Contents
Also by Robert Lacey 1
PUBLISHING INFORMATION 2
DEDICATION 4
Godfather, Retired 6
Part One 13
1 15
2 23
3 37
4 55
5 63
6 77
7 88
8 101
9 110
10 125
Part Two 141
11 143
12 160
13 171
14 181
15 197
16 214
17 229
18 246
19 266
20 277
21 291
22 303
23 319
Author’s Note and Acknowledgments 333
PICTURES 341
BONUS MATERIAL 357
Kefauver Report, 1951 357
FBI Vault 359
FILM FOOTAGE 364
Links to videos featuring Meyer Lansky 364
About the author 368
9
“Benny Siegel . . . He Knocked Out Plenty”
IN JANUARY 1946, America had a lot of fun to catch up on — and the place she went looking for it was Florida. The war had given many Americans their first experience of winter sunshine. Stationed for their military training in Miami or Fort Lauderdale, they had drilled on the beach, and had been billeted in the gaudy holiday hotels as barracks. In the early winter months of 1946, they came back, liberated and cash-rich, to enjoy the place properly.
Honeymooners, golfers, jaunty retirees — thousands flocked south for Florida’s winter “season,” the new folk rite of America’s postwar consumer high life. You had to book weeks ahead to get a seat on the train. In the winters of the late 1940s, Miami Beach and its surrounding resorts became America’s premier fun complex, a vast, extended play city that stretched from the Miami River up to Fort Lauderdale — and right in the center of it lay Meyer Lansky’s carpet joints. There were no fewer than thirty-two illegal gambling establishments of different types, by one estimate, flourishing on the Dade-Broward line in the years between 1946 and 1950 — wire rooms, horse parlors, small, single crap games, full-blown carpet joints.
If you came up to Hallandale by the coast road, you risked the waves that sometimes ran over the blacktop, and the shells of the huge land crabs that were tough enough to puncture your tires. The first joint you encountered, where the county line hit the beach, was the Club Bohème, a night spot with gambling and a floor show in the Lido tradition, run by Albert “Papa” Bouche, a local impresario with Ben Marden—like aspirations.
If you chose the less adventurous but still unpaved and unlit U.S. 1, you were greeted, to your left, by Greenacres, a packing-shed structure in the raw tradition of Potatoes Kaufman’s original Plantation. Greenacres housed a money crap game, New York style, where players would bet against each other, with the house taking a cut. There were no chips — just dollar bills by the thousand.
Meyer Lansky had shares in both these new establishments. He had kept one or another of his original Hallandale clubs operating in a low-profile fashion through all the winters of the Second World War with the help of his brother, Jake, who had come to oversee the Broward business as his local general manager. After Jake’s first 1936-37 season in the Plantation-renamed-the-Farm, the younger brother had decided to make Florida his home, renting a house on one of Hollywood’s palm-shaded streets named after presidents — Van Buren one year, Jackson the next.
Jake had married in the 1930s, and had started a family. His wife, Anna, came from a poor family on the Lower East Side. She was a quiet, domestically inclined girl who shared Jake’s easygoing tastes. Aged forty-one in 1945, Jake Lansky was a square-faced, burly man, whose nose and eyes gave his features an odd echo of Meyer’s. He wore thick pebble glasses. With his dark, curly hair already graying around the edges, Jake looked older than he was — most people assumed that Meyer was the younger brother. Jake Lansky was made to be the stolid front man, and he played the part to perfection.
Jake’s working base in Hallandale – the headquarters for the complicated network of partnerships, cuts, and share-outs that linked Hallandale’s various gaming joints — was the clubhouse that Ben Marden had set up in the early 1940s, the Colonial Inn. Be-pillared and porticoed, it sat beside the Gulfstream Race Track. During the war, the Colonial Inn had served as operations center for an army signal corps unit. There had been cots and showers in the gaming room, a mess hall in front of the stage. Now repainted and refurbished, twinkling like Tara at the head of its long, curved drive, the Colonial Inn reopened for business in December 1945.
For their first postwar season, the Lanskys brought a member of the thriving Detroit gaming fraternity, Mert Wertheimer, to help operate the Colonial Inn’s gaming room, alongside familiar faces like George Sadlo. Wertheimer and his partner, Ruben Mathews, took nearly a third of the Colonial Inn’s declared profits. Jimmy Blue Eyes had 7.5 percent. Frank Erickson had 5 percent. With Joe Adonis and Benny Siegel cut in as well, the Colonial Inn represented a partnership of all the talents.
There were a few gaming rooms and a large number of bookies operating in Miami Beach to the south of Hallandale, but they were vulnerable to the shifting complexities of politics in an urban area. The Miami Herald had a crusading young editor, Lee Hills, who had the bright idea of collaborating with northern newspapers to identify and publicize gamblers and undesirables who came down to winter in Miami and the Dade County area. He ran a series, “Know Your Neighbor,” with photographs and criminal records.
The Miami Beach authorities decided to start their first postwar season “clean-up.” At the end of 1945, the police started a program of raids on Dade’s private gaming rooms, and they did what they could to make life difficult for the cigar-stand bookmakers in the tourist hotels.
Meyer Lansky and his Hallandale partners to the north of the Dade county line could not have been happier.
The authorities in Broward County suffered from no misplaced righteousness. Sheriff Walter Clark had won his position as the county’s principal law enforcement officer by popular election in 1933, and he had been reelected regularly and resoundingly in the dozen years since on the basis of what Sheriff Clark liked to call a “liberal” ticket.
Sheriff Clark’s definition of “liberal” meant giving the people what they wanted. “I am not going around snooping in private businesses and homes,” he later explained.
If pressed, the sheriff would admit that gambling was probably being conducted along the Broward line with Dade County. But it was not his job to interfere, he would explain, so long as none of his constituents made any formal complaints.
Thirty pounds overweight, with a wide grin and carp-like features that were not dissimilar to those of the fish that he liked to hook out of the county’s waterways, Walter Clark was a gregarious and popular character. In his election campaigns he made much of being a simple, down-home, local boy, and even those who opposed his pro-gambling attitude found it difficult to dislike him personally. He was, he liked to claim, the first white child born in Broward — the county that was carved out from its neighbors, Dade and Palm Beach counties, in 1915. It had been named after Napoleon Bonaparte Broward, the aptly named governor of Florida who, in the years after 1905, initiated the conquest of the Everglades in the cause of farming and real estate.
Law and order was a basic plank of Walter Clark’s platform. Under his stewardship, he liked to boast, “Broward has enjoyed the lowest crime-occurrence record of any U.S. resort county for its size” — and the operators of Broward’s gambling joints contributed significantly to this record. Prostitution was not the problem in Hallandale that it was in Miami Beach, or, up in New Jersey in Atlantic City, because Meyer Lansky and his partners enforced a strict “no B-girl” rule in and around their Broward establishments.
Back in 1936 it had been Lucky Luciano’s involvement with prostitutes that had ended his run of luck. Dealing with girls, many of whom came from other states, carried the same risks as dealing in drugs, or not filing your tax return with the IRS. Taking prostitutes across a state line was a federal offense — and that meant the attentions of the FBI. “Nothing federal” was the motto by which America’s wide-open enclaves and carpet joints survived.
In any case, no serious casino operator wanted to encourage girls whose business lay in enticing men and their money away from the tables. It also got the wives upset — and it was one of Meyer Lansky’s principles that a good casino should keep the wives happy. A bored, unhappy wife or girlfriend was likely to nag her man and drag him away from the tables early. So, a few hours after the main dinner show, just as the gambling started to gather momentum at the Colonial Inn, the lights would go down in the dining room for an extra midnight spectacle to occupy the ladies’ interests while their menfolk kept on gambling.
Meyer Lansky took pride in running a clean operation. For all their illegality, his carpet joints were essentially bourgeois establishments. Claude Litteral, elegant in black tie and tuxedo, sat at the desk screening the doorway that separated the dining area from the gambling room – the threshold across which a harmless evening out became, technically, involvement in an illegal act. Locals were politely, and apologetically, turned back toward the bar or showroom. Drunks and suspected hookers were escorted firmly to the door, and men or women in uniform were also banned, since any trouble with them would bring in the military police — another jurisdiction, like the feds, over which Meyer and his partners had no control.
By the winter season of 1946, Hallandale’s system of legalized payoffs via the municipal court, from the casinos and horse parlors directly into the official coffers, had developed from its small beginnings in the early 1940s into a major source of income for the city’s government. There were direct handouts to the taxpayers also. Joseph Varon, who was shortly to become Hallandale’s city attorney, remembers a system whereby the registered voters, numbered only in the hundreds in the years before 1950, all received a personal cash payment in the course of the season — thirty-five dollars per household, the equivalent of a week’s wages.
The local farmers got good prices for their produce from the kitchens of Hallandale’s restaurants and dining rooms, and there were jobs as well. The inventory of correspondence of the Colonial Inn, lodged with their accountants, Messrs. Eisen & Eisen, showed twelve letters on Hallandale’s official city stationery, all dated December 1947 and introducing twelve individuals anxious “to secure a position with your firm this season.” The letters were all signed “H. C. Schwartz, Mayor.”
The inventory showed other letters to Jake Lansky from the North Miami Police Department and from the West Miami Police Association, with thanks for generous donations. Also acknowledged were checks totaling $750, gratefully received by the Florida Sheriff Association, the Justice of Peace & Constables Association, and the Florida Peace Officers Association.
Paid off still more directly were the local Hallandale police, a select corps of three men who had recently graduated from motor bicycles to squad cars, but who were not equipped with radios. When they needed to report an emergency, they would call in from the nearest pay phone — the operator, who recognized their voices, refunded them their nickel at the end of the call. These three local representatives of the law got their cut from the annual invasion of the gamblers by working off-duty stints supervising the parking of cars outside the Colonial Inn and the other gambling joints.
Everyone got in on the act. At the end of the night’s business, a call would be made, and a posse of Sheriff Clark’s uniformed deputies would arrive to escort the night’s take to the bank. Sheriff Clark’s brother, Robert, owned the armored truck company whose vehicle transported the money.
We know about these payments because, like all good taxpayers, Meyer Lansky and his partners supplied the IRS with a detailed accounting of their expenses. In 1931, the case of Al Capone had memorably demonstrated that the IRS was not concerned with how a businessman earned his money, so long as he paid his taxes. Meyer’s accountants turned this to their advantage.
“Mr. Sadlo’s position with the Colonial Inn is a very responsible one,” wrote Ben C. Eisen, the Colonial Inn’s accountant, in response to an IRS query of George Sadlo’s traveling expenses. “It is his job to see that all dealers hired for the casino are honest, trustworthy and of the highest type . . . In order to be able to hire this type of dealer, Mr. Sadlo travels throughout the country and visits the best casinos.” The fact that these casinos were illegal establishments, and that George Sadlo was recruiting dealers for illegal purposes, did not affect the validity of his tax deduction for IRS purposes. “Since the winter season is an off-season throughout the country, except in Florida,” explained Ben Eisen to the IRS, “Mr. Sadlo is in a position to get this kind of help, but not before he makes all inquiries . . . The $2,500 which Sadlo deducted for expenses in the pursuit of business is a very nominal amount.”
Like many a good taxpayer, however, Meyer Lansky and his partners did not quite present the whole story in the figures that they submitted to the IRS. At the end of every gambling shift, the “drop” from each table in the casino would be brought into the counting room. There, Meyer and Jake Lansky would personally count the mounds of dollar bills until they reached the “handle” — the amount of money they needed to meet their daily expenses. The handle, with the addition of a moderate sum for cash reserve and profit, would be passed on to be recorded in the credit column of the casino’s ledger and, eventually, in the accounts that were presented to the IRS. Any money in excess of this went directly into the pockets of the Lansky brothers and of their partners.
This cash — which might be tallied in the tens of thousands of dollars on a good night — was what came, in later years, to be known as the casino “skim”. But in the carpet joints of the 1930s and 1940s, it was simply the take, the loot, the boodle — the real return to the partners on their investment — and, as in bootlegging days, it made sense to have a capable, honest partner like Meyer Lansky in charge of the share-out. At the end of every gaming season, Meyer organized the figures that the partners declared to the IRS, and, week-by-week, he organized the skimmed-off cash payments as well.
It was not only the partners who got paid in cash. The top entertainers got money under the table in addition to the fee that their agent negotiated. Joe E. Lewis, the comedian, had a cashbox in the safe of his hotel, into which he would haphazardly stuff hundred-dollar bills each night. Sophie Tucker, a compulsive gambler, would take a proportion of her money in chips, and by the end of a week’s engagement, the singer had, quite often, given it all back to the casino again, across the tables.
Frank Sinatra, whose career got started in these years, became a byword for his associations, real and rumored, with mobsters, and was much criticized for them. But in the years after World War II, it was the carpet joints that offered America’s entertainers their most remunerative live venues. All the stars who played them were paid in illegally earned money, and they inevitably hobnobbed with their paymasters.
Comedians like Jimmy Durante and Joe E. Lewis actually incorporated the nature of their employers into their act, and Lewis became the gangster entertainer to end them all after he was attacked and slashed in Chicago in 1927. Scarred for life, he steadfastly declined to identify his assailants, or to give the police any clue as to who they might have been – an incident depicted in the 1957 movie The Joker Is Wild, in which Frank Sinatra played the part of the comedian. Joe E. Lewis never lacked for work again, and from 1946 onward, he was a feature of every Hallandale winter season in one or another of the Lansky clubs, a tipsy, wisecracking whirlwind who drank, kibitzed and played gin rummy into the small hours with Meyer, Joe Adonis, and the other partners. He kept stuffing his cashbox with money, but he would also hand out large tips — particularly to the down-and-outs who were the special object of his generosity.
“There,” he would say, thrusting five or ten dollars into their hands. “This is for you. And don’t go spending it on no food.”
Lewis’s brand of low comedy, delivered while he wandered round the audience with a filled tumbler in hand, relied heavily on his weakness for whisky, gambling, and three packs of cigarettes a day, and it struck a chord with his gangster fans. Their own idea of a joke was the hotfoot — a complicated and stealthy maneuver involving a pack of matches slipped into the victim’s shoe. The folded-back cover of the packet was slipped inside the side or back of the shoe, exposing the matches themselves, which were then ignited with a whoosh to the amusement of all around, while the victim jumped up and down, feverishly endeavoring to prevent his trousers catching fire.
Meyer Lansky tended to stay aloof from this horseplay, and his partners admired him the more for his seriousness. He was their resident intellectual, the authority to whom they turned in arguments great and small – the oracle.
Frank Costello was particularly exercised by his own poor reputation, and that of his friends. It irked him that the world regarded them all as gangsters and hoodlums. Who did gamblers kill? Who were they hurting, even? It was unfair, he complained. They would never get respectable.
“Don’t worry, don’t worry,” replied Meyer, the history book reader. “Look at history. Look at the Astors and the Vanderbilts, all those big society people. They were the worst thieves — and now look at them. It’s just a matter of time.”
Harold Conrad was a young New York sportswriter who started work at the Colonial Inn at the beginning of 1946. Conrad had been hired to help with the club’s public relations, and he met Meyer Lansky the day after he had submitted his first expense account, for two round-trip cab fares to Hollywood. Conrad claimed twelve dollars.
Meyer came up to the young man, serious and unsmiling.
“You must be a big tipper or something,” he said. “Two round-trips to Hollywood is eight bucks, and four tips is two dollars. I make that ten bucks.”
Conrad soon discovered that managing public relations for a joint run by Meyer Lansky could mean, as often as not, keeping the place out of the newspapers. A few days after he arrived, Lansky told him that Frank Costello was due from New Orleans the next morning. “He’s got something on his mind,” Meyer said. “Maybe you can help. You wake me up in the morning and we’ll go to the airport and pick him up.”
As the two men drove Costello back from the airport — Lansky at the wheel, Conrad sitting to attention in the backseat — Costello explained what was on his mind. Walter Winchell was in Miami Beach, and, with Dade County clamping down on its gambling, Costello was worried that the gossip columnist might run an embarrassing story about the wide-open situation that prevailed, by contrast, up in Broward.
“I don’t know what to tell you, Frank,” said Meyer. “You got any ideas, Harold?”
Harold did have a suggestion. He had been close to Damon Runyon in the writer’s final, painful months, when Runyon was dying of cancer. He knew that Winchell had started the Damon Runyon Cancer Fund, and that the fund meant more to Winchell than most things.
“A check for $5,000,” suggested Conrad, “would make a big impression.”
Next day, Conrad was at the Roney Plaza on Miami Beach, handing over a $5,000 check to a sun-oiled Winchell in a deck chair.
“It’s from the boys at the Colonial Inn,” Conrad explained. “They really loved Runyon.”
Winchell was impressed.
“Why don’t you come out to the club?” suggested Conrad.
Winchell went up to Hallandale that evening. He danced three rumba sets, shot craps in the casino, and took a fancy to a showgirl in the chorus line who came from Texas. Frank Costello looked at Harold Conrad with new respect.
“You done good, kid,” he said.
Harold Conrad’s 1946 season at the Colonial Inn was a succession of surprises. When George Raft, the film star, arrived in Hallandale to spend some time with Benny Siegel and his other friends, Conrad assumed that the actor would be taking advantage of his visit to study the originals on whom his gangster roles were based. But the reverse proved the case. It was the gangsters who spent their time studying Raft, trying to find out the name of his tailor, and who made his elegant, handcrafted shoes.
Conrad also discovered that, contrary to stereotype, gangsters did not spend their time killing people. It was making money that was on their mind.
In 1946 an off-color, black-market record was making the rounds — “The Farting Range,” a vivid depiction of a world championship of flatulence in which contestants gave performances in line with their national characteristics.
When Joe Adonis heard the record, he fell on the floor, laughing. “Wait a minute, wait a minute,” he cried. “I’ve got to get Frank . . . Frank, you’ve got to hear this!”
Within a minute, Frank Costello was also convulsed with laughter, and Harold Conrad was instantly dispatched to discover where he could get copies of the record made locally. A day or so later, he was back with fifty fresh-pressed records that had cost him four dollars apiece.
“Fifty dollars,” said Joe Adonis to the young press agent. “Charge fifty dollars each.”
Adonis then turned and addressed himself grandly to the assembled showgirls and gamblers. “By special request of Mr. Costello,” he declared, “we proudly present a record that has just reached us from England — the latest speech of Winston Churchill.”
Conrad then played “The Farting Range,” and within thirty seconds pandemonium reigned, everyone doubling up in paroxysms of mirth and pulling out their wallets to hand over their $50. By the end of the day, Harold Conrad had sold out his entire stock of records — a clean and instant profit of more than $2,000, which his patrons allowed him to keep.
“You see?” said Joe Adonis. “I’m a Mob guy — I’m a businessman. I want you to know about business.”
Carpet joints all over America reaped rich dividends from the nation’s new affluence in the years following the Second World War. Leisure and pleasure were the peacetime priorities. In 1946, Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello resumed their August partnership in Saratoga, and they also collaborated on the opening of a luxurious new nightclub in Jefferson Parish outside New Orleans, the Beverly Club. Frank gave Meyer a 25 percent cut of the Beverly Club’s profits for the first two years in return for his help with the layout and setting up of the casino.
But there were only so many Hallandales and Jefferson Parishes in America, and the fix was never totally reliable. In 1946 Meyer Lansky and Bill Syms had gone back to Iowa to restart their dog racing after the war — to discover that there had been changes in Council Bluffs. The new mayor was scandalized at the selling of “options” on greyhounds — so that was the end of the Dodge Park Kennel Club.
“Will they open this year?” was the anxious question at the beginning of every season from Saratoga to Broward County.
Since 1931 Nevada had been the only state in the Union where casino gambling was legal, and that was the other side of the world – Nevada was eighteen bumpy and unpressurized hours by plane from New York at the end of the 1930s. But the war had made America smaller. In 1941 the Nevada state legislature voted to legalize betting on horse race results coming in by wire, and that caught the eye of Benjamin Siegel, who was then making book in California. The prospect of earning some legal money from his gambling appealed to Benny Siegel, so in 1941 he set off to explore the racing-wire market in Nevada, starting in the first dusty settlement down the road from Los Angeles — the railroad depot town of Las Vegas.
As the crooks and hoodlums of one era have become the heroes of the next, Bugsy Siegel has come, in popular folklore, to be seen as the patron saint and inspirer of modern Las Vegas. There have even been suggestions that the city should raise a statue to him — the founding father who strode out into the empty desert to inspire a city of shining palaces, inventing the concept of the modern resort hotel-casino.
In reality, Bugsy Siegel followed a trail pioneered by quite a number of others. When he arrived in Las Vegas in 1941, there was already one luxurious hotel-casino in the desert outside town, El Rancho Vegas, a landscaped resort complex covering sixty-six acres, and in December 1942, El Rancho was joined on Highway 91 — the Strip, as it came to be known — by an even more luxurious development, the Last Frontier. The Last Frontier featured a swimming pool, sun deck, tennis courts and riding stables, a showroom and casino, and 170 individually air-conditioned rooms.
“Each room,” reported the Las Vegas Evening Review-Journal, “has a private bath, tiled about the tub and on the floor. The color scheme in the bath harmonizes with the theme in the adjoining bedroom . . . Stream-lined upholstered chairs in harmony with drapes and bedspreads are provided.”
War boosted the development of Las Vegas as an American entertainment center. The arrival of the U.S. Army’s gunnery school increased the town’s population by nearly fifty percent, and in the best carpet-joint tradition of social outreach, El Rancho and the Last Frontier sent their entertainers to put on shows in the military camps. They also made their showrooms available on quieter weeknights for the celebrations that attended the graduation of each new batch of gunnery officers or airmen, the boys being treated to a slap-up dinner, dancing, and floor show before they were sent off to battle.
The bookmakers of Las Vegas shared in the town’s general expansion, and after a couple of years Benny Siegel was doing very well out of his wire-service franchise. But he could see that he was not doing nearly so well as the owners of El Rancho and the Last Frontier, the regularly overbooked resorts out on the Strip, and he decided that he wanted to get in on the luxury hotel-casino business. Early in 1943, he made contact with Tom Hull, the owner of El Rancho Vegas, and made him an offer that Hull found very easy to refuse. The California hotelier knew something of Bugsy’s reputation.
“You may say for me,” Hull told the Vegas Review-Journal in March 1943, “that the people of Las Vegas have been too good to me for me to repay them in that way. Mr. Siegel has contacted me several times with an offer to purchase, but I have told him I was not interested — and that goes for all time.”
As the war drew to an end, Benny Siegel was by no means alone in seeking to duplicate the spectacular success of El Rancho Vegas and the Last Frontier. “I’m going to build a hotel,” was the standard boast of wealthy visitors to Las Vegas in the early months of peace, according to an article in the Review-Journal in July 1946. Mae West was planning a hotel-casino, said the paper, and Frank Sinatra was part of a consortium that was trying to develop a resort hotel-casino that would feature its own radio station. Roy Rogers was negotiating to start a dude ranch.
Ben Siegel was in some danger of getting left out when, late in 1945, he heard of the chance to acquire the El Cortez, on Fremont and Sixth Street, a gambling hotel in downtown Las Vegas which had been doing good business for several years. Benny had quite a number of local partners — but he also turned for funds to his old friend Meyer Lansky.
Meyer and Benny had been friends rather than business partners since their Cannon Street garage days, but Meyer did not share his friend’s enthusiasm for Las Vegas. “It was in sorry shape,” he said years later, recalling his visits there in the 1940s. “Living conditions were bad. No one wanted to go to Vegas to gamble. Air connections were bad. And the trip by car was bothersome. It was so hot that the wires in the car would melt.”
Las Vegas offered Meyer Lansky the second great chance in his life to go legit, but he made no special effort to take it. Several dozen former bootleggers, bookies, and carpet-joint operators flooded into Las Vegas from different corners of America in the late 1940s, seizing the opportunity to sidestep their pasts — and most of Ben Siegel’s co-investors in the El Cortez fell into this category. Gus Greenbaum was an Arizona bookmaker. Willie Alderman and the Berman brothers, Davie and Chickie, had run carpet joints in Minneapolis. Moe Sedway had come out with Benny from Los Angeles to help with the franchising of the wire. All these men invested in the El Cortez in December 1945 while also working there, helping to operate the hotel’s casino.
But Meyer’s focus remained firmly in Florida. In December 1945, he was busy getting ready for his first postwar season in Hallandale. He was content to be little more than a sleeping partner in the El Cortez project, investing $60,000, a 10 percent stake that he trusted Benny Siegel to handle.
Benny handled it well. Real estate prices were rising sharply in Las Vegas’s postwar expansion, and in July 1946, Benny and his partners in the El Cortez syndicate resold the hotel for a profit of $166,000 — a 27 percent return on their investment, in little more than six months. The trouble started when the successful El Cortez syndicate decided to reinvest their money that summer in another new hotel-casino that was being built out on the Strip — the Flamingo.
The Flamingo Hotel Casino was the brainchild of Billy Wilkerson, the suave, waxed-mustached founder of the Hollywood Reporter, who also created the Cafe Trocadero, Ciro’s, and La Rue’s, a trio of successful Hollywood nightspots, which between them formed the beginning of Sunset Strip.
It was Wilkerson’s idea to transport the sophistication of these nightspots to Las Vegas, for though El Rancho and the Last Frontier had their luxury, their atmosphere remained in the “Howdy, pardner” dude ranch tradition. Wilkerson envisioned something more glitzy, a refuge from the desert and the sagebrush — a showroom that featured major stars, and a casino ambience that was Beverly Hills, rather than Nevada.
But the impresario’s vision outran his budget. Wilkerson had purchased the land for the Flamingo, had drawn up the plans, and had broken ground on construction when he started looking for new investors. Benny Siegel finally had his chance to buy his own hotel-casino — or two-thirds of it, at least. Benny and his other partners, including Meyer, reinvested the $650,000 from their sale of the El Cortez to secure a 66 percent holding in Wilkerson’s Flamingo.
As controller of the majority consortium, Benny set himself Christmas 1946 as his deadline for getting the Flamingo finished. But he immediately developed bright new ideas for improving the rooms — not least his own, designated master suite — and he wanted nothing but the best: unique designs, rare woods, the finest marbles. The charming and imperious Ben Siegel totally lacked his friend Meyer’s sense of control.
His latest girlfriend compounded the problem. Benny’s marriage to Esther had fallen victim to his relentless womanizing, and in 1946 his consort was Virginia Hill, a lady whose own varied track record included marriage to a Mexican rumba dancer, and a relationship with Joe Epstein, an elderly Chicago bookmaker who, with touching fidelity, kept sending Virginia checks long after she ceased to be his permanent paramour. Plump and pugnacious, Virginia Hill had a temper to match Benny’s, and they made a formidable couple of building inspectors when they drove out to look over the latest elaborations at the Flamingo.
To the surprise of many, Benny Siegel managed to get the Flamingo opened on time — and in some style. “That was the biggest whoop-de-do I ever seen,” remembers Benny Binion, who came out of town on December 26, 1946, to cast a professional eye over the new casino on its opening night, and was considerably impressed. “They had Jimmy Durante, Cugat’s band and Rosemarie, all in one show.”
“You never saw so many black-chip gamblers in your life,” says Lou Wiener, Ben Siegel’s Las Vegas lawyer.
The problem for Ben Siegel, and for the bankroll of the new Flamingo casino, was that the players who were so energetically putting down their $100 chips, were almost all winning back their bets, re-wagering, and then winning again.
The Flamingo could have done with Meyer Lansky in the gaming room. Through a combination of poor luck and dealers who had not yet found their rhythm, most of the tables at the Flamingo suffered heavy losses in their first hours of gambling on the night of December 26, 1946. And then, not long after midnight, when some of the biggest winners might reasonably have been expected to go on playing into the small hours, almost everybody cashed in their chips and took their money home with them.
Benny Siegel had got the casino, showroom, restaurant, and bar of the Flamingo finished by his deadline – but there were no bedrooms for the guests. So it was the neighboring El Rancho Vegas and the Last Frontier which made the big money, as the guests from the Flamingo’s opening reception came back to their hotels, sent their wives off to bed, and decided to play for an hour or so with the winnings they had brought from the new casino down the road.
The same pattern continued through the entire Christmas week of 1946 and through the New Year’s celebrations of 1947. When the holidays ended early in January 1947, the visitors all went home and the whole of Las Vegas suffered a downturn, with the Flamingo being hardest hurt, since it was farthest gaming joint out of town, with no captive, residential guests of its own. Late in January 1947, the new casino closed its doors, less than a month after it had opened.
Meyer Lansky had originally invested $62,500 of his own money in the Flamingo. This was the sum he had withdrawn in August 1946 from his successful partnership in the El Cortez, and he transferred it to the Nevada Project Corporation, the company formed by Ben Siegel to represent the stake that he and his partners purchased from Wilkerson in the Flamingo. Meyer’s $62,500 gave him one hundred shares — a tenth of the total stock in Benny’s new syndicate.
On November 29, 1946, the Flamingo consortium had had to borrow more money to keep the project going. Billy Wilkerson signed for a loan of $600,000 from the Valley National Bank of Phoenix, Arizona, which had links to both Gus Greenbaum and Del E. Webb, the Phoenix contractor whose company was building the Flamingo. This brought the money paid out on the Flamingo to a total of some $1.2 million, in addition to the price that Wilkerson had originally paid for the land — and on top of the $1.2 million, Benny Siegel had made quite substantial cash payments in order to secure restricted building materials.
One million dollars, maximum, was the rule-of-thumb construction cost of a decent-sized Las Vegas hotel-casino in the years after the Second World War — to include the price of the land. But by December 1946, the costs of the Flamingo were doubling this, and Benny Siegel was looking for more. He went back to the Valley National Bank for another $300,000, and he was postponing accounts from his builder, Del Webb, which totaled as much again.
With the accountable price tag for the still unprofitable Flamingo at the $3 million level and rising, there was a cash-flow problem that clearly called for the talents of Meyer Lansky. But Meyer did not want to get involved. Vegas was Benny’s territory, and the Flamingo was Benny’s baby. There were other partners in the project who were on the spot, and who had stakes of their own to protect. Gus Greenbaum, Davie Berman, Willie Alderman, and Morris Rosen were tough, professional characters. Working in the Flamingo every day, they had as much money invested in the project as Meyer did, and it meant more to them.
Meyer stayed in Hallandale, and it was Benny who made the long trip to Florida to confer with him. Harold Conrad remembers Benny’s reappearance at the Colonial Inn in the early months of 1947 — dashing and elegant as ever, but very much on edge. A customer who did not know the form was so rash as to greet him as “Bugsy,” and found himself on the floor a second later, his nose bleeding.
“The name is Ben,” said Siegel, looking down at him disdainfully. “B-e-n. Ben Siegel . . . Don’t you ever forget it.” And as he walked away, he kicked his victim in the ribs.
“That’s very bad manners,” said Frank Costello, disapprovingly. “He never should’a kicked him.”
Benny’s Florida friends were delighted to see him, sweeping him off to the cash craps game in Greenacres, where Benny made a killing. But once the Bug had gone back to Nevada, Harold Conrad heard the grumbling.
“They had this barroom where they had their own big table at night,” he remembers. “Most of them would sit around there . . . I could tell they were getting fed up, because when Bugsy wasn’t there I could hear the discussion — ‘That son of a bitch,’ and so on. That sort of thing.”
Investing in the Nevada desert, they complained, had been Benny’s idea. “They were against it from the beginning. ‘Why the hell do we need that stupid little sandy town out there?’ they said. They thought it was a mistake in the first place. But Costello went along and kept pouring the money in.”
Meyer was always Benny’s champion, Conrad remembers. “He would say, ‘Let’s really look into it.’”
Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello gave Siegel the money he needed to get the Flamingo’s rooms finished and ready for visitors. But as his palace in the desert reopened for business at the beginning of March 1947, Benny Siegel was under notice. This time the Flamingo would have to work — and it would have to show a profit.
The Flamingo Hotel reopened on March 1, 1947, with its bedrooms finally completed. The Andrews Sisters headed the reopening show. Benny Siegel was alive with new ideas. Midweek bingo games were instituted to entice locals out of town on quiet evenings, and Benny was in the hotel every night, sitting in his booth with its own telephone by the door — meeting, greeting, and charming, charming, charming.
People who got to know Benny Siegel personally have countless tales of his warmth and charm. It is difficult, in fact, to find much evidence of his ever doing a mean deed in his life — with the exception of breaking the noses of people who called him Bugsy, and killing the people who really upset him. Benny is said to have confided to Del Webb, the Phoenix builder, that he had killed twelve men in the course of his life — and no one who knew Benny personally would say that was impossible.
Greg Bautzer, Billy Wilkerson’s attorney, saw this dark side when he accompanied Wilkerson to a conference to arrange Wilkerson’s sale of stock. Ever more strapped for cash, Benny reckoned he could raise the money he needed by buying, splitting, and reselling Wilkerson’s 33 percent of the Flamingo — and Wilkerson was not entirely unhappy to get out.
The question was the price, and as the negotiations got tougher, Siegel, who was accompanied to the meeting by Moe Sedway and Gus Greenbaum, resorted to the tactics of a different world.
“You give me the thirty-three and a third and get paid for it,” Bautzer recalled his shouting at Wilkerson, “or I don’t think any place you live will be healthy for you.”
Bautzer told his client to leave the room, and Wilkerson was only too happy to comply.
“It was a frightening experience for him,” Bautzer recalled. “He was not used to violence.”
The attorney issued Benny a stern warning. “From this moment on,” he told Siegel, “you had better put a couple of guys on Wilkerson to be certain he doesn’t slip, or get a scratch on his finger, or anything else to hurt him.”
Bautzer told Siegel he would be preparing an affidavit that set out the details of the threat he had just heard, and that copies of it would be lodged with the police and with the FBI.
“You can imagine the reaction,” Bautzer said later. Benny’s fury increased to such a pitch that his own lawyers had to intervene to calm him down.
“He was like a pistol when he got mad,” remembers Lou Wiener.
When rage overwhelmed Benny, it would take total possession of him. It was not difficult to imagine Ben Siegel grasping someone by the neck and squeezing the life out of them. His rages were so pure and incandescent, so very much the essence of Benny, that people who knew him did not take offense at them — not until he started to threaten them, at least. Getting violent was just part of the way Benny Siegel was — and the violence claimed him on the night of June 20, 1947.
Benny was down in Los Angeles, staying in the home of Virginia Hill, on North Linden Drive in Beverly Hills. Virginia was not there that night. The couple had had one of their furious rows, and Virginia had flown off in a huff to Paris, via Chicago and New York, where she spent a few nights with Joe Epstein.
Benny was sitting on a chintz-covered sofa, reading the Los Angeles Times after dinner, when the first bullet hit him. It was fired from a .30 caliber army carbine, the police later determined, and nine shots were fired into the room. The assassin was found to have rested the carbine on the latticework of a rose-covered pergola just outside the window, close enough to smash in Benny’s left eye, crush the bridge of his nose, and shatter a vertebra at the back of his neck. His right eye was blown out completely, and was later found fifteen feet away from his body.
Benny Siegel lolled back dead on the sofa — immortal. Next day his shooting was front-page news across America, invariably accompanied by the photo of his body, incongruously blood stained on Virginia Hill’s demure chintz sofa. The murder of the flamboyant Vegas adventurer roused people’s curiosity about the play city on the other side of the country, and if they had to name one hotel that summed the place up, then that hotel was Bugsy’s palace in the desert. The Flamingo came to represent the new, wickedly enticing Las Vegas.
Ben Siegel did not invent the luxury resort hotel-casino. He did not found the Las Vegas Strip – and he did not buy the land or first conceive the project that became the Flamingo. But by his death he made them all famous.
Ben Siegel’s Las Vegas lawyer, Lou Wiener, heard that his client had been shot from a friend whose radio was tuned to a ball game in Los Angeles, and he drove straight out to the Flamingo, to discover Gus Greenbaum and Moe Sedway cutting through the general confusion with the steely precision of generals mopping up after a coup. Neither man displayed the grief and shock that characterized almost every other member of the Flamingo’s staff, and in the days that followed, it became clear that Greenbaum and Sedway, along with Davie Berman, Morris Rosen, and Willie Alderman, were the new bosses of the Flamingo.
Lou Wiener’s conclusion, which he holds to this day, was that it was Benny’s Las Vegas partners who got rid of him. Harold Conrad, who was following the story from the East, feels exactly the same. “Benny had spent a lot of their money,” he says, “and money was what counted with those guys.”
With Benny dead, Greenbaum and Sedway were able to go back to the Valley National Bank in Phoenix and get a loan of $1.4 million — half a million dollars more than the hotel had managed to collect when Benny was in charge. The bank evidently considered that the Flamingo was now a good risk.
Meyer Lansky always denied having any part in the murder of Benny Siegel. “Ben Siegel was my friend until his final day,” he told the Israeli journalist Uri Dan when Dan taxed him with being involved with the murder. “I never quarreled with him.”
“If it was in my power to see Benny alive,” Meyer said in 1975, “he would live as long as Matusula [sic].”
There is no reason to disbelieve him. But that is not quite the point. Throughout his adult career, Meyer Lansky was careful to distance himself from the “dirty” crimes — drugs, prostitution, and murder. But his closest companions were men who dealt in all three, and as an investor in the Flamingo Hotel, Meyer knowingly put his money behind someone who deployed threats, violence, and murder in the routine pursuit of his business. Meyer knew exactly how Benny Siegel got results — and, after Benny’s death, he remained in partnership with Greenbaum and Sedway, the Las Vegas men who had, almost certainly, arranged his friend’s killing.
The adult Meyer Lansky was not the vicious boy who had wielded a steel pipe on the strikebreaking foreman. Nor was he a Murder, Inc., executive, ordering up hits in the style of Lepke Buchalter. But he was fully at ease with “muscle,” and he did not shrink from frightening people when he wished. Meyer Lansky might not have the blood of his best friend Benny on his hands, but he was just as much a gangster as the people who did.