Bugsy (Unrated Extended Cut): Warren Beatty, Annette Bening, Harvey Keitel, Ben Kingsley, Joe Mantegna, Barry Levinson, Mark Johnson, Desert Vision & Famous Players: Movies & TV
Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel was a Jewish American mobster. Siegel was known as one of the most "infamous and feared gangsters of his day". Described as handsome and charismatic, he became one of the first front-page celebrity gangsters. He was also a driving force behind the development of the Las Vegas Strip. Siegel was not only influential within the Jewish mob but.
Background
Benjamin Siegel was born on February 28, 1906 in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to a poor Jewish family from Letychiv,[10] Podolia Governorate of the Russian Empire, in modern Ukraine. However, other sources state that his family came from Austria. His parents, Jennie (Riechenthal) and Max Siegel, constantly worked for meager wages. Siegel, the second of five children, vowed that he would rise above that life.
Education
Born in New York City to middle-class parents, Siegel was the archetypal movie mobster: handsome, hot-headed, ambitious, and ruthless. At age fourteen he bossed his own criminal gang and became a feared power on New York’s Lower East Side. Because of his violent fits of temper, he was called “Bugs,” a nickname he hated and which no one dared call him to his face.
While still a teenager, he joined with Meyer Lansky to form the Bugs and Meyer Mob. The gang sold protection to night clubs, engaged in armed robbery and hijacking, and handled killings for various bootleg gangs operating in New York and New Jersey. By the time he wa twenty-one, Siegel had been arrested for hijacking, mayhem, bootlegging, bookmaking, robbery, rape, and murder of boyhood associates including Charles "Lucky” Luciano, Louis 'Lepke' Buchalter, Joe Adonis, Abner “Longy” Zwillman, and Meyer Lansky, became a founding member of the national crime syndicate.
Career
Siegel is most famous for his transformation of Las Vegas, Nevada, into a gambling mecca, although in reality that isn't quite true. Gambling had been legal in Nevada for quite some time and there were already gambling establishments in Las Vegas when Siegel got there. A Los Angeles businessman was trying to build a huge luxury hotel and casino to which he was hoping to attract wealthy film-industry and businesspeople from Los Angeles, but he was running into financial problems. Siegel, who had been unsuccessfully trying to gain a foothold in the gambling business in Las Vegas, seized the opportunity and bought a controlling interest in the project. He renamed the hotel "The Flamingo", after his nickname for his girlfriend, actress Virginia Hill. Siegel convinced many of his organized-crime friends and associates to put both the mob's money and their own into the venture, and he soon had more than a million dollars to work with. Unfortunately, Siegel's lack of business experience and his unfamiliarity with Las Vegas and the construction industry in general resulted in huge overruns as costs escalated, much of it due to theft, double-billing and other fraudulent business practices by many of the resort's contractors and suppliers. Soon the estimated price tag of the complex had ballooned from $1 million to $6 million, with no end in sight and no revenue coming in. The casino finally opened at the end of 1946, but opening night was a disaster. The weather was awful and kept many potential customers away, few of the locals showed up, and since the hotel wasn't finished yet, the customers who did gamble there took their lodgings at several of the other downtown casinos, thereby cutting into the hotel's profits on food and services. A few days after it opened the Flamingo was basically empty, and shortly thereafter Siegel closed it in order to finish up the hotel.
Siegel's mob "friends" were furious and wanted to put out a contract on his life, but were persuaded by Siegel's friend Lansky to let him have more time to finish the complex. In March the hotel was finally finished and the casino opened up again, and since gamblers were now able to stay in the hotel and avail themselves of food and entertainment in addition to the gambling, the casino began to make money, By the middle of 1947 it was showing a $250,000 profit for the year.
However, if Siegel thought he was off the hook, he was mistaken. On June 20, 1947, he was sitting on the couch at his home in Beverly Hills when gunmen standing outside his living room window opened fire on him. He was killed instantly. Although it has never been established who had ordered the hit, conventional wisdom is that his mob associates, even though they were now making money from the casino, were still angry with him for the financial losses they incurred during the construction phase, especially since much of the money came out of their own pockets.
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Connections
On January 28, 1929, Siegel married Esta Krakower, his childhood sweetheart. They had two daughters. Siegel had a reputation as a womanizer and the marriage ended in 1946. His wife moved with their teenage daughters to New York.