Bugsy Siegel Read online

  Dafni gave his pitch, and Smiley rang off. Shortly after, Dafni was directed to the back room of LaRue, a new Billy Wilkerson restaurant on Sunset Boulevard, recounts Rockaway. After a few pleasantries, Smiley left the room and two toughs walked in to check Dafni for weapons. Once they had left, Siegel entered. Dafni made his pitch for arms and money. “When he finished,” Rockaway recounted, “Siegel asked, ‘you mean to tell me the Jews are fighting?’

  “ ‘Yes,’ replied Dafni.

  “Siegel, who was sitting across the table, leaned forward until the two men’s foreheads were almost touching. ‘You mean fighting, as in killing?’ Siegel asked.

  “ ‘Yes,’ said Dafni.

  “Siegel looked at him for a moment and said ‘I’m with you.’

  “ ‘From then on,’ recalled Dafni, ‘every week I got a phone call to go to the restaurant. And every week I received a suitcase filled with $5 and $10 bills. The payments continued until I left LA.’ ” Dafni guessed that Siegel contributed $50,000 in all to the cause.34

  Giving to Israel was clearly gratifying to Siegel. In a way, though, it underscored just how desperate his financial straits were: $50,000 was a drop in the bucket in the grand scheme of his expenses, so why not help the Jews?

  But was Siegel trying to help the Jews—or redeem himself? “Judaism has an innate sense that people regret evil, and crime, which is why we have Yom Kippur,” suggests Peter Rubenstein, emeritus rabbi at Central Synagogue in Manhattan. “Of course, simply attending services means very little, nor does giving to good causes. If you’re still killing people, giving to charity is not going to redress the balance. If you stop your crimes, then one could argue that maybe you could do good.” But murder, he notes, is in a special category. “Only the victims can forgive the murderer, and they’re not around. Which is to say the murderer really can’t be forgiven.” “God sentences Cain not to death,” Rubenstein adds, “but to ceaseless wandering, friendless and alone.” Ultimately, Siegel’s only salvation was that his wandering wouldn’t last for long.35

  Still in a mood of atonement the night of November 28, 1946, as he flew from Las Vegas to L.A., Siegel asked a stewardess for a few sheets of writing paper and a pencil. Esther had written him to complain about Millicent’s adolescent issues, and to point out that Ben was doing nothing to help. Siegel responded, in a schoolboy scrawl, at some length. His advice, coming from anyone else, would have sounded mundane. From a vicious killer, it was downright bizarre.

  “Esta, I well realize the problem you have with the girls and you know that I always have and I always will do all I can to help you with them,” Siegel began.

  Our love for them and our responsibility to them is something we will always share. So do not be so overwrought and feel that you are carrying the burden alone. Unfortunately, business interests have me so tied up that I cannot be with you to solve all the problems that come up in the rearing of two adolescents.

  First, you must remember that children do not automatically give parents respect—as you speak of your neglect to your father. Parents have to earn it. Now I know you have always acted in the very best interest of the children, and that you love them dearly. But sometimes we do not love too wisely and I suppose we are to blame for Millicent’s misdeeds, too. As you yourself said she is a fine healthy smart child who I believe is going through a stage of antagonism towards us now, because we have constantly thwarted her. Perhaps a little more love and understanding on our part would be more helpful now than constant criticism and punishments. I dislike the idea of her dy[e]ing her hair as much as you do, but I think if you tell her that if she’ll wait until she is seventeen, and if she still wants her hair lighter we will see to it that it will be done properly in a good beauty salon.

  The same thing goes for the smoking. You know I never like you to smoke and yet you have for many years. So you see you must be more tolerant with her. I don’t like the idea of her smoking at all, but I would rather we knew about it than have her cheat behind our backs. That is what you must impress upon her. Tell her she may have an occasional cigarette with you in the house to see if she really enjoys it. When she gets older she can then indulge in moderation if she so desires. I would point out to her that it is not at all ladylike or nice to smoke on the street, and that her home is far the better place.

  Frankly, I hope she won’t continue to smoke, and I dislike the habit in women, and when I see her I will tell her just that. As to her lying, you know that you, I and everyone else is guilty now and then of that habit. None of us likes to admit our faults, yet I feel that you, as the mother who is with her all the time, must be patient and more understanding and try to encourage her to confide in you about her boyfriends and all her social activities. As to her staying out so late, I do not approve of that either, except an occasion when something big is on. Firmly but pleasantly make her realize that you want the name and telephone number of her companion for the evening. This is in case she is unduly late for some reason, so that you can reassure yourself that she is all right. Tell her that you are doing this not to check up on her but because you love her and worry about her. You and she should also agree on a reasonable hour when you expect her home and if she doesn’t live up to her part of the bargain then she can’t go out on her next date.

  And on it went. Some seventy years later, the letter hangs framed on a wall of Siegels 1941, a Bugsy-themed restaurant in the still-standing El Cortez casino, a testament to Ben Siegel’s curious commitment to parenting. Just days later, he would show his dark side, all but threatening Billy Wilkerson with physical assault if his frazzled partner didn’t do as he wished.

  Wilkerson had watched Siegel make one mistake after another as his own expertise was ignored. A few days after fin­ishing his fatherly letter to Esther, Siegel demanded that Wil­kerson help keep the Flamingo afloat by taking out a loan for $600,000, a loan on which Wilkerson would be the sole signatory, pledging his stock as collateral. Or else.

  “Billy was in a difficult spot,” explained Wilkerson’s lawyer Greg Bautzer in a posthumous biography.36 “If Wilkerson signed, he would be sucked into a whirlpool of corruption and insanity. If he did not sign, he might kill [Siegel’s] project and lose his investment.” Wilkerson signed, only to learn that Siegel was now planning his grand opening of the Flamingo for December 26, three months ahead of schedule. Not only was it the night after Christmas, but the hotel wouldn’t be finished! This was a blunder to eclipse all the others, Wilkerson felt. Grimly, he asked for a meeting with Siegel, to which both men brought their lawyers.

  Siegel had come to a conclusion about Wilkerson, the partner with whom he had been so enamored just six months before. He wanted Wilkerson out completely. To that end, he wanted to buy Wilkerson’s 48 percent of the Nevada Projects Corporation, which was to say the Flamingo. But there was a problem. In order to raise more money, Siegel had sold excess shares of stock in the Nevada Projects Corporation, stock that didn’t exist. Apparently he hoped the Flamingo’s success would float all boats. Shares in the Nevada Projects Corporation would rise so high that the new stockholders would be made whole by the original ones, who would quietly sacrifice a bit of their legitimate stock as needed. Wilkerson was shocked to learn of this scam, the more so to learn that he was expected to make it work by sacrificing a big chunk of his 48 percent interest in the venture. “You’re gonna have to part with your portion of the interest,” Siegel declared. “You’re not gonna be paid anything for it, and you’d better have all the interest in hand.”

  “Just a minute,” Bautzer said. “Are you telling this man, who has a legal and valid right to that interest, that he’s gonna have to part with it? Cause he’s not going to have ‘to do’ anything.”

  “He’s gonna have to do this,” Siegel explained. “I’ve sold one hundred fifty percent of this deal, and I don’t have one hundred fifty percent—only 100 percent—and everybody’s gonna have to cut, including Wilkerson.”

  “Well, you’d better find another
way out,” said Bautzer, “cause he ain’t gonna cut.”

  As Bautzer’s biographer James Gladstone relates, Siegel’s famous temper began to erupt. “I can only tell you if I don’t deliver the interest to the people in the east, I’m gonna be killed.” He turned to Wilkerson. “And before I go, you’re gonna go first. And don’t take that lightly. I’ll kill you if I don’t get that interest.”

  But Bautzer had a temper to match Siegel’s. “Sit down and shut up,” he shouted. He proceeded to tell Siegel exactly what would happen next. As soon as he got back to his hotel room, Bautzer would write up an affidavit recording exactly what Siegel had said, and send that affidavit to the district attorney, the FBI, and the police in two states. If anything happened to Bautzer or Wilkerson, Siegel would be arrested right away.

  With that, Bautzer took Wilkerson by the arm and led him out of Siegel’s office, without once looking back. As they reached their rooms, Wilkerson made a sheepish admission to his lawyer: he had just wet his pants.

  Bautzer made out the affidavits just as he had said he would, sent them out by wire, and brought Wilkerson home to L.A. without further incident. He advised Wilkerson to stay out of Vegas for a while. Wilkerson sailed immediately from New York to Paris via the Île de France and checked in to the George V Hotel. His partnership with Siegel was clearly at an end. All that remained was for the two men, through their lawyers, to agree on what it would take for Siegel to buy Wilkerson’s ownership shares—assuming that he had any money left by the time they sat down to work out that deal.

  Wilkerson, whose vision more than anyone else’s had brought the Flamingo to this point, made the wise choice to stay in Paris for the gala opening on December 26. In fact, he stayed away through the next tumultuous months, letting his lawyers do the deal that would buy Wilkerson out of his 48 percent. He never set foot in the Flamingo again. He did do radio interviews for the opening night. He just neglected to say he was doing them from Paris, rather than from the floor of the Flamingo.

  For Siegel, Wilkerson’s departure was a relief. The Flamingo was his now, his dream about to come true. All he needed was an opening night so star-studded and glamorous, and so dizzyingly profitable, that the Flamingo would be, from its first night, the most famous and successful hotel-casino in the world.

  10

  The Flamingo’s First Flight

  BY THE WEEK before Christmas, the Flamingo looked ready. The casino’s big double doors swung open, the swimming pool shimmered, and at night, the tall, illuminated waterfall cast the desert in vibrant hues. Only a walk-through revealed how much needed to be done. Work on the hotel, Siegel’s personal priority and responsibility, was lagging, many of its ninety-three guest rooms awaiting beds and furniture, their bathrooms so incomplete that some had merely a hole in the floor where the toilet or bidet should be. The casino had its gaming tables and roulette wheels in place, but piles of two-by-fours lay in dim corners. As of December, some $4 million had been spent on construction.1 But that didn’t include the other loans and funds needed to finish the hotel. All told, Siegel was in the hole for . . . $5 million? $6 million? Who could count the losses anymore?

  At the start of that propitious month, Siegel and Hill moved from the Last Frontier Hotel into the Flamingo’s fourth-floor penthouse, the airy suite that Hill had designed just for them. The offending low beam was gone. Hill was thrilled to settle in with Siegel to what felt like their home as man and wife. To celebrate, she splurged on a top-tier radio phonograph from the Penny-Owsley Music Company in L.A. for a whopping $1,129.80 and had it sent gift-wrapped.2 Quite possibly, the radio phonograph served an ulterior motive, giving its owners privacy in bed without being overheard by the FBI’s “technical surveillance” team.

  To the hastily departed Billy Wilkerson, now hiding out in Paris, Siegel’s decision to open the Flamingo on December 26, 1946, was a catastrophe in the making. Entertainers and their audiences alike would want to be home the night after Christmas. So would gamblers. Even gangsters would want to be with their families, singing Christmas carols and quaffing eggnog. What was Siegel thinking? As his blowup with Wilkerson suggested, he may have had no choice. His East Coast confederates were ready to hear the jingle of big money coming in, holidays be damned.

  Siegel had planned to charter two or three planes for the stars whose presence would shine up the place. But by mid-December, a disturbing pattern was emerging. The stars were declining, one by one, to come, and more than holiday timing was to blame. “I don’t like to tell you this, Ben,” George Raft finally admitted, “but old man Hearst has passed the word around the studio that he’s against the whole idea, and everybody’s been told to stay away.” The studio was Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which produced press magnate William Randolph Hearst’s nationally broadcast newsreels. That gave Hearst sway over MGM and its stars, including Joan Crawford, Greer Garson, Spencer Tracy, and Ronald Colman. All were Raft’s friends, but the charming gangster-actor had no sway over Hearst.3 Raft at one point tried to weasel out of going himself, but Siegel’s silence on the other end of the line was too menacing for him to ignore.4

  At one point that month, Siegel was ready to cancel the opening altogether, or so Virginia Hill’s kid brother Chick later recalled. He was furious and heartbroken, also a bit contrite. Maybe Wilkerson was right about the post-Christmas opening. Maybe they should have kept to the original date of March 1, 1947, and let the East Coast Syndicate stew. But Hill had just been sent a flaming orange-red $3,500 gown designed by couturier Howard Greer and created for the occasion, and insisted on wearing it.5

  In the end, there would be three opening nights, not just one, Siegel decided: December 26, 27, and 28. The first, noted in full-page ads, would be for the locals: good public relations, and a way to paper the house if too many of the stars failed to show. Siegel had at least lined up comedian Jimmy Durante as his headliner, along with singer, comedian, and radio star Rose Marie, backed by the Xavier Cugat band.

  The morning of December 26, Siegel made frantic rounds, picking up cigarette butts left by the construction workers and fussing over the stacks of cocktail napkins. He went outside to inspect the multihued waterfall, only to find it dark. A pregnant cat had gotten into the waterfall’s sump pump and had six kittens there. A groundskeeper proposed turning off the system and flushing out the mother and her brood so the waterfall could be up and working that evening. “You bother those kittens and you just lost a job,” Siegel snarled. For a gambler, touching a cat was bad luck. The cats would find their way out on their own, Siegel decreed; the waterfall would stay off on opening night.6

  Some stars promised to come despite Hearst’s ultimatum, as long as Siegel was willing to fly them up by charter plane. Lucille Ball signed on, as did William Holden, Ava Gardner, Veronica Lake, and a twenty-three-year-old Peter Lawford. But then, as if the Flamingo were in thrall to a higher power, storms swept the West Coast. In desperation, Siegel chartered an all-Pullman Union Pacific train. But nary a celebrity clambered aboard.7

  Some stars did manage to make the trip. George Raft drove up. So did British actor George Sanders; Sid Grauman, who pioneered putting stars’ hands onto wet cement in front of his Chinese Theatre; entertainer and master of ceremonies Georgie Jessel; and Georgia-born actor Charles Coburn. They found an outdoor spectacle of palm trees spotlit in red and blue, a veritable forest of greenery, and scores of local cars, a traffic jam in the desert waiting to reach the front doors.8

  The casino they entered was glamorous, but very unfinished. The bar in tufted green-and-tomato leather looked over the top, even for a casino in the desert. So, too, the statues, thick draperies, and deep plush carpeting. Everywhere were massive bouquets of flowers. Jimmy Durante twitted Siegel that “da place looks like a cemetery wid dice tables and slot machines.”9 Yet according to Wilkerson, who was hearing the blow-by-blow long distance from Paris, the lobby was draped with dropcloths, and the air-conditioning conked out with annoying frequency.10

  Distraught at
the lack of stars, Siegel made his appearance early that evening in a sports shirt with no tie or jacket. “You crummy peasant!” Hill reportedly said. “Go back and get into a dinner jacket.” Siegel vanished without a word, and came back suitably attired.11

  As the casino filled, Siegel’s scowl gave way to a grin. “Siegel was the most accommodating guy, most likable fellow, had the best personality you ever seen,” observed legendary Texas gambler Benny Binion, who was there that night. “If he was a bad guy, he damn sure didn’t show it from the outside.”12

  Erskine Caldwell, Georgia-born author of Tobacco Road and God’s Little Acre, was no less impressed. “With his handsome physique and his expensively tailored dark-blue suit worn with a white-on-white monogrammed shirt and black silk necktie,” Caldwell wrote, “it was a magical combination that stated ­Bugsy’s presence in unmistakable terms.”

  At the bar, Caldwell added, loud talk dropped to a whisper as Siegel ordered drinks. “Bugsy blew a puff of cigar smoke at one of the (scantily) costumed cocktail girls,” Caldwell recalled. “She stopped as if mesmerized and stood there panting with a heaving of her breasts until he motioned for her to go away.”13

  “The dining room is packed all evening,” reported the Las Vegas Review-Journal. “Cugat and his orchestra are presiding on the podium, and when he starts his rhythms there are more people on the dance floor than you can shake a sacroiliac at. . . . Durante is sharper than a GI bayonet during the evening and while he is on the stage he rips apart a $1600 piano and scatters Cugat’s music all over the dance floor.”14

  The crowd swelled, and the headlining acts captivated the room. But by midnight, something was seriously wrong at the gaming tables. The house was losing cash by the buckets. Rival casinos had sent their best card counters. Siegel’s own crou­piers and stickmen were said to be working with Greek shills, splitting the ill-gotten gains. So suggested Mickey Cohen’s ­biographer. “These handsome croupiers, imported from Havana, stole huge sums of money from the house.” Guy McAfee, Siegel’s nemesis for more than a decade, walked out with thousands of dollars; so did his girlfriend, starlet June Brewster. One world-famous gambler, Nick the Greek Dandolos, left with $500,000 after three nights, reported columnist Dorothy Kilgallen.15