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Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel

Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel was a New York racketeer whose brief involvement in Las Vegas helped attach Hollywood glamour—and organized crime—to the Flamingo. His reputation has often overwhelmed the history of the resort itself, including the contribution of its original developer, Billy Wilkerson.

Born in Brooklyn in 1906, Siegel formed an early partnership with Meyer Lansky. Their criminal careers developed during the years when street gangs, bootlegging and gambling helped create larger networks of organized crime. Siegel later moved into Southern California, where his contacts included film personalities as well as underworld associates. The combination made him unusually visible: a criminal businessman who also moved through the social world that Las Vegas resorts hoped to attract. His relationship with Virginia Hill became another part of the public fascination surrounding him.

Las Vegas was already a gambling destination when Siegel arrived. In 1945, he joined partners including Lansky, Moe Sedway and Gus Greenbaum in purchasing the El Cortez downtown. The following year, he became the central figure in completing the Flamingo on the highway south of town. Wilkerson had conceived and named that project; Siegel represented new financing and eventually took control. The Flamingo's December 26, 1946 opening was followed by financial difficulties and a temporary closure. When it reopened in March 1947, its fortunes improved. Those events matter because the familiar claim that Siegel single-handedly invented the Las Vegas resort replaces a complicated business history with a much simpler legend.

Siegel was shot and killed in Hill's Beverly Hills house on June 20, 1947, aged forty-one. The killing remains unsolved. Disputes over the Flamingo's escalating costs feature in explanations of his death, but an explanation is not an established identification of the killer or whoever ordered the shooting. Greenbaum and other associates continued the Flamingo after Siegel's death. The El Cortez and Flamingo connections therefore lead into different chapters of Las Vegas history: downtown casino investment, an ambitious Strip development, and the later operators who made that development endure. Siegel's fame belongs to those places, but their histories extend well beyond his short time in the city.

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