The Jews in America Trilogy

by Birmingham, Stephen;

  Meyer Lansky knew that things were serious between Benny and Virginia when, that year, Esther Siegel came to him and asked him if there was anything he could do to break up the romance. Sadly, Lansky replied that there was nothing, but he did offer a suggestion. If Esther threatened Benny with a divorce, and demanded custody of the two girls, that might bring Benny to his senses. Esther followed Lansky’s advice, and to her dismay, Benny agreed to a divorce on whatever terms Esther wanted.

  Meanwhile, construction of the Flamingo proceeded. As promised, the hotel would be the ultimate in luxury. The finest woods, the costliest marbles, the most sumptuous fixtures and appointments were going into it. Each bathroom would have not only its sunken tub, but its own individual plumbing system and—that naughtiest of imports from the European hotel scene—its own porcelain bidet. No cost was being spared, and suppliers from as far away as Denver, San Francisco, and Salt Lake City were shipping their wares to the Flamingo. While other builders were still experiencing postwar shortages and delays, Lansky’s and Siegel’s friends in the Teamsters union had a way of facilitating shipments. There was alarm, however, when Benny Siegel announced that Virginia Hill had been placed in charge of the hotel’s interior decor, and was being given a free rein.

  Early in 1946, a meeting was called of the hotel’s backers—with Benny Siegel not invited to attend—to discuss what was now no longer called “the project” but “the situation.” A grim-faced Meyer Lansky opened the proceedings to report that the Flamingo was now five million dollars over budget, and the end appeared not yet in sight. In fact, the hotel was not even half completed. Another fact had to be noted. Virginia Hill had been making a number of trips to Europe. Her excuse was that she was purchasing furniture and fabrics for the hotel, but there was also the possibility that she and Benny had been skimming off some of the construction costs, and that Virginia had been depositing the skim in Swiss banks. These suspicions had been confirmed when a Lansky informant in Switzerland advised that Virginia had deposited some five hundred thousand dollars in a numbered Zurich account.

  The situation was now very serious. At the 1946 meeting, one of the investors—it is not clear who—suggested that the solution might be that Benny Siegel be “hit.”

  Lansky, however, cautioned patience. He had never liked the idea of killing people, and certainly did not like the idea of killing Benny Siegel—a fellow Jew, one of his oldest friends. He had been best man at Benny’s wedding. The thing to do, he said, was to get the hotel open and get it making money. Then, if it turned out that Benny had been cheating his partners, Lansky could deal with that, and would get Benny to give the money back.

  The logical thought, of course, is that someone might have suggested “hitting” Virginia Hill. But killing a woman was beneath the syndicate’s dignity. The thought, on the other hand, that a mere woman could wield enough power over her lover to cause him to betray and steal from his associates was an intolerable insult to the male sex.

  From that meeting on, Lansky knew that his friend Benny was in deep trouble, for not all the others who had money in the Flamingo venture were as moderate-minded as he. He immediately warned Siegel to do everything in his power to get the hotel finished, opened, and producing income as quickly as possible. No further delays or overruns would be tolerated.

  Siegel got the point, and his activities toward completing the Flamingo became feverish and frantic. He went so far as to move out of the house at 810 North Linden Drive in Beverly Hills that he had rented for his sweetheart, and to the construction site, where he could oversee matters personally. Workers were now paid overtime and double time, and offered special work-incentive bonuses to make sure that the hotel would be ready for occupancy, and gambling, by the scheduled date of Christmas, 1946. The new urgency to get the Flamingo open, of course, made costs soar even higher. And back in the offices of syndicate members, faces grew longer and darker, while Lansky implored his partners to at least give Benny the chance to open his hotel.

  Siegel had announced the gala opening of the Flamingo for the week between Christmas and New Year’s, and he worked desperately to meet that deadline. Later, it would be claimed that his timing was wrong, and that for the entertainment business the days between the two holidays had always been considered the deadest period in the entire year. Siegel, if he was still thinking clearly, may have felt that the opening of a spectacular new hotel might serve as a remedy for that deadness. But as the date of the opening approached, it was clear that much else was wrong.

  By mid-December, the hotel was far from finished or ready for occupancy. Only a handful of guest rooms were completely furnished. Then bad luck made matters worse. Siegel had hired a small fleet of Constellations to fly in celebrity guests from Hollywood for the gala opening party on December 26. On the afternoon of departure, bad weather in Los Angeles caused the flights to be canceled. A few movie notables made it—among them Charles Coburn, George Sanders, and Siegel’s old friend George Raft—only to be received in a lobby that was still festooned with painters’ drop cloths and noisy with carpenters’ hammering, and guest rooms that were half finished and, in some cases, had no sheets or towels. Some bathrooms had bidets, others just had open spaces in their floors. The air-conditioning worked fitfully, and guests sweltered in the desert heat. The green and untrained staff had not mastered the hotel’s layout, or their own routines and duties, and service ranged from slow to nonexistent.

  Back in the East, Lansky and the other partners received the grim news: Benny Siegel’s opening had been an unmitigated disaster. As usual, “the genius,” as Lansky was called, had a stopgap solution. The hotel should immediately close, and the corporation go into receivership. Then the original investors could buy back their shares at ten cents on the dollar, and needed capital would be raised to complete the hotel. But not all the partners were happy, and Lansky contacted Mickey Cohen and alerted him never to leave Benny Siegel’s side. His life, Lansky warned, was in danger.

  By February, 1947, the Flamingo was still not furnished, and things were not much better in March, when the hotel reopened, and guests checked out complaining of construction noise, room service orders that never came, burned food from the kitchen, telephones that didn’t work, and toilets that would not flush. By April, however, things had improved somewhat, and income began to exceed outgo. But the partnership was still heavily in the red, the hotel seemed far from capable of producing the profits Siegel and Lansky had predicted for it, and it was still suffering from the poor word-of-mouth reviews it had received during its first months.

  That spring, Benny Siegel and Virginia Hill flew down to Mexico and were married. He had made an honest woman of her at last. But now the pair seemed doomed by the Fates. In Mexico, Virginia supposedly begged Benny to fly with her to Paris. Realizing that her new husband was a marked man in the United States, she suggested that they could live out their lives in Europe on the money she had squirreled away in Swiss banks. If indeed this happened, something—perhaps macho bravado, perhaps fatalism—made Benny insist that they return to Los Angeles, to face whatever was coming to him. Possibly he felt that in a final show of courage he could demonstrate to his partners that he could, after all, behave like a man and not like a sex-ridden adolescent.

  For several weeks after their return, there was a period of relative calm for the newlyweds. At the Flamingo things continued to look up. The month of May was better than April, both in quality of the hotel’s service and in the profit picture, as the last square of thick carpet was laid, the last glittering chandelier hung, and the last bits of gilt paint and antique mirroring were applied. Siegel may have had good reason to believe that the crisis had at last passed. By mid-June, he was in an expansive mood. The Flamingo’s ledger sheet was showing more black ink. Esther Siegel had consented to let Benny’s two daughters spend the summer with him. On the afternoon of June 20, Benny had his regular weekly manicure at Harry Drucker’s barbershop in Beverly Hills, and talked enthusiastically o
f how well the Flamingo was doing, and of how the pieces of his life seemed finally to be falling into place. That evening, in the big house on North Linden Drive, Benny Siegel was relaxing with Allen Smiley, an old friend, in the living room. Upstairs, Virginia’s brother, “Chick” Hill, was with a girl friend in one of the bedrooms. Virginia was off on one of her trips to Europe, but was due home in a few days. Mickey Cohen, instructed by Lansky never to leave Benny’s side, was mysteriously absent. At a few minutes after ten o’clock, the barrel of a .30-30 carbine crashed through a living room windowpane, and eight shots rang out. One tore through Benny’s skull, ripping out an eye, and four others plunged into his upper body, through his heart and lungs. Three more bullets went astray, and Allen Smiley was unhurt. That evening, employees of the Flamingo were informed that the hotel was under new management, appointed by Lansky and Company.

  The murder of Benny Siegel was never solved. In the investigation that followed, one assumption was that Lansky had ordered the killing. He was the mob’s linchpin, the reasoning went, and no one else would have dared to do it. Bitterly, Lansky would always deny that he had ever done such a thing. He had loved Benny Siegel, he insisted, as much as he loved his own sons, his own brothers, his own father. He had done everything in his power to warn Siegel that some members of the syndicate were not happy with his performance, that his murder had been proposed. He had also done everything in his power to persuade his partners to give Siegel time to turn the hotel into a success and that, in fact, the hotel had already rounded the corner. Esther Siegel, when questioned, also defended Lansky as the last person who would want to see her ex-husband dead.

  Another possibility was that Lucky Luciano had ordered the killing. From his exile in Italy, Luciano pooh-poohed the notion. How could he have engineered such a thing from seven thousand miles away? Nonetheless, Luciano still wielded enormous power, personal and financial, in the organization, and he was one of the important silent partners in the Flamingo venture. Only Luciano, it was argued, had sufficient clout to arrange for Mickey Cohen, in defiance of Lansky’s orders, to be elsewhere on the night of the murder. As for Cohen, he simply shrugged and said he hadn’t been hovering over Siegel because he and Siegel had both assumed the heat was off.

  But the heat hadn’t been off. And there were any number of disgruntled Flamingo investors who might have decided, acting on their own without consulting anyone, that Benny Siegel had to be eliminated. Not everyone in the syndicate was as fond of Benny as Meyer Lansky was. And Benny had committed the cardinal sin of violating the code of honor among thieves. He had stolen from his brethren. In any case, the 1947 murder gave Benny Siegel a certain distinction: he was the first member of the syndicate’s board of directors to be gunned down by one of his own.

  The murder left Virginia Hill Siegel alone and unprotected, presumably a very frightened lady. But Lansky knew how to handle her. Once the dust had settled, he quietly approached Virginia and asked her to return whatever money Siegel had passed to her from the hotel’s construction budget. Virginia, who knew which side her bread was buttered on, immediately complied. It was as simple as that.

  Following Siegel’s death, Virginia, insisting that Benny had been the only man she had ever really loved, went into a deep depression and tried, unsuccessfully, to kill herself. There followed years of alcohol and drugs, in which she returned to her old profession in a desultory way. She didn’t need to work very hard. A Chicago mobster who had been a long-ago flame still kept her on a regular monthly allowance. In 1966, she finally killed herself with an overdose of barbiturates.

  By then, of course, the Flamingo in Las Vegas had become the enormous financial bonanza that Benny Siegel, and Meyer Lansky, had said it would be all along, and all the investors were very happy. The Flamingo had also become the prototypal Las Vegas hotel, the very cornerstone of the Strip—that garish stretch of outlandish hotels that extends for four miles west of town into the Clark County desert. From the Flamingo outward, hotel followed hotel and casino followed casino, each trying to outdo and out-gimmick the last in extravagance and overstatement and Las Vegas “high class.” From the first days of the Flamingo onward, Las Vegas has grown from a dusty crossroads of sand and sagebrush to a glittering Oz-like metropolis, with a permanent population of well over half a million; an entire city supported by, and devoted to, a single pastime: gambling. It is Benny Siegel’s city.

  In Las Vegas today, his name is spoken with reverence and awe. He is to Las Vegas what Benjamin Franklin is to Philadelphia. Las Vegas was Benny Siegel’s vision, his grand design. Had it not been for his dream, there might be nothing there at all.

  *Once, in her column, she evoked the poet Robert Browning, and quoted him as saying, “Oh, to be in England, now that it’s May.” The next day, she cheerfully acknowledged her error, and wrote that the line should be, “Oh, to be in England now that May is here.”

  15

  ALL THAT MONEY CAN BUY

  By the late 1940s, the social and economic dominance of the German Jews in the American Jewish community had all but disappeared, but few of the old German-Jewish upper crust were willing to admit that this had happened. Within the tight and interrelated circle of German-Jewish families, where dynasty had interlocked with dynasty for a hundred years or more, the myth was maintained that the Germans were the “best” Jews, and that the Russians were “riffraff.” All the Germans would concede was that the Russians now outnumbered them, as they did by several millions; what was harder to swallow was the fact that the Russian Jews also outpowered them in nearly every area, from the marketplace to philanthropy.

  Some people would trace the demise of German-Jewish overlordship to as far back as 1920, and the death of the patriarchal Jacob H. Schiff, who had been called the conscience of the American Jewish community. Schiff’s mission had been to remind the Jews periodically that they were indeed Jews, with Jewish responsibilities, and it had been he who had headed most of the Jewish social welfare programs that had aided the turn-of-the-century Russian immigrants. Schiff had passed his mantle of Jewish leadership to another German Jew, Louis Marshall, a prominent New York lawyer, but Mr. Marshall had not had the commanding authority or personal charisma of Jacob Schiff. It had been under Marshall’s leadership, however, that the elite German congregation of Temple Emanu-El had begun its plans to move its house of worship from Forty-fifth Street and Fifth Avenue to an even grander address uptown, at Fifth Avenue and Sixty-fifth Street, facing Central Park.

  The ostensible reason at the time for the move was noise. Fifth Avenue and Forty-fifth Street had become one of the city’s busiest commercial corners. The noise of commerce, Marshall explained, did not bother Christian churches in the neighborhood, since they held their services on Sundays. But Saturdays were heavy shopping days, and members of Temple Emanu-El claimed to find the street sounds disturbing on the day of worship. Not stated was the fact that the move uptown was also an attempt to disassociate themselves, socially, from the continuing uptown movement of former Lower East Siders, from the onslaught of the parvenus, or “the newer element,” as the Russians were sometimes called. At the time, upper Fifth Avenue was pretty much the exclusive domain of wealthy Christian families and Old Guard German Jews. The width of Central Park would separate Temple Emanu-El from the “Russian side” on Central Park West, or so the reasoning went.

  The real problem seemed to be that Reform Judaism had become too popular, too successful—so successful that it was difficult for Emanu-El to maintain its traditional German-Jewish exclusivity. When the congregation had first been formed in 1845, its treasury had contained exactly $28.25, and its first services had been held in a Lower East Side tenement at the corner of Grand and Clinton streets. But the congregation had quickly been able to move to better and better addresses until, by 1868, the temple had been able to build—for six hundred thousand dollars—an entire building of its own, on Fifth Avenue, New York’s premiere street, where all the most fashionable Christian churches w
ere.

  By 1930, however, when the grand new building, which had cost seven million dollars, opened its doors, the possibility of exclusivity had gone out the window. The upward and outward mobility of the Eastern Europeans had been so rapid that Russian Jews were able to afford the higher rents and taxes of the fashionable Upper East Side now, and were moving there in goodly numbers. Ironically, the new temple’s first service was for the funeral of Louis Marshall, and the eulogy was delivered by its first Russian-Jewish head rabbi.

  The Old Guard had given way to the new, who had overcome by sheer numbers.

  Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Temple Emanu-El drew Eastern European worshipers like a magnet until, by the late 1940s, Russians outnumbered Germans by a ratio of something like five to one. The reasons for this dramatic switch from the little Orthodox synagogues of the Lower East Side to this stronghold of the American Reform movement were several. For one thing, there was the physical magnificence of the new Temple Emanu-El itself, with its glorious rose window and its altar framed and valanced with carved woods and glittering handworked mosaics. In size, it ranked behind only the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine and Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in New York City, and could seat twenty-five hundred in its main sanctuary, and accommodate at least thirty-five hundred more in an adjacent chapel and auditorium for the High Holidays. Architecturally, it radiated self-confidence and importance.

  Then, too, Emanu-El had long been considered New York’s most fashionable Jewish congregation, and the appeal of fashionability to families moving upward on the economic scale could not be ruled out. All the heads of important Jewish philanthropies had traditionally been Temple Emanu-El members—the presidents of the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, Bonds for Israel, the United Jewish Appeal, the American Jewish Committee, the Friends of Hebrew University, and the boards of directors of Hebrew Union College, Montefiore and Mount Sinai hospitals, and the American Jewish Historical Society. Rubbing shoulders with the leaders of the community also had its appeal.