For Jewish-American gangster Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, Las Vegas represented the gamble of a lifetime.
In the 1940s, Siegel poured the Mob’s millions into what seemed like a quixotic scheme. He was convinced that the sleepy town in the Nevada desert would someday become a glamorous gambling center. To make that dream a reality, he and his Mob-connected girlfriend, Virginia Hill, built a casino hotel called the Flamingo that would rival anything in Monaco. Yet costs ballooned, and his gangster associates suspected him and Hill of skimming funds. On June 20, 1947, the 41-year-old Siegel was gunned down in Hill’s Los Angeles apartment. The carnage left his eyeball spattered on the wall.
Siegel is the subject of a new book by Vanity Fair contributing editor Michael Shnayerson — “Bugsy Siegel: The Dark Side of the American Dream,” part of the Jewish Lives series from Yale University Press.
“On some level, Ben did want to be a good Jew, and I would dare say he hoped he might put his life of crime behind him and be a practicing Jew for the last years of his life,” Shnayerson wrote in an email. “He just never had the chance.”
