Don't Call Me Bugsy”: The Violent Life of Benjamin Siegel

0:01 Benjamin Siegel absolutely detested the nickname Bugsy. If you said it to his face, it might be the last thing you ever did. To him, it meant he was crazy, a loose cannon. But while he hated the name, he absolutely loved the life. From the bloody streets of Brooklyn to the glitz of Hollywood and the neon lights of Las Vegas, he lived fast, killed ruthlessly, and died violently. This is the story of the mob's most glamorous monster. Benjamin Siegel did not just walk into the desert and conjure a city from the heat.

0:38 He bled for it, lied for it, and eventually, he died for it. Long before the neon glow of Las Vegas became a global beacon, it was just a stretch of Highway 91 and a dream that was costing the American mafia millions of dollars they didn't want to lose. On the night of June 20th, 1947, Siegel was sitting in a rented mansion in Beverly Hills reading the Los Angeles Times, unaware that his time had already run out. The man who hated the nickname Bugsy because it implied he was as crazy as a bed bug was about to face the ultimate audit from the friends he had grown up with on the rough streets of New York.

1:17 To understand why Siegel was on that couch in California, you have to go back to the tenements of Williamsburg and the Lower East Side. Born in 1906 to poor Jewish immigrants, Benjamin Siegelbaum didn't want the life of grueling labor his father endured for meager wages. By the time he was 14, he was already running a gang on Lafayette Street. He wasn't just a petty thief, he was a natural predator. He would approach pushcart peddlers and offer them protection for a fee. If they refused, he didn't just walk away.

1:49 He would douse their carts in kerosene and strike a match. The sight of their livelihood Turning to ash was usually enough to make the next week's payment a certainty. This wasn't just violence. It was a business model. It was during these early years that he met the man who would become his lifelong anchor and, eventually, perhaps his judge, Meyer Lansky. While Siegel was the muscle, the pistol, who fired before anyone else could think, Lansky was the brain. They formed the Bugs and Meyer mob. a crew of Jewish teenagers who handled everything from car theft to contract hits.

2:27 They weren't just street thugs. They were the proto version of what would become Murder, Incorporated. Siegel and Lansky soon caught the eye of Charles Lucky Luciano, an Italian gangster who saw the potential in a multi -ethnic alliance. Together, they helped dismantle the old world mustache peets like Joe Messeria. In 1931, Siegel was reportedly one of the four gunmen who walked into a Coney Island restaurant and ended Missouri's reign over a plate of pasta, signaling the birth of the modern National Crime Syndicate.

3:01 But as the syndicate grew, Siegel's profile grew too hot for New York. By the mid -1930s, Lansky suggested his friend head west. In Hollywood, Siegel found a world that finally matched his vanity. He didn't just want to be a gangster. He wanted to be a star. He moved into a palatial estate in Holmby Hills and began rubbing elbows with the elite. He befriended movie stars like Clark Gable, Cary Grant, and Gary Cooper. The actress Jean Harlow became the godmother to his daughter, Millicent. Siegel was obsessed with his appearance, terrified of losing his hair and his youthful looks.

3:38 At night, he would apply expensive face creams and wear a chin strap to keep his skin taut, a secret routine for a man who during the day, was extorting movie studios by threatening to call strikes through the unions he controlled. He also rekindled a friendship with a childhood pal from Hell's Kitchen who had actually made it on the silver screen, George Raft. Raft had become famous playing the very type of man Siegel actually was, even flipping a nickel in the movie scarface as a nod to their shared roots.

4:10 Raft was Siegel's gateway to the high life. introducing him to studio heads like Jack Warner and Louis B. Mayer. Siegel would borrow thousands of dollars from his celebrity friends, knowing they were far too intimidated to ever ask for it back. But while he was playing the glamorous host in Beverly Hills, the syndicate back East was looking for a return on their investments. They wanted him to build a bridgehead in the Nevada desert. The Flamingo wasn't originally Siegel's idea. It belonged to Billy Wilkerson.

4:42 the founder of the Hollywood Reporter, who had run out of money after gambling away his funds. Siegel saw the potential for a luxury resort that didn't look like the dusty, frontier -themed joints then populating Las Vegas. He took over the project with syndicate money, but he was a terrible businessman. He was gouged by contractors who sold him materials during the day and stole them back at night, only to resell them to him the next morning. The original $1 .2 million budget ballooned to $6 million.

5:13 Segal's temper flared as the costs rose. He once told a worried foreman, don't worry, we only kill each other. The real trouble started when the syndicate began to suspect that the $6 million hadn't just gone into the plumbing and the pink neon. They suspected Segal or his volatile girlfriend, Virginia Hill. of skimming the budget and stashing the cash in Swiss bank accounts. Hill was a courier for the Chicago outfit, a woman who could hold her own in a room full of killers and was known as the queen of the mob.

5:47 The relationship between Siegel and Hill was a tempest of passion and violence. During a meeting at a hotel in Havana, Lansky and the other bosses confronted Siegel about the losses. Lansky, the friend who had saved him countless times, reportedly stood up for him Pleading for more time to let the flamingo to her profit, but the grand opening on December 26 1946 was a catastrophe a winter storm kept the Hollywood stars away the hotel rooms weren't finished and the casino lost $300 ,000 in its first week By the spring of 1947 the flamingo was finally starting to show a profit But for the men back East it was too little too late The suspicion of theft had curdled into a death sentence.

6:37 In early June, Virginia Hill was suddenly ordered by her Chicago bosses to leave the country. She claimed she was going to Paris to buy wine for the hotel, but the timing was too perfect to be a coincidence. Siegel himself chartered the plane that took her away, perhaps unaware that he was being cleared for the hit. She was safely in Europe when the end finally came for the man who thought he was untouchable. On that June night, Siegel was relaxed. He was reading the paper in Hill's living room on North Linden Drive when a sniper fired nine rounds from a .30 caliber M1 carbine through the window.

7:15 Two bullets hit him in the head. One entered his nose and blew his left eyeball 15 feet across the room. He was 41 years old. The precision of the hit and the speed of the aftermath left little doubt who was responsible. Within 20 minutes of the shooting, Siegel's old associates, most said way in Gus Greenbaum, walked into the Flamingo in Las Vegas and announced that they were now in charge. There was no argument. The audit was complete. Benjamin Siegel didn't live to see the Las Vegas he envisioned, a place where the mob and the movie stars could coexist in a shimmer of desert heat.

7:54 He left behind a legacy of violence and vanity. buried in a silver -plated casket at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Virginia Hill would eventually end up in Austria, plagued by the secrets she carried and the IRS agents who wouldn't stop knocking until her own life ended in the snow near Salzburg. The flamingo still stands, a monument to the man who was too crazy for New York and too greedy for the desert. If this story of the man who built the oasis of Sin City stayed with you, tell a friend about this episode.

8:26 And that's the way I heard it.