off and sell a plane in South America,” recalled a Binion casino executive. “He always settled his markers.”4
But Kirk still had a lot to learn about gambling. Too often he stayed at the tables chasing bets—riding winning streaks into the ground or turning small losses into big ones. He was still the kind of gambler that made casinos rich. That’s why Bugsy knew about Kirk even before they were formally introduced. And the gangster’s favorable impression of the gambler probably benefited Kirk’s brother one night at the casino when Nish brashly greeted Mr. Siegel with a hearty and cringe-inducing “Hey, Bugsy—how are ya?” Anyone but Kirk’s punch-drunk brother might have left with a bloodied nose.
Outside of aviation and the casino worlds, one of Kirk’s best friends was a cop—a Clark County deputy sheriff. They met during a brawl outside the El Rancho. James “Bad Boy Jimmy” Williams had been engaged in heated conversation with a tall, blond plainclothes deputy when their dispute turned physical.
Kirk was part of the crowd that had gathered around the fringe of the tussle. Bad Boy Jimmy was clearly losing but refusing to surrender. Rifle Right Kerkorian was impressed with the young deputy’s cool, methodical fighting style. He had a boxer’s stance, a boxer’s eye for opportunity, and his quick fists landed like hammers.
“Who’s the big blond kid?” Kirk asked casino manager Katleman next to him.
The Gambler Page 6