[On June 20th, 1947, mobster Bugsy Siegel was killed in Beverly Hills. So for the 75th anniversary of that murder, I’m going to AmericanStudy Siegel’s role in the development of Las Vegas, along with other contexts for that tellingly American city. Leading up to a weekend post on Vegas in song!]
On what
Siegel’s two earlier settings contributed to his Las Vegas legacies.
1)
New York: The son of Eastern European Jewish
immigrants, Benjamin
Siegel (1906-1947) was born in Brooklyn and came of age in New York’s early
20th century Jewish American community. He joined street gangs at a
very young age and shortly thereafter befriended Meyer Lansky,
just four years older than Siegel but already on his way to becoming the
notorious gangster who would help fix
the 1919 World Series and become part of the inspiration (along with his
compatriot Arnold Rothstein) for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Meyer Wolfsheim.
Together, Siegel and Lansky went on to found the National Crime Syndicate, also
known as Murder,
Incorporated, an organization that linked numerous families in the area and
beyond. What Siegel clearly learned in each of these early stages was the role
that local relationships, networks, and communities played in building larger
and more nationally powerful presences—lessons he would seek to apply a few
decades later as he helped build an entire city where there had been no network
but the desert a short time before.
2)
Hollywood: When the heat got too much for
Siegel on the East Coast (thanks to his own role in various famous murders and
assassinations, to be clear), he moved both his young family and his crime
organization west, settling in Los Angeles in the late 1930s. He would continue
and amplify all his Murder, Inc. and related activities out there, but would
also become closely associated with Hollywood, associating with stars like Clark
Gable and Cary Grant, becoming close enough to the
actress Jean Harlow that she was godmother to his daughter Millicent, and
throwing parties at his Beverly
Hills home for bigwigs like Louis B. Mayer. Although much briefer than his
time in New York, Siegel’s Hollywood stage offered a crucial lesson in the
intersections between crime and celebrity, with both among other connections
being irresistibly appealing to the broader American public. Siegel would help
turn Las Vegas into the single clearest symbol of those interconnected layers.
3)
Vegas: In 1930, Las Vegas (which had only been
incorporated
as a city in 1911) was scarcely populated; by 1950, it was one of America’s
most booming urban centers, despite that aforementioned location in the middle
of hundreds of miles of uninhabitable
deserts. There were various factors which contributed to that striking
change, but a central one was the
role of organized crime in supporting and financing the growth of casinos
and the Strip—and no single figure was more instrumental to those efforts than
Bugsy Siegel. Siegel saw in William
Wilkerson’s Flamingo Hotel a perfect starting point for such rapid
expansion, and eventually forced Wilkerson out and turned the Flamingo into a
model of the hotel-casino-lounge-theater form that would come to define Vegas. Yet
despite its success the Flamingo was constantly in the red, and Siegel’s
criminal compatriots accused him and/or his mistress Virginia
Hill of skimming from the profits. His June 1947 murder was the result, one
more reflection of the intersections of crime and community, commerce and
celebrity, vice and violence that defined Siegel’s life and the city he helped
create alike.
Next Vegas
context tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Las Vegas contexts, histories, stories you’d highlight?
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