It has been said that it is an ill wind that blows no good. When I heard of such an occasion on a visit to Puerto Rico, it reminded me of a similar situation in Las Vegas. I visited Puerto Rico a year or so after a tragic fire had killed scores of patrons at the Du Pont Plaza Hotel and Casino on New Year’s Eve 1986. I asked a manager of another hotel about the effects of the disaster on casino business in San Juan, expecting to hear that revenues had gone down. To my surprise, he said, “I can’t say this too loudly, but you know, that fire really helped our business”. I was somewhat stunned, but he added, “Before the disaster nobody knew that Puerto Rico had casinos; now the story about one of our casinos was on the front page of every newspaper in the world”. I was reminded that years before that tragedy in Puerto Rico, Las Vegas had been just a cowboy town with a few casino joints, hardly in the minds of anyone far away. Then on 20 June 1947 a bullet rushed through the handsome head of Benjamin Siegel, a mobster who had orchestrated the construction and the opening of the most glamorous casino of the day. The next day his murder was headline material for newspapers everywhere. Part of the story focused upon the property he had developed and the many glamorous people – mainly movie stars – who frequented his Flamingo Hotel Casino resort. Las Vegas was on the map!
In death, Benjamin Siegel, also known as “Bugsy”(although no one dared to call him that), became an indelible part of the history of Las Vegas, credited in large part for developing the Las Vegas Strip. The reality diverges somewhat from the myth. Siegel did not start the Strip, he did not own the Flamingo, and his role as the manager-builder of the property was secondary to his image as a handsome but nonetheless ruthless mobster who controlled rackets on the West Coast mainly through intimidation. But his death certainly was a bit of marketing genius for Las Vegas, although it can be certain that city promoters were not responsible for pulling the trigger on the Army carbine that did the trick.
Benjamin Siegel was born in 1905 in Brooklyn. As a youngster he became a friend of Meyer Lansky, and the two drifted into rackets, including bootlegging and illegal gambling. The engendered fear that Siegel cast upon others as he walked through his shortened life was a product of the fact that the “Bugsy and Meyer” gang gained a reputation for doing contract work for other organized crime interests. But all need not have feared. As Siegel told builder Del Webb, who was constructing the Flamingo, “We only kill each other”. Lansky and the other New York Mob leaders chose Siegel to be the chief of their West Coast operations, specifically the wire services that carried information on horse and dog races. In California, Siegel befriended the Hollywood movie crowd, and himself became somewhat of a celebrity. He pushed himself into most local rackets. He took a piece of the action from gambling boats operating off the Pacific shore, he controlled action at dog tracks, and he had a piece of the Agua Caliente track and casino in Tijuana. Siegel also bought into several Las Vegas casinos, including the Golden Nugget and Frontier.
In 1945, Meyer Lansky and Siegel drove to Las Vegas together to check on their interests there – the casinos and the wire services – and they discussed the notion of having a new resort that could attract a real tourist crowd as opposed to the existing “sawdust” joints that throve on local and drive-in trade. They found the Flamingo. It had been the dream of Billy Wilkerson, an owner of a nightclub in Hollywood. Wilkerson shared lots of friends with Lansky and Siegel, but he did not have access to their money. His dream was stymied by a lack of financial resources. Siegel and Lansky saw an opportunity, and they took over the project. The organized crime elements in New York and Chicago invested $1.5 million into the venture. Siegel was given the task of getting it done and opening the doors.
Siegel, like Wilkerson, had financial problems with the property. World War II was ending, and materials were scarce. He paid Del Webb’s construction firm top dollar for overtime to rush the construction schedule. Many suppliers found that Siegel did not have a business sense that allowed him to keep track of inventories, and they effectively cheated him out of many dollars worth of goods. Cost overruns followed cost overruns. At the same time, Siegel was carrying on a relationship with Hollywood actress Virginia Hill. That tempestuous affair caused him to neglect work duties as well. As the mobsters back East were being hit for more and more money for construction, they became suspicious that Siegel himself was stealing from the project. They became convinced when Virginia Hill started making trips to Europe and visited Swiss banks. By the end of the project, the price tag had risen from $1 million to $6 million, and the conversations about changing management via assassination had arisen.
Siegel was allowed to survive to open the property, and he did so on 26 December 1946. The opening was another financial disaster, however. The hotel’s rooms were not finished, so guests stayed elsewhere. Bad weather precluded many celebrities from flying in from Los Angeles for the opening. And the players had a run of luck beating the house. To stop the financial hemorrhaging, Siegel closed the Flamingo. He reopened it in March 1947 when the rooms were done and the weather was better. His luck was better, too, and soon the Flamingo was turning a profit. Unfortunately, it was not soon enough for Siegel. His mobster partners had entered the contract for his life. Virginia Hill was in Europe in June, but Bugsy decided that a trip to her apartment in Beverly Hills would beat staying in the Las Vegas heat. He was sitting in her living room reading the Los Angeles Times when three bullets flew into the window and changed the mythology and probably also the history of Las Vegas. The identity of the killer was never discovered.
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